Ask Lemmy

I’ve occasionally noticed ordinary comments with zero upvotes to them. Yet, our own comments are upvoted automatically whenever we make them. So for comments to have zero upvotes, either something I don’t know about is happening, or there are people who downvote their own contributions.

I can’t help but wonder, why? It seems like extra effort without a clear reason.

I came across this cryptic phrase in a description of an old D&D adventure Tale of the Comet . In context, it seems to describe the designer solving a problem of game balance by having the powerful technology items have limited charges / uses before expiring. But I cannot parse prophet-squeeze-monster and I certianly don't recognise it as a classic trope. Any ideas?

Small rant: Perhaps I'm getting old and cynical, but the entire process through their sites feels a lil sketchy lol

Sure, it requires the basics, along with your SSN and cellphone to receive a text confirmation. Can't just be me, right?

Anyways, thanks for answering my crazy questions due to my lack of faith in the safety of the internet in the days of SEO's. 🤣

Title essentially. Youtube's algorithm is hot garbage, so I can't search for anything anymore without a ton of AI slop and rage bait. So, who do you go to for actual good long form videos? Exposes, scandals, behind the scenes, documentaries, film, travel, transit, who do you recommend I follow?

Hello! I use 2 Lemmy accounts. The first one for everyday use, the second one for specific, more anonymous use. They both are on the same instance and follow the same communities. But when I look at the same community, with both accounts, I see not especially different posts, but on one account the oldest Post is 7 months old, and with the second account I see every recent post.

It's like im shadow banned or something. Yes im 100% sure its the same community. Even if i go on the profile of my main account I can only see 2 out of 25 posts.

EDIT: The answer to my problem was my language settings! Lemmy blocked a lot of posts because of this. Quite interesting for me because I didn't know that. If you have set your language to Belgian for example, you will only see content from people who have set their language to Belgian. Even if their posts are written in English. But you can set multiple languages by holding down the CTRL key and clicking on your preferred languages. This is not solved well in my opinion.

Ohhh boy.... how many posts I probably missed because of this....

Wondering if anyone out there might have experience in knowing what's wrong and what I need to do to stop it. Owned it for 2 years, but I didn't do the installation myself.

Also if it needs repair or something, what might it cost me and how difficult would it be to do myself? Thanks in advance, I know someone here always has experience I lack lol

Love her or hate her (and my opinions are mixed), I must confess, JK Rowling was a huge influence on why I didn't become a regular author. No shade on people who get what they paid for, but the young reader crowd is just so gimmicky, and not in a good way, and you see that with a lot of works like Percy Jackson and Twilight (but also predominantly with Rowling's work). How do you compete in such a no-rules game?

So then let's talk about one of the cores of the issue. People often have an epiphany when divulging into Harry Potter, and they think "huh, what's the deal with this if that thing is how it is". While noting that conflicts in literary analysis don't always reflect something that doesn't add up and that it could be a hiccup in details/semantics, the questions themselves don't go away. And there's nothing that matches the amount of those having to do with Harry Potter. What example of which strikes you as the most overlooked?

If Rowling herself ever notices that I'm bringing this up, let it be known I do think of her work as a reskinned Brothers Grimm in the universe of The Worst Witch and that I'm collaborating with another author (Samantha Rinne) whose work I would argue deserves Rowling's prestige if Rowling's work deserves it. Thanks (and here is where I run for the hills).

For reference, I’m not referring to goth rock synthwave but the modern homonymous style like the playlist linked with the post.

(originally posted on the AskLemmy community from Lemmy.ml)

I have recently started to care more about my privacy and anonymity, so I am just scratching the surface and still don't know much about it. I know that you should not log into any accounts with sensitive information while using the Tor browser to prevent your identity from being leaked. What about websites (like Lemmy, Masterdon, etc.) that can't leak personal data because I never provide any directly? I use Mullvad + alias email addresses to log in.

What if I logged into my Lemmy account outside of Tor without a VPN one single time? So Lemmy should have received my real IP and location at some point. Could someone find personal data because of this single, unprotected login while I'm browsing Lemmy through Tor?

Thanks for any answers and explanations!

I'm looking for opinions from outside the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, NZ

The current hostile corporate takeover in the USA and the clear loss of political power of the common people, I started wondering what happened if people used consumption as their leverage. Since the system is designed for continuous growth, what would happen if a mass movement of people stopping buying new non-essential consumer goods?

It would send a much stronger message than angry public protests. Thoughts?

Edit 1: Received some fantastic responses one of these highlighted February 28th as the "National No Spend Day" that we can consider the rehearsal.

*Do not make any purchases Do not shop online, or in-store, No Amazon, No Walmart, No Best Buy, Nowhere!

Do not spend money on: Fast Food,Gas,Major Retailers Do not use Credit or Debit Cards for non essential spending

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Only buy essentials of absolutely necessary (Food, Medicine, Emergency Supplies) If you must spend, ONLY support small, local businesses.*

This movement is the definition of equitable, not spending means everybody can contribute within their means, and if you can't afford to buy shit anyway, you're already doing your part!

https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2025/02/12/national-no-spend-day-economic-blackout-amazon-walmart/78410711007/

I fled Reddit due to the authoritarian mod craziness, but Lemmy.world seems infested with too much Communist craziness. I'm leftist, but communism is idiocy. Is there an instance that leans more democratic socialist but refrains from going off the deep end?

I was on another thread and got deep into learning about the history of certain words and thought I'd post here. What word history origins / facts do you know?

I'll start with two that I recently came across:

• "‘Wer’ (meaning ‘man’) came from Old High German with the Anglo Saxons 1,500 years ago, and was part of Old English. It then became ‘were’ in Middle English and remains as part of werewolf (‘man wolf’) in modern English." (Source: BillTongg@lemmy.world)

• "Sculptors in antique Rome could fix mistakes they made by mixing marble dust with wax. If a sculptor was especially gifted and made no mistakes that needed fixing, they would market their art as “sin cera”, which means “without wax”, which is where the word “sincere” comes from." (Source: Pooptimist@lemmy.world)

I don't want to single anyone out, but whenever I browse Lemmy for new communities I feel like it's not uncommon to find ones that only have 0-2 posts in them from months (or even as much as 2 years) ago.

I get why it happens: every time Reddit or some other platform does some crazy anti-user shit there's a big flood of interest in Lemmy and the Fediverse again, and with it a rush of people making communities (often trying to quickly clone popular subreddits).

But it seems that after some time they either get bored or disappointed that they weren't able to grow things as fast as they wanted, and then they just take off, leaving nothing but a ghost community behind--nobody posting anything and effectively unmoderated from what I can tell. That's my experience at least.

Of course, people can always create entirely new servers with an entirely new set of communities. But it feels like a shame that there are so many effectively dead communities on otherwise popular servers due to the fact that the people who created them never put any work in and just up 'n' left.

• Have you run into many "ghost communities" during your time on Lemmy?
• Do you think it's a problem now?
• Will it be a problem in the future?
• If so, what can/should we do about it?

Why do they think it will suddenly work this time? I feel like exhibiting a little more creativity might make it more effective, but I'd like to hear what others have to say.

My understanding of federation is that it's like email. If one server is misbehaving, then they get defederated.

So how come email spam still exists - why don't spammer domains get defederated? It seems like we've got the worst of both worlds, where it's hard to get your emails relayed when you run a small email server, and easy to get them relayed if you're a spammer.

Is there anything about Lemmy's architecture that will prevent this problem?