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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’m reading a book atm, Losing Earth, that kind of goes through the history of climate change scientists in the USA as they try to get the country on board with fixing things. Obviously during the Reagan years there was a massive pushback on the progress they were able to gain from the Carter administration, with one exception. When the story of Ozone depletion came out and was directly tied to CFC’s, even conservatives got on board with a CFC ban (as I understand it). But they only got on board this one time, for this one thing. Not for stopping climate change as a whole, obviously.

    It makes me wonder if another simple and even more easily visible climate change disaster could spur a similar sort of change in policy. I think, if anything, we would have the increasing summer wildfires in North America (and worldwide) to use in replacement of the Ozone layer story. “Stopping summer wildfires” feels more concrete and “real” than stopping climate change. But I have no idea what, if anything, will convince politicians to act here. Plus, now the issue is infinitely more politicized than it was in the 80s, so who knows if tactics used then will work now. Idk where I’m going with this. Food for thought, I guess.





  • My immediate thoughts as a fedora user: Fedora is looked at as a bleeding edge testing distro for what eventually goes into red hat. By using fedora, I am sort of a beta tester for ibm, and am in some ways contributing to the improvement of a distribution (red hat) that goes against what I believe a Linux distribution should do. Given that, should I distro hop?

    Or is my brain just trying to make me distro hop again?



  • I’ve been on mastodon for a couple of years, here’s how I handled instance fomo there. I made an account on a few different instances that I liked, got a feel for each instance’s rules, what was allowed, what wasn’t. Over time, I started to realize what kind of mod styles I liked, whether I cared much about the local timeline vs my subscribed timeline (I didn’t care as much about this on masto, but here, I’m much more interested in the local timeline, which I’ll get into in a bit.) Eventually, I settled on just one account, but really you never have to if you don’t want to, lots of people have alts, even back on non federated social media.

    I’m doing this process again here. I currently have accounts on Beehaw, Kbin.social, and slrpnk.net, where I’m posting from currently. No matter which one, I can follow any community I want from any of these accounts provided they aren’t defederated. But, I also get a unique local timeline view, and a specific culture brought on by mods and users for each. I really think this gives power to smaller, more topic focused instances like slrpnk.net. Specifically, I’ve noticed two things it gives me that Reddit didn’t necessarily have

    1. a quick “show me only posts related to this specific topic I’m interested in” button via the local timeline. (This could technically kind of be built with multireddits, but that wouldn’t quite be the same)
    2. (what I think is even better) show me more general topics, but hosted by people also interested in this one specific root topic (for my instance, the root topic would be solarpunk, but for others, I’ve seen instances dedicated to star trek, cyberpunk, local towns, the list goes on.) This I think has more community building power in an a way that is unique to here and that I’m interested in seeing more of, personally. After all, someone could make a subreddit called, idk, r/startrekurbanism, but I don’t see that taking off on Reddit. It would be weirdly extremely niche, and the chances of it showing up on your TL (which you need to happen to encourage engagement) over more popular posts is minimal. Here though, I bet a community dedicated to discussing city planning and design ran by Star Trek fans could have some engagement just due to the local timeline bringing it to people’s attention. This has potential to allow Lemmy to be weird and unique in a way previous aggregator sites couldn’t pull off.

    Tl;dr: local timelines are cool. try a few instances out to get a feel for what you like (and to get over instance fomo), and give fedi time to grow on you. It may not work out for everyone, and that’s okay, but I really have grown to prefer Mastodon to Twitter, and I’m excited to see a federated alternative to Reddit gain traction.


  • Only Car lite here. I only own an ebike, but my partner owns a car, that we use for trips out of the city, mostly. Props for going car free in Seattle! The infrastructure there, depending on where you’re at, is pretty good from what I’ve seen. I’ve considered trying to take my bike up via amtrak next time I visit instead of driving. maybe someday.