Ext4 came out 20 years ago.

Social media. It wasn't until very recently that people started to realize just how harmful it actually is.

What is their fixation on this? Why does this issue matter out of all the other issues that they could be bringing up right now?

For me it was growing up around drug addicts. I wanted to know why so many people in my life liked them so much, so started using drugs around the age of 13.

It started with abusing inhalants, huffing ether spray for small motors, and even huffing gasoline at my worst.

I started associating with troll groups online at the time, and a lot of them were drug users as well. They knew I was a dumb kid and got me to stop huffing and move onto abusing my prescriptions, which included adderall and xanax. I would switch between the two based on what I had on hand. Crushing up the adderall to snort it, taking multiple pills of Xanax trying not to black out.

I did this for a year or two and stopped as I learned about "research chemicals", which I could legally buy online. I tried all kinds of psychedelic drugs such as 2C-E and nBome. I was lucky I didn't die, since those drugs were extremely intense on my body. I ended up going to the ER after talking too much nBome, which resulted in my legs turning a completely pale white. They felt cold and numb, which told me it was vein constriction, a known risk of the drug which can easily result in death or limb loss.

I'm about 19 when that happened, and Silk Road was kicking into high gear, so I figured I should just start using that to buy real drugs, which I did. I started buying absurd amounts of weed and acid, spending basically all my money from my first job. I didn't have to pay bills or rent as I was living with my grandparents. I don't even remember most of this period of my life, as it was just a constant stream of psychedelics, alcohol, Xanax, and marijuana abuse.

In 2016 the weed and psychedelics weren't doing it anymore, and for whatever reason my grandpa had managed to collect enough unused Xanax prescriptions that I got my hands on HUNDREDS of pills. I quickly became addicted in the span of about a month, which I knew because I started to wake up feeling stabbing pains, cramps, extreme lethargy, and depression.

The next 6 months were the worst period of my life. I would take xanax multiple times a day just to get through the day. Even with that, I was having awful withdrawals that included dry heaving even though I wanted to throw up, strange memory loss (both short term and long term), intolerance to light and sound (even the wind was enough to make me want to vomit), cramps, stabbing pains, insomnia, and so much more.

Eventually I ended up buying heroin, but luckily my friend at the time put his foot down and threatened to leave me if I didn't accept his help getting off the drugs. It took about 6 months and lots of checking in, but eventually I tapered myself off the Xanax and got rid of any heroin I had. Unfortunately however the taste of heroin I got was enough for me to start seeking out opiates. Luckily between the high prices and extreme risks that fentanyl was posing at the time, I never got addicted, but even to this day I wish I was able to use more, and often get obsessive thinking about how nice it would feel to use them again.

From that point to now I've been able to stick to weed for the most part, but looking back on all the time and money I wasted just makes me sad. I am lucky my experiences were benign compared to what could have happened at least.

To anyone who may be considering using drugs for the first time, just don't. Yes they feel good, but living life feels better. With drugs the pleasure quickly goes away and you just end up using them to cope. It's a stupid, worthless cycle that just leaves you feeling empty.

Sorry this comment was so long.

Linux phones are getting closer and closer to usability every day. I don't care that they'll always be less polished than iOS or Android, I want a Linux phone.

Reddit was full of racists even back in the early 2010s. /r/Coontown was a prime example of that.

Voat died because they took a max free speech approach, even allowing racism and stuff. Lemmy does not have a central administration that can make decisions like that, as each instance gets to decide if they federate with another instance or not.

There's no doubt going to be a banlist that gets shared amongst the biggest, most popular instances to get rid of the trolls.

At least they took a stand. Thousands of other subs who got the same ultimatums just gave in no questions asked, no malicious compliance.

Lawns were a mistake

Good. The rule is stupid and deserves to be worked around. Water is essential. I hate when I go to these kinds of public places and they give you no option to get water other than bringing it yourself. Poor logistics on the part of the event organizers.

Not to put a damper on, but it's more like 50k who started posting on lemmy in the past week for a total of 110k. We basically doubled the user count, but still are an order of magnitude away from 1 million.

Even if they bought up a few instances, they would never have the ability to buy them all. Even if they did, you could just create more that are outside corporate control.

The Internet used to be federated like this, where you would connect to servers that hosted various services such as chat (IRC), instant messaging (XMPP), streaming (IceCast), file sharing (FTP), etc. It wasn't until the 2010s that corporations started to centralize popular protocols into their own proprietary standards.

All we can do is let corporations run themselves into the ground over and over until people get sick of it and use stable, federated services.

It's worth keeping in mind that the World Wide Web, which people often incorrectly refer to as "the Internet", is the biggest federated service in existence. Companies like AOL tried and failed to make their own walled garden version of The Web.

The goal of the fediverse is to do what The Web did, but for every service online. This is something that could take decades, but it is something we need to do to make sure the future Internet is resilent against corporations and governments.