ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝

A geologist and archaeologist by training, a nerd by inclination - books, films, fossils, comics, rocks, games, folklore, and, generally, the rum and uncanny… Let’s have it!

Elsewhere:

  • Yrtree.me - it’s still early days for me in the Fediverse, so bear with me
  • 4 Posts
  • 319 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I think if more people took on tasks like running the communities while educating people the benefits of the fediverse, then we can see a bit more growth.

    This is the way - be the change you want to see in the world.

    Lemmy isn’t the size of Reddit, so it isn’t at a place where the vast majority of users can just passively consume content.

    If there’s a niche for a community then start it. If you want more Mods, keep an eye out for active posters and ask if they want to help. If you are unsure about starting a community or want help from the start (as it might be popular) then start a thread on !fedigrow@lemm.ee. The more active communities, the more likely it is for the next wave of users to stick around and some of them might start new communities.

    If you build it they will indeed come and stay.




  • It depends on where they were from. If the big repositories don’t have the data (and you have clearly tried them) then:

    • The data may have been destroyed or never written down. I am ¾ Irish but landing any of my ancestors in Ireland has been hard. The records burned in 1916 and, in some areas, there are gaps during the Potato Famine when no-one was around to write things down. One of my best DNA matches on my Mum’s side falls foul of the latter as we have matching surnames and know pretty much when and where our connection would be but the parish records just stopped in that period.
    • It’s not in English. They are doing their best to fill such gaps but adding translation in can be hard. There are often regional family record offices but they may be in a language you don’t speak (I’m having trouble tracing my sister-in-law’s grandmother who was born in Estonia. I am also helping a friend whose grandfather was born in Malaysia and it is tricky even working out where to look). Scandinavian genealogy tends to be excellent, but you may need access to the “farm books” where the records are kept.
    • It’s paywalled elsewhere - Scottish records need you to subscribe to a specific site.
    • The names are badly transcribed - the British record keepers clearly struggled with some Irish names especially when being told them by illiterate peasants (possibly not helped by some being in Gaelic). I have one family whose name is written over a dozen different ways and it can be hard piecing it together. The names settle down after a bit (there was a big push for literacy in the late 19th Century) but there are two branches of the family that ended up with two different spellings of their surname.

    Or any other issues. Without details it is tricky to point you in any specific direction.

    If you hit a wall, try DNA.



  • Yeah, I was pondering if it’d be possible to make it less of an issue. I presume the metal of the discs and chain is pretty thin, so you could get to work with tin snips, a file and some needle-nose pliers. Take them off, rework some and hang them back up. However, a) I’m not sure it could be done satisfactorily and b) that sounds like a lot of hassle for some, hopefully, cheap knickknack, so I’d probably just make it have an accident.







  • It depends on how optimistic, I feel:

    • Very - Digg died and Reddit rose, MySpace died and Facebook rose. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die.” Reddit and Twitter are enshittifying rapidly and we are here for when people wake up.

    • Not very - Big Social Media has reached critical mass/achieved escape velocity and they’ve hoarded all the “fuel” (people) that got them there. Other places aren’t going to take off like they did without hitting some unknowable level of active users and so growth is slow (if there is any growth) which creates a Catch 22 situation. It is easy to see this as all doom and gloom but the Fediverse is growing and may well wander across the threshold in which a positive feedback loop of growth starts happening at which point it seems like a viable alternative to the masses and they leave in droves putting the old places into a death spiral.

    • Not at all - most people just don’t give a fuck how the sausage is made as long as they get enough attention and have no incentive to leave. Elon Musk good live stream himself barbecuing puppies and enough people would be able to shrug it off because they don’t want to lose their few thousand followers and all the little dopamine rushes that Big Social has trained us to rely on.