• 451 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • seems to be down at the moment

    DNS. It’s always DNS… It’s back now.

    To answer your questions:

    Who do you imagine would create the majority of these requests?

    Ideally, the answer to this is “the users who sign up to a fediversed instance and see their favorite subreddit missing on the list of recommendations.” If this is going to be true, I honestly do not know.

    How would the “best participating instance” be determined?

    By the categorization matching. If someone wants to make a community to bring a local community (e.g, for a city in Australia) it would try to match the request with aussie.zone. If it’s a science focused subreddit, it should try to match it with mander.xyz, etc. Granted, this assumes that those instances are participating and using the fediverser software on their side, and at the moment I’m the only one doing, but the idea of the whole project is to create incentive for instance admins to use it.

    How long would it take?

    A request should trigger some type of message to the admin. So, “as long as it takes for the admin to act on the message”?

    Even if a community is created, it needs people to grow it, making posts and contributing to discussion

    100% agree. This is why the other leg of this creature is the “Community Ambassadors” feature, which is meant to help people to grow their communities and find them content.


  • I agree, but I think we need to be a little more granular than this. We don’t need to create a 1:1 mapping for every subreddit, but if at least we can make it in a way that each subreddit has a recommendation in a adjacent sub-category, it will be better than just pointing to the closest/most popular community in the higher-level category.

    Imagine if you are into one specific genre of games and subscribed to a bunch of different subreddits through the years for the games you enjoy. When you come to Lemmy, the recommendation is simply that you signup to a generic “Gaming” community, only to find out that no one is really talking much about your niche genre. You’d be more likely to say “this recommendation is non-sense” than “ok, I will start posting content related to the things I am interested about”.












  • Try “sustained movement and activity levels due to human-scale urban environment”

    The calle de jordán, a short street in central Madrid, encompasses the entire cycle of human life. On one block is a fertility clinic, an increasingly common sight in a country obsessed by its shortage of babies. A block further down is a day centre for pensioners, advertising services like memory training and help with mobility. It is common to see women in their 60s gently leading their 90-something mothers up to the door.

    But a geographic cluster of relatively poorer countries are also conducive to longer lives: Spain, Italy, France and Portugal. (Three nearby microstates, San Marino, Malta and Andorra, make the top 20, too.) The oldest person alive is a Spanish woman, Maria Branyas Morera (117), who succeeded a French one. Health and long life correlate unsurprisingly with gdp per capita. Why does southern Europe outperform the usual link between wealth and health, making the average lifespan in Spain (85.5 years in 2050) longer than that of the average Dane (83.5)?

    Many point to the “Mediterranean diet”—fish, whole grains, fresh fruit, vegetables and olive oil. Critics, though, point out that diets differ widely from Portugal to Greece. Besides, researchers find that today’s Mediterraneans do not stick to their namesake diet. Plazas in Spain are full of people eating fried fish and salted ham, washed down with beer at hours some might consider unseemly. Spaniards drink more booze and smoke slightly more than the European average, and are among Europe’s biggest cocaine users.

    Dan Buettner, who has written several books on areas where people live long, notes that to understand why people grow old one must look not at today’s habits but at those of half a century ago, when people ate “peasant food”, dominated by grains, beans and tubers. A recent study of the “blue zone” (a designation for areas that feature many centenarians) in Sardinia found that the diet included “famine foods”, such as bread made from acorns and clay and a cheese made with insect larvae. The most notable fish product was salted, dried mullet ovaries; inland shepherds rarely ate fresh fish. Diets today increasingly include Western processed foods, but “cultural inertia” keeps them somewhat healthier, says Mr Buettner.

    The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington recently issued projections for longevity by country in 2050. Among the top 20 for living to a ripe old age are rich ones like Switzerland and Singapore. East Asia is also represented by South Korea and Japan, longtime longevity leaders. That shepherding past points to another factor: movement. Spaniards lead western Europe in steps per day at 5,936, according to a study from 2017. (Italy, France and Portugal are less impressive.) The study found that countries with “activity inequality”—a few prolific walkers but many couch potatoes, as in America and Saudi Arabia—had the highest obesity rates. Those where everyone moved a reasonable amount, as in Spain, had low ones. That evidently reduced mortality from obesity-related diseases.

    Why do Spaniards move so much? Spanish cities, and even tiny pueblos, are densely populated; hit the city limits and you are often in empty countryside. Neither culture nor regulation favour sprawling suburbs, so even with abundant land, Spaniards live on top of each other. Paris and other places aiming to create “15-minute cities”, where most necessities are within walking radius, could learn much from Spain. The same study that looked at “activity inequality” examined urban America, finding that dense cities like New York and Boston had greater (and more evenly distributed) levels of activity than sprawling places like Atlanta and Phoenix.

    But stressing diet and exercise misses a piece of the puzzle. Spain’s walkability is also good for social life. Cities are built around plazas where friends, family and co-workers sit, eat, drink and talk. That turns out to be good for you even if you sip vermouth and eat crisps at noon. Reams of research show that social contact is critical for physical and psychological well-being.

    According to a recent survey by Gallup, a pollster, and Meta, a social-media company, 76% of Spaniards say they feel “very” or “fairly” socially supported. That is above average, though not top of the table. Jon Clifton, head of Gallup, says his firm’s research shows that Spaniards are fairly unhappy and disengaged at work. He quips that a headline in El País, a newspaper, got it more or less right: Spain is “the best country to live in and the worst to work in”. But work is not everything. Spaniards are fourth in the world when asked whether they have seen friends or family who live near or with them in the past week (Greece was second). This may be the unexpected upside of the fact that many young southern Europeans cannot get good enough jobs to afford to move out of their parents’ homes. Family bonds remain tight, including in trying times like the financial crisis and the pandemic.

    Southern European countries do not score highest on happiness—that title has long been held by Denmark and Finland. But happiness assessments weight long-term life satisfaction more heavily than short-term smiling and laughing. Those sorts of gleeful emotions are reported most often by Latin Americans. And, metaphorically and physically, a line drawn from Helsinki to Buenos Aires would pass through Spain. That country has European levels of wealth (the best predictor of happiness) and health care (which keeps people alive), while also sharing cultural traits with Latin Americans: living for the moment and treasuring friendships and families. These are not just good in themselves. They keep you going, too.







  • So what is your argument? Who is responsible for the decision-making process that leads to “hand writing an inferior solution”? Why do you think that this at all acceptable and reasonable?

    You’ve been writing nothing but opinion-as-fact and resorting to wild rationalizations to justify your preferences, now you want to couch yourself under the questionable ethics of “it’s done this way and I can not fight it, so it must be the correct thing to do”?

    Let’s make a simple test: if you were in charge and had the choice between spending some $$ to dual license a GPL package or to pay for the development of a GPL-only system vs paying $$$$ to do it in-house because you did not find a MIT/BSD package that does what you need, what would you do?



  • There is no fundamental problem in working for free either. It’s second-order effects that we should worry about. Those who are “working for free” because they “just want have software being used by people” are diluting the value of the professionals and in the long term end up being as detrimental as professional designers or photographers who “work for exposure”.

    If you ask me, the reason that is so hard to fund FOSS development is not because of bureaucracies, but because we are competing with privileged developers who are able to afford giving away their work for free.