It's not a full replacement for Discord, but it's working towards that. If you just want a basic server for yourself and friends with emotes and voice chats, Revolt works. If you want polls, events, threads, forums, etc., it can't replace your setup. I think the goal is to be a full Discord replacement in the future, but it's still a work in progress (such is often the case with FOSS software maintained by hobbyists).

I don't think people take dry heat seriously. Humid heat is obviously dangerous because you can't sweat the heat out of your body as efficiently, but dry heat at these temperatures feels like walking outside and holding a hair dryer to your skin. It's so fucking hot. You can feel the sun touching your skin like its physically reaching out. You sunburn from 5–15 minutes in the sun without sunblock. And it doesn't cool off either, not really. Temperatures stay in the high 80s and low-to-mid 90s all night. "But it's a dry heat" is really dismissive of how dangerous an unwavering 90–120° is, in this case for weeks on end.

This is the argument I see to defend use of the word and I've never understood it. Where I am (west coast-ish of the US), the word is used very specifically to mean autistic. If you ask someone not to say retard, they say autistic instead. If you ask them not to say autistic, they say special education. If not that, slow. If not that, someone who takes the short bus. Unambiguously the people here use the r slur as a slur against autistic people. They use it as an insult towards allistic people to degrade them as lesser. Same as calling a straight person the f slur. Maybe it's different in other parts of the country, but the r slur is absolutely used as a slur against autistic people where I am.

It's probably not a bluff. They've pretty much saturated the U.S. market; there's not much room left to grow here. It would make more sense to focus their efforts on growing in other regions where they have plenty of headroom to increase their userbase and monetization. Depending on how things play out, they could match their current revenue in a matter of years and still have room left to grow. There's also the potential to re-enter the U.S. market down the line. Why would they throw that all away and essentially create their own competitor by selling their core technology and diluting/confusing their brand with whatever U.S. company they sell to?

The entire time. Obligatory "what Hamas did on October 7th was horrendous," but if you look into the history of Israel's occupation of Palestinian land, it's pretty understandable (although not justified) why something like that happened. Israel has been the bad guy from its conception.

Israel has been particularly monstrous the past few months, but this is something it has been working towards for decades. Only recently has it felt willing and able to go this far without its allies pulling their support.

what does this mean

I think it's an anti-joke referencing the go ahead fucking die bike lane meme

Hi, I'm one of the people who stopped playing when EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat) was introduced. I and most of my friends stopped playing for 6+ months. It genuinely became unusable for some of us between the time that EAC blocked modding and the time that most of the features that mods added were finally implemented into the game natively. The development speed and communication also shifted drastically since that event and it genuinely feels like a different team. We know what's going on behind the scenes now and get to actually have an input in upcoming features in a way that we didn't get to even just a year ago.

A lot of us have decided that these changes in development speed and communication are enough to warrant coming back. Those who disagree have left entirely for alternatives like ChilloutVR that explicitly allow modding. Things died down because the situation changed. The problems that were caused by the decision have for the most part been fixed. The people who still don't trust VRChat work on ChilloutVR now.

Also, VRChat has had a sizeable increase in its playerbase. People leaving the game was noticeable, but any lingering effects have been smoothed over. There are just a lot more people playing now.

tldr: yes, things have changed a lot. no, the people who were angry didn't "go back after a week" like some other comments suggest. a lot more people play this game now and the developers are more transparent with what they're working on. the problems that were caused by banning mods have mostly been addressed.

I feel like every time I see a comment from hexbear, it's a tankie with the most insane take possible. I often see them use their emotes/memes not to add to a conversation, but to deflect or avoid directly responding to criticism. I also keep seeing entire comment threads taken over by hexbear as soon as one of them replies to someone. Almost like a bat signal goes out to call in reinforcements. I'm sure that's mostly a product of them being terminally online and not necessarily malicious, but I have to block like ten hexbear users for every one I come across that isn't like that.

It's worth noting that most of the hexbear users I see are under politics stuff posted on large instances like .world and .ml, so these issues may be less prevalent or even non-existent on posts hosted on blahaj.zone. But fuck I really hate the energy they bring on. Honest to god I almost stopped using lemmy altogether because of how bad it gets under most of the posts I come across. I'm sure a lot of hexbear users are fine, but I don't like constantly blocking half of a comment section because the tankies came out of the woodworks to say some dumb shit about Ukraine or whatever. I doubt I'm the only one constantly blocking tankies from hexbear.

I'm mostly posting this to see if others feel the same way or have had similar experiences. I've searched for posts about hexbear a couple times over the past week and haven't seen one until here right now. I'm going through the first post from two days ago and it seems like I might just be coming across a very loud minority from their instance. If that's the case, then defederating seems extreme and unnecessary. But if this is just what most of hexbear is like, I'd prefer to defederate and let the non-tankies make a new account here or on another instance that we federate with.

Update after two days: I'm officially casting my vote as "defederate from hexbear please god," final answer. The tankies and trolls are exhausting and I'm sick and tired of dealing with them. Either they can't be reigned in or they simply aren't. It's not even just their politics. Now that I've been thinking consciously "is this comment's bad politics indicative of the whole instance" I've noticed that a lot of people from hexbear are kind of just assholes. I don't want to deal with them anymore. "The good ones" can make another account here or somewhere that we federate with. But honest to god, most of their instance is a drain on my mental health and I can see that I'm not the only one from blahaj zone that feels that way.

I know they come off as trans-friendly, but they also let tankies run defense for authoritarian countries that don't treat queer people like me well. If hexbear keeps up like this I'm just gonna stop using lemmy altogether. Logging on isn't worth the excruciation of dealing with their instance. I know Ada wants solidarity with other trans-friendly instances, but I don't think the tankies and trolls at hexbear care about that, and I don't think the rest of their instance cares enough to get them to chill out. It feels like they're taking advantage of blahaj zone's charitability to keep vomiting authoritarian apologetics and brigading any comments or posts that call out that behavior. Dealing with that isn't what I signed up for.

In the interest of transparency, this comment was at 38 upvotes when I added this update.

You can count on one hand the number of cities we have with actually usable public transport. It's pretty bad.

At least part of it is that NASA is good at marketing. They make cool shit and hype up the public so we all know how cool it is too. Soon they'll be launching a NASA+ streaming service that's completely free. All their video and live content in one place. They're genuinely one of the coolest public entities I know about, and part of why I know about them is because they're so good at marketing their projects to the lay public.

Moving out of hell is cheaper said than done. Most Americans can't even afford an emergency $500 expense. Vacancy rates are near historical lows but housing costs are at all-time highs. Finding somewhere to live is hard, especially if you don't have middle or upper class income. Most of the people risking their lives by not moving don't have a choice.