Instance selection at sign-up remains the primary barrier to entry.

I think there needs to be a quick question form upon sign-up, going over the biggest differences between instances. Such as: “do you want downvotes activated? Do you want to see NSFW? Do you want little, moderate, or heavy automated blocking of potentially objectionable material?” etc, then have the sign-up page provide you with up to three instance options based on your selected preferences.

Otherwise you’re either forcing users to do this research on their own (“ew, homework just to sign up for social media? no thanks”) or they’re going in blind and selecting at random, very likely ending up on an instance with qualities/features they don’t like.

A separate issue: during the big 2023 rexit (when I moved over), the primary instance that most new users joined, lemmy.world, was a buggy, buggy mess, practically unusable for the first few days. I don’t know if that was specifically because of the influx of new users or if it just worsened problems that had skated by when there were only a handful of users before, but I imagine the bugs turned away quite a few potential new Lemmings. Hopefully that won’t be an issue this time around, but I guess that depends on how big the exodus is and how much Lemmy infra has strengthened in the 2.5 years since.

I’ve also seen it recommended for breaking “death grip” habits.

*too

Says the AI slop…

the timing of the tassle and silk is so off for mine that most pollen will just fall off before the silk even came out

I’ve had this happen before too; I assume it’s too prevent self-pollination, but is super frustrating. As far as keeping the pollen from blowing away, I read somewhere that the best time to hand-pollinate is around 10-11am, which has worked well for me (but I don’t live in an especially windy climate).

I’ve had good success hand-pollinating corn. But a husk-less ear is definitely a new one.

Reading the title, it’s obvious OP cucurbit off more than they could chew.

We saw what happened when Internet platforms tried to be inclusive of differing viewpoints:

Nazis

Is it any surprise, then, that people started doubling-down on their echo chambers?

I’m really confused what this could be referring to.

Because the folks who’ve been around the longest and remember the early days of the Internet are currently in utter dismay over how their fun international sandbox has become a Black Mirror-esque horror show, while everyone else seems to just shrug and obediently upload their face scans so they can watch AI videos of uncanny-valley cats playing cruel pranks on facsimiles of political figures in-between unskippable ads for applying to be an ICE agent under promises that it’ll be like COD but in your own backyard with living, breathing brown people.

I don’t care, I’m not giving up the em-dash in my own writing. Good luck reading half of my run-on sentences without it~~~

A roulette wheel of random instances is certainly a solution, but it’s not a great one, given that there are substantial differences between instances that could potentially impact a user’s fediverse experience, such as who they’re defederated from, whether they allow nsfw or downvotes, etc…

You and I have very different definitions of “mildly”

Giving you an upvote because I think this is a legitimate position, but I strongly disagree. AI has become so pervasive in our lives that it’s extremely difficult to avoid even offline, so I see no problem with someone saying in an irl conversation, “I wish my mom would stop sending me AI slop videos” or “I can’t help but feel paranoid I’m going to wake up one morning and find out I’ve lost my thesis work to the latest microslop update” or “I’ve started dreading work ever since they hired ‘workslop Bill’”

My comment was more about the use of “female” as a noun, but your comment about which to use as an adjective raises an interesting point, especially because, as you mention, the generation to regularly say things like “woman doctor” in a not-so-great way has mostly died out. I’m not sure where things stand currently on which adjective is preferred; I think it’s mostly contextual at the moment? (Like “I would feel more comfortable being examined by a woman doctor” sounds grammatically a touch clunky but connotatively fine to me, whereas “I can’t believe what that idiot female doctor diagnosed me with” sounds grammatically correct but otherwise awful)

Not even interests per se, but rather qualities of the instances like:

• do you want nsfw blocked?
• do you want downvotes enabled?
• do you want more or less defederation from potentially objectionable instances?
• etc

Basically all the features that invalidate the “just pick an instance, bro, it doesn’t really matter” argument.

No, not unless the “choose an instance” problem at sign-up is resolved.

I agree that

“Female” instead of woman or girl.

Edit: as in, where “woman” or “girl” would be grammatically correct. e.g. “a lot of females work at that company” vs “a lot of women work at that company” or “that company has a lot of female employees”

I actually thought the ending to S1 was brilliant, especially for a cliff hanger, and that the first arc of S1 was the weakest of the three (although E3 was quite good), and that S2E7 was just okay, so it’s likely that we have different tastes.

S1 did an excellent job of its storytelling, such as show don’t tell; character actions driving the plot, not the other way around; and well-written villains with clear motives. S2 fell flat on a lot of those fronts. I’d need to rewatch it for a proper write-up, but some examples from what I remember:

A lot of what made S1 great continues over into S2, such as the soundtrack and animation. But the character development, writing, and little details just didn’t match up in S2.