What you say: It's easy!

What you (hopefully) mean: Don't be intimidated! You can do it!

What they hear: You must be stupid if you can't do this.

What you say: It's so simple even a child can figure it out!

What you (hopefully) mean: Calm down and work through it. You've got this.

What they hear: Even a child is smarter than you!

Keep in mind that if you're dealing with someone who is struggling it is self-evidently not easy for them. Claiming that it is invalidates their experience and makes them feel small and stupid. Don't do that.

What you should say: I get it. This can be pretty intimidating. Let's work through this together.

It really is that <irony>simple</irony>.

Ah. The Google+ approach to signing up "users".

Speaking one language that is mildly gendered (English), two that are strongly (and in the case of the second bizarrely!) gendered (French, German) and one that is almost entirely ungendered (Mandarin), I have not found any utility whatsoever in grammatical gender.

I suspect that grammatical gender is just an ur-form of grammatical classifiers that has stuck around for non-useful amounts of time. I suspect this because one of the grammatical "gender" divisions that's in use in many languages isn't masculine/feminine(/neuter) but rather animate/inanimate. So I suspect that grammatical gender was a classification mechanism whose system and utility was distorted into uselessness over the thousands of years of spread and development.

So why do we have classification mechanisms? Well, in Mandarin there's classifier words. (In English too: "a sheet of paper", not "a paper", but it's waaaaaaaaaaaaay stricter in Mandarin.) The classifiers in Mandarin, given the sheer amount of punning potential in oral language, are likely a redundant piece of information to help nail down which specific word you mean in contexts where it might be unclear. For example in a noisy environment, or if someone is speaking unclearly, "paper" (纸张[zhǐ zhāng]) might be confused with "spider" (蜘蛛 [zhī zhū]). But if I say 一只蜘蛛 [yī zhī zhī zhū]—a spider—it's harder to confuse that with 一张纸张 [yī zhāng zhǐ zhāng]—a piece of paper.

So I'm positing that perhaps at some point grammatical gender was used as a primitive form of classification for disambiguation that some languages just never grew out of. Which is why in German men are masculine, women are feminine, boys are masculine, and girls are neuter. It has nothing to do with actual physical gender and is just a weird, atrophied, and somewhat useless remnant of language.

Every once in a while I find myself looking at the Internet without ad blockers. Like, newly-installing a browser on a newly-installed OS, or trialing a new browser on my phone or whatnot. And when it happens it's a massive shock to me just how unusable the modern Internet is without an ad blocker.

If I were forced somehow to not use an ad blocker, I would probably stop using the WWW portion of the Internet and likely grossly cut down on other facets of the Internet.

By stopping asking how to make it more popular and starting making it a place that could become popular.

It's a "final straw" situation. No individual straw broke the back of the proverbial camel. One straw after another was placed atop it until finally the back broke. It's not the final straw that broke said back, but the load of all the straws including the final that did it.

So they're not necessarily quitting because of the name change. They're quitting because of everything else plus the name change. That was the thing that pushed the go/no-go decision into "go".

Mastodon is "dead" because you're not making the switch from spoon-fed algorithmically-supplied content to content you have to actively seek out. Mastodon supplies tools for this, but if these aren't for you, then yes, Mastodon is useless to you.

To make Mastodon "not dead" you have to take some actions of your own to become part, in effect, of an actual community. These steps helped me:

1. Follow some #hashtags of interest. As you find people posting interesting content on that hashtag, follow them. Engage with some of those directly, responding to their posts. Do this for a couple of weeks and you'll have a full feed.

2. Occasionally look into the local feed. Skip over stuff that bores you. Read stuff that interests you. If you see the same names making interesting content, follow them. Also, engage with the stuff that interests you by responding to posts.

3. Make content as well as the replies mentioned above. Apply relevant #hashtags so it's findable. But keep in mind that the system is not going to stuff this in other people's feeds on your behalf. This isn't Twitter or any other corporate microblogging setup. You need to get followers, which you can get by following steps 1 and 2. Otherwise you're just going to get the occasional person seeing your posts who is doing step 2.

4. Boost boost boost boost boost. There's no algorithm cramming posts into other people's feeds. The only way things go "viral" in Mastodon is if people spread it around. You have to be part of the process instead of abrogating that to an algorithm designed to foster "engagement" by spreading dissent and hate.

It is definitely blocked.

Source: I'm in Mainland China.

Mass shooting in _________, USA kills ___

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

It's evidence that his money is fuckable, not him.

The GOP is not protecting children from anything. It never has done. The GOP is protecting itself by directing the rage and wrath of its base away from its own incompetence and malevolence so that its base doesn't see it for what it is: a collection of billionaires and billionaire quislings worsening the conditions for non-billionaires at an accelerating pace.

Trans is just the latest in a long series of distractions that the conservative base keeps stupidly falling for. (My introduction to their bullshit was the crusade against Dungeons & Dragons and the closely-related Satanic Panic. Ever notice how both those aren't things anymore? Did they really protect children against the harms of D&D given that D&D's current edition is the best-selling version of that game in history? No, because it was never about protecting children.)

I'd happily pay for a service if I could have a guarantee, with legal teeth (like a service level agreement with truly massive penalties for breach), that the service won't ever do any of the following:

1. Put an ad in front of my face.
2. Sell my personal information.

I used to pay for some services to get the "ad-free" version, but almost invariably this chain got subsequently followed: ad-free → opt-in "curated" ads → opt-out "curated" ads → "curated" ads → dropping all pretense of there being any advantage to paying as the site becomes ad-o-rama.

So I won't pay for sites. I just block their ads.

Mastodon has limits for number of pictures. Pixelfed has higher limits out of the box. Pixelfed has image filters available. Mastodon doesn't seem to. Pixelfed's UX is oriented toward picture management. Mastodon's is oriented toward the textual experience.

They're different products that happen to share a protocol.

I'm going to block it as a user until I find a friendly, stable instance of my favoured Fediverse flavours that blocks it for me.

There's no persuasive argument I've heard for treating Meta as anything other than a rampaging horde of Huns on the attack.

By "BOFH that happens to run the server" you mean "the volunteer whose money, time, and effort are being expended on your behalf", right?

This is the single most entitled opinion I've ever heard in this. "I, the person who bears none of the pecuniary, temporal, or psychological costs of running the server insist that 'the free software ethos' means I get what I want on someone else's computer."

Fuck that noise.

If you want a server run your way that federates with the people you want to federate with, put your own skin in the game. Run your own server with your own rules. THAT is the actual free software ethos: DIY if you don't like the way someone else does it.

The free software ethos is the punk ethos, not the hippy dippy shits ethos.

Support for user blocking by instance.

English has gendered pronouns, for example. There's also some gender divides in nouns: actor/actress, for example. (These are slowly being replaced, however.)

Languages like Farsi and Mandarin and such don't. The only difference in pronouns, in fact, with Farsi is "courteous" vs. "common". And even that isn't happening as much as it used to. And the only time nouns are gendered is if the item they're talking about has an actual physical gender. Like "man" or "woman". There are no gendered declensions of any kind, in fact.

It's more complicated in Chinese. In oral Chinese there's no gendered pronouns. It's pronounced [tā] whether you mean man, woman, or other.^1^ As with Farsi, however, there are no gendered nouns outside of those describing literal physically-gendered things. And unlike Farsi, not only are there no gendered declensions of any kind, there are hardly any declensions of any kind^2^.

^1^ In written Chinese, for complicated reasons, there are three different pronouns in common usage: 他 for masculine (he), 她 for feminine (she), and 它 for everything else (it). This "modernization" was first proposed in the very late 19th century and came into its final form sometime in the 1920s. It was a deliberate attempt to make Chinese easier to translate into western languages (and since at the time the Chinese had somewhat of an inferiority complex it was also couched as making Chinese a "modern" language). (There were a couple of others added, including one for deities and one for animals, but those never caught on and are hardly ever seen in modern Chinese.)

But they're all pronounced the same: [tā].

And now, full circle, Chinese is "modernizing" again. While official laws, forms, scholarly papers, regulations, etc. use that three-way split in pronouns, increasingly in commercial settings (like the world's largest digital souq: Taobao) all pronouns are being replaced with "TA". Yes. Latin letters. Uppercased.

This I find completely hilarious: Chinese developed gendered pronouns (in writing only!) to soothe western tastes ... only to pick up an ungendered pronoun again ... to match western tastes. And before westerners have solved the problem themselves in their own languages!

^2^ Chinese does not decline for number except for a tiny handful of cases you can learn completely in 30 minutes. (And even here it's not quite 'declension' like that word applies in the Indo-European family of languages.) There's no "car" vs. "cars". They're both 汽车. If you want to specify that you mean more than one car, you would modify it by saying "some" or "three" or whatever in front of it: 一些汽车 [yī xiē qì chē], literally "one (small number) car" or "some cars".

(And what caused this)

Prediction: bad database programming. ;)

Wow! Someone who gets "choice" and "freedom of association"!

I can see that you very strongly feel something about this … but I can't for the life of me figure out why. Can you show me on this doll where the bad kbin touched you?

See, that's exactly why I like Mastodon and want nothing to do with Bluesky. Sounds like we're both happy this way.

Post-Soviet decline?

Their last attempt at a lander was in 1976 which is (checks notes) smack dab in the middle of the Soviet era ... and it crashed too.

Weird. Most of my feed is filled with embedded systems stuff, left-leaning politics, and a few jokes. There's Linux stuff here and there, naturally, because of the overlap with embedded, but it's hardly dominating.

Perhaps you need to learn how to curate your feed? Try subscribing to hashtags and to people talking about the things you want to talk about. And there's also the possibility you're on an instance that is more Linux-focused and thus getting that artificially increased; changing your instance to something you're actually interested in will likely help. For example if you like tabletop games, dice.camp is an instance where a LOT of tabletop game designers and players hang out.

I hate you so much right now.🤣

Replace "communist tankie shit" with "CSAM" or "torture porn" or such and see if that makes any sense to you (keeping in mind that all content from your "whitelisted" stuff is stored on the server owner's hardware).

It amazes me when people think their opinions are so important they feel they have to announce they're leaving. The insecurity involved must be truly astonishing.

Step one: learn the name of the language?

I don’t believe that I am being rude or uncivil

Dude. You're literally naming yourself "you are hurting the fediverse". How 'bout I go to your instance and call myself "@youareafuckingmoron" and ask you politely to change something on your instance? Would you think it just a wee tad uncivil?

I pirate like a son-of-a-bitch.^1^ The stuff I pirate is not available where I live. There is literally zero avenues for me to purchase it.

In what meaningful (←this word is important and doing a lot of heavy lifting, so pay close attention to it!) way are the people I'm pirating from getting harmed? As such, in what meaningful (←c.f. above for the importance of this word) way, then, is it unethical?

And if it isn't unethical it is ... ?

The Internet truly does never cease to amaze. Just not in the way that some of its louder, brasher, more uninformed, thoughtless portions think it does.

^1^ I still support lemmy.world's decision to block those communities. Yes, you can be pro-piracy, an active pirate, and still support an action that is contrary to piracy. Welcome to "nuance". It's not a native of the Internet so you don't see it very often.

And yet it's the "liberals" who are the whiny snowflakes.🙄

That's a lot of people who are a net drain on society both economically and in terms of accomplishment. SO MUCH EFFORT is wasted on trying to get my eyes on their graffiti. The greatest engineers of the 1950s and 1960s put humans on the Moon. The greatest engineers of the 2000s onwards struggle to get eyes on ads.

It's fucking repulsive.

Cryptoscam shill is shilling the cryptoscam.

It's amazing to me that anybody considers crypto"currency" to be a viable currency these days after all the failures of the (... uh ... you know that "exchanges" are payment processors right? RIGHT!? ...) ecosystem to the tune of now billions of dollars.

But hey, you can at least send your funny money on a public ledger (for PRIVACY! LOL!) and have it get processed painfully slowly while contributing to more greenhouse gases than most medium-sized nations!

There's literally no downside!

Dude, you've been asked at least ten times now (I stopped counting when I reached ten) if you've addressed your technical problem with the admins here. Ten times (or, likely, many more) you've avoided answering that question which implies, naturally, that you have not.

You're not interested in solving a problem. You're interested in being "right", even if you're utterly, completely, and inescapably in the wrong.

Go back to your instance and flail your arms like a toddler in a tantrum over there, please. Or, you know, work with the admins to solve your problem where it actually exists instead of where the voices in your head are telling you it is.

I've seen the controversy where myisp.com blocked mail from 2 email hosts. So since there is no one big owner what is stopping someone creating an email host that propagates CP or other illegal stuff?

From what it seems like is ISPs can try to block from those hosts but the only justice that can happen seems only from government/police but that only works in certain countries because more can just pop up bypassing the blocks.

I'm kinda concerned if this issue has no solution because it's a pretty sharp edge of the double edge sword of having instances anyone can create and host.

Because someone can just host a CP mailing list and now that list, even if blocked from other ISPs, still provides a safe space for pedophiles to share content and other illegal stuff.

Also what is stopping someone from creating an email host that has a slur for its name and then go sending email around to other ISPs. Like you don't want someone named "NAZI_LOVER@n-word.f-slur"

Adjust as appropriate for literally any other technology used on the Internet up to and including frickin' DNS.

ANY technology, without exception, has utility for evil as well as good. (Some are more evil-leaning, like corporate social media silos, while others are more good-leaning, like automated puppy scritchers, to be fair.) To pearl-clutch over one technology because it's the new one is just ...

... well, human I guess. Humans are always doing this shit.

Leftism acts like a cult.

Trump: [exists, has a cult-like following, is 100% right wing]

QAnon: [exists, is a literal cult, is 100% right wing]

Yeah, sure buddy. Whatever lets you look in the mirror without getting the urge to smash that face into a bloody pulp.

I get that all the time. It amused me greatly until the day I found out I can turn off the Fantasy Internet Points entirely. Now I have no idea if my votes are up or down or sideways.

And I don't care.

"Mastodon" is a program. It has absolutely no agency whatsoever, and without agency there is no responsibility.

So now you're probably really saying "Mastodon's developers" have responsibility.

Good. Pay them. Writing software is a huge job, and getting your software suddenly stress-tested by millions of users abandoning a sinking ship is a good way to get overloaded and even burned out. So you think they have responsibility for something? Help them get it done. Beginning with paying their foundation so that they can hire more people to do it.

Coming in and writing a huge rambling set of demands is not how you're going to get anything changed.

The emphasis on Kanji composition is hilarious to me since that's Chinese and in Chinese it's got all the dials turned to 11.

I use Textadept over any of the named ones, including VS Code. (I use the vi subset of Vim for remote access to machines I haven't yet installed Textadept on.)

Why?

I have a moral objection to ... Well let me show you:

One of those is VSCode (well, VSCodium, which is VSCode without Microsoft's spyware installed), and the other is Textadept. One of those is occupying almost 30MB of memory to do nothing. The other is occupying about 1.5-2GB of memory ... to do nothing. In both cases there are no files open and no compilers being run, etc. I find this kind of intense wastefulness a sign of garbage software and I try not to use garbage software. (Unfortunately I'm required to use garbage Windows 10 at work. 😒)

Oh, and Textadapt has both a GUI version (and not the shit GUI that Emacs provides in its GUI version!) and a console version, allowing me to quickly get it running even on remote machines I have to use. VSCode/Codium ... not so much. I'd have to run it with remote X and ... that is painful when doing long-distance stuff.