It’s more like “Slapping on the wrist isn’t helping.” The Alex Jones bankruptcy is the first time I’ve seen anyone fined significantly to the point of it mattering. Fines are meant to be significant enough that the company would do its best to avoid them. If the fine is palpable, then it’s just the cost of doing business.

Puerto Rico is an island east of the Dominican Republic, in the Caribbean. It is considered a U.S. territory.

In the U.S., territories are not equal to nor do they have the same privileges as U.S. states. Notably, they do not have anybody in Congress or the House of Representatives actually representing them.

Due to the electoral college, that also means Puerto Rico cannot contribute to the national U.S. elections in any significant way.

Am I dumb or what’s up with the radio stuff on the left? 😅 Is rust common for some sort of radio programming?

I will finally be available to fairly and accurately measure all the men in the gym locker room without being suspicious and bringing in a ruler 😤

I think it’s mostly subjective or anecdotal, but what comes to mind:

• The community generally is more friendly. Absolutely, there are still jerks or trolls around, but the ratio of jerks or trolls feel way less than reddit.
• I feel more active here myself. This one I can’t explain. The community is smaller, so maybe I’m not subconsciously worrying about being drowned out by other comments? On Reddit, I’d average about 1 comment a month at best. On here I usually leave a few comments a week.
• This point might not mean much if you didn’t join reddit when it was younger: I joined reddit when it was still young. I think back in '08? Lemmy feels like a young reddit, back when I enjoyed it most. Again, I can’t really explain this since it’s just a feeling, but one example of what I mean by “young reddit” is community wide memes. Wayyyyyy back in the day, everyone on Reddit was ravaging about “The narwhal bacons at night” or something like that lol. There were also a bunch of dickbutt memes… if you know, you know. Well, my first week on Lemmy everyone was posting beans for a good couple of days. No reason. Just beans. A few weeks ago there were a bunch of “Taylor Swift going to Australia,” Taylor Swift taking a swim," “Taylor Swift spotted at the airport,” titled posts, but all those posts were pictures of airplanes. The rotating meme right now I think is Jeans??? Idk. This is just a symptom of a younger community, and why I like it more, but there’s more to enjoy about it than rotating memes. This place just feels more genuine as opposed to artificial if that makes any sense.
• I feel like I’m not missing out on anything on Reddit and I have a healthier relationship with social media on this site than with reddit. Every once and a while, I log back onto Reddit to see what’s going on. Most of the “Big news” that’s posted on there is also posted here, but the experience now feels more bloated compared to here so I don’t stick around as long. As for this site… Yes there is less content. Yes there is less to scroll through. At the same time though, you can scroll for a very long time if you really want to. This eventually led to me being on my phone less and being somewhat a little more productive as opposed to doom scrolling.
• Lemmy absolutely has better third party support for well, anything. Sure, it doesn’t have official apps, but go to the app store and count how many different Lemmy apps there are vs reddit. Nearly all of these apps are better than the reddit app IMO. Most of these apps are also FOSS; they’re free with no ads. Yes, there are still few paid apps as well if that tickles your fancy. I know Sync for Reddit came over to Lemmy as Sync for Lemmy as an example. This shouldn’t stop at apps though. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are browser plugins.
• You have more say in your experience here. Again, with the smaller community, your voice is louder. On top of that, is your server’s admin doing something you do not support? Your instance is doing something you don’t like? Create an account on other instances! Lemmy is federated, so most of what you see should be the same as in other instances, but you aren’t under the rule of one toxic CEO anymore. I myself have like 4 accounts on 4 different instances lol.
• Piggy-backing off of the previous point: if reddit is down, it is down. If your instance is down here? Sign into another instance!
• On the opposite end of the spectrum, does some instance have a bunch of members or just communities you don’t want to see? Lemmy might not have native tools out of the box, but some Lemmy apps will let you block entire communities.
• One fun thing I like about Lemmy is you can post pictures in comments!

If anything, the only reason why I still use reddit is for smaller, niche, communities. To that end, yeah Lemmy is smaller, thus the smaller reddit communities are even smaller here. If I find myself wanting to make a post on a given niche topic, I typically post on Reddit AND here. Sometimes, my post on Lemmy will somehow get more comments than reddit still though. Reddit posts seem to fall off after a day or so, that’s not typically the case for Lemmy if you do trend something.

At the end of the day though, this is just a social media platform, and the enjoyment you get out of it comes down to you. ☺️ One tip I do have though is to sort by “Top of 6h” or “12h”. I don’t like the “Hot” sorting on here that much.

I don’t think this is definitively “better” than reddit. The functionality of the site is more bare bones. No big hidden features or anything like that. What you see is what you get as far as interfaces go. But I am enjoying it. It reminds me of a much younger Internet and much simpler times. I am loving that Lemmy servers are run by your average joe who just wanted to start up a Lemmy community. No single CEO who only cares about how profitable a site is.

PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) are their own categories of websites and they do indeed have the ability to behave like an actual app. They are much more than just a shortcut, which apple is reducing them to.

On android, my PWA that I developed for fun can go full screen and appear as though a browser isn’t wrapping the page, I can send notifications, I can access the microphone and camera, I can do nearly everything you could expect an app to do, I can support offline mode, I can store data locally, and I can manage my PWAs permissions as well as uninstall my app at an OS level. My entire family uses my PWA, and they see it as an app.

Are there some things native apps can do that PWAs can’t? Absolutely, but that is not the point. PWAs are an open and clearly defined technology to the web. Windows supports them as well.

Apple is refusing to accept that though. They are removing notifications, badges, etc, and reducing them to what you have described, just a shortcut to a Safari window. They are citing security concerns even though other operating systems are able to implement security around them just fine.

The real issue is Apple wants more control over how you use your device and is acting against the consumer.

I also wonder how liquor sales are as well.

My wife and I are obviously only one couple, so this is confirmation bias, but alcohol in general just isn’t as appealing anymore. With all this general stress we’ve been going through (struggling with inflation, insane work hours, insane work conditions) alcohol is causing more migraines, sucky morning-after-drinking symptoms, high calories, expensive prices, there’s just no good reason to drink as much as we used to. And it’s not like we drank that much earlier in our lives as well.

Tie this all together with marijuana availability which has none of these cons except for high taxes, then alcohol doesn’t sound as appealing anymore.

I didn’t know the Pope was antisemitic?! /s

What if both wombs conceived twins 😱😱

My payment was late because my servicer changed over COVID and when the auto-pay kicked in my bank rejected the withdrawal. Said they were an unrecognized entity or something.

Had to get my servicer and bank on a 3-way call just to pay my loan. 🤦‍♂️

I agree with the other commenter here. I could see this going the other way for smaller towns or more rural areas, but where I am at right now there are 4 dispensaries and 2 pharmacies in a 5 mile radius.

It’s also Sunday; one of those pharmacies is closed and the other one will close at 12 in the afternoon. As for the dispensaries, one of them will close at 5 and the others will close at 10 ~no different than any other day of the week.

Getting rid of dispensaries in favor of pharmacies here would benefit nobody except for the drug companies.

Yay, I’m in Kansas. My state is winning the race to 100%!

/This is a joke if it wasn’t clear. Someone help make this state sane please 😵‍💫

Any witches I can follow on Mastodon who provide stock analysis???

Well it’s a good thing hospitals are safe from being a military target. Right guys?

Yeah, another way I’ve heard it phrased is comments are for explaining why you did things a certain way, not for explaining what it’s doing.

This is a South Park episode.

Watch out everyone, now South Korea is going to start taking over Minecraft!

(Reference: South Park. S17E2. Informative Murder Porn)

Yeah, I’ve seen people complain about bots on mastodon but generally I’m all for it. Especially for accounts that you don’t interact with too much but more-so just want updates from.

Cries in Kansan too

Is this an actual punishment or a slap on the wrist? I can’t seem to tell anymore because initially I think, “wow, that’s a lot of money.” But then I am reminded of how much money some of these companies are hoarding.

If we’re talking about a hypothetical succession situation, then the next in line for succession after speaker is the President Pro Tempore of the Senate. Currently that would be a Patty Murray