I am an atheist and I believe the world would be much better without religions. Having said that, I don't conisder it as a scam in itslef. Instead they must have been something evolved over the time due to our ignorance, fear and helplessness. The very same factors that still keep them going.

But hell yeah, people are exploited in the name of religion. I'm from India, one of the largest so called democracies, currently under the governance of a fascist hindutva party that thrives on polarizing people in the name of religion.

BTW I was actually looking for specific instances of scams carefully plotted by known people, companies or even countries instead of broad answers like religion.

You're free to have your own opinions. But please note that your tone is not helpful and you may be just doing what exactly you're speaking against. Let's keep the discussions civil and healthy instead of labelling people.

One of the best examples of unintended consequences, aiding in one of the largest human caused disasters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

Yes, but things can change. Stories of Mastodon and Lemmy are inspiring. When Reddit backslash happened, Lemmy was already there as a good alternative for people to switch to. So was the case of Mastodon with the Twitter exodus. It's good that we've Pixelfed, it may be just a matter of time.

I agree, but unlike usual blunders this was very much planned!

At least something we can all cheer about :)

This also reminds me of Yahoo turning down the offer to buy Google in their early stage! https://finance.yahoo.com/news/remember-yahoo-turned-down-1-132805083.html

There are many, but right now it's definitely "Infinity for Lemmy" ❤ (Available from IzzyOnDroid F-Droid repo).

Stories feature is there. But I haven't used it myself, so I can't tell more about it.

Thanks for sharing. This is exactly the kind of blunder I had in my mind when asking the question, a seemingly silly mistake like forgetting to do something causing way too much trouble!

Thunderstorms & lightning strikes can severely affect "cloud" computing!

Oh yes, I've heard about this. Thanks for reminding.

Adding more details for others:

Founded in 2003 by then 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos raised more than US$700 million from venture capitalists and private investors, resulting in a $10 billion valuation at its peak in 2013 and 2014. The company claimed that it had devised blood tests that required very small amounts of blood and that could be performed rapidly and accurately, all using compact automated devices which the company had developed. These claims were later proven to be false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

"Survival of the fittest" (when used without trying to understand its actual meaning).

Sorry, I've been hearing about this for some time and I don't know the story behind it. Can someone please explain the enshittification that happened with digg? How good was it before and how bad was it after?

I got started with !asklemmy@lemmy.ml, just 3 posts so far. I'd like to see askhistorians & askscience communities gaining more traction.

Tildes is AGPL licensed Free Software. But yeah, the author has no plans to add federation support.

Sorry to hear that. I didn't mean to remind people of their personal mistakes. Hope you'll recover your password soon.

Earth is flat!

Whether many of the answers here count as a blunder or not, I'd like to say that I got way more replies than I expected and came to know about a lot of stuff I would have never heard otherwise. Thanks for sharing.

Asymmetric cryptography was a game changer, before that communicating parties had to exchange the secret keys used for encryption which was very risky.

Surprising that no one noticed the double prime symbol for inches instead of the single prime symbol for feet. The scammer was like "well, I didn't lie, you weren't careful enough and it's not my problem!".

Covid helped that I guess.

Yes, I'm looking for more specific cases.

Took a glimpse at the article and it seems they could've gone uncaught for longer if they were a little more careful with the dates!

Thanks. Power to the people.

But... but we wouldn't be having this conversation if our ancestors hadn't done that! 🤷‍♀️

The apps are listed on the official website. The official app is in public beta, but I hope it gets a public release soon. You can follow @pixelfed@mastodon.social on mastodon for updates. There are also 3rd party apps, but I haven't tried any.

33,000 km, woah!

Thanks for sharing, I remember this from a documentary on Steve Jobs.

Exactly. The questions section on their homepage says this: "Peer-to-peer broadcasting - It reduces server bandwidth overload if a video becomes viral;".

Compared to other fediverse platforms like mastodon and lemmy, peertube will obviously have more storage requirements though. And as usual, having many small instances is always better than a small number of large instances.

Pixelfed is going to introduce such a feature soon: https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/110683611384204420

There is also joshuto, another ranger clone, written in rust.

https://github.com/kamiyaa/joshuto

Mastodon supports account migration. You can export the list of your followers and the accounts you follow as CSV and import them from another instance. But there's no option to import posts yet.

Also, note that when you migrate all followers in the old account will get automatically unfollowed.

For more details, see https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving

Lesson for next time, use the text part of your post to define what you are asking or are interested in hearing.

Right, I should've seen it coming. But as long as the discussions are healthy, instead of mudslinging, I'm kind of okay with it.

Thanks for sharing.

I doubt if it counts as a blunder, but thanks for sharing anyway.

I use ranger with zoxide plugin, very handy. I even use it inside neovim as well, using rnvimr plugin.

You're enjoying the benefits of federation, by having the ability to grow "your" community with people across the fediverse rather than with only the people on the same instance as yours. So that's the price you have to pay. Also, in the long run, communities will grow naturally based on the quality of the content and not just because they have popular names!

True that.