plus you can always just look through the "communities" listing -- in the web interface it's at the top of the page, just select "communities" and "all".
"OK, here's my elevator pitch. You know Operation Paperclip, after World War 2 where us and the Russians grabbed all the German rocket scientists we could? Well this is Operation Catgirl, and it's the future, and the US and EU have collapsed, and Russia and China are going through this post-apocalyptic wasteland trying to grab all the furries they can. It's like Mad Max meets Oppenheimer meets fandom. Whatdayasay?"
True story I swear: My BFF had this skill where if they sang Elvis tunes, after a while their cats would start humping each other. We hypothesized that this was because my friend had a warbling kind of singing that sounded like cats mating. Anyway, we go to the zoo and are at the lion's den. It's a couple terraces separated by a moat and a fence. And brilliant me, I say: hey, what if you start singing your Elvis tunes? My friend's like yeah and starts singing.
Fam that really gets the lion's attention. I mean, the lion is staring right at my BFF while they're singing. The lion is tense, like right before cats leap into action. And suddenly that moat doesn't look all that wide. The kicker is my BFF had a terminal illness and no doubt would have loved to die being being boned by a lust-crazed lion. Anyway I finally convinced my BFF that if the lion got free they'd probably have to shoot it, so they stopped singing and we fled. I sometimes wonder if that lion ever thought of my BFF again.
you can make a dummy Facebook account and only login using their website from behind a VPN.
After a couple days Facebook will say you are suspicious and demand that you upload a government ID (and/or take a "video selife" or something similar.)
Most countries have a strategy tuned to their particular needs, and experience learned from last time. As I recall it often involved flattering Trump and building relationships with his subordinates.
I was in Pittsburgh for a while. Excellent town, great people. When I was there they were power-washing some of the buildings and it was amazing how different the buildings looked afterwards.
Hydrogen fluoride and sulfur dioxide emissions from U.S. Steel's Donora Zinc Works and its American Steel & Wire plant were frequent occurrences in Donora. What made the 1948 event more severe was a temperature inversion, a situation in which warmer air aloft traps pollution in a layer of colder air near the surface. The pollutants in the air mixed with fog to form a thick, yellowish, acrid smog that hung over Donora for five days. The sulfuric acid, nitrogen dioxide, fluorine, and other poisonous gases that usually dispersed into the atmosphere were caught in the inversion and accumulated until rain ended the weather pattern.[3]
The fog started building up in Donora on Wednesday, October 27, 1948. By the following day it was causing coughing and other signs of respiratory distress for many residents of the community in the Monongahela River valley. Many of the illnesses and deaths were initially attributed to asthma. The smog continued until it rained on Sunday, October 31, by which time 20 residents of Donora had died and approximately one third to one half of the town's population of 14,000 residents had been sickened.
Anecdote: I was living in coastal LA for a while, and yes the breeze from the ocean would usually push the air pollution away from us inland. But every once in a while there were those Santa Ana winds that would blow the air pollution from all of inland LA right through us and the outdoors would smell kinda bad. And then there were days without wind and the air was just kind of meh.
Lemmy is different from Reddit in one important way.
Reddit is a product. You install the app, you look at the ads, the mods and admins curate an endless feed of cartoons and safe ragebait and awwwunexpectedsmiles.
Lemmy is an environment. If you're passive, then any random thing may happen to you. So you have to be proactive in this environment.
You could subscribe to communities that are non-politics/news, non-meme, non-tech, and browse these "subscribed" communities.
You could use blocklists, as described elsewhere in this post.
You could find an instance that does some of this work for you, by defederating and blocking certain types of opinions and behaviors. This seems to be what you want, and many people have provided suggestions.
These are all ok. But the one defining characteristic of Lemmy is that it is not just another product.
During the API exodus a lot of us deleted our comments bc we didn't like the fact that Reddit was monetizing the knowledge we had created. Some people argued that it was better that the knowledge remain out there. Either way is cool I guess.
Hmmm... I'm thinking Jack Black as a Russian officer and Simu Liu as Chinese officer... I dunno about the furries and catgirls...