This is the second reference to elbows I’ve seen related to this topic, and I really don’t understand. Would you mind providing context?

Honestly that caught me too.

I’d have to guess his family suspected/knew he was a piece of shit and wanted proof. Maybe he was also abusive? I don’t imagine someone like that would be like… super kind otherwise, you know?

I don’t know this company but fiber came into my area (central WI) a few years ago and I couldn’t be happier.

Prior to that the infrastructure I was on for cable internet was old and would have frequent problems.

The brand new infrastructure is figuratively worth its weight in gold, imho, even if the company itself is just as crap and your price ends up the same.

Even better, the fiber cables run underground, so other than having them severed when digging, they won’t go out unless there is a major widespread outage. No random branch taking out your service in a wind storm or whatever nonsense.

I’ve been doing these for years… they don’t work as intended for more than a year or two, and then become pretty unstable. Even the lady who created it went back to low-maintenance (as opposed to zero input) systems after a few years. Still with the dirt and all but not without water movement and stuff.

Just don’t be a woman on Lemmy.

Sure, most people won’t downvote or harass you just for being a woman (a lot will… we didn’t get the best of Reddit at all, and I doubt the new adoptees are any better…) but they will often enough make things difficult even if they aren’t actively causing problems.

But men of Lemmy (aka the vast majority of the user base since they ran off all the womenfolk) don’t care. They see that as quality control or some dumb shit, because THEY aren’t interested in woman things, so nobody should be, or they think their “as a man” comments should be important or some shit… Whatever the post is about. If it doesn’t cater to them, it can fuck right off.

Which is why cis women make up <10% of the Lemmy side of the fediverse. It’s a disaster for women here.

But I wonder how long you’ve been here. Most of the posts of this nature are from very new accounts and they don’t know the problems yet…

There used to be, but it was mostly men commenting, and mostly men upvoting, which drowns out any actual women’s voices that may have been there.

Pretty sure all the woman-focused subs have shut down.

I don’t really think there’s anything that can be done other than policing your own and letting the platform grow.

It’s a whole vibe thing, not just obvious stuff.

For example, whenever there were questions aimed at women (hey ladies, what’s your hair routine? Sort of thing), it’s nothing but a bunch of men spouting off about what their wives or girlfriends do, and maybe a few actual women, but their comments always ended up buried. Nobody actually wants that “the woman in my life does this, I think…” sort of input at all, except other men (which unfortunately is the vast majority of the platform, so those “as a man” comments get heavily upvoted, even when they are obviously full of complete shit). It drowns out the few female voices that actually are around. And if you correct some dude in a post for women voices, about something men typically know nothing about, you’ll get heavily downvoted for it. Not at all welcoming.

I know we have some strong transfem comms, and I’m all for it because all women are women, but the experience of those women is wildly different from cis women, and a lot of the memes and stuff coming from those comms are sort of… cis-excluding and often very off-putting. Which is sort of the only fem representation on here.

It’s just not friendly for women. And so so many things need to change before it really is.

I only mention Lemmy as a caution, like what to avoid, while I’m mentioning other fediverse social media…

Because I’m a woman and most of the people I know who want social media alternatives are also women, and I’m not subjecting them to this shitshow. I like them too much to bring them here.

I tried to sign up for an account, I was going to use it to create long form content, so I picked some tags (which definitely leave out too many broad categories to be particularly useful, and is thus incredibly limiting) that seemed somewhat related to what I wanted to do.

I then looked through the instance list based on those tags, and tried to find one that fit… and I couldn’t, because all of them had some caveat or blurb or whatever that made me go “nope, probably not here…”

The problem is that I had to click through multiple pages to hit those caveats in the instance rules/description during the signup process, and I had to do it for every one I wanted to check out. They weren’t at all listed on the main page, and they probably should be, maybe under a popup tooltip sort of button. As it stands it was a huge waste of time, and I gave up, and lost interest in having a channel. Maybe I’ll browse it if it ever picks up, but frankly the process of signing up to be a content creator is far too onerous.

Maybe that’s a problem with the instance owners and how they have things set up, maybe with the way the whole platform works, I don’t really know. It was pretty consistent though, so I assume it’s a platform problem.

It’s so depressing and aggressive, honestly. I can’t do that to my friends who don’t do that already.

These concerns, and more, are why just today, during a conversation with some friends looking to get off traditional social media, I advised them to join pixelfed, peer tube, mastodon, and loops, but suggested they strictly avoid Lemmy.

The communities aren’t right for anyone who isn’t seeking something exactly like Lemmy or leftie-Reddit-lite. I don’t even really like it here all that much anymore. Not the content; the interactions… across all my accounts… even joining “nicer” spaces is not a particularly nice or pleasant experience, plus the more interested is a woman, and Lemmy is a horrible sausagefest echo chamber not at all suited to a normal average woman person who isn’t techie. I’m techie, so I’m used to the vibe, but for your average cis-woman, Lemmy is a very very bad fit.

Bring on the downvotes if you like (the echo-chamber anti-voice sentiment is part of why people shouldn’t be recommended this platform, after all) but these are legit concerns for people who may want to join, and those of us already here can and do steer people elsewhere as a result.

Yeah, I think they just wanted to promote an unhealthy competitive environment, to get everyone to do their best or something. But that’s a sort of pressure that does the opposite of motivate a lot of people.

I got let go from a job because I told them I have absolutely zero interest of ever moving to a management position (I managed people in the past, which they knew, and I can do it, but have no desire to do that much work ever again). Apparently the company doesn’t want people who just want to be good at their jobs, they want everyone to move up to project management and beyond so they can all compete for limited promotions… and like… I just don’t want that.

Ultimately, I realized that place was highly toxic in a ton of ways so it’s for the best, but it was devastating at the time…

Anyway, I’m totally on board with gen z saying fuck that. After all, there’s been heavy talk for years about how middle managers are pointless busywork… at least someone is listening.

I haven’t accepted iCloud ToS changes in many months, and I refuse to update to iOS 18, because of AI bullshit.

I’ll probably end up back on android over this… at least I can get a phone that can be stripped down to basics… (don’t ask why I got an iPhone at all… mistakes were made…)

These signs are typically installed as multiple circuits due to having a lot of lights (even the led ones are usually split, and the split tends to be vertical or diagonal). The installers have some discretion as to which letters/words go on which circuit, so it’s possible the installers did this semi-intentionally, but really it’s just a byproduct of how large signs are lit.

In this case the other letters are probably the same color, the circuit just broke for whatever reason.

Probably because if we admit that it’s a necessity of the modern age like power and water, it would basically need to be metered like a utility, and there goes all the profits with flat rate “up to” speed pricing that most people don’t even remotely use.