I read left hand of darkness and loved it. It was my first Le Guin. I had heard a lot about the gender themes, and was surprised to find how it does not it you over the head at all. It was a great adventure and just really stuck on your head thinking. The dispossessed was another one like that. Its message is a little bit more obvious, but is an incredibly well built world that really is anarchist. All of her works I’ve read so far are great to read. There are extremely strong themes, but she seems to present it a bit more as a take it or leave it approach than a lot of the other (cough, Heinlein) I grew up reading.

Yeah, I had a few scripts just act weird on osx. The parameters were different and some of them just behaved differently. It was oddly frustrating.

I think this is a good point. Lemmy pre protest sucked. There was just no content or activity. Post protest, it’s not too bad here. It’s viable. Slowly, hopefully more people end up here over the years. I still browse Reddit (not logged in, my account is kaput) and it seems the same as it was before though. However, digg too died, so there is hope yet.

j eighth? J over 8? It took me an embarrassingly long time to remember to use i :(

Yeah, it is a bit strange. That was a central hub of where I got news, jokes, stayed connected with internet culture. That's mostly gone now. So many things feel splintered anymore. I'm old so I don't keep up with the latest games, but that feels all over the place---too many games, too many communities. Streaming/TV stuff---very few people I know watch the same things I do, and I miss the joy of watching something new and then talking about it the next day moments. Worse now is that most people can't even access the same content since there are too many services. Music is strange now too. Partly, I'm just not connected to pop culture, but also everyone is listening to VERY different stuff (referring to college-age folks---most other millennials I know just listen to NPR, podcasts and 90s mixes). There doesn't seem to be any monolithic music culture at all anymore. Everyone has super customized spotify playlists. I know a big part is just millennial aging, but also reddit kept me connected to broader things, and now its just like everything else and enshittified and disappearing. sigh ... get off my lawn I guess :(

This is an article from 8 years ago (2015)

Plasma. It’s the most customizable and you can dive in and shape it. It feels much more natural for me to jump into.

I put xfce on older hardware.

Distro wise I tend to go with Ubuntu flavors most because they seem to have better compatibility for various software and stuff I need, but I haven’t really shopped around too hard in years. Work is RHEL (and clones) and they make me sad.

Out of the box, maybe, but kde is super customizable to be how you want it. I think gnome can do that too, but it feels much more opinionated and all I ready about is install scripts that break. (I haven’t tried gnome in years though)

I don’t really have a problem with the main post you linked to. Are we a strictly pro-NATO server or something? I think I’m missing exactly what the issue is 🤷‍♂️

You need both though. Memes and shitposts to scroll though and chuckle, and then quality stuff to engage on. Lemmys got that, and the momentum will keep it growing.

I tried lemmy like a year or so ago, and it felt so stale. The technology is there, but the content just wasn’t. That’s clearly changed now. 😊

This place is feeling a lot like the Reddit from 2008. Just get some rage comics back and this place will be 🔥🔥🔥.

Lemmy takes a bit more curation to start finding communities and has some rough spots, but I’m super excited for this.

Universities are also on a trend to not host their own stuff or run their own servers. Most US universities are either google or Microsoft schools which handle all the email and (often) file sharing services. A lot of this is from a combination of shrinking budgets and security-scares.

I think fediverse and universities could be interesting, and it may just need to take some slow momentum buildup and education of fedoverse services.