Wow! With vpn on (as usual) I get tons of other people’s stuff - almost entirely movies and TV, lots of Bluey episodes in particular? Makes sense I don’t see anything of mine, bc I haven’t torrented anything in the past few days. When I turned the vpn off, nothing showed up. I suspected my rommate wouldn’t be torrenting bc he always asks me to do it for him lol, he’s less tech savvy, but it would be funny if something of his actually did show up.

Same story here. I dream journaled religiously for a couple months, it happened once during that time, and then I gave up, lol.

My partner and my mom both use swipe, I guess I thought it was more common. Meanwhile I would rather walk over to my computer and use a desktop version if possible if it’s anything more than a sentence here and there.

I like kids, and want to become a parent. Not because kids are cute - they often aren’t - but to have a family and get to nurture a young person and see them grow up. However, I hate the societal pressure to have kids and the way it pushes people who don’t genuinely want to have kids into parenthood because it’s the default. And it’s often justified with ‘kids are cute’ as if finding kids cute is all it takes to be a parent. So you run into shitty to mediocre parents running around with kids they didn’t want because they were told kids are the fucking meaning of life, but gave up early on because, what do you know, parenting is actually hard. And for a lot of us, those are our parents, grandparents, bosses, friends, or community members, and it’s so frustrating to see that everywhere. It’s really disturbing to be told by shitty parents (like my own mom) that parenthood is the best thing in the world.

As long as it’s not in front of actual kids, I don’t see a problem with jokes like this, and I sometimes find them pretty funny tbh. I’m not interested in giving shitty parents a free pass because kids are cute. It’s not cute when someone doesn’t support their kids or think about their needs, or sees them as a cute accessory instead of a person. I’m with the childfree people on this - usually their hate is not towards the children, but towards shitty parents and towards having kids being seen as the default.

I disagree. I never fully stopped using reddit, aside from the protests. There are just too many small unique communities there that I can’t leave atm, because there is no equivalent Lemmy community. I use it less and less over time but I can see how many people in my shoes would have just returned to reddit 100% instead of using both.

I also use VPN all the time for privacy - if I wasn’t pirating I’d still have it. I’ve also used it at times to access region locked content.

I personally only pirate things I feel are more “moral” to pirate, or if I don’t have a choice - I never pirate any kind of indie content, for instance, but I do pirate movies and tv shows put out by large corporations. In undergrad I pirated almost all of my textbooks because the markups are unethical. I’m not against paying for things, I just want to boycott some specific companies, plus I’m often too broke to afford things or sometimes need a downloaded copy specifically for offline access. When I was working full time I did actually pirate fewer things - only things from the companies I boycott or things I can’t access legally where I live - and I will return to that once I finish grad school.

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/gltides.html

If the great lakes only see a fluctuation of 5cm max, I don’t think it is affecting the human body in any meaningful way.

Maybe. Pre-centralization, it was very similar - forum boards run by different people on different servers. A system like Lemmy is basically the same but without the inconvenience of having to make a new account every time, which should make it more accessible in the long run.

What it would need in addition to that is discoverability - if just a few major instances show up high enough in major search engines results it’ll be a huge draw. Right now discoverability is kind of abysmal, which worries me a little, but I know people are working on solutions.

Imo what we regular users can do right now that will have an impact is contribute to communities and keep them active, and encourage reddit-based communities to switch over. If we all can prove that this is an effective way to run communities, the people will come.

It’s not about what company has the best system and most control, it’s about what we as groups of people with shared interests gravitate towards. Lemmy fixes some barriers to running forums and might enable more individuals and small groups to start running their own servers again.

One small part of the problem I only learned about recently is the Whole Language approach to teaching reading. Basically teaching kids to guess what words make sense instead of actually teaching them how to read. It was popularized in the 80s and 90s but continued to be used in some parts of the US into the 2010s. An entire chunk of the US population (and a few other countries as well) was literally not taught phonics/sounding it out because their teachers or schools followed this ineffective alternative method.

Of course that’s far from the only factor, but it’s one many aren’t aware of.