Would I have accepted his weight in dilithium? Yes. Could I have filled the empty void in my heart? Never.

I don't speak a lick of Japanese but I found this online:

です is used to mark words as polite if they cannot conjugate to show politeness themselves... です is one of the most fundamental words in the Japanese language. It’s super useful — it can be attached to just one other word to form some basic sentences. It’s also quite safe to use since it’s part of the polite form, so you’re unlikely to offend someone with this word... です can be tacked onto the end of a noun, な-adjective, or い-adjective to form a polite, positive, present tense sentence (say that ten times fast 😉). In other words, it allows us to talk about something that is true, and relevant to the present moment and/or the future—all in a polite way of course.

source: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese-grammar/desu/

I wonder what the interest rates are like. It'd be wild to end up in debtors prison (forecasting here) over a baconator.

I love this

sure it would

I hate how much effort is put into property damage but when my house was broken into or when my friends truck was stolen, the police did nothing.

It's also disturbing how hard it is to be anonymous. Crime or not, it gives me the creeps that anyone could probably track me down if they wanted.

I think the issue is that these platforms are motivated by advertisers. I can build a Reddit clone in a weekend and have it be ad-free. It's not expensive to host text + urls - which was how old.reddit.com used to operate. It's basically a few dollars a month or I could host it out of my house for the cost of electricity (and security). And, without advertisers, I don't really care what I host so long as it doesn't directly contributing to harming others.

The main issues are:

• No one wants to join a platform devoid of content
• Once you reach a large enough platform that people want to join, it might require revenue streams to afford the scale
• It's hard for people to even find platforms (Google will direct you to the top 5: Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok)

The modern infrastructure hasn't changed. It's still HTTP and servers. The problem is internet culture. We used to use the internet as an extension of our community. We could share links, forums, etc. in person (bizarre, I know). But now the internet is our entire community. And there is little drive to participate in niche communities. People like to be heard and to engage quickly on the internet which requires a large-ish platform (Lemmy is a good example of this).

The front fell off