I can’t foresee Lemmy specifically reaching levels of popularity comparable to platforms like Twitter or Reddit. Barring some very strange disastrous upheaval of the whole landscape they and their ilk will continue to be Leviathans even with decisions at the top that look like outright sabotage. There is so much inertia. Maybe those two examples might disappear, but only if they’re devoured by another just like them.

I can see Lemmy and similar Federated platforms with their quite sizeable yet comparatively miniscule user bases carrying on as they are and even growing a little bit and having some effect on the zeitgeist with the occasional piece of local culture seeping in to the wider platforms though people there will likely not know that’s where it came from. I also think efforts like Threads or likely something similar that comes after will be where the fediverse meets any mainstream success essentially becoming part of those bigger platforms in some way I can’t yet predict in detail.

The big appeal of Lemmy is ideological and technical, this will always limit the number of people drawn to it. If there weren’t already giants in this space that wouldn’t matter because there’d be a snowball effect that would draw crowds who came because of other people not because of any interest in how the platform functions or ideals to pursue and with those crowds could come more crowds until you have a critical mass. But with the situation as it is now, the big crowds that draw yet more crowds still, are elsewhere so you’ll only ever have enthusiasts or ideologues that go out of their way to be here.

You might want to try soft claws. They’re little plastic caps in the shape of a cat’s nail (except soft not pointed) that you fill with a non-toxic adhesive that comes with the pack and attach to the cat’s nails. Over time the cat naturally sheds their nails and the nail caps come off with them and you just replace them again when that happens. They say it doesn’t bother the cats and they don’t even notice but I think they’re exaggerating a bit there because my cats hate the process of having the nail put on which makes me feel bad but once it is actually on they quickly forget about it and it doesn’t bug them.

It’s not a perfect solution the claws are finicky to work with, the applicator for the adhesive gets clogged with dry glue, the cats don’t really like having the nails applied, the caps themselves are really quite expensive and some items like wooden furniture, still get damaged even with the soft claws but the damage in such cases is still greatly reduced and for soft items like a couch it pretty much stops them doing any damage.

One thing to keep in mind though, don’t buy cheap ones off eBay, they’re not worth a cent, the cats hate them for some reason, they don’t seem as well manufactured and they don’t come with little cleats inside to help lock it in place. Because the cats absolutely hate them so much and are definitely bothered by them they immediately pull them off straight after you’ve applied them and they’re just a waste of your time and an unnecessary source of stress for your poor kitty. I’ve found 2 brands that seem to actually be good and they’re both a lot more expensive then I’d like but at least you can buy a supply of several months and save your possessions from destruction. The two that worked for me are Soft Claws and Soft Paws. Claws seems slightly cheaper. I think they might actually be the same product since they have the exact same artwork and typeface for their packaging and logos and the caps themselves seem to be identical, one of them just says claws and the other paws. Weirdly enough they’ve both chosen to use Garfield on their packaging and somehow I’m fairly sure neither has paid for the privilege.

I noticed a little folder icon had appeared just recently and that if I clicked it, it… listed all the tabs, so I guess that was the list all tabs button. I actually rather liked it but hadn’t yet trained myself in to the habit of using it. I hadn’t even noticed it’s now gone, but curiously it seems like for me it hasn’t really gone, so much as it’s become a down arrow icon rather than a folder. Sounds like this change is to make it optional, meaning it will otherwise stay there which tracks with my experience, but why has it become a down arrow now?

I care, usually not very much, but somewhere above zero. It’s good that they actually have something to talk about which therefore gives us something to talk about. Holidays overseas are a bit easier than kids because there’s some relatability there but whatever they’re talking about it’s usually more the person talking about it that’s interesting more than the thing. You’re already friends, so you already enjoy their insights or way of talking about things and you’ve probably been there for a fair few of their important life events so it’s nice to hear about the latest ones and how that’s shaping then today as others shaped them before.

Because I don’t have kids and wasn’t on their vacation for me there is a natural limit imposed on just how interesting it can be hence saying I don’t exactly care a whole lot, but it’s usually at least enough to make sharing a beer more satisfying.

I guess that’s making a bit more sense. Strange though, seems like you have to experience it first to want it.

Really, I don’t get the appeal, that’s the weirdest thing about this. If this was an article about impractical and irresponsible racing cars getting popular and the objection was that they consume too much fuel, they drive too fast increasing safety risks and they only have 2 seats meaning less people moved per car, I’d lament the trend in the same way, but it’d be a story of how we tragically can’t stop ourselves from stupid but understandable excess. It’s easy to understand for example why obesity is hard to combat because at a basic level and all other nuance aside, generally, we like eating, and typically the foods that most lead to obesity are easily the most liked by people in general too.

But these fucking American truck things are bad for all the same anti social reasons as a sports car might be and more but they’re also not appealing in the slightest, they look awful, they don’t go fast and all the dubious “utility” value, even taken at its word, is such a weird thing to try to appeal to the masses with. Selling things like this to people who don’t need them used to rely on a kind of “sex appeal”, if it was a sports car your customer might never be able to actually drive it as fast as it can go but the idea that they theoretically could is sexy and it has those lines designed to feel like it goes fast, who the fuck thinks “ooh I could fit so much lumber in that thing” and gets a weak at the knees? It sounds about as exciting as selling something on fuel efficiency isn’t. Somehow though, not only Americans apparently, but like everyone wants these things? I am baffled. Did we all go to some mass brain washing event and I slept in that day? What is this?

It’d be cruel to the people around me, but I do rather like the idea of starting over every 30 years or so, your could try out so many different paths.

Yes, I accept that that is a URL.

Is saying someone doesn’t exist a criticism of them? It doesn’t sound very nice, but like, how can you criticise someone if you think they don’t exist?

Yeh it’s pretty clearly not sincere in voice. Seems like by saying ‘not satire’ they’re trying to avoid people thinking they mean the content of what the article describes isn’t sincerely true, but given how it’s written, it’s hard to conclude the author cheering on from the sidelines. Te nonchalance and unaffected language when discussing a travesty seems pretty clearly to be a device used for effect which frankly is pretty close to what gets called satire.

I ran a hackintosh for about 7 years and they didn’t care, I used an Apple account. Don’t think I had an iCloud though, maybe it makes a difference that I set up that account originally some years prior to building the hackintosh on a real mac.

I think with memes, there’s something of an implicit promise of at least some degree of comedy. I get the sentiment here about proprietary vs open source operating systems but there doesn’t really seem to be even an attempt at being funny besides maybe the way the characters are drawn which, given that as memes, they are recycled art used to establish the format, they don’t really elicit much of a laugh because there’s not even an expression of humour through the original artwork.

This isn’t really a commentary or a parallel or satire on that distinction between open source and proprietary OS installation, it’s more accurately describable as a complaint. Simply placing this complaint underneath the yes chad and crying wojak’s doesn’t really feel like a step up from a text post that says “I don’t like Windows or Mac OS because you have to pay for them and they make you sign up for and agree to things”. No one asked for my opinion I know, but I think this is a critique worth making: if you sum up your attempted meme in a bland, emotionally neutral sentence and then compare that bare sentence to its proposed meme counterpart and you can barely see the difference then maybe it’s not a meme that has to exist. The format is flexible, but you can still use traditional written words to express complex thoughts, not everything has to be meme-ified and if it’s not even funny when it is, why should it be?

It’s a tough job

It’s amazing how effectively just hearing this from someone who has firsthand insight can put it in perspective.

Further to that third point as well, there’s probably also a question simply of opportunity. You could take the Munich situation as evidence of capability, but it may also have been opportunity plus capability. Intelligence seems like it’s a pretty difficult game and perhaps the successes in operation bayonet had to do with fortunate and unlikely intelligence scoops that they have not luckedh upon this time around and can’t rely upon as a strategy. Also, while I don’t know much about the post-Munich assassinations, it sounds like they went on for over twenty years, didn’t really take out many of the actually important, directly involved individuals and a lot of the people they would have logically wanted to target successfully went in to hiding out of their reach so if the strategic goal is to behead the organisation that carried out attacks as a defensive strategy to weaken their capacity to do it again, 20 years just to take out relatively minor unimportant figures isn’t really going to work.

That said, it also looks, as many have stated, like “taking out Hamas” is more a convenient political smokescreen for a much more sinister goal so a very successful intelligence operation that rapidly took out all their leadership at once would actually run counter to their true objectives in this scenario.

Wow. That was fucked up.

I think he’s famously at least eaten a lot of McDonalds.

I can’t imagine getting worked up about it either, but then the whole mildly infuriating deliberate oxymoron turn of phrase is that it’s something that should only really be a little annoying but which nonetheless is really quite annoying. It’s a type of silent frustration where you feel it, but you don’t really express it or visibly react.

In terms of what should they have put on these screens? If they felt they absolutely had to do this or really thought it might help make people’s situations feel even a modicum of improvement, then the glib messages could maybe have focussed on something other than gratitude as their common theme. It hardly seems like the appropriate time to bring that up. By their nature, any cheesy and overly broad phrase is probably going to have a sadly ironic and patronising tone to it in the circumstances but maybe something like “hang in there” or just about anything except what they went with has got to better.

To keep you busy so they can show up during the call and claim no one was there.

I pass butter.