Before billion dollar companies move in, we need to see governments, universities, and journalists on the platform.

Bottom line: is threads a potential entry-point into the fediverse for a lot of people who otherwise would not be aware/ interested? ABSOLUTELY YES.

Does that benefit offset the catastrophic harm it will do by overwhelming the fediverse with corporate interests, stacking nonprofits with Meta-friendly officers, and exerting leverage on Activity Pub development? NO WAY.

fediblock.

I’ve been using Kagi for the better part of a year. I find it removes about 2/3 of the time and effort between search and goal. There are a lot of very simple quality of life things that every search should have (and would have if not for user tracking).

Some people have fairly said that paid search is inherently privacy unfriendly. You have to log in to use it. That doesn’t really bother me, and if it doesn’t bother you, it’s great to use a quality search where you are not the product.

Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought they were saying that there are not other holidays observed by secular folks

Not necessarily, there are a lot of secular Jews who still celebrate chanukah and passover, and even Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Many cities have some type of religious council. It may be helpful to reach out, as they may have some sort of list maintained. Alternatively, maybe contact the main school district. The superintendent’s office should have such a list for their scheduling purposes.

In either case, these lists should be pre-negotiated. The local religious leaders have already determined which key holidays should be recognized.

Calendars are arbitrary. Rosh Hashanah is on the first of Tishrei every single year. Not my fault that Pope Gregory the 13th came up with some ridiculous contraption that doesn’t even follow the moon in the 1580s.

What a silly thing to cling to.

Without regular access to the phone number, WhatsApp will not work. I know it’s a couple months (from long term travel), but not longer. I set up an account for the landline at work, but it fails every few months and has to be re-established

The problem with comparing “engagement” across platforms is that it is never apples to apples. My experience on Mastodon has been that the engagement is lower in quantity, but much higher in quality. The number of meaningful and thoughtful engagements is much higher. The number of enduring connections is much higher.

If you want to interact with people who are seeking your exact content, if you want to build fidelity, if you want more meaningful comments and to build community, there is no better place I’ve found than Mastodon.

Social mass media favors “influencers” who create content that has broad appeal, but no depth or meaningful engagement, or else ragebait that attracts conflict and repetitive comments.

If you like Lemmy.World, why not set up the account on Mastodon.World? It’s the same admin/ops team.

I second moshidon, although I’ve just started using phanpy, which has some cool innovations. There is not nearly the wealth of Mastodon apps that we have here on Lemmy.

If you start following hashtags, then you find interesting people. There are also curated lists that you can sign up for. That will introduce you to a lot of new content.

Woodworking or restoring old appliances and tools.

Please fediblock.

There are 200 mil. Threads users, and 10 mil. in the fediverse. Meta has been unable to meet basic federation assurances, is unable to guarantee moderation, is unable to detect and remove bots reliably, unable to guarantee basic user protections, unable to reliably detect and remove actions like doxxing, harassment, stalking, ban evasion, brigading, etc. etc.

Federating with threads means giving up on these basic protections for users and being overrun with threads users. When there is ONE instance that serves 95% of the users, federation has failed. What happens when Meta engineers start submitting pull requests to the AP protocol? What happens when they fork it to add their own “features?”

Federating with Threads is bad for the present and the future of the fediverse. We need to see more government organizations, universities, and journalists joining and spinning up instances. I want to see @POTUS@whitehouse.gov, @bucky@wisc.edu, and @AndersonCooper@cbsnews.com

There should be at least 6 more ducks this time.

For sure! History is the scientific study of the past using all available evidence. If new evidence showed up, we should absolutely use it.

Take the Dead Sea Scrolls. They are a huge cache of texts, many over 2000 years old, containing biblical texts and fragments. The Vatican tried to buy up and conceal them, thinking that they might contradict existing manuscripts. They only let approved researchers have very limited access.

To help the research, some of the scholars created a concordance - basically a list of words and how many times each appeared. A copy was leaked. It became the world’s largest Wordle puzzle and some scholars were able to essentially reverse engineer it into the original text. They published the results, even identifying some of the speculated variants. It was so accurate that the Vatican ended up releasing the original scrolls for study. There was no longer a point to concealing it.

Although the discovery was tremendous for the field, it didn’t end up ruining anyone’s religion. It just offered new insights into the composition and development of the Bible. Pretty cool.

AI generating this right now!

Edit: I should not have done that.

It’s Mastodon. I use Moshidon

I haven’t seen it. Can you explain where you see it? I find the Amazon Container Addon pretty helpful, and you may also look into site-specific permissions, such as blocking microphone, camera, and location sharing on certain sites. If it is a certain element that show up, you may be able to block it using a custom setting in your ad blocker.

Or “in Soviet Russia, television watches YOU.”

I think that’s one of his.

Here are a few books I found about the lives of the super-wealthy.

Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live–And How Their Wealth Harms Us All

Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent

And here is an interesting 20-min interview with the second author:

What’s It Like To Be Rich? Ask The People Who Manage Billionaires’ Money

I highly recommend the Hidden Brain Podcast.