I think fediverse people are wildly overestimating how much 99% of Reddit users care about this. The mod team on r/futurology (I’m one of them) set up a fediverse site just over a month ago (here you go - futurology.today ) It’s been modestly successful so far, but the vast majority of subscribers seem to be coming from elsewhere in the fediverse, not migrants from Reddit.
This is despite the fact we’ve permanently stickied a post to the top of the sub. r/futurology has over 19 million subscribers, and yet the fediverse is only attracting a tiny trickle of them. I doubt most people on Reddit even know what the word fediverse means.
People who would leave a site like Reddit because of a principled stance often mistakenly believe that the rest of society cares as deeply as they. Spoiler: society mostly doesn’t care; at least, not enough to go out of their way to change anything.
My father had a doctorate of engineering. He was a brilliant man. When I saw him search for Google and then follow the search link to google.com, to then search on their home page, I started to tell him he should search from the address / search field in his browser. He was instantly becoming confused and so I said, “nevermind,” because his way got him satisfactory results so why bother. Some people aren’t dumb at all. They just don’t care about the same things you or I mighty enough to learn them (beyond basics).
IIRC stickies are also excluded from feed once they get this attribute.
But yeah, we don’t even understand what a barrier switching to fediverse sites is for regular joes, jemmas and jermas. Like, for many people the internet is suggested apps’ feed and, rarely, their browser’s default start page. They don’t choose anything, and why would they? And here we are, challenging them to do something on intent while they are pretty happy with what they have now.
and why would they? … they are pretty happy with what they have now.
Exactly. Only a very small number of people are motivated as the pioneers who’ve setup the fediverse now are. Again looking at this through the lens of r/futurology & our fediverse site. Why would a user also want to go to a second version of the exact same thing, but way, way smaller.
My hunch is that long-term the fediverse will prosper. Reddit still isn’t too bad even with these changes, at least not compared to what an absolute shithole Twitter has become.
But people who care about making it bigger, should be asking themselves hard questions - this meme comes across as very complacent & out of touch, if many people really believe the sentiments it’s expressing.
If you just accept that the book was impossible to make into a TV show it's actually pretty great. Lee Pace is astounding, the story is great, and Bear McCreary did a lot of the music. You may know Bear's beats from Battlestar Galactica.
Any country has its specialties and these German Meme things are certainly good, but in general German cuisine is not very sophisticated. In Europe by far it is Spanish and in general Mediterranean cuisine. I am from Spain and here the food is worldclass, apart there are also not only the best wines, but also the beer can compete with the German one. The worst cuisine is in Nordic countries and England, this is already off the scale, luckily there are good Chinese and Indian restaurants there that guarantee survival outside of fish and chips.
A huge chunk of traditional Nordic food is either dirt-poor peasant food, or food that keeps for months on end so the brutal winter doesn’t kill you regardless of whether you’re a dirt-poor peasant or a hoity-toity lord (and this is what lutefisk is: usually low-quality dried fish cured in lye to soften it.)
Unfortunately this also means that many recipes are more or less lost, or really only written down in eg. family recipe books. And at least here in Finland we’ve also stopped using a majority of the local herbs we historically used, in large part because they’re not seen as “fancy” (being herbs that dirt-poor peasants gathered from the woods) – not that we were ever that into spices, life being honestly pretty miserable for the majority of the population especially when serfdom was a thing. People had, well, other priorities
Why are anglo writers obsessed with using latin as some ancient, mystical language? Why would Latin be tied to magic in any way? Do they realize that Latin was spoken all through Europe for millenia and its vulgar form evolved into tons of current languages? Or that people were using latin in churches, courtrooms and universtities all the way up to the 20th century? Latin was an optional in my high school. I took two years.
If random Latin words could do magic all of Europe would have been constantly exploding. Newspapers would be covering the latest magic volcano to pop up in Southern France. World War II movies would include accidental summonings.
Also, for us romance language speakers it sounds vaguely understandable, so the weird things they use for spells sound goofy as hell. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than using fake Latin-sounding made up stuff as in Harry Potter.
Latin was the lingua franca for the educated western world for centuries. Texts on alchemy, mysticism, and religion were all written in Latin. Church rituals were performed in Latin.
Most magic in fiction has its roots in the past. What language would be more fitting?
No, wait, it was not "lingua franca in the educated western world", vulgar latin was just... the language a lot of Europe spoke for centuries.
People think of Latin as this highbrow educated thing, because that's what was left of it after the development of romance languages from vulgar Latin, but Latin was just what normal people used to talk to each other for a long time.
And yes, sure, texts on alchemy, mysticism and religion were written on it.
Also texts on food recipes, tax collection, how the tree from your neighbour's yard was blocking the sun to your oranges and the rude graffitti in the tables of the pub.
Honestly, I don't see why the chosen language would have to matter to your fictitious magic system. Surely if you have to say words and words mean things, the language doesn't affect what the words mean. I tend to like it when people still manage to tap into magical thinking without the crutch of pulling what they think sounds old-timey from somewhere. Neil Gaiman, Jim Henson or Grant Morrison were/are really good at it.
Or, you know, if you're a meganerd like Tolkien you can always just... make a whole new language for it. That also works.
I’m not talking about vulgar Latin or the romance languages.
For about a millenia and a half, everything that could be considered scholarship was written in Latin. Newton’s Principia Mathematica? Latin. Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium? Latin. Kepler’s Astronomia nova? Latin.
Almost every educated person in the western world learned Latin. That’s how they communicated with their colleagues in other countries - letters written in Latin. That’s why it was a lingua franca.
Yes? I think you may have missed my point in the shuffle.
What I'm saying here is that Latin doesn't make sense as a mystical, secret language for magic because it was too common. I'm not saying it wasn't the language of scholars, I'm saying that not only was it the language of scholars, so every treatise on optics or history would have triggered accidental lightning bolts, but it was also a commonly spoken language as well.
Hey, you know what is lingua franca for science while being widely spoken? English.
If English had been a dead language for fifteen hundred years and was only used by people who talk about things only a tiny subset of the population understands?
But that's my point, it hasn't been, and it wasn't.
Again, Latin was mandatory in my high school for a year, optional for two more. In the 1990s. It's still optional, I believe. My parents went to church in Latin as kids.
So no, it doesn't sound mystical outside the anglosphere, it sounds like crusy old priests, lawyers and boring lessons. Today.
I’ll probably get hate, but the content just isn’t there. I tried using Lemmy as my main, but most of the communities I’d follow on Reddit just weren’t on here, and if they were, they would have a couple hundred of subscribers at most, and there would be 7 different versions of the same community on different instances with no way to measure quality at first glance. Lemmy thrives for geeky hobbies that surround the FOSS space that gave birth to it, so communities like Linux or Unixporn have a strong enough presence, but for pretty much anything else it’s just not there yet. Is this a negative feedback loop? Yes, but there isn’t much to be done about it until shit REALLY hits the fan
PD: As an added, Lemmy can get incredibly circle-jerky at times, even more so than Reddit already is. Like seriously at times 90% of the content on my feed is just shitting on Reddit plebs
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