jadero

I’m glad I’m old enough to not have to consider living at the population density you suggest. I find the population density of Saskatchewan to be quite enough. I lived in a small city (Saskatoon) for 40 years and the last 10 were flat out miserable. The first 30 were tolerable only because we escaped to nature every weekend.

Tundras aren’t going to be all that liveable just because the temperature is a bit nicer. They’ll still get very dark in the winter. Like 24-hour darkness, in some of it. Some people thrive, some people cope, some people go batshit crazy when daylight hours drop below about 4 hours a day.

That’s actually the easy part. Most tundra is sitting on top of permafrost. I worked on low latitude tundra for one summer and if my experience there is representative, melting permafrost is going to turn a lot of tundra into swampland for a long time.

Even if I’m wrong about the tundra turning into swampland, there isn’t really all that much room. Good luck cramming a few billion people above 55 or 60 degrees latitude.

@ChatGPT@lemmings.world is tablespoons a valid metric unit of measure?

Yes, I agree. My perception of hobby communities, at least the online ones, is that there is an inordinate amount of time spent trying to figure out how to monetize what used to be seen as a primarily recreational activity.

I know that some of it is self defense, in the sense that some hobbies are expensive enough to stretch a budget to the breaking point.

Some of it is likely due to incomes not keeping up with the cost of living and, of course, some people are budding entrepreneurs.

But it seems to me that there are a lot of people who feel that it’s not reasonable to have a hobby that has no income potential.

I’ve tried to explain this to people before, without success. I’m starting to think that most people have no concept of what it means to be passionate about something, so they go through life with nothing more than pastimes to keep their minds off reality.

For me it’s building boats. I’ve only ever built 2, the last one 20 years ago. But the amount of time and money I spent on magazines and plans both before and after those actual builds dwarfs the time and money it would take to run a lemmy instance. And now I’ve got 3 years and several thousand dollars into building and equipping a shop so I can build another one.

I’ll throw out a few bucks here and there because it feels like the right thing to do, but I actually want hobbyists, people with a passion for it, running the show. After all, that is what made reddit work. All the passionate mods doing their thing as a hobby.

Perhaps, but my personal experience was that Usenet was well on its way to being a dumpster fire of trolls, creeps, and spammers before the Web 2.0 technologies were more than a glimmer in anyone’s eyes.

Everything is about community. Usenet all but disappeared because it got overrun with selfish assholes. It’s not that hard for a community to be killed by its own membership. There are many examples both online and off.

Moderation isn’t the answer, or at least not a complete answer, because Reddit brought to the fore that moderators can be selfish assholes, too. If I understand what’s behind certain recent defederation decisions, those selfish assholes are already here.

Explicit federation (and defederation) is an interesting twist on decentralized, but it is unlikely to be a panacea.

I think we’re all running the Red Queen’s Race. Some of us are forever doomed to run away from the selfish assholes and the selfish assholes are forever doomed to chase us in the hopes of finding a place to showcase themselves. They are not and never will be happy to just be selfish assholes in their own spaces because that would be neither selfish nor asshole-ish.

Yes, and thanks!

Yeah, I’m not a fan of the form of capitalism that’s about selling what they want us to buy instead of what we want to buy, but it seems to be working for pretty much every company out there.

I guess we missed our window of opportunity with Netflix. We moved to the middle of nowhere with no internet or cell service 12 years ago. We’ve had Starlink for nearly 2 years and are just starting to run out of stuff available for free on our Roku. It’s been a couple of decades since I played with, um, other options, but I somehow doubt it’s become more difficult. :)

Former water treatment plant operator. Thanks for living up to your name.

We’ve been watching an old TV series called “One Step Beyond.” I actually like the Alcoa ad that runs ahead of the program. It’s written specifically for the program and runs as an introduction. They use “One Step Beyond” as a phrase highlighting their ability to innovate and in contrast to the “One Step Beyond” our normal existence as portrayed by the upcoming episode.

I know I’ll tire of it eventually, but for now I’m enjoying it much the same way I enjoy listening to a piece of music multiple times or rereading a good book.

Put BBS discussion boards, FidoNet groups, and Usenet out front and drop Fark for my path. Along with a variety of standalone forums and random stuff that never went anywhere, of course :) (yes, I’m old!)