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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • golli@lemm.eetoReddit@lemmy.worldWtf has happened to reddit?
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    2 months ago

    I’d say the most recent major influences were the IPO and the emergence of LLMs.

    Reddit becoming a publicly traded company and the preparation to do so certainly initiated a major shift in its priorities.

    Ai and large language models make it easier than ever to create shiny, but low quality content.

    And the rest is just reddit becoming more mainstream leading to an overall shift towards banal rather than niche topics.






  • Yes, it does make a difference, but like with many other things you should not fall into the trap of decision making paralysis.

    Your current instance lemmy.world is the largest and perfectly adequate for the majority. It also costs nothing to make accounts on other instances and is done in less time than it takes to decide between them.

    That said some reasons to choose one instance over another:

    Federation with other instances

    Some instances choose not to federate with others. Common reasons being political ideology or NSFW/piracy/violent content. Others might be more liberal and leave it up to their users to block whatever within their own apps. As someone already mentioned world seems to have defederated dbzer0 the piracy focused instance. Some political instances that often also get defederated are the far left ones like hexbear and Lemmy grad (seems like those are defederated by lemmy.world as well).

    Server location and performance

    Especially country focused instances like lemmy.ca or feddit.uk will have their servers in their own countries. You can of course access them from anywhere, but a European user might have a better time choosing an instance with servers located in Europe, while someone in America might have lower latency with one located there.

    Alternate frontends

    If you are accessing Lemmy through a browser rather than an app, you might enjoy alternate frontends that change the design. Your current one lemmy.world for example offers 4 different designs that can also be found in the sidebar alexandrite, photon, voyager mobile and one looking like old.reddit.

    General ideology of the instance

    Your choice of instance might also tell others something about you. If you choose a country specific instance people seeing your profile name might assume you come from there, if you choose one with a particular political view people will probably assume you hold similar views. Same goes for other instances that are related to things like sexuality or hobbies.




  • Since I see this claim constantly: where in the Budapest memorandum did they promise protection?

    Looking at the Wikipedia summary nowhere does anyone give security assurances similar to NATO article 5 or the even stronger worded mutual defense clause article 42 TEU of the EU. The closest it comes to is in the fourth point, but that is only in the case of nuclear weapons being used. Which obviously hasn’t happened yet. Beyond that it is just a promise not to attack, which Russia has broken, but every other singator has kept. And as far as I can see it does not contain anything that compells others to act on someone else’s breach.





  • Bloat and bad performance aside, you don’t see a benefit in having a all-in-one solution that in a way acts as a drop in replacement for people wanting to switch away from the likes of Google/Apple? I certainly do.

    Yes, having a dedicated app selected for each use case will likely give better results. But it also means more management. And many users don’t actually need more than basic functionality.

    But yes looking at the complaints, they should look at polishing existing features first.



  • This seems like a great idea and i wouldn’t mind it getting expanded to become an EU wide norm.

    That said it only adresses part of the problem. Another way consumers get tricked are recipe changes to substitute expensive ingredients for cheaper ones. And this one also subverts the mandatory kg/€ (or litre/€) price notices, which in a way already help with identifying shrinkflation. Although prominent warnings would help a lot fighting the psychological tricks involved in shrinkflation.

    Personally i would also like laws to go even further and make it mandatory for companies to maintain public databases with product sizing and ingredients. Although i assume it wouldn’t be easy to fight against companies trying to subvert such system and claiming that near identical products are something new rather than just a new worse version of something existing.


    On that note i also miss the more standardized portion sizes we had here in Germany for a lot of products. Actually something that sadly had to be abolished due to eu regulations, which at the same time at least seemed to have given us the already mentioned kg/€ price labels.

    I had to jog my memory with this article (in german) from 2009 when the change apparently happened. An example it gives is that e.g. sugar (up to a size of 1kg) could only be sold in portions of 100, 250, 500, 750 und 1000g. So no trickery with random inbetween sizes. Obviously not a huge problem with something like sugar, but it similarly also applied to something like chocolate bars. Which nowadays come in the most random, constantly changing weights.

    Maybe a bit heavy handed, but i wouldn’t mind fighting shrinkflation in some areas by simply forcing standardized sizes.