Instead of "shielded" I think that a more accurate word would be that we have a "buffer". The network effect still applies to us, as much as it does in the microblogging side of the Fediverse; it's just indirectly (more people → more content → more people), in a way that content produced here in the past still might attract users in the future.
Once in a blue moon I remember that I have a Mastodon account. And I use it mostly because of the cross-compatibility with other Fediverse applications, something that Bluesky lacks.
I suspect it has drawn people away from the fedi and back into the loving embrace of venture capitalists.
I think so, too. Even people who understand what federation is and why it's good are still affected by network effect; "it's federated" might weight a lot for them, but it is not a perfect shield.
Pets and language learning are some amazing combo. They don't judge your pronunciation, they're happy to stare at you while you speak with them no matter language, and you can still train language usage.
Probably because yelling at pets is my favorite use of it, it makes the neighbors nervous
My neighbours, in the meantime, gave up pronouncing her name. She's locally known as "a alemãozinha" (the little German).
Yup, pretty much. Eventually she gets used to the smell of the new shoes being of the old human, and stops caring about it. (In the meantime I just let her smell my hand, so she knows that I'm still myself, not some cat-eating alien abomination that took over the human and a threat to her well-being.)
The Tumbleweed users are likely doing this separation just to use different partition formats for /home and /. It's one of the reasons why you'd want a separated /home; the others being already mentioned by other users (easier distro-hopping, easy backups), as well as the con (sometimes you'll have free space, but not in the partition where you need it).
Yeah, bullshit machine would be awful for that. The way that it works it's simply too prone to invent parts that don't exist, or claim that two pieces are compatible when they aren't [or vice versa].
I like this piece. Well-thought, and well laid out.
I do believe that mods getting weathered, as OP outlined, is part of the issue. I'm not sure on good ways to solve this, but introducing a few barriers of entry here and there might alleviate it. We just need to be sure that those barriers actually sort good newbies in and bad newbies out, instead of simply locking everyone out. Easier said than done.
Another factor is that moderator work grows faster than community size; you get more threads, each with more activity, users spend more time in your community, they're from more diverse backgrounds so more likely to disagree, forest fires spread faster so goes on. This is relevant here because communities nowadays tend to be considerably bigger than in the past; and, well, when you got more stuff to do, you tend to do things in a sloppier way.
You can recruit more mods, of course; but mod team size is also a problem, as it's harder to get everyone in the same page and enforce rules consistently. If one mod is rather lax and another is strict, you get some people getting away doing worse than someone else who got banned, and that makes the whole mod team look powertripping and picking favourites, when it isn't. (I'm not sure on how to solve this problem besides encouraging people to migrate to smaller communities, once they feel like the ones that they are in are too big.)
All I know is I don’t know how to pick parts and what is compatable with ehat
In addition to the site linked by the other user, you can also websearch "is [part1] compatible with [part2]?" and check the results, they're often useful.
The site that you've linked blocked me for some reason, and cost/benefit in Malta is bound to be different from the one here in LatAm, but I've recently built a midrange-ish computer, so might as well list what I bought for reference.
CPU - Ryzen 7 5700X3D. Good cost/benefit ratio, and rather good performance. I had to buy a third party cooler as the CPU doesn't come with one, so keep that in mind. I considered the Ryzen 5 5600 for budget reasons, too; it might be an option if you want to make the build cheaper.
Mobo - Gigabyte B550M Aorus Elite. If coupled with the above you need to Q-Flash update the BIOS, but that was relatively painless. So far it's working great, can't complain about it.
RAM - I went for 216GB instead, mostly to future-proof my build. The brand is Apacer Nox, I didn't find people complaining about it and it had a reasonable price.
SSD - Adata 480GB.
PSU - Gamdias Cyclops M1-750B, 750W. Frankly my method to look for a PSU was to look for 700~800W ones in a local forum, with the word "porcaria" (rubbish, shit) alongside it so I could see complains, then I found people actually praising this one.
If I convert my overall costs from reals to euros it was around €500, but keep in mind that I didn't buy a new HDD or a new GPU. GPUs in special are relatively expensive here, I'm hoping that the prices go down next year.