Reddit

Weird, I look at posts by All fairly frequently, and I haven't run across any porn yet. It's mostly just AskLemmy or tech memes.

My favorite thing over there right now is r/videos, which only allows text descriptions of the video you were going to post. It's way more entertaining than it has any right to be.

Ugh that reminds me of trying to talk to a Replika. "I have a gift for you!" "Great, what is it?" "(Hands you a box)" "...cool so what's inside the box?" "Wouldn't you like to know!" "Umm. Yes. Yes I would like to know what's in the box you just gave me." ...and so on and so forth until I rage-quit the app. 😆

I see a lot of people saying, "I can't believe it was only a 3% drop," and I'd like to offer some context as to why there's not enough data here to really tell a story, yet. It could go a few different ways.

The Reddit protests in June were a big deal, not just on Reddit or Lemmy, but to the media at-large. Traffic surely saw a huge influx of people wanting to look at the dumpster fire. I know that I myself used Reddit a lot leading up to the blackouts, since it was, in a sense, the last hurrah of Reddit as we knew it. The Spez AMA would have driven traffic. The NSFW sub protests would have driven traffic. All those news articles linked to Reddit directly, and they would have also driven traffic.

Even with all that, there's still a decrease in traffic. As others have said, July will be a better metric for the actual damage done, since the media has largely moved on and aren't driving as many visits, and 3PAs are toast.

These numbers would have been more representative if we could have had more than a quarter to look at. What was the QoQ trajectory before this? For all we know, this could have indicated business as usual, or it could have indicated something much bigger, depending on what the traffic metrics over the past 12-24 months could show us.

I also would have liked to see the history for unique sessions and unique visitors. If there was a huge influx of unique visitors compared to the past few months, but traffic was still decreased overall, then that would indicate it came from news clicks or bots.

Basically what I'm saying is that the data doesn't paint any kind of real picture right at this moment. That doesn't mean there was no impact though. Time will tell.

Unfortunately r/videos is only allowing text based descriptions of videos at this time, so you'll have to describe it in excruciating detail.

(Srsly tho the illegal upload of Bee Movie was a thrilling read.)

As someone attempting to grow from seed here in Central Texas:

It would be SO MUCH cheaper for me to buy store bought.

You have to factor in a watering costs, soil quality, fertilizer costs, and time commitment. Oh and potentially overhauling large swaths of your yard to grow crops and flowers to encourage enough pollinators to show up.

I spent probably over $1,500 this year getting my yard in suitable enough shape to grow, after a complete bust on any kind of yield last year. I also grow herbs indoors, and yes that can be more cost effective. That isn't to say it's not worth it, I'm about to have an insane yield of tomatoes that I won't know what to do with. I currently get to make my own fresh bruschetta every week with home grown basil and tomatoes. I get fresh strawberries off the vine every day, though the bushels aren't very large. If all goes according to plan, I'll also have some bell peppers and okra later in the season. All grown from seed. I have morning glory and passion flower vines that have volunteered all over parts of the yard, the latter being a critical food source for butterflies, so I now have a few dozen butterflies flapping around on a given day. I also have a ton of volunteer sunflowers after setting up bird feeders with black oil sunflower seeds as feed.

It's wonderful, my yard is slowly rewilding and I love being able to grow a little food. It'll get cheaper over the next few years to maintain. But it certainly was not cheap to get here! Container gardening is cheaper, but you still have to have the right light sources and watering schedule. If you live somewhere naturally rainy and sunny in equal measure, and the climate isn't trying to kill you, then it might be cost effective. It was at one point in time. But it isn't here, now. Still worth it for me though.

My dad is in an assisted living facility and this is unfortunately the type of food he gets. I have to send him groceries every week just so I can be sure he's getting enough to eat.

Probably 3-4 months? I had things planted, but they didn't really start taking off for a couple months there. One side I didn't put anything in to grow, and it's completely overtaken with volunteer morning glories and passion flower vines. Burying soaker hoses about an inch under the mulch helped to loosen that cardboard up so my other plants could break through with their roots.

I did it this year too. I had a whole dumpster load of compost delivered to my house, and had a pandemic's worth of Amazon boxes in cardboard. I also had some fallen tree branches that I cut up.

The areas where it went cardboard -> branches & twigs -> leaves n crap -> compost, are the areas that are doing the best right now. In areas where it was just cardboard -> compost, it took much longer for my plants to get established. However, eventually they did! The big key was making sure to keep that cardboard wet. If you wet it down really good, and then wet the compost on top, the roots have a much, much easier time digging in there. Bonus points if you can add a couple inches of mulch on top of your compost.

Now I'm finding there's so much compost that it's making the weeds go fucking nuts, it's wild to see how "life finds a way" in some areas.

But yeah, it worked out decently, just required enough water and time. Also thyme. No, seriously, using creeping thyme was a great way to help get the compost & soil to do its thing and firm up so that it could hold other plants.

Yeah I gotta say, "Webrings are back!" was not on my 2023 bingo card. But I'm not hating it by a longshot! It feels like a nice hybrid of the lil Angelfire/Geocities sites and yahoogroups/onelist. Usually fandom communities were hand in hand with those two platform elements, and I've missed that tight-knit community feeling.

^^ facts. It took me a little bit to figure out the community search, but it connects to all available instances.