No argument here. The wasteful and dangerous vehicles are just a minor symptom of our cultural issues.

There is a lot of anger, frustration, and unacknowledged insecurity going into vehicle purchases in the US.

We may be thinking of different populations of users. The folks using Lemmy right now don’t really need much help to get what they want out of it. But if the fediverse is to grow, even if it never hits Reddit/Facebook/etc numbers, its developers should look at ways to decrease friction to getting the best experience.

And to be clear, I did not mean to argue that redundant communities are a problem. I can just see potential benefits of allowing cross-instance merger of communities IF the leaders of those communities decide they want to.

There undoubtedly IS strength in redundant communities, just as there is with all the different instances to choose from. One mod, one admin, one hardware failure or seized server, etc cannot just shut things down. Plus competition is good. There can be a natural selection process to determine over time which community is the best run.

But thanks to the network effect, there is also a first mover advantage, and an inertia to whichever community gets the most users at the beginning, since many people will just sub to the one or two most active communities on a subject. It would be interesting too see how, and IF, such a “merge communities” feature would be used by like-minded communities/mods. That kind of feature would/should be low priority in these early days though.

It all comes down to the network effect that I mentioned. It’s not a matter of making the users’ lives easier, it’s a matter of making the content better, especially the comments.

A single merged community may kick off discussions and debates that would never happen if the users were spread across 10 different communities in different instances.

I mean, maybe the conversations would still happen if everybody subscribed all 10 of the instances’ communities. If everybody interested in, say, photography subbed to every photography community out there, you’d basically have the same effect as merging. But people won’t do that. Some will, but I bet most won’t.

That’s fine on an individual level, but unless everybody does it, you probably still have the downside of the users — and therefore the content & comments — being spread too thin. If the mods of the communities had a tool to federate/merge at the community level, that gives the benefit of the network effect. And if the “merge” functionality just mirrors all content to all connected communities across instances, it would make popular ones more reliable.

But that should only be an option for communities, never forced. There’s strength in diversity too.

I thought the same thing when some (talented and well meaning) individuals recently put out tools/procedures to access Reddit in a more clean way.

Nah. I don’t need to be an absolutist — I’ll load up a page if some search shows me that’s the only place to get what I’m looking for — but spending time to make undesirable websites more accessible for myself isn’t something I plan to do.

I’m reading through the comments and every reply of yours is like another stroke of the paint brush. I will watch your dark art from afar.

Install Linux Mint in a virtualbox VM. It gets up and running so quickly, and works extremely well.

I have been focusing more on learning Linux at work, between some Fedora VMs we use for various things, and the Mint VM I spun up myself. It’s great because jumping between windows and Linux is a simple matter of moving the mouse cursor to a different monitor. I usually just leave Linux Mint running full screen on one of my monitors.

I’m not experienced with lots of distros, but Mint is damned impressive.