Hmm, that is fair. I would suggest making votes not federate at all in that case, except doing that would make single person or very small instances effectively be limited to sorting by new

thats fair I suppose, though in practice id assume that making a whole bunch of individual instances is probably more difficult than making a much of accounts on one instance that you control, and thus vote manipulation in this manner should have a higher barrier to entry?

If one wanted to ensure that external content is still easily visible, one could always have things set up so that posts on local communities only appears in local and subscribed, and only posts from outside appear in all (though it might need to be renamed to better fit such a layout I suppose)

Honestly, I’ve begun to think the upvote/downvote model is a bad fit for the fediverse in general:

*Different instances have different rules around it, and in some cases (for example, an instance disabling downvoting) this might give a modest advantage in the sorting for content on that instance

*Instances have to trust votes by other instances, and while an obvious manipulation could be defederated, that has to be noticed first

*Votes are more publicly visible than on a place like reddit, potentially leading to something like a downvote being a catalyst for incivility towards the downvoter by whoever posted something

Honestly what I would do with Lemmy voting is just make vote counts mostly not federate. Have instances send a single up, down, or neither vote depending on if the net number on their insurance passes a certain up or downvote threshold, just so people on private instances have something to sort by, and have the score of a post or comment otherwise just go off of whatever the users within an instance vote. Then, an individual instance could have whatever rules or restrictions on voting it wanted, without worry over if that gets its votes drowned out by the wider network or seen as vote manipulation.

Ceres was classified as a planet for some time after it’s discovery iirc, then as an asteroid, and then as a dwarf planet and asteroid.

I forget, do the replicators produce utensils to go with the food or is there like a reusable set somewhere? If the former, maybe some dish or another comes with wooden chopsticks or such out of tradition? Or perhaps some species or another might have a diet that includes wood in some way and they can accidentally leave splinters around like crumbs or something.

Aka methanol

I actually like the ENT one, having it on it’s side in a housing makes it feel more “engine-y” I guess.

Faith of the gallbladder wouldn’t have the same ring to it.

Was going to say something similar, I have no idea what it sounds like but the letters look beautiful written out.

When I started my current job, my boss and one of the older guys there asked me “star trek or star wars” after I mentioned liking sci fi (they preferred the different franchises respectively and were looking for a tiebreaker for their banter or something I guess). Got a laugh out of them by replying with “stargate”.

A dictatorship of any sort wont get you much different than capitalism does: capitalism has the effect that it does because it creates a situation where power concentrates (because wealth is generally a proxy for power, and having a lot of capital under capitalism allows you to more easily obtain more of the finite pool of it), so that decisions are made that benefit the few with power while the many without much of it suffer the negative externalizes of those decisions, that the wealth of the powerful insulates them from. A dictator represents simply skipping to the end-state of that, where power is highly concentrated among one person and those that directly enable them. They still will make decisions that benefit themselves at the cost of the well being of everyone else, because people are selfish that way. Even if you somehow get a person that somehow cares more about everyone else than themself, that person wont be dictator forever, and since that mentality isnt the norm for dictators, odds are soon enough you’ll end up with an “unenlightened” dictatorship again.

Its a great movie quote, but I always found it a bit grating used outside that context, because, well, other animals dont instinctively develop some natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment.

Its not like a wolf will realize that they’ve been reproducing too much for the local population of prey animals and decide to have fewer cubs, or actively avoid certain prey species that have declining numbers compared to the rest, if theres too many to support the excess ones will simply starve, or wander off in search of prey. The rabbits wont decide to reproduce less if something happens to the local predator population, they simply overeat their food supply until their numbers collapse back down or their abundance causes the number of predators to rise.

The equilibrium is a product of every species acting in a way that would upset that balance if they were not all in competition with eachother, and it is only stable over relatively short periods of time, in the long run it changes under pressure from geological and climactic shifts, evolutionary adaptation, etc. All humans have done, is evolve an adaptation that is too disruptive for this process to look the way it normally does. (namely enough intelligence and aptitude for tool use to effectively adapt to different conditions much faster than the time it would take for anything slower breeding than perhaps a single celled organism to evolve a counter for).

Id be willing to bet that, if you gave any other animal a set of traits that effectively allowed them to adapt to things much faster than the pace of natural evolution, you would get similar disruption.

What’s more, such an equilibrium will eventually come back. If humans manage to destroy our natural life support system enough to go extinct? Then it will return as whatever survives our mass-extinction event fills empty niches and carries on as it has. If humans do survive but manage to make large scale civilization impossible and must revert to low tech subsistence hunter-gathering? Then they would be subject to the same growth constraints and competition as other large omnivores. If humans develop technology and infrastructure that allows for high tech industrial civilization to exist with a generally sustainable resource cycle, that doesnt disrupt the surrounding ecosystem anymore? Then that surrounding ecosystem is no longer subject to our disruption. If humans develop technology and infrastructure that just replaces by brute force the natural systems that we rely on, so as to no longer need them to survive, and continue on until the whole natural ecosystem is gone? Then as humans and their pets, crops, livestock, parasites etc would represent the whole of life remaining on earth, that built environment would be the environment, and as it would have to have been made generally self-sufficient and stable to get to that point, it would still represent a stable ecological state, if a very different and less diverse one than what exists now.

That doesnt mean that things wont change anymore once a stable state is reached, even stable environments in nature are not permanent, but humans cant logically continue to diminish a finite natural environment forever. Eventually humans will stop doing that, there wont be any humans to do it, or there wont be a natural environment left to do it to. In that sense, we can be viewed the same as any other disruption caused by any other organism, we’ve just created a much bigger shock than usual and the process of finding a stable state is still ongoing.

Honestly, maybe slightly justified by the nature of the setting? The number of ships that seem to exist in universe, compared to the number of entire planets full of people to draw crew from, is so low that one must imagine that the entry requirements can be exceptionally high. One could also imagine better technology might imply better education technology as well as more refined techniques for using it.

It’s funny because the characters act in a way that is blatantly inappropriate for the situation, a lot of humor is like this, even including violence.

There’s a difference between understanding a rule and it’s rationale and breaking it because you know it isn’t ideal in this circumstance, and breaking a rule without a full understanding of why it is there and what the results may be, I suppose.

This was me with peas growing up, hated them so much that I’d carefully swallow them without breaking the skins to taste them less, but they were one of the more common vegetables for my family. I’ve developed more of an appreciation for a few other vegetables since growing up but not those.

The pigeon, on the other hand, appears unimpressed

I don’t remember if it’s come up, does the federations/earths dislike of genetic and other such augmentation extend to animals? If not, I wouldn’t think it entirely impossible for them to have found an actual cure to aging, sufficient to make the lifespan of an organism indefinite until killed by some accident or infection, for some common species like a dog, but found that the technique requires the use of tech they aren’t willing to deploy in humans (though the aversion to it would have to be crazy strong to give up that temptation I’d imagine.)

I’ve been pretty happy with how the instance I use has been run thus far, but it is focused around furries, so it won’t be something most people outside that subculture like I expect. Still, the fandom is big enough that someone in it looking for an instance might look at this thread, so I mention it anyway.