Yeah, it’s a bad, bad time to be a wild bird right now, or anything that eats them. The list of mammals who’ve died from it is growing, and sea lions are getting wiped out by the thousands. I think only Australia and Antarctica are still virus-free (for now).

It doesn’t keep me up at night, but I’m definitely watching!

“We laugh so we do not cry.”

I’ve been following H5N1 pretty closely for several months and one of the first things I did on Lemmy was set up a community to post news stories to. !h5n1_avianflu@lemmy.sdf.org

5 more of the deceased cats in Poland were confirmed today to have died of H5N1 for a total of 34 now. There was a report that one of the owners provided a sample of raw chicken that had been fed to the cats, and it tested positive for H5N1. This was almost immediately followed up by a very defensive press conference with the Polish government insisting it wasn’t true; Poland supplies about 20% of the European market for chicken. Make of that what you will.

That none of the owners got sick is great news, but no one should be breathing easy about what’s happening globally. :|

Upvoted for visibility! 🤪

Christian closed the sub for a while until everyone’s emotions settle down. The sub will be back at some point, even if the app isn’t. :)

ETA his post about it in case you can’t see it:

Hey all,

Almost a week since Apollo closed and it’s been such a weird adjustment, I really miss coming here and talking to you folks about feedback and cool ideas for Apollo going forward, and scribbling down ideas on how I could make them happen. I thought Friday would mean things would calm down, and they have a fair bit, but it was surprising and nice to get almost a second wave of really nice comments from people saying how much Apollo meant to them over the years.

(I started on app development because the thought of being able to jump on the bus and one day hopefully see someone using something I built felt like the coolest thing imaginable, and the idea that so many people used and loved Apollo really really makes me smile.)

I’m not really looking to come onto Reddit at the moment, and a few friends have indicated the subreddit at times can skew a bit over the top with anger about Reddit’s actions at times. Trust me, I totally get the frustration, but we’ve had a “no dumping on other apps” rule in this subreddit forever for a reason: we want to be nice people, and in the case where others are maybe disappointing us, be the bigger people.

That being said, I don’t really want to have to keep a keen eye over this subreddit, nor do I expect the other moderators here to, so I think for the time being – until maybe emotions settle a bit more and this place can turn into a nice flowering meadow of memes and reminiscing – I’m going to set the subreddit to restricted so no further posts can be made, you can still talk in existing posts or here if you so please. Heck, tell me something fun you’ve done over the past week, or give me a game recommendation to play (I should be finishing ToTK soon).

(Hopefully this is the one subreddit Reddit is okay with the moderators changing things, at least for a bit. :p)

Anyway, that’s it from me. If you want to hear more of my musings or keep in touch outside of Reddit, I’m on Mastodon, and Twitter. Per request, I also added a bunch more designs to Apollo’s merch store, and the promo code “RIPAPOLLO” will still work for a few more days.

- Christian

I thought it was +++ for extended ANSI graphics.

Me either, so I started a community for a subject I’m interested in and follow on reddit and I’m populating it with new content as the news comes in so new people can catch up. Be the change you want to see. Interact with that content and post more of it. Don’t just complain that it’s not being fed to you.

ETA: I might add that I have no intention whatsoever of moderating that community in the long term. If/when Lemmy grows, if that community picks up, I’ll be looking for someone to take it over.

I’m not really into beans and shitposting, but I don’t mind my feed flooded (yet) because it’s always good to see people being active and having fun.

Ha, me too, I figured it was just chugging or something.

That’s my biggest concern, too. People are fuckin’ weird and you never know what will set them off. Some people just can’t stand any sort of disagreement or pushback and might want to retaliate. I really think the source should remain invisible to other users.

I have 3 young-and-not-so-young adult children (big gap between them) and I have found myself wanting to apologize to them so many times for bringing them into this shit show. I really didn’t know it was going to get this bad. As a child of the 70’s I was promised a world of ecologically and socially conscious people by now. Welp…

It’s a good one! 👍

Thanks for the reminder! I signed up at sdf.org because I saw that r/bbs had moved over. As soon as I saw SDF’s website, which hasn’t had its look updated since the mid 90’s by my eye, I knew it was the one for me. I can tell they’ve been struggling a bit under the load but I appreciate so much that they’re hosting an instance and I have confidence they’ll get it all running smoothly. They’re a non-profit and I’ll be donating as soon as I’m able.

I do worry, though, that as the fediverse grows many of the instances won’t be able to scale up and will drop out. I’m not an admin or sysop and know nothing of how this works on the back end, so hopefully those fears are groundless.

Hopefully someone will come along and answer. Thanks. :)

Any tips for a sighted person on what makes for a good and useful description?

It’s when most of the third party apps stopped working forever due to the API changes.

🙋‍♀️