Whereas now, the changes have already happened.

A decade ago, kinda - see e.g. wildfires in California every single quarter now (since 2014 iirc?), plus just about everywhere else as well like remember when Australia was on fire?

Okay so the 1.5 threshold wasn’t reached a decade ago, but who even knows where the real tipping point is, or rather was.

But going along with your theme: it was supposed to be hundreds of years from now when the climate would change, and start to become more hostile. Whereas now, that “start” was a long way back, and some people born since then have already reached puberty.

Today the Great Decentralization is accelerating, with newspapers of record, Luke Skywalker and others as the latest high-profile refugees to lead fresh retreats.

For a moment I thought this was some kind of AI-written glitch, but apparently it was taking “artistic license” to use the name of the character rather than actor without acknowledging such - and is real (wow I hate trying to mess with Forbes, it kept changing the link to some other article entirely).

It seems like I’ve heard this story many many times before throughout history, and elsewhere besides.

It might be the best show in the universe. Or maybe not, but either way it’s funny as hell 🤣.

It is much worse than that: the game and pieces are real, yet one side keeps chewing on the pieces and then rolling them as if they were dice.

I think… I think we might end up losing this one, everything else being equal (fortunately the latter is not the case, and I’m hanging on to that sliver of hope with every fiber of my being:-).

There are lots of possibilities.

One being mere FUD - remember that he doesn’t have to succeed to cause disruption, and even the attempt will draw focus away from Russia’s own annexation of Ukraine.

And if that can simultaneously be accomplished while also acting to isolate the USA away from its allies - and perhaps more importantly them away from the USA - then so much the better (for Russia I mean, though at the expense of the Western nations).

Or Putin could have meant it as a jest, and Trump did not realize that.😜

But I also think there’s a halfway decent chance that Trump himself won’t even bother trying - he could back down, and then claim: “see how reasonable I am, I wanted to do this crazy thing, but you didn’t want me to so I didn’t, yet now I want to do this other much more ‘reasonable’ thing and it’s my turn to win so you gotta let me have this new thing I want, if you want me in return to keep doing things your way occasionally, that’s called ‘compromise’ btw” (it’s actually not btw, as a better term would be rather “shifting the goalposts”, but whatever…).

And if that was the case, then we wasted all of our efforts trying to understand the “strategy” behind something that was only ever meant as a distraction to begin with - unless that’s what they WANT us to think, and then they push it through and actually get it DONE!? That’s the thing when facing against an opponent who actually knows what the word “strategy” means - whereas the voting public seems to have no clue, which is why we probably should not have been in charge in the first place 😞 (at least I heard that sentiment a lot after Brexit, by people in the UK - like “whoopsie, can we get a do-over?!” then doing the identical thing again every single time that the latter was granted, proving just how impossible it is to help people who are absolutely dead set against receiving that aid).

Also, bold of you to presume that the USA will ever have another election again… - it is now legal to assassinate his opponent if he so chooses, so the playing field has changed entirely. Probably he’ll allow bad candidates to run that have no chance of actually winning, so it will appear as if his preferred choice had won entirely legally (Jared Kushner? or some other handpicked candidate - in all likelihood by Putin, or whoever succeeds him and inherits whatever other dirt he keeps on all rich and powerful people around the world). The gloves are off now: this is a brave new world.

Mostly, though there’s also fire-fighting too.

We all know who. But if anyone does need help connecting the dots: https://ponder.cat/post/1252517.

You don’t want to be known as a nag, do you?

I think that initial sign-up even if it mentioned that it was for topic areas, was actually joining you to communities? (Bc the actual “Topic” areas seems to be invariable) I mean, based on those Topic areas that you selected, it Joined you to Communities that will fill up your All feed.

You can now “leave” a community at any time, and while this doesn’t seem to block it from showing up in the Topic areas list - more’s the pity, bc it really should - it at least stops it from showing up in the All feed. And ofc you can (re-)join other Communities as well.

So as we are seeing, things tend to work slightly differently than Lemmy.:-) What I find helpful is how my entire “workflow” is different on it: since Lemmy doesn’t even offer Notifications for posts from communities, for those where there are only like 0-3 posts per day, I prefer receiving those Notifications rather than have to “find” the communities as I would have done in Lemmy. Like, this works much better than hoping that they show up in a Feed somewhere, especially when a community is small like [email protected]. Then again, this would work better for someone who checks things daily, although… there is a “Mark all as read” button as well.

On Lemmy I used to browse All rather than Subscribed, but on PieFed I usually use a combination of Notifications and rarely browsing All or like when I want a concentration of news stories (ahem, even from communities that I’ve “Left” even:-), then that is available as well. This whole aspect of PieFed really works much better for me overall, though indeed it took quite some getting used to it at first to discover what was possible and have to re-think my workflow. I hope this description helps you think through what may work best for you, or perhaps you’ll just copy this.:-)

Well I know a way but you won’t like it. Actually two ways.

The first is to start your own PieFed server instance. The second is to message an existing person who admins one to add it. Whenever I add new communities, like [email protected], it just goes under the generic Home -> Communities, while in comparison [email protected] goes underneath Home -> Topics -> Chilling and so that’s where AskUSA should have gone as well.

Perhaps in the future, whoever brings in a community could make a suggestion as to which Topic areas it should lie underneath, but PieFed is fairly early in its development and thus kind of “polish” is still being added. But for now, it’s something that is predefined by whoever admins the instance.

The good news is that the devs & admins are EXTREMELY responsive, both in speed and concern for what they are making. Like, if you ask for it, there’s a very good chance its prioritization would be increased over other things to get it working faster. Here’s an example post of mine showing such conversation: https://piefed.social/post/301249.

Oh and perhaps I misunderstood you - something like a text listing of them should be available within the code itself, if that’s what you meant? Or there’s https://piefed.social/topics - is that what you mean? I just noticed that the way to access this list changed just today or yesterday I think - this page used to exist but it was also a drop down list as well (that never worked right in my desktop browser, though did on a mobile), so if it is being difficult lately that is likely why:-).

Though beware if you are considering making PieFed your daily driver: it helps if you know your way around Lemmy and have a backup account for when you can’t get things done using PieFed. Searching for instance is not great, so trying to find a post I usually do with Lemmy rather than PieFed. Another is that Notifications are more than a little bit broken: e.g. your very comment reply to me here I had an extremely difficult time trying to find - I read through every comment on this thread before finding yours in fact. The reasons this can happen are many and varied: posts that later get removed still remain in your Notifications area, as do users from instances that you have blocked, and if a comment is buried too deeply in the chain in a post then you’ll need to click the Continue thread button, except you won’t know which one of those to click in the first place, also a comment can be auto-collapsed or even hidden, frustratingly even if it was not at the time you replied but then that happened later then you similarly to these other situations won’t be taken right to it when you click the notification. Honestly sometimes I’ll go to Lemmy, visit the post, and search for my name and see all the people who replied to me, then walk up the chain to see some text to search for, then switch back to PieFed to actually do the reply… So anyway: TLDR: PieFed is quite interesting, and I do use it for my daily driver, but it can also be quite frustrating until some of these more foundational issues are fixed.

That said, PieFed already can do more than Lemmy, in so many ways. For one, I can have it send me a notification upon every single new post in a community or my choosing, like [email protected] and !
[email protected], and for another, if I wanted I could have it cease sending me notifications for a comment that I made if people decide to relentlessly troll me for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards (this is no mere hypothetical situation: both hexbear and Lemmygrad have done this exact thing to me). I can also view a post without having to read any comments at all from users posting from an instance of my own choosing - instance blocking is horrible misnamed on Lemmy and does next to nothing along those lines, while defederation is dependent upon an admin, except that PieFed puts that ability to choose into the hands of its users. That alone made me want to choose it, but everything else is does is great too! Caveat: so long as I can fall back onto Lemmy when I need to.

Also PieFed has next to no moderation tools, so there’s a lot that is still coming.:-) I am definitely here for it!:-)

There are dozens of us - not quite a dozen dozen, but at least multiple dozens! (on PieFed) :-P

Omg I thought that was like it’s whole deal even!? 😞😲

I got my start on Kbin.social as well - he was ambitious, that’s for sure, but despite all the people clamoring that they could do things faster and better, that dream doesn’t look to me like it has materialized? Although Mbin is also good as it is, if you like the interface and also want the interconnection with Mastodon.

I do see features being added to PieFed over time, and hold out high hopes for it.

Sublinks also looks promising, though it was paused for basically a year due to its founder having a baby.

Well actually we use Arch btw…

No but it’s pretty early in development (and yet amazingly well developed for that) as a Lemmy alternative, and so I doubt there are plans to expand beyond that like to Mastodon or Friendica, at least until it becomes more fully featured regarding its Lemmy functionality. e.g. user tagging like @[email protected] is not implemented yet. It does already have hashtag support though:-). Certain features are just amazingly well done, while more basic and foundational features are needing to catch up. Thus it is something to watch with close interest, as well as a few of us with early adopter mindsets to test out even as a daily driver.:-)

Fwiw PieFed (which is a Lemmy alternative that isn’t quite ready for mainstream usage yet, but is nonetheless coming along nicely:-) has Categories of Communities - e.g. https://piefed.social/topic/news - so that at a touch of a button you can switch to see a feed dedicated to that, or some other, topic.

Then see also those sub-topic links at the top allowing further filtering to your more specific desires, like “US Politics”, “World”, “RSS Feeds”, etc. Using this, you can have your cake (e.g. all the memes, yes I mean ALL of them!!! 😁) and eat it too (i.e. they politely go away whenever you want them too:-P).

That’s not really possible in Lemmy itself just yet (except probably in some apps but I don’t use those so not sure which ones) unless you create multiple alt accounts and set up subscriptions for each one tailored to a specific interest type.

Which wrapping back around to the OP, helps explain why we are far less active than those Fediverse activity stats show - e.g. I personally am 3 of those Monthly Active Users. Not that that’s bad, just saying that they are known to be inaccurate.

The real answer: https://lemmy.ca/post/35073012