As for the ages here, the people most likely to migrate are the long term Reddit users that have had an account using third party apps since 2010 or so (because younger people have only ever known the official app). That self selects for anyone that was old enough to use Reddit in 2010 back when the user base was mostly high school / college / recent college grads. Someone in their late teens / early 20s back then will be in their 30s now.

Stress is relative to your own personal conditions. It’s not absolute. A tech executive might have a nice house and financial security, but if he’s working 80 hours/week under intense pressure to meet some deadline, that’s still stressful. Nobody wants to be perceived as a failure at work, even if their personal financial consequences for failure are minimal.

Your argument seems to imply it’s impossible to feel stress if you’re comfortable in life. Even the poorest Americans can count on access to food, clean running water, electricity, internet, etc. For most of humanity’s existence, and still today in some parts of the world, these would be considered enormous luxuries, so anyone with access to them would be seen as extremely comfortable in life. Clearly though, people can still be stressed out despite having access to these sorts of things that most of history would consider luxurious.

Stress is relative, not absolute.

The play to earn model is literally a ponzi scheme with a fancier name. The money you earn has to come from somewhere. It doesn’t appear out of thin air. In 100% of P2E games, the earliest players get paid by the revenue from later players. Eventually, the game stops growing, so the later players are left holding the bag.

Obviously, some people make a lot of money in ponzi schemes (most notably, the people that start the ponzi scheme in the first place), but it’s a terrible design for people that aren’t the ponzi creators or the first adopters lucky enough to get in on the ground floor.

Defederation works against that though. When I first joined a few weeks ago, a lot of the discussion was taking place on Beehaw. I joined a few communities over there and started to enjoy the experience but in an instant, all of that was blocked because Beehaw decided to defederate from Lemmy.World (and others). That sort of thing will happen more and more in the future. I don’t want to have to create a dozen different accounts on a dozen different instances to view the content I want to see: I want a simple interface with everything in one spot.

Reddit offers the “everything in one spot” piece, but they killed the simple interface possible via apps like RIF and replaced it with an abysmal official app.

Lemmy offers the “simple interface” piece with apps like Jerboa, but the federation aspect of it makes it hard to get everything in one spot.

The second a competitor offers both features with a large enough community to allow for meaningful discussion, I’d be happy to make the switch.

Looks like the markets are pretty apathetic to the news today. Economists had expected 225K jobs added, so the 209K is a little below expectations, but not a huge miss. Unemployment remains at a very healthy 3.6% mirroring the pre-pandemic landscape with one of the lowest rates in decades.

I wonder how much of this low unemployment is demographic. Aside from the pandemic, the last decade has been marked by increasing Baby Boomer retirements (in 2023, the youngest Boomers turn 59, and the oldest are 77). While that large cohort is leaving the workplace, the cohorts behind it are smaller (in relative terms, not absolute terms), so there are more roles to fill with fewer people to fill them. That allows employees to be choosier when looking for jobs, which has been great for the average worker.

So far, yes, but I don’t really have any allegiances to this site and will jump ship to a competitor in a heartbeat if something better comes along. I know some people like the decentralized federation approach here, but I actually see that as the biggest downside to using this site. The value proposition of Reddit in its heyday was that it offered a single landing point for all sorts of discussions that used to be scattered across hundreds of different forums. The decentralized federation approach moves away from that, and while that offers some advantages, it also comes with a lot of disadvantages too.

It might feel like forever in internet time, but it’s only been two and a half weeks since the thing imploded and two weeks since the rescue operation was called off after finding debris from the Titan. Two weeks is lightning fast for a company to formally shut down in response to something like this, especially when you consider that the company’s employees have been grieving the death of their CEO/friend during all of this.

The Titanic fanously sank on its maiden voyage, so that’s a little different. The Titan submersible was successful for hundreds of dives before the implosion, which I’m sure gave the team a false sense of security and ultimately led them to ignore all the red flags.

Why? You should let each post stand on it’s own merit.

First, account age is silly for Lemmy, as almost 100% of people on here will have an account creation date in June 2023 or later because this place was a ghost town before Reddit decided to kill the APIs. A month from now, is someone with an August 2023 join date automatically presumed to be a troll, or are they just someone making the switch from Reddit a month later than everyone else?

As for karma, neither negative karma nor positive karma really tell you anything about the poster:

For instance, people can make good faith arguments advocating for conservative political opinions, but because the user base skews pretty far left here, those arguments will be downvoted. A discussion forum that bans opposing viewpoints is useless, and the echo chambers on Reddit are something I’d love to avoid here.

Similarly, it’s also possible to effortlessly build positive karma. Simply copy/paste highly rated comments from the last time a common repost appeared on the feed, and chances are, your copy/pasted comments will get upvoted too. You can even automate it with a bot.

Karma meant nothing at Reddit, and moderators shouldn’t be using it for decisionmaking purposes. It’s useful for ranking posts and comments, but anything beyond that isn’t helpful.

In what context?

In the insurance world, you sometimes see the phrase “L+ALAE Ratio” to refer to the ratio of (losses + expenses) divided by premium. It’s a way to measure profitability for a book of insurance business: how many dollars of loss and expense do you have to pay per dollar of premium earned? Lower is better, and you don’t want that ratio too much higher than 100%, because that means premiums aren’t high enough to cover losses (though investment income can sustain small underwriting losses).

I could see “L+” used as shorthand for “L+ALAE” or “L+ALAE+ULAE,” though admittedly, I’ve never seen that specific shorthand used.

Doubt it. It’s just dumb low effort posting over here trying to force inside jokes on Lemmy. I blocked all of that sort of stuff back in the day on Reddit, and I blocked it here too.

I almost exclusively read non-fiction, but I just got done reading Slash’s autobiography (the guitarist for Guns N’ Roses among other projects), and that book kept me absolutely hooked from start to end. I have no idea how he’s still alive after the wild stuff described in that book. Highly recommend this one if you have any interest in rock music.

I shifted from that to a book about the history of the US Postal Service last week, so it’s a pretty big contrast in tone.

Open Street Map is legitimate. In bicycling communities, Strava is the gold standard app for tracking rides, and it uses Open Street Maps on the backend. It’s always super accurate for me, even for fairly obscure bike trails off the beaten path.

I agree, though hopefully this will pass with time as people default to Lemmy rather than Reddit for their downtime. That said, when the Titan submersible craft story broke a week or two ago, there was decent discussion on here. For the most part, comment threads are a ghost town aside from threads bitching about Reddit, but there are occasional exceptions to the rule that should become more common as people get adjusted here.

Spotify

Strava

Default alarm clock app

If it weren’t for Spotify and Strava for bike rides, I would gladly get rid of my smartphone and replace it with a flip phone. Life was better before the entire internet traveled with you everywhere you go.

The past 15 years of growth in anything technology adjacent has been fueled by one thing: Extremely cheap debt. Interest rates have at been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis, and they’ve only started to tick up recently. That means the ability to fund infinite growth for basically nothing, so tech companies have relied heavily on debt financing.

Now though, that’s no longer viable. Silicon Valley Bank was very heavily involved with all these tech companies, and it went insolvent in March largely because of rising interest rates. They held a lot of long term bonds at low interest rates. In normal conditions, rising interest rates mean lower bond prices and unrealized losses, but not a major problem because they can just hold them to maturity and never realize the loss. Bank runs forced SVB to sell the bonds for huge losses though, turning unrealized losses into realized losses, and a non-issue into a major problem.

Now that cheap debt is gone, these tech companies are desperately scrambling to attain profitability. It hasn’t been discussed much, but this is a big reason for the changes at both Twitter and Reddit.

That’s why it has to be done today. At the moment, Jerboa instantly crashes when trying to access Lemmy, which will definitely scare away new users. My understanding is that this is because Lemmy.World is on version 17, but Jerboa requires instances to be on version 18 or higher. If successful, I believe this would fix the instant crash issue, so we’ll at least have an Android app working again.

Hopefully, these are just growing pains symptomatic of a site trying to deal with rapid growth and rapid improvements.

Side downloading .apk files from something other than the Google Play store is shady as hell. It’s way too easy to sneak malicious code into the app that way. Even if the project is open source, I don’t have the time or the skillset to review the code to confirm it’s not malicious. No offense to the developers, but there’s no chance in hell I’m doing that for an upstart app I knew nothing about a month ago.

As a result, I’m using Lemmy via Firefox’s mobile browser right now, with Jerboa completely useless crashing the second I open it.

Hopefully they fix it soon (i.e., within the next 24 hours). First impressions matter a ton. For the masses migrating tomorrow once RIF and others shut down, Lemmy and the different apps for it will appear to be dead on arrival. If we expect any actual content on Lemmy beyond complaints about Reddit and questions about Lemmy, we need those people to migrate over.

The idea that different fediverse instances can all be on different incompatible versions is mind bogglingly dumb. The federation/decentralization design choice overcomplicates things to a huge degree. There are far more downsides than upsides to this approach. I want to like Lemmy/Jerboa, but at this point, the official Reddit app is looking more and more appealing.

After a certain point, you consider the risks and have to make a decision weighing the pros and cons of the voyage. Yes, there’s a very real chance of death if things go wrong, but there’s also a chance for a life changing experience if things go right. For some people, the risk and adventure of it all is entirely the point of life.

As for the money, the $250K is a rounding error to a billionaire. Someone with a net worth of $1B spending $250K is similar to someone with a net worth of $10K spending $2.50 (e.g. about the same as a bottle of soda from a gas station).

I think a lot of people on here would be willing to take a trip to Mars if it came with a 1% chance of death and a 99% chance of the most memorable experience of your life. You’d probably get a lot of people willing to do the same if the chance of death were increased to 10% too, though obviously, many would view the 10% as too risky. If you increased the chance of death to 50% or higher, most people would decline, but there are a number of thrill seeker / adventurer type of personalities out there that would jump on the offer in a heartbeat. It all comes down to your personal risk/reward tradeoff.

Before they killed Reddit, I frequently made new accounts for privacy reasons, as recently as maybe a month or two ago. Email was not required.