I’m currently reading The Expanse, and at one point a character mentions checking in on the family aggregator his cousin set up to help everyone keep track of who’s living where.

Dude spun up a private Lemmy instance for his family. The future is now!

Because the youth group was serving it with free donuts—it’s pretty much the reason I went. To be fair, they were really nice; it was just a bizarre experience. I didn’t realize you could just inherit a church and declare yourself a pastor without any formal training.

After looking up how much money my local megachurch took in last year ($60 mil) versus how much they spent on charity ($3 mil), I think you were probably justified.

When I was a freshman in college, I let this youth group convince me to visit their weird church. The “pastor” was a young guy who spent the entire sermon talking about how he squandered his time in college before eventually dropping out. Fortunately, the old pastor took pity on him and gave him a job as an assistant—running errands, cleaning, etc. Then one day the old pastor died, so our hero basically just took over since no one else wanted to.

When it was done he tried to sell us bags of stale coffee.

Sounds like a rogue black hole

You’re not old until the music you don’t consider old becomes old.

Sorry, best we can do is a premium (expensive) ad-free tier that still advertises our own products.

I have mixed feelings. On one hand, Lemmy seems to be finding its groove, and I genuinely feel like I’m part of a growing community. But there’s definitely something missing, and it’s difficult to put into words.

On Reddit, I tended to frequent specific subs, and rarely doomscrolled the front page. But that’s all I find myself doing on Lemmy. Most of my feed is either politics or memes, and nuanced discussion seems rare. New communities apparently have a hard time getting off the ground, and I think it’s mostly because decentralization makes discovery a hastle.

Reddit’s whole purpose is to aggregate content from other websites, whilst providing a central access point. This is antithetical to the very concept of the Fediverse, which is all about decentralization. I find myself wishing for an easy way to aggregate Fediverse content, so that I could access Lemmy, Beehaw, Kbin, etc. all in one place, regardless of whether they’re federated. Really, all the drama surrounding instances federating/defederating is obnoxious as an end user.

The apps are certainly better, though, and in general I’m enjoying myself.

The only Prime show I can even think of is The Boys, which is worth a month subscription once a year or so whenever a new season drops. With so much competition and so little content, you’d think these streaming services would start offering better incentives for long-term subscriptions. Instead, they keep raising rates. Baffling.