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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • I think the big thing is that Lemmy isn’t nearly as monetizable as other social media. What that means to me is that if we do grow, it’ll be largely organic. It’ll be at a pace where the culture won’t change overnight. If we get big enough to have real issues, we can meaningfully splinter to more manageable sizes, or moderate shit stains into instances with no reach beyond themselves.

    In short, so long as we maintain interoperability standards, I think we will have all the tools needed to keep things from enshittification. We might just grow out of pure longevity as other social media enterprises slowly but surely kill themselves.

    But that could be wishful thinking. Who knows!







  • Like most really early animated characters, Mickey Mouse was a lot of things over a long period of time. And as far as American animation goes, Mickey Mouse has been a staple for the childhood of literally every generation. Younger millennials and zoomers grew up on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Children in decades prior watched Mickey be a musketeer in one short and starving due to poverty in the next.

    So while the rough edges of the character have been sanded down over time, he’s still very much a plucky, brave, kind, and helpful protagonist in most of the media he’s in.

    Which to your average adult viewer means… he’s a bland and uninteresting character.

    That said, he’s still an icon of animation as a whole, and most things with Mickey in them are doing some new and novel something (design, production pipeline, whatever) that pushes the whole industry forward in some way.


  • I wish Democrats were willing to put in the same amount of endless, ceaseless planning and toiling and preparing so when an opportunity arises, you can snatch it up. Republicans did this with the Supreme Court, with religion in schools, etc etc etc. Last time Democrats had both Houses and the Presidency, we got barely anything (to my memory at least).

    I wish Democrats had an ounce of Republicans’ ability not just to shape narratives, but to conjure them from thin air and still dominate the news cycle.

    I wish Democrats were as willing to bend to the extremists in their own party as the Republicans do. That’s a real monkey’s paw wish right there, but at the moment the extreme right is literal fascists and the extreme left just wants the cool quality of life stuff the Nordic countries already have.

    Speaking personally… yeah we ARE divided here in the US. It kind of IS that bad. There are a lot of reasons for it, but in my mind the biggest thing is the legacy of slavery in this country. It’s not a scar… it’s still bleeding because bigots keep picking the scab. There’s been so many knock on effects from it that have gone unexamined and unaddressed because there are enough bigots to be a stupid but effective voting block.


  • The “people want to hear about celebrities” part is relevant to the fact that interests drive a big part of the audience to the site. Meaning, you and I both want celebrities to be off Twitter because if we can convince them to go elsewhere, that would be an effective way to cripple Twitter.

    Complaining that people like celebrities when they’re not “relevant to your daily life” doesn’t really do anything to further your goals. It just makes you sound like an asshole who isn’t relatable to the kind of people that we want to listen to us.











  • On the housing thing - there’s been a major intrusion of private equity firms into the regular house market. A report came out recently claiming as much as 40% of all single family homes sold in 2023 went to private equity firms to turn into rental properties (iirc). On mobile, otherwise would try to actually give you the source.

    I can’t speak to the food price increases. My only thought is that most people are creatures of habit and always have been, so I doubt that individual shoppers ‘not putting pressure on the stores’ would explain a historic rise in costs. That said, if we did find evidence that shoppers are less savvy or willing to change habits, my first guess as to why would be people overall being more overworked and stressed. But until the data comes in, who knows.