I know I’m probably in the minority here but I wouldn’t be against getting Sky to watch American football and maybe the odd other channel live, but I won’t because I don’t want to have to pay a bribe to the BBC just to watch it live.

I’m a long term vaper as well but I’m going to be honest I do get the appeal of the disposables. Ludicrous regulation has made proper vapes so ridiculously annoying to use for an average person that it’s no wonder people just turn to the easiest option.

The 2ml tank cap and having to mix your own nicotine are both annoying and impractical. There’s also been a marked decline in the quality of coils and the tanks themselves since that law came into affect, with no actual benefits.

I had to switch to an RDA tank because the terrible coils on offer now were costing me a fortune, I’d gone from using 1 every couple of weeks to having to change them every two days. I’ve tried tons of different tanks and coils but it seems like it’s just a fundamental design flaw, 2ml of juice just isn’t enough to keep the coils wet if you use a decent mod.

RDA tanks are fine if you work from home like I do but it leaks all over my handbag when I go anywhere, so if you don’t work at home it’s just not a good solution.

I know what you’re saying, and I don’t disagree. But in this real world that we live in, when I help people with something technical on the internet they usually thank an imaginary man. If I point out that I’m a woman, their attitude often does a complete 180 and they sometimes start offering me patronising advice when they originally approached me for help.

Definitely not going to disagree with you on that as I’ve experienced it myself plenty of times, especially anything to do with programming.

Of course we need to address the attitudes behind that wearisome nonsense. But I only have one life to live and it’s not going to happen overnight. Sometimes, neutrality helps give people a fair shot because the barriers are all controlled by middle-class, cishet, white men who often lack the self-awareness to correct their own ingrained prejudices, or even acknowledge that they exist.

Does neutrality actually help in achieving that goal though? Isn’t it just making the stereotyping worse? Let’s say purely as an example you were doing IT support and the person you were helping had no idea who you were, their just going to assume a stereotypical dorky cis white man helped them with the problem. Whereas if they knew, let’s say a cis black woman helped them, it’ll atleast to a small degree help break that stereotype. Maybe I’m just be overly optimistic here though, I’d like to think most people wouldn’t care either way, but if there is no representation at all people will just default to the general stereotype and it’ll never improve.

This is a valid and well-recognised criticism. If you mean a specific group or set of groups, name them. But whiteness being the default often means that all "people of colour"are affected to some degree. When that is that case, it’s not reasonable to require an exhaustive list of all possible non-default ethnicities. When the cause of a problem is whiteness, the language should be explicit about that.

I don’t disagree if it’s used correctly, like you’ve outlined, but if we’re honest a lot of the time these days it’s just become a blanket term with no real meaning, that’s what I take issue with. The best example of this IMO is when the media is discussing police brutality, we all know black people suffer this the most yet it’s always discussed as a “people of colour” issue. A young black man and a young ethnically Japanese man probably won’t experience the same issues with the police, so to group them together in my eyes is ignoring the problem. Its basically just an American import to replace “ethnic minorities”, which I felt the exact same way about.

I’m going to be honest, I can’t stand this trend of trying to neutralise everything. I grew up in the 90s/00s so I get this might be a generational difference but to me people being more open about themselves is an amazing thing and I’d hate to see it disappear. I don’t really see what’s wrong with accepting people are different and embracing it, rather than fruitlessly making everything in life a shade of grey.

Personally I actually view it as being kind of offensive, if I’m honest. Terms like “people of colour” to me come across as people minimising the vast and interesting differences in culture and customs that such a broad term covers.

Surely him seeing a therapist is a far more practical solution to that problem then telling everyone else they can’t help out wildlife.

Not the person you replied to but personally I’d like to see some kind of random communities feature so I can discover new ones.

Most of the stuff I see is memes or US politics that I’m just not interested in.

I’ve been car free now for close to a decade but am close to giving up, honestly. The buses that used to be every 10 minutes are progressively getting less frequent to the point it’s usually every half an hour, but not uncommon for them to be every hour.

It’s impossible to plan your day around a bus schedule that constantly changes with no warning, so I just end up not bothering to go out a lot of the time.

The backlash against this is honestly so frustrating. I don’t support the blocking of roads but the Prime Minister is 100% a legitimate target and the kind of person these groups should be directing their protests at.

Is this currently working for you? I’ve followed every step and it just get stuck on installing forever.

So no mutilation is happening to children, as proven by these sources. I hope you plan to go and edit out the blatant misinformation in your original post.

Did you even bother to read your own source?

“Jay Langadinos, now 31, was just 19 when she first met Dr. Patrick Toohey, a veteran Sydney psychiatrist, in May 2010.”

You know full well that they can’t have surgery until 18, you’re just spreading deliberate misinformation. It’s pathetically transparent that you are just straight up lying.

Realistically most people aren’t going to make their own instance, so you kind of have to rely on the good will of others.

Purely as an example, let’s say that Lemmy world decides they no longer want to be federated with ML because of the Meta situation. If you’re on either world or ML now you’ve lost access to huge sections of Lemmy. This could basically go on forever, so any instance that wants to remain neutral can be locked out of either both or one of them as they keep defederating from instances until the whole thing becomes a walled garden, basically the same as if you upset a power mod on Reddit and lose access to huge sections of the site, except it’s worse on here because you wouldn’t even be able to lurk.

I guess you could just have multiple accounts, but we could easily see a situation where you need like 10 accounts just to see the most popular instances, which is obviously ridiculous and not practical unless you’re terminally online.

It seems like a pretty huge flaw in the system, to be honest. Theoretically it’s a good idea, but as more and more people flock to the large instances it seems like it’s only a matter of time before the power plays start to happen.

Is there anything at all to stop that happening? It’s seems inevitable to me that eventually the whole thing will fall apart if people abuse the system.

Isn’t it creating a situation of Reddit power mods on steroids? It’s easy to say “well go and make accounts on multiple instances”, but it’s creating additional barriers to entry that a lot of people won’t understand and frankly is kind of irritating as a user.

I feel like people aren’t taking the consequences seriously and that defederating needs to be viewed as like a nuclear option that’s avoided unless absolutely necessary. That’s what I get from the additional information you provided.

This place will become completely unusable in the future if the good will dies out and large instances decide to defederate from each other to try and become the “top” instance, especially as more and more casual users move over.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t understand the point in defederating. Aren’t you just cutting down on the amount of content you can see? As a user I’d personally prefer to pick and choose what I can see.

What’s the actual upside in doing it? Obviously I can see why you’d want defederating from say a far right instance, but in general it seems like only downsides.

I’m new to all this so maybe I’m missing a crucial bit of information.