…what?

I’ve always had an alternative take on the “afterlife”. Some people like to think of spirits as this tangible thing, like a ghost, or something that is self aware. I see it more like how someone would say “The spirit of the city comes alive at these events!”. So in that case, the city has a spirit. It’s not a ghost, but that’s more along the lines of how I interpret the spirit. My grandma died in October. Her spirit lives on with me until the day I die. I will continue spreading stories of the things she’s taught to me. In that way, she will continue to inspire people who she’s never even met. So in that way her spirit lives on.

So now that you get the idea of what I mean by spirit, here is what I think happens to us when we die. In the short term, you cease to exist. You don’t experience anything more. You don’t look down upon people from the heavens. You don’t roam the earth observing life. You just…don’t exist anymore. In the long term your spirit lives on. Each persons spirit will continue a different length of time. I’m sure there was probably a guy named Tom who lived in what is now Boston, back in the 1600s. I have no idea about who or what Tom did, because everything he ever did has been forgoten. Toms spirit has died. Others have their spirit live on for much longer. George Washingtons spirit lives on as long as America lives on. There may or may not have been a guy named Jesus. If he did exist, he’s got to hold the record for longest living spirit. I can’t think of anybody elses spirit from 2000+ years ago we still think about today.

The point is, while you’re alive you have the chance to make an impact on as many or as few people as you can. Physically everybody is going to experience death differently. Ironically, people who are executed through lethal injection have the easiest death I can think of. Pain free. The rest of us are going to experience something much more horrible. Some die in their sleep peacefully.

But after you’re gone, your spirit is all that remains. How long it remains depends on who you inspired, and what concepts you gave birth to for societies benefit.

Don’t worry, if Kyiv’s getting nuked, so are all the rest of us, so you’d have found out long before you had time to read about it! :D

Actually, I don’t think they’d ever find out about it. One second they would exist, and then suddenly, not so much. Obviously no one has any way to prove this, but the going expectation is that if you get nuked, you don’t even feel pain. It happens so fast, you just cease to be an alive person anymore, and instead become a pile of ash. You essentially go from healthy living human, to creamation where you stand, in an instant.

Obviously nobody who’s ever been vaporized like that can comment after the fact if they felt pain, or were aware of anything. What we do know is there have been recovered scenes after the Japanese nuked cities where you see a shadow in the shape of a person. That’s where that person was, and their body cast enough of a shadow in that moment of bright intense light, that it prevented the ground from being cooked by the blast. Unfortunately, nobody was giving the middle finger to something unrelated when the blast happened. As dark as the situation was, if it had to happen, it would have been kinda neat if the shadows were doing something interesting by pure chance.

But yeah, they wouldn’t have had time to even know they’d been bombed.

Is this whole thing FOSS, and using ActivityPub?

TomSpace.

…there’s no website I can go to? It’s app only?

Love it! Now we just need a guy named Tom, and a super potato quality camera for Toms profile pic.

I want a MySpace clone. Does that exist as an open source project in the fediverse?

I don’t know what Canvas is, but I JUST came to Lemmy because AI bots tagged me 3 times in one month. And I sat there, thinking to myself “Well…now what?”

I thought to myself “There has GOT to be more people affected by this, and by all reddit’s shitty decisions over the past 2 years…”

And then I started thinking “What if there WAS a reddit clone, except with some sort of balance system to ensure mods can’t get TOO powerful, and run the whole site?”

Then I found Lemmy. And, other than userbase size, and demographic, I’m pretty pleased here. If Lemmy.World makes some boneheaded decision, I could just migrate to another instance. From a functionality standpoint, Lemmy is superior to Reddit in everyway…except for the fact that Lemmy is still trying to cater to the Linux audience. Once you GET OVER that learning curve, and once Lemmy catches up with Reddit for not only number of users, but also general audience types, THEN it will truely be better than Reddit.

But I think a good barometer of if you’ve reached that point is, “Does Lemmy have an active community for women to discuss fashion?” and then “Does Lemmy have an active community for kids to talk about how much they love monster trucks?” and then “Does Lemmy have a place for men to talk about every single sports team that’s ever existed?”

If Lemmy is going to grow, you CANNOT cator to certain groups of people, and ignore any critisism about how hard it is to use. Because the people who don’t want to learn, will just not bother. They’ll ask “well why should I use this, and not reddit?”

Because whatever you are most passionate about, whether it’s the independantly owned instances, whether it’s the interconnectivity with mastadon, and every other service, whehter it’s the customizable apps others develop, or maybe you develop…with all that, you have to remember one thing. YOU care about that. The majority of people do not give a shit. They just want an easy place to talk about shoes, and monster trucks, and sports.

Now you can say “But you can CREATE any of those communities on any instance.” And that’s true. You can…but THEY won’t. They want fast, free, easy, and active. You have to design everything around the idiot…because the idiots are everywhere. Linux has the same issues, but that’s another topic for another day that’s been said repeatedly for 20+ years and hasn’t changed.

Question is, do you want to be like Linux, or do you want to be like Reddit? I don’t care what your interests are. You can find already active communities for it on Reddit. Can someone else find whatever they’re interested in on Lemmy?

Me, some of my interests are here. Not all. I want to help this platform grow, and they will come. In the meantime, the developers need to decide if they want a niche platform that cators to their kind, or if they want to grow and cator to EVERYONE with all interests.

I think it’ll be more like “LOOK AT MY LINUX SYSTEM!!! IT’S BETTER THAN YOURS!!! I AM GOOD AT COMPUTERS!!!”

I’ll find you a date!

…for $100!

It’s me. The date is me. Also, I’m going to flake after you send the $100.

Wait…is a femboy not still male? I thought it was just a feminine looking male?

I don’t get it…it’s like tinder for mastodon users? All mastodon users? Or juat mastodon users who also use this?

(and thats just America…the internet is the world. Except for north korea).

At least use the full quote.

And now for the part this platform doesn’t want to hear. THOSE “problematic” posters are a GOOD thing.

You have to understand, if you took the world and seperated its humans by intelligence, the “idiot” group is going to be much bigger than the “PhD” group. Like…by a lot.

So if you ONLY cater to smart people, you ARE limiting your growth. Again…by a lot.

So the eventual question needs to be asked. “What is Lemmy trying to be?”

Are you trying to be an alternitive to Reddit? Are you trying to replace Reddit? Are you trying to be a Reddit similiar niche community seperate from the mainstream?

Because if you want this to be a small niche unknown community geared towards older people, tech minded, then congrats. Thats what you have.

But if you want a broader reach, then you can’t gatekeep the idiots. There’s a reason they call them “the unwashed masses”. Sometimes even quite literally.

Thats because America alone has something like 3.5 BILLION people in it. Ohio alone has 11 million citizens. I assure you 95% of ohio is farms and cows, and we STILL have 11 million. Sometimes I wonder if they include the cows in that number.

My point is, 50k in scale to how big the internet is (and thats just America…the internet is the world. Except for north korea).

So, 50k is not really a lot. Especially when you consider that this userbase is fragmented by design.

I feel like this is the smarter design for this type of format. I also feel like this format could be so much more than it is. And it’s because this format relies on the idea that you have to please everyone. Otherwise they’ll defederate.

Well when I was 7 years old there was a girl at school who didn’t like me. My great aunt edna asked what the other kids thought of me. They liked me ok. I had some friends. It was just her that actively disliked me. So my great aunt edna says some advice that has stood the test of time. She told me “In life, not everyone is going to like you. The only thing you can do is be yourself, make sure they don’t dislike you because you’re being a problem, and then surround yourself with people who DO like you. Let the others dislike you. As long as you’re not being a problem child, you can only stay true to yourself, and likeminded friends will follow.”

And even though she said this in the 80s, and has been dead for decades, her words speak true in my 40s today. Essentially the modern version would be “haters gonna hate”.

So if there’s 50k users, and they’re segregating into their own spaces, it’s going to feel more like 1000 users. And now take into account time zones, and individual schedules, it’ll feel more like 200 users.

…no? Who uses outlook?

I say DON’T fork it. Heres the thing nobody in communities wants to come to grips with…security is not the way to grow a very new platform. “Normie” users will not give one shit if you are super secured with 87 point encrypted authentication. Super secure? Don’t mean shit.

You know what normie users DO care about? Marketing. They want one concise marketing vision. They want one baseball brand. One football brand. One basketball brand. One twitter. One facebook. One instagram.

Now. There are times that those dominant platforms can be disrupted. If oh…I don’t know…some dipshit decided to spend 44 BILLION dollars and spend the next 2 years changing it from the dominant name in microblogging, to a right wing facist supporting echochamber where differing ideas are stiffled, blocked, and shut down.

That would create the need for a secondary dominant microblogging platform that allows for freedom of ideas to be posted and not deleted due to political stance.

Enter Mastadon. It fills that void nicely. It’s still small as the majority of the userbase of twitter has no idea Mastodon exists. However it’s undeniable they are losing massive numbers of users. Not because they don’t like the twitter concept, but because they don’t like what it’s become.

With more marketing, mastodon COULD be the new dominant twitter, thus rendering that 44Billion dollar purchase even MORE stupid than it already is, if 90% of their userbase leaves.

But where you’ll lose them is if they have to make a choice. Mastodon 1 and Mastodon 2??? Well twitter was just twitter…this must not be twitter.

And just like that, you’ve confused and lost the new user. Forget the fediverse. Forget instances. Forget security. Forget federation. The normie user doesn’t know and doesn’t care about ANY of that. Instead just say “its one mastodon. It’s like twitter without facism”

Boom! User influx. This is already happening in spite of lack of marketing and the fediverse existing. Thats how badly people want a twitter clone. If someone else makes another non-fediverse clone, with no facism, and big money marketing, mastodon won’t grow to its full potential.

But for gods sakes! Don’t shoot yourself in the foot to spite yourself.

I’m pretty new here, and unaware of whats going on around me. So to me this is just "A thing is happening, and most people to be happy it’s happening.

Sooooooo…YAY! Go Team!

Ah. So it’s not one being better than the other. It’s more a case of layout taste.

THIS IS WHY I LOVE THIS FEDIVERSE!!!

Other platforms would tell you “this is what this service is, this is how it looks, it’s all you’re getting, so kneel down, shut the fuck up and take this corporate dick down your throat!”

Meanwhile the fediverse is more like:

“This is the thing you use. It’s great!”

And then another guy is like “No, wait, try this instead. It’s better.”

So now you have to try both, snd make your own conclusion.

Or maybe there’s a third thing I don’t even know about. Theres no law saying that ONLY two options are available. There’s no limit. You could show me 500 different options.

Nobody can tell you what to use, what not to use, whats better…thats all stuff for the user to decide.