aside from leaving them behind

Could this future give me glasses that can’t be smudged? If so, sign me up!

Pogs

I pick up something new almost every time I watch Memento.

Reddit can't be divorced from the leadership. If you hate the direction leadership is taking Reddit, how can you still like Reddit itself? What is it apart from that?

This argument makes more sense to me with Lemmy. Yes, if you hate the direction one instance admin is taking their Lemmy instance, it doesn't make sense to hate Lemmy as a whole… but Reddit has only one "instance," so if you hate the "admin," you hate Reddit.

Lemmy.world seems to be frequently under attack

You've seen for yourself that it does have a significant effect. You may not want the largest instance because that paints a big target on you. You also need to pick an instance with admins you can trust, or at least reconcile yourself to jumping ship to another instance if they do the wrong thing.

I started on lemmy.ml about a year before the reddit exodus. It was fine, and I didn't use it much because there wasn't much activity. I started using Lemmy more heavily when everyone came over… but at the same time, performance at lemmy.ml became horrible. They also disabled community creation because "(they) have enough communities." What does that even mean? I still haven't created any communities, but I would like to be able to if I choose to.

I ended up jumping ship to another instance I'm happy with so far… but I almost went to vlemmy first, which no longer exists. That would have had an affect on my experience.

If I were evaluating an instance today, I would start by scrolling to the bottom of the page to see what version they're on. Is it the latest? That means the admins are engaged at least enough to keep the software updated. If not, you should probably move on. Are they on a pre-release version? If so, are you comfortable with a little instability to have bleeding edge features and fixes? Then, I would just poke around a little to see how performance is on the instance before creating an account. Is it acceptable? Read the server sidebar. Are you OK with the rules? Last, I would find the support or "meta" community for the instance. See what kinds of discussions are happening there. Are the mods and admins active and are they philosophically aligned with you? Are problems being fixed? What are the big announcements? Does the way the server is being managed make sense to you?

Drop will continue to operate independently

In the case of an acquisition, this sentence always has an implied "for a little while" at the end of it.

I'm a long-time PC gamer but first time gaming laptop ("notebook?") owner. I'm traveling at the moment, so I had to ditch my desktop for the laptop. Mine is still fairly portable so I'm often tempted to use it on my lap… but I'm always afraid to cover those vents so I'm left scrambling looking for something in my hotel room or AirBNB that would approximate a lap desk. 😅

I've been baffled by this design decision. Thanks for the context. It makes a bit more sense now.

How does it help though when the user inevitably uses it on their lap and covers those vents?

Every movement, subculture, whatever is just about fashion for 98% of the people involved. Fashion is easy. Values are hard.

Back in the days of shopping malls, you could travel and go to a mall in any city, and it would be virtually the same as a mall in any other city: same stores, same (or similar) restaurants in the food court, same teenagers trying desperately to impress each other… all shoved into a slightly different layout. It was kinda bleak. One reason we don't just copy our content from somewhere else is that we don't want to re-create this nightmare hellscape on the internet, where every new social network is a slightly different skin on the same content.

Lemmy is not Reddit. Please let Lemmy continue to not be Reddit. If you want to fuck Reddit, do it by not going to Reddit. Reddit doesn't own the content, but the contributors do. (Read section 5 of the Reddit terms of use; when you post on Reddit, you retain ownership of your content and grant Reddit license to it.) When you repost their content without permission, you're not fucking Reddit; you're fucking them.

I replaced Reddit with the satisfaction of knowing I won’t be a pawn in Reddit’s plans to monetize the community’s free labor. 😉