A university is a typically a collection of colleges (or schools).

For example: Harvard University is made up of Harvard College, Harvard Business School, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Law School, Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, etc.

For all intents and purposes - we use the word “college” and “university” interchangeably because they’re the same level of education. Either can do associates through doctoral.

Community colleges, however, only focus on 2 year degrees and certain certifications.

I had a lot of good years on Fark.

You want to kill germs? Use mouthwash. There’s pretty much nothing beneficial about smoking cigarettes.

Even when you take the health considerations out of account, you will reek. I assure you, nobody wants to spend time around a partner that emits a nauseating scent. It’s a bad habit in every sense of the term.

Yes - nicotine can be a quick stress reliever. That’s about al it’s good for.

I understand that you need something to help you get through the days, but there are tons of other things that you could do.

Heck, even switching to vaping will improve your health outcomes considerably. And you won’t smell.

I don’t know why you’re fighting your girlfriend on this, it seems like she’s genuinely concerned and you’re being so stubborn as to look online to justify your addiction. Yes, you are addicted. You smoke more than a pack a week and refuse to quit or offer a compromising alternative. If I was her, I’d leave you.

…Spiiiriiiit……

I heard ‘Congregation’ in the show Devs (loved it), and was surprised I never listened to them before. Went back and listened to the whole catalog… several times over. It’s the best airplane music.

I listen to a bit of everything. Bands in my recent rotation include Low, 3rd Secret, Motörhead, Rick James, L7 and Joji, Aimee Mann, Mdou Moctar, Aphex Twin, Beastie Boys. Donny Benet

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s PetroDragon Apocalypse is my favorite album all year.

My favorite all time genre is industrial. So stuff like The Young Gods, Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, KMFDM, Ministry, Filter, Mulitple Man, Meat Beat Manifesto, Pig, Emptyset, Youth Code, Atari Teenage Riot / Alec Empire, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, Download…

The PetroDragronic Apocalypse is one of the best records I’ve heard in some time, from any band, in any genre.

I can’t stop listening to it. To add, I’m not really a fan of any of their other records. They’re clearly good, just doesn’t resonate with me as much as this one does.

Indeed. Prior to 2010 - it was a roll of the dice. If insurance wasn’t provided through your work, you had to be lucky enough to live in a State with decent laws preventing some of these predatory insurance practices. Back then, the uninsured rate was close to 19%. Almost 1 in 5 Americans.

Today, that rate is 8.4%. Which hails the victory of the ACA because “91.6% of Americans have insurance” sounds nice. And compared to where we were 13 years ago, it is nice.

In reality, we have 28 million uninsured people, many of whom are children. There’s a long way to go.

While I’m personally satisfied with my level of coverage and standard of care, I don’t understand how we can comfortably accept a society that bankrupts our most vulnerable residents for being sick. I’m baffled how this wasn’t already solved or mostly resolved in my lifetime. Or at least seeing more states take on the Hawaii or Massachusetts health care models.

An individual can sign up for a plan through their State’s health insurance exchange or the federal government’s HealthCare.gov website.

It is usually more expensive than getting it through an employer - but works to serve small business owners, freelancers, etc.

A few States (like Massachusetts) have semi-universal systems that cover all individuals that earn under 150% of poverty, independent students, newly unemployed, etc.

A lot of Americans are also covered under Medicare, Medicaid , Social Security and other programs.

Retirees aged 65 and older are eligible for Medicare - a semi-universal federal system that covers pretty much everything and accepted most places.

It’s been rough since 6/30. I can barely browse and leave comments in my .world account. I’m sticking to .ml for now.

Makes more sense for Meta to create their own “Metaverse” than join an open-source network.

Instagram and Facebook already communicate, it won’t be too difficult to include WhatsApp into that mix.

If they buy something like Mastodon, it would make better business sense to cut it off from the Federation and sync it with Meta’s products instead.

There are some early open betas going on for iOS apps through Test Flight.

mlem already reached their iOS testing limit of 10K users, but /c/memmy is trekking along with daily updates and not quite there yet. I’m using it now, in fact.

Both apps are planning to be publicly available in the App Store for 6/30 - and I’m sure there’s a few other developers work on stuff now as well. Really exciting times!

I’ve got two for Lemmy.

mlem is currently being developed for iOS with around ~20 contributors. It’s in early open beta, and I’m psyched because there’s supposed to be a massive update between now and tomorrow.

memmy for iOS looks promising. Really intuitive ‘swipe to upvote/downvote/reply’ feature and browses similarly to Apollo. It’s very barebones right now, the project is just a few days old and there’s one developer (as far as I know).

YouTube is a bit of a different animal.

YouTube allows creators to monetize content - so there’s a sense of shared success. Channels from Tom Scott or Captain Disillusion are amazing, because their production in part relies on that revenue model.

YouTube also understands that without paying for popular content, you won’t get the consistent cavalcade of medium content from people that want to earn a living or notoriety through YouTube. And that include anything from videos of cats falling over, blogs about life in remote places, DIY home improvement or niche guitar technique lessons.

Meanwhile on Reddit, if a user gets thousands of upvotes and a million page views for a short story they wrote exclusively for the platform, Reddit won’t pay them a cent. The very thought is laughable.

The other thing to consider is that the technology just doesn’t exist for there to be a viable ‘federated’ YouTube. YouTube has 800 million videos - many in HD and many are hours long. That’s a big ask in terms of storage and maintenance - even several thousand videos.

Video compression has a long way to go before that changes. For now, it makes sense for leave that storage to the companies with resources.

Text, however… well, all of Wikipedia can fit on around 20 gigs - 60 million odd articles. And for the record, that can pretty much fit on an iPod from 2002.

I do wish that YouTube wasn’t a monopoly. Twitch is the only thing that’s close, and it has it’s own special lane for live streaming. Back in the old days, there was some competition - including Google Video. But that went away when Google bought YouTube. I guess there’s Vimeo, but they’ve got a very different approach.

I mean, the Justice Department is suing Google for monopolizing ad tech - and I think we could see antitrust laws used in the next few years to breakup YouTube. Maybe the successor companies would federate - like when Bell was broken up into what became Verizon and ATT - who now directly compete for customers.

It would’ve made the users happy, but ultimately Apollo is not profitable for Reddit. It would need to be retooled and redesigned to extract data and push advertisers. as a free version…

Of course, Reddit could sell it as a “$2/mo Premium Reddit Experience” app that keeps what it is. And I’m sure there’s a ton of folks that’ll pay the benefit of that, particularly mods and power users.

Apollo’s paid subscriber base is 50K. Assuming they maintain that, it’s $1.2M/year revenue. The question is… is that worth it to a billion dollar company? To maintain and support all that?

My gut would say ‘yes’. Although goodwill is unquantifiable, keeping the community of volunteers placated is an investment in Reddit’s longterm health. Same reason the Mafia bought turkeys for uninvolved neighborhood families on Thanksgiving - so they’d look the other way when shady happenings go down.

But Reddit doesn’t want to spend money on turkeys. So we’ll see how well that works out for them. I’m not optimistic.

My city’s subreddit is/was a prime source of local politics, infrastructure projects, restaurant openings and closures, activity recommendations, and even making friends. I also loved popping in to give tourism advice and steer people to the best of what the region has to offer. I got a lot of value out of it.

While there is a city community here, there is no engagement or any posts really. So this is why l’ll probably be using both Reddy and Lemmy for a while.

Lemmy also isn’t super diverse… yet. I think this is going to be an advantage for Reddit for a long time.

That is, Lemmy is an early emerging technology - and users are disproportionately young middle class white men interested in tinkering with unfinished tech. To be clear, that’s not the criticism. That’s me (except maybe not young anymore)!

It does, however, mean communities will steer towards Technology and Gaming… and less Relationship_Advice or AITA or something. Less human interest stuff.

The mobile apps will be key to building this place into a better Reddit. And that’s if the developers can make a streamlined, simple experience that doesn’t overwhelm new users with jargon like “instances” or “servers”. Just sign in, quickly find a community and join a conversation.

The day I get to read something like, “Hi Lemmy, I’m a 75 year old Venetian gondolier. Ask me anything!” would be the mile marker for a dead Reddit.

If Subreddit -> Sub…
Then Community -> Commune ?

Seems apt given the developer’s political leanings. But it wouldn’t be as inviting to neutral users, so ‘sub’ seems to be fine to me.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be patreon pages for servers & instances you support, which is enough to keep the lights on. Especially if it unlocks a little cosmetic token or icon.

Wikipedia is the 7th most visited website in the world, more popular than Amazon, TikTok, even PornHub. It’s not funded by advertisers or other bullshit - rather through reader donations.

With that said, Wikipedia is still centralized content whereas Lemmy isn’t. Meaning there’s fewer expenses and pressure on any one instance or server to succeed. And if one instance or server doesn’t succeed, your access to the Federation is far from over.

If you use lemmy.ml (the developer’s instance), I would recommend reading the front page sidebar. Under RULE #1 - “No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia”.

Here is a screenshot for reference, feel free to share with folks.

If the enemies of Nazis are religious, ethnic and sexual minorities - then lemmy.ml 's front page immediately puts to rest any notion they are associated with far-right ideologies.

That said, my best understanding is that one or more of the developers identify as communists/anticapitalist and are involved in lemmygrad.ml and /c/socialism.

And with that in mind, a platform like Lemmy is communist by nature: nobody owns it.
So it doesn’t matter who the developers are, really. What matter is who runs the server and instance you’re using. You, as a user, have a choice in how you wish to connect to the Federation.