Ugh, Andreeson is such a creep.

I am glad that he tried to assassinate 418, because the massive outcry that led to 418 being saved is something wholesome that I love.

Link with context for anyone unfamiliar with the context: https://save418.com/

Something that I have enjoyed recently are blogs by academics, which often have a list of other blogs that they follow. Additionally, in their individual posts, there is often a sense of them being a part of a wider conversation, due to linking to other blogs that have recently discussed an idea.

I agree that the small/slow web stuff is more useful for serendipitous discovery rather than searching for answers for particular queries (though I don’t consider that a problem with the small/slow web per se, rather with the poor ability to search for non-slop content on the modern web)

With respect to the presentation of your site, I like it! It’s quite stylish and displays well on my phone.

It’s baffling to me how customisable some fruit features can be. I know someone who works in plant genomics and cultivation and it’s really cool how they can use genomic analysis alongside selective breeding to select for traits. I imagine that imported papayas are cultivars that are easier to transport internationally.

I agree. I replied to Kris elsewhere saying this, but I am super glad to have been a part of this instance because it feels like a nice balance of being large enough to be robust and diverse, but small enough to have a distinctive culture. I don’t often interact with the communities that were on the instance, but I always enjoy seeing my peers crop up in the comments of various posts — it’s one of my favourite parts of Lemmy being federated (db0 is another example of an instance that has such a distinctive vibe that seeing it as someone’s instance is often useful metadata that affects how I parse their comment)

(speaking as a slrpnk user): Another backup communication strategy (once things are backup) might be to designate somewhere on a non-slrpnk instance as a place where people can check for updates if things go down; when I first discovered the outage, I wasn’t sure where to go to check for info/updates.

Unrelatedly, I hope that this unexpected outage isn’t causing you or other admins too much stress. Whilst the extended nature of this outage is unfortunate, I respect that you’re using this as an opportunity to migrate to a more robust solution. This kind of resilience focussed response is a key part of the solarpunk ethos, in my view.

Some people have said that such a long outage seems likely to kill an instance, but for my part, this community is worth waiting for — I have enjoyed having an account on this instance because it feels like the perfect blend of small enough to have a distinct culture and ethos, but is large enough to be robust and diverse.

I really appreciate iFixit and how they help bring the discussion of repairability to the forefront.

An interesting component here is that it’s possible that the video creator is responsible for this silly level of ads, but it’s impossible to know. Creators can select points in the video where ads will happen, which they can use to preserve the video’s flow as much as possible. In theory, you can even select to not monetise your video at all, which is a useful tool if the topic is something particularly dense or sensitive. In practice, I’ve seen plenty of creators apologizing when an inappropriate ad plays at a sensitive part of the video, despite them having tried to disable ads on the video. It must suck to have so little power over one’s own work.

In your case, I suspect this was a creator choosing to maximally monetise their video, given the regularity and number of ads. However, it’s possible that this is a 100% “Fuck Google” situation, given how opaque they are. I find it frustrating that when we have poor experiences like yours, we don’t even have a clear target to get angry at. It leads to accountability so diffuse that it’s like homeopathy. Getting angry doesn’t necessarily help change things (at least individually), but it can be incredibly cathartic even then

It often does, yeah. Not always though. I got one of the adblock warnings last night, and it refused to play the video. I fixed it by heading into ublock settings and manually updating. It always makes me laugh how rapidly the ad-blocker arms war progresses