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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Before Arch that role belonged to Gentoo.

    To add, before the change the Gentoo wiki was a top resource when it came to Linux questions. Even if you didn’t use Gentoo you could find detailed information on how various parts of Linux worked.

    One day the Gentoo wiki died. It got temporary mirrors quickly, but it took a long time to get up and working again. This left a huge opening for another wiki, the Arch wiki, to become the new top resource.

    I suspect, for a number of reasons, Arch was always going to replace Gentoo as the “True Linux Explorer”, but the wiki outage accelerated it.






  • In addition to the cowards reasoning it’s also because Paramount (parent company of CBS) and Skydance Media are trying to merge.

    That deal is valued at ~8 billion dollars, so settling for a couple million in that context makes sense.

    Additionally since it’s a merger it requires FCC approval and Trump appointed the FCC chairman and is known to meddle in things.

    So these companies are trying to play nice with Trump so they can merge.

    Basically paying $20 to make this go away is the cost of doing business. Corruption all the way.


  • then you lose half the users and perhaps half the communities

    As a thought, do you really lose them?

    For example the “Television” community previously existed on the lemm.ee instance. The lemm.ee instance is scheduled for shutdown. The “Television” community is now hosted on the piefed.social instance.

    It has the same users and has the same topics of discussion. Were the users really lost? Did the community really go away?

    Let’s pretend Reddit decided it would no longer allow discussion on “Television”. What if BlueSky no longer allowed discussion on “Television”. You’d have to leave those platforms completely. You really would lose those communities. Those users (at least in part) really would be gone.

    Is Lemmy.World a big instance? Sure. Would the users and communities really be lost if it went away? I don’t think so.





  • I’m not surprised, but I agree with the hot take, so maybe it’s only warm.

    I think they keep interest in ActivityPub in order to keep regulators concerned with Antitrust at bay. The Fediverse isn’t a real threat in Meta’s view and keeping an engineer or two on it in order to stay invested is worth the cost.

    Threads can say they are making an honest effort to work with the larger open source community and open federated internet. As an added bonus, it isn’t actually a lie. Now the effort they’re putting in is the absolute minimum, but it’s there.

    Now I still do think this is a positive. While most people on Threads will probably never leave, it does introduce them to the wider Fediverse. It makes the Fediverse a less scary thing.




  • Search also sucks because people suck.

    If I post a picture of a flower with the caption “Look what grew in my garden!”, that’s a terrible post from a search point of view.

    Later on someone will search for “flower” but I didn’t use the word “flower” so now search sucks.

    Of course a much more common post is someone posting a picture of text, from Twitter, Tumblr, etc. with, once again, a vague caption. You remember the picture, but not what the poster actually said.

    Searching comments will sometimes help, but that depends on the comments being related.



  • My favorite part,

    Trump administration officials have suggested that the card will replace the EB-5 immigrant investor visa programme, which grants permanent residency to immigrants who invest at least $1.05m in the US, or $800,000 in designated economically distressed areas.

    So since the 90s anyone with $1 million has been able to buy/invest their way in.

    This “new gold card” costs $5 million.

    So it costs five times as much, it’s just a bribe and not an investment. I’m guessing putting together a business plan costs less than $4 million.

    So the obvious question becomes… What type of person is willing to spend $5 million, but not $1 million. (And I’m guessing less oversight.)



  • David F. Sandberg aka “ponysmasher” comes to mind. He started doing largely horror films himself on no/low budgets. One of his own films got opportunity to become a feature film. That then gave him future opportunities, the largest of which was Shazam! (2019).


    Additionally when YouTube Premium (YouTube Red at the time) first launched they also launched YouTube Originals. Many of those programs were created by YouTubers.

    The “Originals” eventually stopped being made, but it’s not clear if the issue was the content, the service or a bit of both.