Because religion evolved to thrive in us.

It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.

Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.

Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.

This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.

This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.

What do you mean? Of course they do. It’s not a contradiction, because they are adversaries.

In Germany, whenever the discussion about wether to deliver a specific weapon system or not extends to a “new” weapon system, this usually is an argument against. Hurr durr, it could be used to poke too deep into Russian-held territory, or beware, even strike native Russian soil. Russia might not like that and pull Germany into the war or throw a nuke or whatnot.

The day this country’s tensions between conservatism and liberalism die is the day the USA ceases to exist. That tension is at the core of our republic, literally since its founding, and it’s what makes us great, unlike any other nation on Earth.

That sounds as if this tension was somehow unique to the united states. It’s not, it’s everywhere. Even worse, the US have less of a political spectrum than most other nations, just shy of dictatorships.

An (intuitively) working search would be a great step ahead. It should find and show things if they exist, and only show no results if they do not. That a plethora of external tools exist to meet these basic needs shows both how much this is needed, and how much it is broken.

I also feel I have more luck finding communities if searching for ‘all’, instead of ‘communities’. Don’t make me add cryptic chars to my search to make it work. Do that for me in the background if necessary.

It’s been long since I’ve been using it, but iirc, it’s impossible or painful to search for a specific community in your subscribed list.

There’s a famous hill-top cemetery in the city, and sure enough I saw basically all of my classmates there too

That was an unexpected dark turn. Glad you live to tell their story!

I like that it comes in a can, not a plastic bottle simply because it gets colder faster and stays colder longer.

If it feels colder in your hand, it means the opposite of what you assume: It absorbs heat from your hand faster, so the stays colder shorter.

Imagine instead you hold a perfectly insulated container. You could not feel wether the inside is hot or cold, or else the insulation would be faulty.

So if you really want to have a drink that stays colder longer, grab something which does not give away how cold it is, quite literally.

From the title, I had a question and found the answer in the FAQ:

What’s an unconference?

An unconference is a conference in which the participants – rather than the organizers – decide which sessions happen each day and on which topics. In the many years we have been organizing unconferences, we have found that for complex subjects like the Fediverse, attendees get more value (and fun!) out of unconferences than from traditional conferences. Sounds disorganized? It did to us, too, until we actually experienced our first one. So don’t worry, it will be fine :-)

Here are some suggestions for how to prepare for an unconference.

And this is another issue which hinders discoverability. It’s nice there are tools and workarounds but their existence also signals the issue exists.

I didn’t say able to locate I said there being a list.

Are you confusing comments?

I see this in the referred comment:

having the capability to locate

While the word “list” does not appear.

But mostly I think we should try to read the message, not focus on single words.

This is not the way to go about that

What is your way to go about that?

If you aren’t doing anything, what way(s) would you deem acceptable? If you know acceptable ways, why aren’t you following through? Honest if-questions, not meant as assumptions.

Healthy and sustainable food seems to be a decent goal. People should be able to get behind this. So if all the disagreement is about the right approach, where are the people with the right approach, and where are all the people voicing their concern about art supporting them?

Please help me out. It feels as if people are more concerned about pieces of art which they may never see, than about healthy food, the climate, or other major issues which affect everyone.

I get why it puts people off, these points exist. I just wonder what the “right” alternative to these “wrong” approaches is, and wether the critics walk the talk.

Exactly this. It’s often about finding the right balance between technically optimal, and socially feasible (lacking the right phrase here).

The nerds brimming with technical expertise often neglect the second point.

Oh - wow! I was about to complain about how https://join-lemmy.org/ is a shining bad example in this regard, talking about server stuff right away and hiding how Lemmy actually looks until page 3, but apparently they changed that and improved it drastically. Cool, good job!

Anyways.

For collaborative projects especially, it is important to strike a balance between tech and social aspects. Making poor tech choices will put people off. But making your project less accessible will also result in less people joining. It’s crucial to find a good balance here. For many coming from the tech side, this usually means making far more concessions to the social side than intuitively feels right.

Just a guess: to prevent bots from scraping the full content?

I find the plateau quite puzzling (lemmy.world, but the total looks very similar):

There was quite a steep increase, and then it suddenly stopped.

I would rather expect it to slow down, than to stop that abruptly.

We’re looking at a fairly large group of people making a decision to create an account on Lemmy. There are plenty of reasons to expect it to be fuzzy. Even if they all responded to one particular event in time, some would have done so immediately, others the next day, few more even later.

Yes, that’s true, but the number probably actually declined for a similar reason.

Some created multiple accounts, others tried multiple platforms. Some were happy with lemmy and stayed, others did not.

Right, it does display a karma value in the user profile page (not my own, but for others). Regardless from which instance that user is.

It does not display user karma in threads, regardless on which instance. Does your experience differ?

Lemmy.ml Karma Calculator

Display Lemmy.ml Karma.

Seems to not be so useful outside of lemmy.ml

Reddit was using karma for a long time and people stayed. The exodus happened when reddit announced charging for using their API, and everything that came along. Karma was no significant part of that story.

When people “farm” for fake internet pointe by appealing to the oppinions of everyone else it leads to people just expressing one “right” (popular) oppinion.

We have the same result already, for several reasons. One is, we do have karma within threads.

Another is, people will get backlash for voicing the “wrong” opinion even if there is no point system. People happily reply to correct someone.

In any case, performance is just one factor. For a FOSS project to be successful long term it needs contributions from other developers and with the massive pool of Python developers there are, hopefully I’ll be getting some help soon. Also along those lines I have deliberately chosen:

to code as simply and stupidly as possible, to make it accessible to most skill levels.
No complicated frameworks, fancy algorithms, or esoteric design patterns. Model View Controller, baby.
No frontend build process or tool chain (vanilla JS only. No npm).
Few third party dependencies, only Redis and Postgresql. Mostly.

All this makes setting up an initial development environment, finding the bit you want to change and testing it out fairly quick and easy.

Sounds very wise to make it as accessible as possible. And you basically get super maintainable code as a side product!