Having been there since the pre-Digg days, I simply hate what they're doing with the place. It hurts to see something you've enjoyed and contributed to over the past 20 years become the antithesis of the free and open internet it once represented. Every change they made to the site since they tried to migrate off the old.reddit.com interface has been a negative one for the users. The sudden acceleration of those kind of changes has made the site both unreadable (content is beyond stale now) and worthless to participate in.
I think for me, this disappointment turned to real visceral antipathy when I saw this page - it looks like something the CCP would design for kindergartners. It's not a place I want to be a part of at all, and I don't want my past contributions to fuel it.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that they repeat the word "community" like every fourth word all the way through that insipid swill. It's definitely not a pathetically transparent attempt to retroactively stake a claim on the term that lemmy - the Reddit to their Digg - uses for its subforums.
People on reddit have been referring to the people in their subs as a “community” forever. It’s definitely not that deep. They don’t even know or care what Lemmy names anything.
Like I said, I'm sure it's just a coincidence that they repeat the word "community" at least 30 times on that page.
Oh, and this bit too, that I just noticed when I was counting "commumity"s:
Communities are the lifeblood of the Internet. But on today's Internet, they are not in charge of their own destiny. Instead, they are controlled by the large platforms that hold all the power online. It is time for a change.
Community Points are the first step towards a different future for online communities.
That's definitely just a coincidence and has nothing at all to do with trying to compete against the fediverse, which they definitely don't even pay any attention to.
I just told you why they use the word community though? A community is a group of people in the same place. Subreddits have been referred to by the people in them as a community for years. People on Discord talk about their “community” on their servers. People on Xbox Live are a “community”.
It literally has nothing to do with Lemmy. Reddit aren’t threatened by Lemmy. Look how the protests went - they all flickered out and died with a whimper. Reddit is business as usual. Pretty much every sub is back to normal as if nothing ever happened because nothing basically did happen.
Pretty much every sub is not even close to back to normal. I still check in from time to time over there. It’s very noticeable that a particular segment of the popular subs is now completely gone.
The video game and shitpost subs. Those are unchanged. The rest is very different.
Highly recommend “The Expanse” series of books. Really great story, really great characters, and some moderately heavy topics. Good books to get lost in.
I also recommend CS Lewis’ space trilogy which starts with “Out of the Silent Planet”. Very accessible but well-written sci-fi that’s not nearly as long as other traditional Sci-Fi.
Heinlein is also all wonderful (Starship Troopers is a goodie that’s very different than the movie).
This is something I’ve struggled with. I read a lot of trending books in high school like Hunger Games and Twilight but ended up reading 50 Shades of Grey to the end and it honestly turned me off of reading for a while
I’m not the fastest reader so it really seemed like I just wasted a lot of time
Just do it! I would suggest just start writing. Editors and technology can help you cover some of your issues. What sort of books are we talking about? 200+ page nonfiction? IMO writing a book is an endeavor.
Find a platform somewhere and write short stories, whether it be your family and friends or somewhere on the Internet. Check out lemmy.world/c/writingprompts (even bigger on Reddit). Write blog posts. Write write write. Maybe exploring those partial ideas. Collect all your writing in one area so that you can look back at it and see progress.
I think it also ties into a larger portion of people being fed up with corporate social media and corporations in general. All the ads, tracking, and shareholder profit driving decisions instead of what makes a product “good”.
If I get to about 40% of a book and I don’t care about what happens to any of the characters, I’ll just drop it.
I’ll usually flip to a random page in a new book and read a few paragraphs to see if I like the way the author writes. If it doesn’t click with me; phrasing, vernacular, etc, I won’t bother with it disregarding whatever the story is about.
There’s a lot of good answers already here, so I will post a few unique things.
I’m writing a novel (a damn good one too). The first thing you want to know is that you need years of experience if the novel’s going to be any good. That does not mean you need years of reading and writing experience specifically— you can replace it with other kinds of experience. For one, you’ll need some maturity— some understanding of people, some understanding of the world, stuff like that. And then you’re going to want to read at least a little about writing, even if it’s just TVTropes.
This may not work for you specifically, but it would also help a lot if you— like me— are a huge lover of any of the fictional arts. I don’t really read novels anymore, but I am obsessed with the multimedia fiction arts— things like movies, comics, and video games. I read a ton of articles about writing, I watch a ton of multimedia critics and essayists, and I read things like Mythcreants and TVTropes. Unlike most people I know, I hugely value the writing and storytelling in video games, and can get really angry at games that have a ton of writing/dialogue but it’s all crap (looking at you, Pokémon and Golden Sun).
I would also like to say that pure “pantsing” is a pretty bad idea, even for pantsers. “Pantsing” means that you just sit down and start writing. Don’t do that. At least start planning and writing down things you really want to see happen in your novel, locations, characters, whatever. At best, outline as much as possible before you even start. With that said, having a roadmap is good, but not critical; personally, I think preparing your novel to include scenes you are super excited about is much more important.
Which leads to a very important point: if you don’t like writing something, stop writing it. Focus on things you love. If that scene or genre is boring you or is soul-crushing, stop writing it and write a scene you’re excited about. If you’re excited about something, your readers will be too. They’ll feel your energy and love.
Next point. In this day and age, don’t write anything too standard or predictable. There are a million and a half generic D&D-feeling fantasy books that don’t get published, and they will bore any agent (and reader). Bring something new and exciting to the premise, and make sure people know about it from the first few paragraphs. Intrigue people.
Final point for now: Focus on writing well. Don’t focus on what’s selling, don’t focus on a market, don’t try to chase bandwagons. Do not care if you will get published or not. For one, trade publishers are usually awful, don’t offer anything of value except a professional editor, and are basically crappy venture-capitalist middlemen. Just focus on writing something you love and which is genuinely good, for now. By the time you’re done, the trade publishing landscape will probably have changed anyway.
API changes should have come into effect on July 1st, but they have been doing a prolonged rollout (a lot of the popular apps closed on June 30th) so that shattered some hopes for people that believed the blackouts would work.
And they also managed to make a lot stupid comments and other decisions between then and now. Combine that with people already being unhappy and some hostility towards the company is not out of the question.
Hating platform is unproductive, but emotional response is a very human thing. I’m just happy new alternative platforms came from Reddit greed and they are thriving. I stopped following all the Reddit-focused communities and I don’t even keep up with what’s happening there.
In my experience, when Linux works, it’s beautiful (yay package managers). But once you have an issue or go off the beaten path, it can get complex and confusing very quickly. You’ll find a perfect fix… oh wait, that’s for Red Hat. This is Ubuntu and everything is different.
This man page is thirty pages long and has in depth descriptions of all fifty switches in alphabetical order, but all i want is an example on how to do a very simple, common thing with it. And of course, all commands have their own syntax (of course windows isn’t any better, outside of Powershell).
Don’t curl to bash, it’s dangerous. But heaven help the adventurer that tries to do the install manually. And building from the source? Hah!
The registry gets a ton of shit, and yes, it can be opaque and confusing, but hundreds of text files in hundreds of random directories (that might be a different place on a different distro), all with their own syntax, isn’t necessarily all that more intuitive.
You want this to work differently? Then code a fix yourself! What do you mean you’re not a programmer?
I had multiple Ubuntu installs stop updating because the installer by default made the /boot partition (IIRC) something like 100MB. Do a couple updates and that gets filled up with unused files, and then apt craps itself. And this wasn’t all too long ago - well after the point it was supposed to be the district for the everyman.
Like you, I want to like it more, but it’s never smooth sailing. Granted, a lot of that is familiarity with Windows (and believe me, many curses have been thrown MS’s way), but it always seems to turn into a struggle.
Not just “oh this is for redhat and I’m on Ubuntu” but what I run into all the time is that you find a perfect guide but it turns out to be for the wrong version of Ubuntu. So most of it works until you get half way through and you get an error because they’ve switched from initd to systemd or something. Then you are stuck, do you try to roll back what you’ve done so far? Try to adapt the instructions to the new system? Then you end up chasing your tail down rabbit holes of what is backwards compatible, what isn’t, what can coexist and what can’t, etc etc etc.
If you have been using a particular distro and are familiar with the subsystems then the new version comes out and you just have to learn about the few changes in the release but for someone new it adds a whole second layer of complexity to have to learn the whole new OS in addition to trying to blindly figure out how the old system worked, what’s different in the new system and how you adapt instructions from the old one to the new one, or if you should just give up and try to find a different guide that will work.
This man page is thirty pages long and has in depth descriptions of all fifty switches in alphabetical order, but all i want is an example on how to do a very simple, common thing with it. And of course, all commands have their own syntax (of course windows isn’t any better, outside of Powershell).
Yes man is intended to be a manual so it’s understandably bad at being a cheatsheet. Check out tldr or tealdeer. They are similar but I found tealdeer to be much faster for me. Also try a shell with better completion than bash, like zsh or fish. Having better completion will sometimes sidestep the need for a cheatsheet altogether.
Don’t curl to bash, it’s dangerous.
You can curl the file normally, inspect, and then run it with bash. All the safety issues of running stuff you found online still apply (is the source trusted?), but you don’t get the issues that arise specifically from piping curl to bash. But most applications don’t need you to curl | bash in the first time because of package managers.
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