Coelacanth

Yes, definitely! Using the !community@instance.tld works well for communities, but linking to posts is a bit of a headache honestly.

Sounds like programming.dev might be a good fit, or perhaps dbzer0?

Seeing Disco Elysium near the top of Active User Growth warms my heart.

I haven’t played this since I was a kid but I used to have such a good time with it. I had almost forgotten about it so this was a great blast of nostalgia. I guess people are still playing it? Warms my heart.

It was definitely the go-to abbreviation during the early days of the internet, at least in my circles. Nowadays we’ve become so anglicised that everyone just uses English norms instead.

I remember using asg as a kid/young teen, and I remember people at the time were looking down on those using “lol” or “rofl” instead, calling them silly posers.

I love this. The evolution of the slang is so interesting. I read somewhere else that Japan started to use the symbol for “grass” to mean great laughter because the initial abbreviation “www” looks like blades of grass.

Lots of great suggestions below already, thought I’d add The Prestige. Peak Nolan in my opinion, and definitely benefits from going in blind.

Oh god, I can’t even begin to imagine what that feels like. I’m glad you recovered, but that sounds horrible to have to go through.

If you want some inspiration or hope, look up Pat Martino. After a brain haemorrhage he had to have part of his brain removed, which apparently included crucial parts relating to musicianship. He was a virtuoso before, but completely forgot how to play guitar. This was at 36 years old, but he managed to re-learn guitar enough to be considered a virtuoso once again post-haemorrhage. I think I read brain scientists were stunned, science it should have been impossible. But the brain is a fascinating organ and apparently he managed to form new neural pathways using intact tissue.

It’s more like AI art in reverse, when you think about it. Instead of an AI spitting out images to our taste, it’s the YouTubers pumping out images to the algorithms taste.

The original poster was @mizu6079@lemmy.world who seems to have deleted his account and the original post. It was archived in various places though, sadly without the original comments (which had some back and forth with the OP that only increased the mystery). It was the top upvoted post on Lemmy as a whole for a while. Here is a link to an archived version of just the OP:

https://lemmy.world/post/616615

No-poop guy truly was a Lemmy moment.

Close to 40 million I think? As I recall it was said about one in 200 is a direct descendant.

This is great advice, it’s pretty much the same approach I’ve had to do.

Anything involving leaving the house is basically impossible for me due to required activation energy and associated anxiety. Investing in a good treadmill was one of the best decisions I ever made. Got one with a shelf built in for a phone/tablet so I can watch videos while I run. I know that type of exercise is not what was asked for, but the same principle applies to body weight exercises or free-weight training you can do if you buy a set of weights:

• Make it something you can do from home to minimise startup friction
• Set up a way to stimulate yourself while working out
• Make the exercise program varied and bite-sized so you just have to focus on finishing the current exercise instead of starting to think about how long time is remaining on the program (which is why I run intervals on the treadmill).

Thanks for your efforts keeping the Poetry comm alive! I know I mainly lurk there but I appreciate your posts!

Its just that I see people use a lack of population in ‘niche’ communities as a failure of Lemmy overall, and using some subjective made-up number to justify Lemmy’s overall failure, when there’s obviously traffic to major communities and ‘life’/activity on Lemmy on a daily basis.

It’s not so much a “failure” of Lemmy as it is an assessment of the situation (at this point in time). I wasn’t suggesting Lemmy was or will be a failure, nor that it’s dead. I like it here and I’m active most days. There still isn’t enough activity in niche subs for Lemmy to have mainstream appeal, though. Even a broad subject like Poetry is carried by a handful of people, and that is a fairly lively “niche sub”.

We’re currently still in the phase where determined, committed individuals have to spend concerted effort into keeping small subs going, rather than them being self-sustaining.

I do like it here, though, and I really hope the growth continues.

Yeah, I feel that. Formula 1 does okay (maybe unsurprisingly due to it being tech adjacent), but even huge sports like soccer are mostly ghost towns.

To confirm, you don’t think we have a minimum population base currently on Lemmy?

I mean, depends on what you view Lemmy as, right? It’s a great place to hang around and chat (depending on your interests). The people here are generally polite and friendly, and most interactions feel meaningful. It does not currently have enough content volume and niche communities to provide a viable Reddit alternative to most people.

If so, how do you make that judgment? How are you measuring that? How are you quantifying that?

Completely subjectively, though I didn’t think it was an unpopular opinion. I thought most people agreed niche communities struggle here. The exact number of users needed to reach critical mass I have no idea on, just a best guess extrapolating between where we are now and where Reddit was a decade ago. You can use Mastodon as another data point. I’m not on there, but I’m under the impression that Mastodon, too, has a little low userbase to truly feed niche communities, and it’s noticeably larger than Lemmy.

Both sides have their benefits, and it’s a shame there is no good best-of-both-worlds. I get where you’re coming from, I never felt the urge to participate on Reddit because it was so often just shouting into the void and getting buried in hundreds of one-word replies and in-jokes and memes. Here I feel seen, and often feel like my contribution (although mostly just small comments) makes an impact.

At the same time, a huge critical mass of a userbase is completely necessary for niche communities to survive. Maybe not as overwhelmingly massive as Reddit’s, but magnitudes larger than Lemmy has right now. Lemmy has a very distinct userbase slant and if you’re in the target audience (tech, FOSS, Linux etc) you’re probably great here. But even common interests like sports struggle for traction, and true niche stuff has an extremely tough time.

God I wish you get that grant. Your Fediverser project is super interesting and promising, and I think could be a great boon.

Commenters were already counted, though, so this bump is really just the vote-only population getting added. Which is still important to maintaining a healthy and varied front-page, mind you.