Wildmimic

lol, i saw that one last night

The big difference is:

On the Fediverse, some random person now has your email and IP address (if you use neither an disposable email nor a VPN). This person has no special access to any other data, meaning that outside of legal proceedings with courts involved (or your email address being publicly connected to your identity), they do not have the ability to even find out who you are.

On corporate Social Media, the people who got your email and IP have a lot more resources to build a comprehensive model of your behavior and psychology, use intensive profiling regarding your devices, and have money to buy datasets for finetuning their knowledge, then sell off access to your eyeballs to the highest bidder, while all the time making sure to keep you engaged with whatever tricks they can play on you.

None of the real-life consequences of using corporate social media have even the slightest chance of also being an issue on the Fediverse. The servers aren’t even really interesting targets for Cyberattacks, because the best you get is a handful (if we are not talking lemmy.world, mostly somewhere sub-500) email addresses.

A slow growth would be preferable at the moment. Getting Lemmy to be regularly used by at least 250k people would allow more niche communities to take off.

I do not see a big problem regarding people feeling being drowned out by rising user count. There’s always the possibility of going the way BeeHaw did, to curate the instances you want to federate with, allowing smaller, more isolated nodes to exist to provide safe spaces and to avoid context collapse .

Everyone assuming the gender of god is a blasphemous republican lol.

I have to say that while i do not care at all about the christian packaging, the things he stands for align a lot more with my left-wing ass than most US politicians.

Alcohol is actually worse than opiates from nearly every perspective, it’s one of the few addictions that can kill you just for quitting, and regularly killing people on both overdose and chronic usage (plus the societal cost of destroying the lives of people around the alcoholic). Compared to the actual damage your brain and liver takes from a bar dive and the added damage to the social fabric, i’d rather take a bunch of opiates and nod off for a few hours - most problems with opiates come from criminalization and unsafe environments.

I can speak from personal experience with fentanyl withdrawal that there is not much space for “rationality” when the need hits, and the danger becomes an abstract that does not deter anyone. I was hooked by my doctors on medical products and not street heroin, mind you. I’d compare it with the need to drink that glass of water when absolutely dehydrated on a hot day, with added intensity and pain. You are cold and nothing can warm you, your nose wont stop running, you can’t rest because your muscles on every part of your body cramp (worst for me were the cramps in the musculature around/between the shoulder blades which prevented me from keeping any position longer than a few minutes, closely followed by the intestinal cramping), and every single thought in your brain revolves around getting the next hit to get out of this situation, just as you would think about finally getting that glass of water you crave.

The body produces opiates for itself in small amounts, but if you add them externally, 2 things happen that make it a bodily need: your body reduces the amount of opiates it produces (which have an important function in regulating body temperature and muscle tone), and your body tones down the intense signal, so whatever opiates your body produces are not enough to keep everything running. Getting that system back to normal working conditions can take a pretty long time.

And then there is the aspect that the feeling opiates give you is not experienceable in any other way. It’s like the warmest, softest hug you’ll ever get, and a state of bliss. This makes it hard for people like me who already have psychiatric issues and recurring depression to even consider stopping - nothing else i’ve experienced in my life has ever come even close to that wave that washes over you and takes away all the pain and doubt.

I only was lucky enough to confess my problems to my primary care physician in a phase of acute withdrawal - i just couldn’t take the rollercoaster of “high or in withdrawal” anymore - that landed me in a substitution program. I am still addicted, but without both the positive and negative sides messing with me i can manage my life.

That’s one of Trump’s “funny” nicknames, and Talarico leaned fully into it - you can buy “Talafreako” T-Shirts to support his campaign, and they sell pretty well from what i’ve heard.

Hospitalization is not the end of things. It can be a start of a new life if you really can’t cope with the old one. Take me for an example.

I always ignored my personal boundaries and that stress was slowly killing me. During an especially stressful time in my early 30s i started the equivalent of force feeding myself up to 10k calories a day, smoking weed 24/7, and was suicidal as fuck. The only thing that got me out of that situation (outside of a possible suicide) was voluntary hospitalization.

I won’t lie, the meds are not a very pleasant thing in general (although not feeling anything was a large improvement above what i experienced before!). But without getting stabilized in a stationary stay, i would never had the possibility of starting the necessary changes to make sure i could rebuild my life in a way that i could cope with long term.