I don’t explicitly block any, but I usually avoid clicking on pinterest and quora links. From experience, I never get what I’m looking for even without the annoying user interface.
The worst, hey we noticed you got a really hard to solve problem, well we got the answer right here, but we’re gonna dim it till you make an account, oh sorry that’s not really the answer thanks for the account sucker!
You cannot just open the image. You must log in to even see most images. Even working around this its scaled to tiny resolution. All content stolen/copied with zero credit/source but their seo outcompetes the original sources.
PSA: If you’re not using uBlock Origin to block ads, please install it. Firefox - Chrome. Every other mainstream adblocker sells your data in some capacity, but uBlock Origin is open source.
It’s not just about it being open source, it’s about the mentality of the people running it. The lead dev for uBlock Origins is hard line on ad blocking and privacy. He fundamentally believes in what they created. That’s the only person you want running something like that.
And they tell users to use Firefox, by the way, because uBlock on Chromium has been handicapped. If you want the full uBlock experience, Firefox is the one and only browser to use it on.
Edit: BTW if you ever want to cheer yourself up, take a look around the closed issues for uBlockOrigins on Git. Every now and again you come across some marketing company stooge stumbling in asking why some address is being blocked and asking for it to be whitelisted, only to get a hard no, then get flummoxed as if they don’t understand why. It’s beautiful.
It’s not just about it being open source, it’s about the mentality of the people running it.
It’s about both. Because, if it isn’t open source, there is no wayit is substantially more difficult to verify that the people running it aren’t lying.
Starting in June 2023 and Chrome 115, Google “may run experiments to turn off support for Manifest V2 extensions in all channels, including stable channel.” Also starting in June, the Chrome Web Store will stop accepting Manifest V2 extensions, and they’ll be hidden from view. In January 2024, Manifest V2 extensions will be removed from the store entirely.
Google says Manifest V3 is “one of the most significant shifts in the extensions platform since it launched a decade ago.” The company claims that the more limited platform is meant to bring “enhancements in security, privacy, and performance.” Privacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) dispute this description and say that if Google really cared about the security of the extension store, it could just police the store more actively using actual humans instead of limiting the capabilities of all extensions.
The big killer for ad block extensions comes from changes to the way network request modifications work. Google says that “rather than intercepting a request and modifying it procedurally, the extension asks Chrome to evaluate and modify requests on its behalf.” Chrome’s built-in solution forces ad blockers and privacy extensions to use the primitive solution of a raw list of blocked URLs rather than the dynamic filtering rules implemented by something like uBlock Origin. That list of URLs is limited to 30,000 entries, whereas a normal ad block extension can come with upward of 300,000 rules.
So it looks like most users aren’t seeing a handicap yet, but may start to see one in January if that block list size cap/updating the list is an issue.
The uBlock team has fought a constant war with advertisers and Chrome on our behalves. Mozilla has done it’s part as well. They deserve a lot of credit and respect for it. And support.
Best answer, Lemmy, like all social media follows the 90-9-1 rule of social media. Of 100 people, 90 will lurk, 9 will comment, and only 1 will actually post anything.
There are people in the communities that want to talk, but you gotta be the one to post.
Hey take it as your opportunity to become a name in a community!
Was on Reddit 15 years, left in June. It was definitely a build up, but I eventually posted every day.
Not healthy, so I scaled back. I post when I have something worthwhile. Otherwise I just contribute comments. And even then I erase half of them because they aren’t helpful or contributive.
I got relay but I didn’t make an account. I just go to the specific sub that there aren’t enough people for here and lurk. I occasionally forget where I am and try to upvote something and it tells me to make an account for that, after which I just chuckle and continue reading. no more reddit account, my previous one I nuked to hell after it got hacked.
idk where these statistics come from, but the 90/9 ratio may come from the fact we don’t comment on every thread we read, and not that 90% of users never comment
Or, like, not really knowing how to express oneself. I’ve got a lot on my mind to share in specific subs communities though it’s difficult as I don’t feel like knowing who I’m talking to
The format actually has a lot of benefits - it supports transparency, animation, and compresses very efficiently. So it could theoretically replace GIF, JPG, and PNG in one fell swoop.
The downsides are that many apps don’t currently support it and that it’s owned by Google.
Personally I use webp for images that are not intended to share (e.g. banners and images on my blog), but stick to JPG/PNG for sending to other people.
I mean yes, but it’s patent irrevocably royalty free (so long as you don’t sue people claiming WebM/P as your own/partially your own work), so it’s effectively owned by the public.
Google hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer implementations of the WebM Specifications, where such license applies only to those patent claims, both currently owned by Google and acquired in the future, licensable by Google that are necessarily infringed by implementation of the WebM Specifications. If You or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any implementation of the WebM Specifications constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any rights granted to You under the License for the WebM Specifications shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed. “WebM Specifications” means the specifications to the WebM codecs as embodied in the source code to the WebM codecs or any written description of such specifications, in either case as distributed by Google.
You could still be on the fence. It’s Google so for sure it has the possibility of tracking or some other user exploiting bullshit feature but we haven’t figure it out yet.
It’s also just an open file format. Anyone could implement it, and in fact I found dozens of completely independent implementations of webp decoders on GitHub in various languages.
There really is no secret ulterior motive in this case.
There really is no secret ulterior motive in this case.
Sort of. Smaller images mean it’s less work for Google to crawl and index them, if every image is 40% smaller then that’s potentially saving them millions a year in storage and bandwidth costs.
So, yea, it’s better for the web but it also massively benefits them.
Well, they crawl and index anyways. I see no harm done with .webp. One of my friends said with .webp you can’t save an image because it stops you from doing that somehow? I’m unsure, maybe true maybe not.
Chromium and Android really are open-source. There are hundreds of products like Electron and Fire OS built on top of them without any involvement or consent from Google.
Just because Google Chrome and Pixel phones have some proprietary code doesn’t mean that Android and Chromium aren’t open.
Well your right I wasn’t clear in my answer. They are open source but for the point of this discussion with open source software backed by an corporation the open source it’s just a mean of spreading “soft power” maybe gather inovation from the market and for sure to offer a way for FOSS creators to use their energies to build in the “correct” direction. The purpose it’s building a monopoly on certain aspects of the market.
Chromium is open source and a lot of small projects have sprouted from it but with the same undelying technology. Except for Firefox, Edge and Safary, everyone stems from the same roots controlled by google trough money and market share. So in this case Chrome dominates the market and decides the course of the industry. See mv3.
Android is open source and some projects are build on top of it but the big market share so the direction of the technology is controlled by Google.
Let them decide a stadard for pictures which has undeniable advantages and I bet you that tomorow they will decide how you share and visualise images and videos.
It’s not about being open source it’s about that project being a tool used by a company to spread their interests (which usually end up being predatory towards the common user).
Yes you can convert, it’s just that many existing tools may not presently support webp. If you just want a quick & dirty meme you can always screen cap.
The fun thing is heif is actually effectively single frame of h.265 video because the amount of work that’s gone into making h.265 space efficient also happens to work really well for efficienct compression of individual frames of video aka images
mozilla made it because it suited their needs; and libpng (the organisation behind png, and who make the standard png decoder[^1]) refused to add compatibility, insisting on mng instead. mng was bad, so nobody used it; and apng was great, but require mozillas version of the decoder so systems couldn’t use both the official version and the apng supporting version together
partly, i don’t think it was just that. mng did have considerable benefits over apng at the time; but it was a solution looking for a problem. i think they wanted it to succeed because they’d poured time into it, but nobody wanted to support it (mozilla, the only browser to support it to my knowledge, dropped support eventually because the mng decoder was bigger than every other image decoder in firefox put together)
Yeah I wouldn’t have an issue with them if they weren’t so incompatible with most of the programs and sites I like to use. It makes them super inconvenient to work with. I know some apps are catching up and supporting them, but it feels like the adaptation is slow and patchy which makes it difficult to know which programs will support webp at some point and when.
It’s absolutely bonkers for Microsoft to even consider that paying $99 or $199 for their ad ridden software is fair and reasonable. If you’re going to bombard me with ads, the shit better be free. You can’t have it both ways. Ads are riddled in the OS whether it be in the Start Menu, notifications area, File Explorer, Microsoft Edge, and even other paid products like Microsoft Office.
It’s so fucking frustrating seeing shit like Candy Crush being forcefully installed onto a system you paid for, especially when it’s supposed to be the “Pro/Enterprise” tier. Windows is a fucking joke and they deserved to have people using this exploit to get “free” activated copies of their OS.
Hopefully this is just another thing that pushes people to other OSes, whether that be Linux or macOS. Just get the hell away from Microsoft and take some of that monopoly power from under them little by little.
That is my biggest gripe with modern windows. The OS itself is pretty decent, but WHY am I paying at minimum $100 and seeing ads all over the start menu? Even with a vanilla MS sourced USB there are so many bloat apps. It didn’t used to be that way.
I set up a PC for recording in a sound system and got a fresh install of Windows 11 on a custom PC and it was still super bloated with garbage games and a video editor that watermarks footage instead of the perfectly functional basic software they used to have.
I am in the process of repairing and setting up an old macbook with Linux since it stopped getting Apple updates. When I get a new laptop I will likely go with Linux there as well.
It’s absolutely bonkers for Microsoft to even consider that paying $99 or $199 for their ad ridden software is fair and reasonable.
Have you seen their Xboxes? Somehow they get by with charging even more for those with more blatant ads and they charge you to play online multiplayer.
They do reportedly sell them at a loss and compensate via software sales and these days more than ever, subscriptions. Ads are just icing on the cake for them, I imagine, compared to the software sales & subscription revenues.
Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation will probably eradicate polio.
Before people jump on the bandwagon about how Gates is evil and problematic, that there are no virtuous billionaires, and a government or an NGO or an equivalent should have been the one to do it… I know. But the question was “name one billionaire that’s done anything good,” and I think it’s pretty difficult to argue that eradicating polio isn’t good.
That’s not how vaccines work. The illness is already there, it’s not like people get sick after you introduce a vaccine into the system. So the “market” has always been there and every dose administered is great.
Sick people receive vaccines for free or very cheap
Sick people gets hope of survival to disease, hope which wasn’t previously available.
Sick people ask their governments to continue receiving vaccines.
People providing vacciones now are charging a lot more to said governments.
Profit (which was the whole point, and not any “humanitarian” notions.)
And the market wasn’t there, because unless there’s some way to create high demand and guaranteed payment in poor countries, there’s no profit in said vaccines (or any medication, for that matter; do you see any multinational farmaceutical companies giving much thought to the creation of medicine to cure Chagas disease? And it’s endemic in many areas of South America. But those are poor areas, so the is no profit there).
The problem with your argument is that the Gates foundation is a non-profit. They aren’t trying to make a profit, they’ve burned through tens of billions of dollars in the past 20 years.
Are you arguing that countries should just let people die from polio rather than accept humanitarian aid or am I missing something?
Some More News went into detail on why the “non-profit” label, especially for billionaires’ charity funds, is bullshit: m.youtube.com/watch?v=69AtkAHkKEc
I thought the foundation’s shady capitalist goals were pretty well known, not sure why you’re downvoted. They are against releasing patent on the covid vaccine, for example, because their goal is for people to profit from it
Sick people receive vaccines for free or very cheap
Awesome, most vaccines last years or even decades, Covid is an outlier because it mutates so rapidly. But “sick people” makes zero sense, you usually get the vaccine before you get sick. That’s the entire point (except for rabies, where you straight up die if you don’t get the vaccine quick enough).
Sick people gets hope of survival to disease, hope which wasn’t previously available.
Also great, they get a chance, instead of lifelong suffering or death.
Sick people ask their governments to continue receiving vaccines.
Why would they be sick if they got the vaccine? Makes zero sense. The ones asking at this point would be the unvaccinated. Like a mom wanting to vaccinate her kids, so they don’t get a crippling disease later in life.
People providing vacciones now are charging a lot more to said governments.
And then the poor countries simply won’t buy them. Because they straight up can’t afford them. There is a reason they aren’t buying vaccines right now: No money. So if they try to charge a lot of money no one will buy and we’ll end up with the current state (just with thousands more who are immune against the disease, which is still an upside).
Profit (which was the whole point, and not any “humanitarian” notions.)
You can’t suck blood from a stone, there is no money, so no profit.
Every single vaccine dose that goes to poor countries is awesome. That’s it. The alternative to getting the vaccine is to catch the disease unprepared and suffer lifelong complications (or straight up die). There is no upside to not delivering vaccines.
Are you confusing vaccines with medication? For example the Polio vaccine lasts for 10+ years, “sick people” are not repeat customers for vaccines. The only time you have repeat customers is when you are still applying the vaccine (for example Polio needs 5 doses, but then you’re good).
The point of eradication is that once a disease is gone, you don’t need to vaccinate against it any more. You’ve probably never been vaccinated against smallpox, for example.
Pretty easy to find the connections on google. Try it. Start with his divorce and work backward. Just because you love him doesn’t mean he didn’t do bad things.
lol… I’m not even an atheist and I recognize the shit is all made up. Do you actually believe it happened?? or is this just “everyone I don’t like is ugly”
to be fuckin honest, if the guy in the picture said the top comment, that’s probably one of the most sexy and agreeable things he’s said since breakfast
It’s not even that I disagree with you, it’s that there can’t be a discussion about the lore of a religion without someone trying to feel smart and superior by saying it’s all made up.
Like, yes… Obviously. That’s not the point of the post. People are allowed to enjoy things.
I mean, how many articles do you need that you’re never going to read on Reddit? You can load up Lemmy with enough communities to keep a good feed of news going.
Sorry, but chalk this up to lesson learned. It’s almost always been this way. Domain squatters will do this all the time. In fact, some domain registrars will use you searching their site for an ‘available’ domain, and if you don’t buy it up right away – will buy it and hike the price and sit on it for years in order to lock it down, knowing you wanted it.
btw, Namecheap says Sunglocto dot com is like $10 - so just register a .com. Not through that Epik piece of shit that you used before. Legit, use Namecheap; they’ve never done me wrong and have been my registrar for more than a decade now.
I had this happen with NameCheap. I’m not sure if they bought it or someone else, but it stayed registered with them. Whoever bought it has held it for a couple years, put up a fake website to look like they were using it, but took it down after a year when I didn’t bite on buying it. Current status shows it’s pending deletion finally for abuse or non-payment. I keep checking to see when I can nab it again.
Yes, I just didn’t realize that auto-renew doesn’t work with PayPal on NameCheap and had lazily set it up with PayPal when I got it because I didn’t want to go get my wallet. Lesson learned!
I think you can also register 10 years in advance, or maybe more depending on the registrar, which would cover all other potential snafus like expired card info.
Then they make you use them for DNS. May or may not be a big deal, but the reason it’s at cost is to act as a loss leader to get you exposed to and buying their other products.
Their free services are extremely useful and you can’t find that anywhere else. I’ve used them for years with hundreds of domains and never paid them a single dime.
I have a script running that uses the Namecheap API to automatically get wildcard certs from Let’s Encrypt. I didn’t pay a dime for this. Did something change?
Absolutely. But I think it might be more advanced than that. They might have some sort of analytics that measures how long people stay on the page, etc to inform their purchasing decisions.
Needless complexity in software is something that gets on my nerves, especially on the web. We went from simple HTML to such a bloated mess that only like 2 web browsers can manage to keep up with it. I mean, does a web browser really need to do everything? Why use an office suite written in JavaScript in a web browser when there are native programs you could use?
if the 'big three' have their way, it won't be a browser to do 'everything', it'll be individual apps instead. where they control everything, including ads and trackers and data collection, instead of in a browser where users at least have some control. but yea, where it's possible or expected, an 'app' should have a standalone application to install or run available. and knock it off already with 'apps' that are basically just wrappers around a 'mobile-first' web page. apps should do something other than just browse your damn web site.
Standards based thin clients, basically. It’s not exactly a bad thing, but I do get your frustration. I still like working with tiny little static sites.
Mostly though, JavaScript is also just trash. The only language we transpile because working in the vanilla version is so miserable.
The fact the Turbo PR caused so much drama earlier this week says it all about JavaScript really. And it’s my daily driver ATM. I’d rather be using PHP. Yes, you read right. At least they’re fixing the duck typing.
It goes deeper than you think. Frameworks like Angular are used everywhere. So you not only have an abstraction of the underlying language (Typescript compiles down to Javascript), but you have additional abstractions like the virtual DOM. Basically, Angular acts like a go between from the code you write and the end result webpage. It makes both writing complex interactions and debugging a major pain.
And this is more being done for even simple websites now. It’s the equivalent of building a small garden shed with a kitchen, fridge, furnace, bedroom, bathroom, insulation, etc.
I agree with you. But with how fractured the software and hardware space has become. Building native is expensive and time consuming.
For example a web browser is compatible with x86 amd64 armv7 aarch64 on any OS from Windows, Linux, Mac OS, iPad/iOS, and Android.
Which means that if I make 1 web page, I can support all these platforms at once.
The customer doesn’t care, they just want funny cat pics.
Building native requires both the hardware (especially if you need to build for the walled garden known as iOS), and frameworks. Where its just easier to recompile chrome, and bake in a Web Page, I.e. react native
The main counter-argument I have is restrictive installation policies especially in Edu/bluechip IE you can do whatever the fuck you want in the sandbox that is your web browser but if you want to install some software you have to wait 4 weeks for approval then another 4 weeks to get approval for each update.
Also security updates/patches for native applications can be really shitty especially on Microsoft inflicted devices… For example, if you want to update Inkscape on Windows you have to do a whole download/install process. This can lead to security related issues…
I recently compared it to sitting in a comfortable little cafe that serves delicious food and looking around and saying, "Gee, I wish this was a McDonalds."
It just doesn't even begin to make sense to me.
And I'm with you - gatekeeping or no - anyone who wants Twitter or Reddit or Facebook content can already go to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook to get it, and that's exactly what they should do.
It's appropriate because that kind of shit happens irl, too. Small city with a cool local vibe becomes popular, people move to the city because it's popular, all the popular stuff gets priced out and paved over to make room for more Starbucks. Then people whine about how cool the city used to be. Gee, I wonder what happened to it?!
Having gone through that, there are also Starbucks suits and the owners of the buildings housing the Starbucks yelling at you that this is WHAT YOU NEED!
I'm not talking about any effect I think it might have on me, because yes - I can just avoid the instances favored by morons.
To belabor the analogy a bit more, it's not quite accurate to say that they want this neat little cafe to be McDonalds - they want the entire town to be McDonalds. They want to be able to open up their door snd see nothing but McDonalds, stretching to the horizon in all directions.
That that literally can't happen - that the decentralized nature of the ActivityPub means that the most anyone can ever do is turn instances into empty wastelands of brain-dead "content" one at a time - doesn't make their viewpoint any less perplexing to me.
More like a small town that used to have real restaurants that got driven out of business when McDonalds came to town selling shit on a plate so cheap it was impossible to be price competitive with food suitable for humans.
But I’m here because I can’t get reddit content anymore in the format I want to consume it. I didn’t have an issue with the content of reddit, just the owners.
I don't necessarily disagree, I just think that the solution is to cultivate the content here. Not connect with the same old corporate platforms that caused the problems in the first place.
I’m in the same boat. I want Lemmy to be a firehose of content, the overwhelming majority of which I won’t ever want to interact with. I want that because different people are interested in different things, and that’s what allows for even the niche communities to find their footing with more than a small contingent of people.
I think the tools at our disposal as users and administrators of Fediverse systems are already good enough to manage and control your own experience, and I’m confident that they’ll continue to improve at a rapid click. The experience of using Lemmy as a Reddit replacement has already improved dramatically since June 12th, and it does so every day. I appreciate that others may feel much more strongly about the “dumbing down” of the overall content and community than I do, and for those folks joining an instance that outright defederates is a great option.
Folks are quick to tell people how they should be using Lemmy. “Don’t sign up for one of the big instances, you should use a small one instead because federation” is a big one - but there’s a lot of appeal in this model with being signed up to the instances generating the majority of the content the broader community is consuming because it makes finding that content easier than it otherwise would be. My hope is that the larger instances like lemmy.world will at least test the waters with Threads federation to see what it actually does to the community before taking the step of defederation, because right now those large instances are what’s feeding the rest of the rest of Lemmy.
As it stands, having those large instances federated with Threads and having smaller communities defederated seems like a best of both worlds scenario, because a small instance defederating with Threads won’t lose out on the other content being generated by those larger instances, but those who want to trudge through the mire of mass appeal can do so in one place.
Also, I don't think that the way to deal with "there is content on a platform that I don't like" is to run from it. It's to make better filtering systems to choose what I want. Two reasons:
First, some people like different things. They shouldn't have to use different platforms just for that.
Second, stuff like spam will show up anywhere that has decent size anyway eventually, once there are enough eyeballs for it.
I think that the goal should be to have plenty of content of all sorts on the Threadiverse, and then just have good filtering tools that are hard to subvert.
Reddit didn't let people build the filtering tools they wanted in and in some cases -- like when it came to their own ads -- were actively opposed to that. The Threadiverse solves that problem for me.
I got a tired of the cliched site culture and some people’s attitudes. I suppose it’s because it’s such a large slice of the public that you get more people being dicks and leaving drive-by jerky comments. The overdone in-jokes and pun threads got to be a bit much too. I needed something like Lemmy to demonstrate what I was missing on reddit.
The issue I have with this analogy is that the food here isn't quite that great. Maybe the service is better and it's less crowded and more friendly, but the menu is pretty limited and not everything it serves even matches the fast food's quality. I guess there's merits from being loyal to your local cafeteria and its community even if it's not always the best, but lets not exaggerate the quality being delivered here.
I used to browse reddit for gaming news, especially indie games, and the communities I found for this on Lemmy didn't pick up any momentum yet.
Mm... you do have a point, but I would argue that the content is generally better at the very least to the degree that it's actual people sincerely posting things rather than bots, shills and karma farmers spamming and/or astroturfing.
And yes - niche communities are extremely underpopulated here.
I don't think the solution to that though is to aim for more generic "content" with the hope that it'll lead to broad growth and that a byproduct of that will be to bring more people who happen to share your interests. The solution IMO is to get on the communities you want to see grow and start contributing stuff, right now. Even if you're just posting to one person, keep at it, and pretty soon it'll be two, then three, then...
But, I think part of the issue is that communities that folks are interested in being a part of, about certain topics/etc, just aren’t active enough here yet. I’m glad to see some are growing, and my personal experience is improving over time, but I keep finding communities that look like something I’d love but have zero activity ir content in them. So I do understand folks wanting to fill parts of this with content in general, even if it’s content similar to what they would’ve gotten on Reddit, because content and activity is what will help build those cool communities over time.
I only wish I had interesting or important things to contribute to the communities I’m interested in, I never know what to say or do to help build a community that’s nonexistent or essentially so. 😥 so far I’ve just been commenting wherever I can, for the most part, hoping that helps.
I hear you! You and me both, I’ve always been more of a lurker on almost every social media. However here I feel more comfortable posting than anywhere else because I know people aren’t here just to troll, gain followers through controversy or self-promote, so it feels way better.
That’s what had me confused at first when people were leaving Reddit but going “bRiNg ReDdIt CoNtEnT oVeR aNd DeLeTe ReDdIt!” and using the whole “we need content” as a reason.
Like, if y’all want content from social media platforms… use those social media platforms. In my mind’s eye, I see the Fediverse as more of an old-school forum where people can make any forum for specific communities, not as a content-vomiting platform.
Yup, that could also be said about music, cinema and any other form of art/entertainment/distraction. It doesn’t produce anything “useful”, but again, what is “useful” varies from one person to another. Some would say the waste of money is the point. You blow fireworks because you can.
Ultimately nothing matters because there is no true meaning of life, so anything that pulls you away from the dark nothingness of existence is good to take.
I can’t think of other art forms that blow off the hands of so many people, wake up my daughter in terror at 11PM, and make both dogs and veterans suffer for an extended period of time. I’m fine with the large group spectacle that is planned and controlled. What I can’t stand is the widespread uncontrollable nonsense of just anyone buying them and setting them off at any hour on the 4th. Law enforcement can do absolutely nothing about it. I’m just gonna have to deal with it. I’m just surprised we haven’t collectively shifted to something less harmful.
That’s what I’m saying. One day we’ll look back in amazement that we let the public buy fireworks willy-nilly. Even the “it was good enough for me!” crowd of angry old-timers will have to go “Well, yeah, people blowed they hands off. And it bothered my vet’ren son and the neighbor’s dogs somethin fierce. They’re alright. It’s prolly fer the best.”
Now, I fully admit later today I will be running around in a country field with my friends shooting bottle rockets at each other. But we won’t be bothering SOMEONE ELSE, and that’s my thing.
One day we’ll look back in amazement that we let people have sex willy nilly and bond with whomever they like on a whim, forming friendships and families without central oversight.
But that doesn’t mean that future we’ll be looking back from in amazement won’t be a dystopian nightmare, or that our perspective won’t be warped by even more decades of infantilization.
As someone who generally is in favor of regulating dangerous things, fireworks are fine as-is. They’re basically limited to one night a year, the damage is not very extreme, and the people getting hurt are by and large the people choosing to endanger themselves.
Yep. With wild animals it may result in the running away in fear without thought and get lost or injured which may result in their death. This technically applies to all animals.
Another aspect which affects all is heart attack from the shock.
I guess ban vehicles of any sort, then. I’d imagine animals dying from fireworks are nearly 0. I’d imagine ones dead from traveling are a thousand an hour in the US.
Great whataboutism. I assume you mean roadkill? That makes one relatively small chance of directly affecting (not necessarily killing) one animal in wider area. One firework has pretty much guaranteed chance of affecting all animals in wide area.
The utility of the firework is also zero compared to a vehicle. In a vehicle you have a chancenof affecting the outcome of potential collision. You can drive more safely when the chance of encountering animals is higher.
And about the nearly 0 chance of death - I don’tbhave statistics but have some examples of pets dying due to shock. There was this village where fireworks got banned because every year a couple of horses died on New Years. A couple of years back there was really eye opening picture (I think from Rome) where a whole square was littered by dead pigeons morning after New Years.
And less not forgey the stress and suffering caused to countless others that don’t die. Discounting them is like saying tortuting is ok because people usually survive it.
And if you don’t care about animals, think about the PTSD of war veterans or other people living through war. Plus the polution and smoke is not good for the health, not mentioning the lost fingers that strain health care for that day.
Is a few pretty explosions really worth others suffering (especially when there are now ways to have light shows without or with considerably less negative effects)?
A local icecream place that also had goats and ducks was fucking setting them off right over the goat pen. They were sprinting from shelter to shelter inbetween explosions.
I don’t plan on going back there now. It’s a shame because it’s one of the better shops nearby.
You make a good point. Which can also be made about any form of freedom as soon as it encroaches on someone else’s comfort.
Ignoring the obvious nuance, a loud concert or a horror movie are also not something law enforcement will do anything against but it could terrorize people as well.
If a loud concert or horror movie popped up next door and rattled the houses of an entire neighborhood from 10pm to 2am, I’m pretty sure law enforcement would do something about it.
If only it were once a year. This year, people started on the 28th of fucking June, and didn’t stop until the goddamn 6th.
If it actually was contained to the 4th, I would be fine with it, but getting woken up by an explosion every night at 1:30am for a week straight, it gets real old, real fast.
What I can’t stand is the widespread uncontrollable nonsense of just anyone buying them and setting them off at any hour on the 4th. Law enforcement can do absolutely nothing about it.
Do you understand why this is our way of celebrating Independence Day? Fireworks are a loud, visible, symbol and example of freedom from authority.
We also have the freedom to self govern. Laws are on the books to prevent firework usage in my state, it is simply ignored one night a year because it turns out mass lawbreaking is hard to handle. I don’t have the right to conduct a parade in the middle of whichever street I want whenever I want. I participate in the social contract of sacrificing absolute freedom for mutual gain because I live in a country and am not a sovereign citizen claiming complete supremacy over all others. My taxes pay for a small and well moderated fireworks show at a designated location conducted by a local government for which I had a hand in voting for. My freedom is louder, collective, voted for, and more sensible. Not all freedom must be focused soley on the individual.
Something like a sunset, a blizzard, or a thunderstorm are the more closely comparable natural equivalent. They’re special because they’re short-lived or rare.
Eh. Half of that 2.7 billion being put into research into a disease like Myalgic Enceph. (ME) could probably significantly improve the quality of life of 80 million people who have one of the worlds most disabling diseases.
Lemmy for me is all Linux, politics, boobs, anime and sports. I’m a straight woman who hates sports and anime, has a surface interest in Linux but doesn’t wish to debate about it, and likes to be knowledgeable about both world and US politics but hates the anger. I’m really debating if Lemmy is for me, but I won’t go back to reddit and I need someplace to browse when the insomnia strikes.
I wonder if playing around with filtering like top/local (on different instances)/subscribed would make this better. There’s always the block community option, but that doesn’t seem to work well to hide topics and would be a pain to keep on top of.
I’m pretty similar to you. Not much interest in technology, I already do it so often during my day-to-day that any more turns me over my breaking point. The main communities I am subscribed to are either picture-related or food-related, hope you can find what you enjoy!
Same - my blocklist is gigantic now, but by combining that with subscriptions means that I can always choose between a very tightly curated list of stuff that interests me and nothing else (browsing subscribed) and a much bigger list of more random stuff that lets me discover new things but still doesn’t have sports, cars, porn and other things in actively disinterested in (browsing all). I like this system a lot.
On the basic mobile website, you go to the sub… community you want to block or even just the comments for a post, expand the side bar button at the top, then hit Block Community.
For example, on this post, I go into these comments, hit Sidebar at the top of the comments, then block community.
I’m somehow in a similar yet completely different boat from you. My feed under all is made up of like 5 communities - memes, lemmy memes, 196, linux memes, and programmer humor - with guest appearances by politics and technology. Regardless of what I set the filter on my feed to, I have yet to see a single piece of porn crop up; and I had to specifically find a search tool on my pc to find some communities to subscribe to like an r/foodporn equivalent just so I would at least have some stuff pop up on my phone with some more variety related to my interests.
This is probably all related to Lemmy being new and not knowing how to get the most out of the app I’m using (and that being new as well), but as of right now I’m largely using Lemmy the way I used to use Twitter X or something rather than how I used to use Reddit. As a time waster rather than a place where I got invested in the communities I interacted with.
Block the meme communities. It makes things much better. I wish there was a way to relegate certain things to a separate feed without completely blocking them. But right now block is the only tool.
I’ve actually considered making other accounts to separate content out by blocking different communities on them, but I’ve never really felt the desire to filter out the memes enough to go through with it.
I know what you mean. I’ve been struggling myself. On top of kind of being unable to relate, I’m not tech savvy and with a demanding toddler on me I just don’t find the time or energy to figure out how to even search for the right communities. I’m trying, but at 2 am when I have 15 minutes for myself and this app asks me what instance I want to view something in and doesn’t let me comment something somewhere and then I try to check whether Abrathatfits is already on lemmy I get a million (non bra related) search results - it’s just echausting for I don’t know what. I miss the memes (I don’t get 80% of the memes here since most are some jokes about tech or coding), and I miss the girly subs. I miss makeup addiction ffs and beyond the bump, and moldly interesting. I like politics in general but somehow the communities here don’t have any news that I care about. The ukraine communities are also rather dead here, that was an important one since I have family on both sides of the border. Maybe I should put more effort into it, more energy, more search les and adjustments, but it might just be that lemmy, while a great concept, is just not for me. Maybe there just aren’t the communities I need. I also doubt I will go back to reddit but damn, I am lost. Maybe I should. Especially when it comes to Ukraine I am really debating whether supporting a futile protest of a social media website to make a point is really worth being less informed and connected. Sorry for the long rant tho.
Yeah you really have to block the annoying communities. I did have to do that on Reddit too as well though. And subscribe to some nice stuff so you have a good home feed to look at when All isn’t working for you.
Nah, definition 1 right there isn’t inherently negative. It’s certainly more involved than otherwise necessary and seems somewhat driven by emotion, so while it skips the negative connotation I think this counts plenty well.
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