I think Lemmy is an existing alternative: https://join-lemmy.org
Based on ActivityPub.
16,547 karma · joined May 7, 2022
Based on ActivityPub.
This is like Twitter all over again: they attract technical users with openness, supporting RSS and a 3rd party API. Then after they get enough users addicted and locked in, they close the service, killing the open web.
The future of Reddit is clearly continuing enshittification, just like Twitter/X. AI scraping was merely a current convenient excuse. They hate RSS feeds because the user controls what they see, not the force-fed algorithm.
Ironically, Reddit had already been rate-limiting their RSS feeds: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2026/6/3.html
I haven't failed to notice. The problem is that people are going off on tangents and talking about other countries in replies to me when I was always intending to talk about the submitted HN article and the US. They mention other countries in replies to me as if it contradicts points that I was making, but it doesn't, because I was never talking about a non-US context.
There was not a preeexisting discussion of other countries. You and others started a discussion of other countries in replies to my preexisting comments about the US, and I was never intending to talk about that, nor do I have much insight into non-US socializing, which is why I've been trying to clarify that my comments are about the US only.
> Someone suggested elsewhere in the thread that you might be autistic.
I'm not and don't appreciate the remote diagnosis from someone who has never met me and knows almost nothing about me.
Stop making personal comments about me. If you want to argue about socializing in the US or in other countries, fine, although I'm already tired of the argument. In any case, though, psychoanalyzing other commenters is unwelcome in HN comments and indeed discouraged by the guidelines. It's out of place and offensive.
You think I'm obtuse, but it's truly incredible that you can convince yourself you're actually helping me by saddling me with a nonexistent disability, based only on a social media argument with a stranger.
This reponse is hypocritical and contradicts your previous comments, talking about the "we were in the neighbourhood" situation, which you repeatedly emphasized was a TV trope.
You call my comment "meaningless" but I would call yours meaingless because you seemingly make it impossible by defintition to have an unplanned meeting if there's a phone involved. If I'm in my car parked in front of your house and call to ask "are you home?" does that magically become a planned rather than unplanned visit?
An example from another thread: "if you’re equidistant between your house and your friends house". A phone call or text while you're out and about does not transform a visit from unplanned into planned. All it does is give a little advanced warning—a few minutes at most—of the unplanned visit. There's obviously a little more courtesy in calling on a mobile phone and saying "I'm in the neighborhood" as opposed to showing up at your door and saying "I was in the neighborhood", but the mobile phone doesn't add planning to the equation.
I agree that mobile phones have a role in the reduction of socializing.
However, I don't agree with the reason you've given, and I have at least two objections:
1. Mobile phones don't actually shut down unplanned socializing. On the contrary, they make it easier to have unplanned socializing, because they allow you to contact another person no matter when or where either of you happen to be.
2. There's no empirical evidence that a significant number of unexpected visits in the past were unwanted. Surely some were, but not nearly enough IMO to explain the dramatic reduction of in-person socializing.
My theory, in contrast, is that the ubiqiutious internet access of smartphones has addicted people to the practically limitless forms of entertainment and attention-grabbing online, and this internet browsing has usurped in-person socializing as a pastime. This change has nothing to do with how easy or hard it is to arrange visits. People have stopped dropping by because they don't want to drop by, not because they can't conveniently drop by.
For the same reason, people have also cut down on non-social activities like reading books. They aren't replacing socializing with book reading.
> You dismissed fiction earlier, for no good reason: A widespread trope doesn't arise in a vacuum.
I dismissed fiction because it deliberately exaggerates for effect, e.g., comedic effect. There may be a grain of truth to it, but fiction by definition is not an accurate reflection of reality.
> I struggle to see why you find it hard to understand,
I'm not struggling to understand. I simply disagree with your analysis.
> so I'm leaning towards thinking you're being intentionally obtuse about it at this point.
You can lean whatever way you want, but you're wrong, and you're also wrong about me "forgetting" the rest of the world when the submitted article is explicitly about the United States: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49894515
> It's not clear to me whether you are intentionally obtuse or if you're genuinely struggling to pick up the context here
The submitted HN article is about the US:
"We’re witnessing the death of hosting in America."
The charts in the submitted article are also about Americans exclusively.
So yes, we are in fact talking only about the US, and I am not obtuse or missing the context. I've been aware of the context the entire time.
What did you think we were talking about?
I'm not "writing off the vast majority of the world" or "forgetting" anything. The submitted article just happens to be about the US, not the rest of the world, and the patterns of socializing in other countries may be very different.
And indeed, the subtitle of the HN submitted article is "We’re witnessing the death of hosting in America."
Yes, I'm referring to the US.
> Today it is more widespread, but it used to be highly unusual.
I can't even speak about today, because I haven't had a landline in years. But at least in the US, unlimited local calls were definitely not unusual in the pre-smartphone era.
Interesting. This may be due to the size of Chicago.
I didn't see such varied options, not even in Minneapolis.
> Before they would happen because we had no ways to stop them
Yes, in a sense, I'm missing that point, because I began with the assumption that more socializing was good, and the dramatic reduction of socializing is to be mourned. If your point is "good riddance to dinner parties", I personally wouldn't agree with that.
Of course individual people differ in their preferences for socialization. However, I don't think it's justified to project personal anti-social feelings onto the majority. You might be annoyed by unexpected visitors, but to others it may be a delightful surprise. When you refer to "A lot of those visits", that's your own personal view and doesn't necessarily represent the views of others. Obviously your visitors didn't feel the same way, otherwise they would have stayed home.
How so? At worst, I said "Um".
Regardless of what you believe I've done, do you not acknowledge that you ought to follow the guidelines, and that personal insults are unacceptable, blatantly cross the line? The guidelines don't say that you get to violate them if someone else does. It may be hypocritical of me—though I disagree with that here—but in any case it's not nonsensical.
Where and when did you pay per-minute for local calls? Everywhere I lived and traveled within the US back in the day, so to speak, local calls were always unlimited, even in rural areas.
> I can’t imagine you get invited to many dinner parties.
Please read and respect the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You seem to be completely changing the situation. In this comment, you're talking about wanting to visit someone at home, whereas in your original comment, you're talking about not wanting to visit someone at home: "there’s fewer reasons to even go to someone’s house any more, you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today."
In other words, the mobile phone is a replacement for a home visit rather than a means for a home visit. (On the other hand, a laptop or desktop works just as well or better for checking social media. Indeed I'm currently typing on a laptop.)
It's true that mobile phones can make it easier than landlines to find out if someone is home, but if that's how people were using mobile phones, then you would expect more home visits, or at least more successful home visits.
> Also if you weren’t the person who paid the phone bill, it was often presented to you as a more parsimonious solution to use your feet rather than the telephone.
I don't understand this point. Long-distance calls were frequently billed per call, but of course walking is not a replacement for those. Local calls were typically unlimited for a fixed monthly rate.
The question is, what exactly is the relevance of mobile vs. non-mobile phones?
I think it really depends on the walking distance. If someone is your neighbor, there's not a lot of effort saved from calling or texting first.
Going back to the OP, these are two very different things: "you can just text them… or not even bother and check their socials to see what impression of a life they’re presenting today."
As far as one-to-one communication is concerned, a landland call is just as good as a mobile call or a text. But social media addiction is an entirely different matter. That's not even about announced vs. unannounced visits but rather about living in the real world vs. living in a virtual world.
> was a frequent plot point in various media.
I'm not sure that citing fiction is useful.
Where I lived, suburban United States, landlines were ubiquitous, and we used them all the time.
Um, we had phones before mobile phones.
This is an exaggeration.
Nonetheless, it's true, is it not, that government budgets are not unlimited, and economic tradeoffs have to be made? Of course the government can engage in deficit spending, but that raises additional problems, creates another tradeoff.
There are literal beggars in the United States. What are we doing about that problem, and couldn't we do more, spend more? What exactly are you willing to sacrifice, which worthy causes, in order to achieve your very specific exceptional thing?
It's interesting that Kennedy did not choose to cure cancer, for example. That's a hard thing, isn't it? Though I've heard that LLMs may do it any day now.
We went to the Moon as a bit of Cold War posturing, to plant the American flag and demonstrate superiority over Soviets. After that was accomplished, we lost interest.
You know what's really hard? Solving longstanding social issues. How about we try that instead.
I don't know. Too much, probably. Certainly there's too much land devoted to golf courses. However, "humans should not spend money on leisure activities" would not be a serious proposal. Should we never enjoy life? I suspect that even people who are hungry and homeless also aspire to enjoy leisure activities in addition to having food and shelter.
If we could go to Mars only by abolishing fun then to hell with Mars.
> I'm probably as skeptical as most about a Martian colony - to my mind it's 100's of years but will almost certainly happen in that time frame.
No, you are definitely not as skeptical as most.
No, because you said, "nobody bats an eye about any of that", which is not even remotely true of military spending.
It's worth noting that the Apollo space program was controversial in its day, simultaneous with prominent civil rights movements, because it was felt that the government was ignoring the economic problems of minorities, for instance, in order to put white guys on the Moon and play golf.
This statement is too hand-wavy, and I doubt that "nobody" bats an eye. Do you have specific examples?
Also, there's no reason why overspending in some areas should be redirected to the space program rather than to vital, underfunded problems on Earth. Again, it's always a tradeoff.
We have limited resources, and every investment is a tradeoff. We can play with rockets, but how does SpaceX solve the problem of humans living with much less gravity than Earth, for example? It seems to me that this is a vastly greater problem than traveling to another celestial body.
Has anyone ever conceived a child off the Earth, much less given birth or raised one? Don’t talk to me about space colonies until we’ve done that.
I think you've vastly underestimated the difficulty and the timeline, ironically. It's unrealistic to use the words "decades" or "a century". On the contrary, that's the delusion.
Consider: more than 50 years after putting a few people on the Moon very briefly, we're no closer to a colony on the Moon. And rocket technology won't help at all. Among the problems: the Moon has very little gravity, and we can't handwave like Q, "just change the gravitational constant of the universe."
I think it’s important to hold Mars enthusiasts to specific timelines. What will humanity do in a hundred thousand years, or a million years, if it survives that long? Who knows. Humanity hasn’t even had agriculture for that long. The relevant question is, what will humanity do with regards to Mars within the coming decades? Let's be honest: nothing much. Elon Musk had made predictions about the future that have already passed and proven false. How many times will you allow him to kick the can down the road before you stop believing lies? Let’s also stop pretending that launching some rockets now will somehow prepare for the hundred-thousand-year future. The best way to get to that future is to preserve the only currently habitable ecosystem in the solar system, by immediately stopping pollution and global warming on Earth. Sadly, Musk is financially backing politicians who are doing the opposite.
That's certainly a simple universal aphorism.
By itself, though, it's completely useless.
This is not intended as an insult to Marshall McLuhan. It would be an insult to reduce his work to a pithy quote. As I said, there's no substitute for doing the work. One has to study his work, not just grab excerpts.
I don't think so. Is the OP not asking for some kind of simple universal aphorism? On the contrary, I think that the OP is making a straw man out of the humanities.
The usefulness to tech of those trained in the humanities is not to apply a few "brilliant" insights but rather to apply their "ordinary" but trained insights every day to ordinary tasks. In a meeting, you might say, "That's a good idea, Chris", but it would be so specific to the task that you couldn't state it as a "brilliant humanities insight". What you want is someone who "thinks different", as the saying goes.
What they're missing is ethics, not education.