No, it's 100% economics. Why do you think that having "careers, lives and travel" (as if having a family is not having a life?) is more appealing to modern first worlders? Because it doesn't impact their finances severely. Having more children in impoverished countries is a financial gain because children are free labor and lottery tickets to get the entire family out of poverty. In wealthy countries, children are only a financial loss.

1. The sign-up process can be improved. But the reason people think choosing an instance complicated is because they're so used to having choices taken from them by social media companies, so when they're given the choice back, learned helplessness causes them to freeze.
2. You do bullet points with a dash or an asterisk, like - This is a bullet point or * This is a bullet point.
3. Click on your profile picture in the top right of the screen and click on "Settings". There is a section named something like "Default Homepage Sort". You can change it to view the All feed instead of Local.
4. We don't think having dumb people in the Fediverse is enshittification. Many of the current users would be considered dumb depending on who you ask. Corporate control of the Fediverse and companies milking users for money while making the user experience worse is enshittification.
5. This text formatting system is called Markdown, which is what Old Reddit used to format text before New Reddit introduced the graphic text editor. This page has a guide on all the formatting tricks you can do with Markdown.

That's more of an Instagram thing. The calling card of the teenage zoomer on Reddit is the nerd emoji and the moai head emoji.

Is renaming the instance domain without reinstalling Lemmy related to changing the WebFinger query? It's the trick some instances use to have a different instance domain from their username domain, like @user@domain.com while the instance is mastodon.domain.com.

There should be a patch for it that hides the "recommended" feed in the homepage. I'm not certain because I never use Youtube with an account or the official website/app, so I don't get targeted recommendations.

"Discussions became binary". And yet you subscribe to the binary of "hateful vs. non-hateful opinion" as if it's clearly identifiable.

I think it has to do with the higher rate of investor funding in the US that allows companies to spend above their actual assets by a huge margin, because of the significantly lower capital gains taxes there. The risk is much higher that US companies go bankrupt or investors stop funding the company during times of high interest rates (such as now), which is why US tech companies are disproportionately affected by the post-Coronavirus layoffs. Even Reddit itself (according to Spez) has not been profitable through all 18 years of its operation, but someone was clearly pouring money into it to keep it running. European companies on the other hand have a lot more administrative overhead when it comes to loans and investment than US companies, so they can't use money they don't have to offer attractive compensation on the level of US companies.

You're right that healthy, young working adults without children have very little to gain from socialized systems. I'm going to assume that OP, like me, is an early Gen Z who fits this description, and is about to enter the job market or has just entered it. For our generation, this statement

The state is not here to rob you, but to provide you with a structure to live in that you couldn’t have in the same way on your own.

does not check out mathematically. The taxes we pay today don't get locked away in a box to be spent when we are sick or elderly and need them. They are spent on the sick and elderly we have right now. This means that at the age that we start needing benefits more than we contribute to them, it's not going to be us, but our children's and grandchildren's generation who are footing the bill. But the birth rates across Europe are below replacement level and none of our countries have come up with a system that either raises birth rates above replacement level or successfully introduces foreigners who will be net tax contributors for all their lives. That means that despite paying high taxes and receiving miserable salaries (compared to American salaries) today, we won't even be able to enjoy benefits from the state in the future because there won't be enough tax contributors by the time we need these benefits.

It absolutely feels like getting robbed.

Pixiv does not allow direct linking to images as it uses an authentication token to fetch images, and this token is only sent if you view the image from the pixiv.net site. They don't have a "no token required reduced size preview" version of the image that is used to generate thumbnails. What @iraldir saw the second time is probably a cached version of the image as it always returns 403 when I request i.pximg.net directly.

I just look to the microblogging side of the network (which has about 10 million total users) as a case study.

The ideal situation? More nodes are added to the network to spread the load and control away from a few very large and very expensive instances. The realistic situation? Some instances manage to secure external funding (such as mastodon.social) and grow extremely large at the expense of smaller instances that shut down from a lack of users and funding. Decentralized protocols like the fediverse and email are not immune to centralization thanks to lazy users who join the biggest instance. My pessimistic outlook is that the Fediverse will eventually become like email, with a few very big instances and a lot of spam making it difficult for smaller instances to enter the network. Enjoy the fresh new internet feeling while it lasts and move on when the platform starts to decay.

Seeing the community get destroyed is hard, but seeing the whole company the community relies on being taken over by someone who doesn't care about is okay?! These unpaid janitors seriously need to re-evaluate their priorities.

The barrier for entry for some subreddits is too high but to be fair, ChatGPT "funny responses" are low-quality content and should be removed.