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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Oh man, this is awesome - it’s wonderful hearing from the practitioners of the art!

    I’m just trying to figure out what driver establishing the tipping point for breaking or the ban hammer - is there any empirical data to drive these decisions, or is the fediverse user base small enough that you act on “feel” or “professional instinct”?

    Managing emerging technologies fascinates me so any input - including the germs you’ve already volunteered - is very much appreciated 👍



  • Thamk you for the insight, instance administrator views are valuable and unique.

    At the risk of sounding like I’m presenting a bad faith argument, why ban them? I don’t like the whole “free market” analogy but surely it’s one of the liberating features of federated servers, being able to to largely express your votes or content as you see fit within the legal framework of the host nation. Wouldn’t the odd one or two mass downvoters/upvoters/theyvoters ultimately be a statistical abberation or is the fediverse still small enough for this sort of shit to carry weight?

    Open criticism of my view welcome, as always!



  • Man I’d love to be able to do that and give cats a good run-in for their twilight years but I don’t think I could - partly because one of the household is allergic to cats; but mainly I don’t think I could deal with the repeated emotional devastation of having to let them go at a much higher rate than a “normal” pet owner.

    Fair play to those that do. Pretty ballsy.




  • It appears to be the question of using a language’s formal or informal way of addressing the second person.

    Formal forms are generally used for those senior in age, rank, social standing etc - whereas the informal is used for colleagues, friends, family etc.

    The question revolves around whether to use the formal conjugations based on the elder nature of the date, or the informal verb endings based on the more intimate nature of being a date.

    In short, not a joke, but a headspinning social minefield for non-native speakers.

    At least I think that’s the jist of it, always happy for a correction.


  • Purely a subjective opinion (and I apologise if the artist shows up in this thread) but is it me or does it look like the person who made the background took a step back after it was done, marvelled at how pretty it was, and enjoyed the moment before thinking “…fuck I forgot about O’Brien”?

    It’s a great bit of artwork but poor Miles looks like an afterthought!



  • UK centric view here, but there were a number of key points in the rollout of narrowband internet access here.

    Freeserve was probably the biggest turning point - scrapping monthly subscription fees and just charging by the minute for local rate calls. In the era of CompuServe and AOL, that was a big shift.

    Next up was probably a mix of BT Free Weekend - paying an extra tenner or so a month so access the internet on 0808 numbers (free at point of calling for non UK telephony nerds), then expanded to evenings and weekends for 2hr stints. That, or Xstream who allowed 1hr stints on a free number, where capacity allowed and so long as you used their dialler and banner software. It used to get royally hammered at 0001hrs on a Monday.

    After that, there was nothing special until ADSL services swooped in and killed dial-up and ISDN services for all but hardened/secure line requirements.

    It got to a point where calling someone’s landline was next to pointless on the weekend unless you liked busy tones, but then this did coincide with the takeoff of 2G mobile telephony services so the next best thing to do was send a text message anyway.