cabbage

It takes time to build friendships. If you meet people for an activity that’s a start, but if you don’t feel like any of them are friend material (or they’re too busy) you need to branch out. Try finding a larger/different group that does that activity, or better yet, try out something else.

Volunteering tends to be a great starting point.

Friendships often start with a leap of faith of sorts - you hang out in a given context, and at some point somebody takes the next step (wanna grab a beer/grab lunch/come for dinner/go to the game/whatever)

You kind of do things that are a bit ahead of your current level of friendship, and then if it works out you’ve managed to upgrade.

We all know Trump is Putin’s man in America. We all witnessed his presidency, we all saw their cozy little press conference with their secret little meeting.

It boggles my mind how dishonest or plain stupid one has to be, as a serious journalist, to frame MAGA Putin supporters as something intellectually surprising or out of the ordinary. Trumpism has been Putin’s project since day one, and there’s no way the journalist is not aware of that.

Journalists are so fucking hungry for a spin they obscure reality in the process.

I hate that I’m surprised by the clarity of this answer. Hopefully Netanyahu is too.

Which is a radical act to fight tech billionaires like Zuckerberg and Musk. Who have both been reasonably accused of enabling some incredibly awful stuff.

Contributing to the fediverse is probably not the most efficient way to fight for human rights and against billionaires and fascists, but it certainly makes some sort of tiny contribution. So I wouldn’t call it pointless. :)

Nice overview but I’m not sure I completely agree with you on everything.

If I want to make a community, is there a reason I would choose one lemmy over another?

There’s absolutely good reason to choose instances wisely when making a community. Some instances defederate from others, and you want to make your community somewhere where you agree with the moderation policy. Also, it might be easier to immediately reach people on a larger instance.

If you create your community on lemmy.ml, you might not reach everyone because some people and instances have blocked .ml due to different philosophies. If you make it on Beehaw, you’ll reach fewer people as they have a higher moderation standard than most, which could of course also be good for your community. Lemmy.world is more neutral in their moderation policy, but I’m sure there are pros and cons there as well.

I like it when there are specific instances for specific niches, as it gives the community control over who to federate with. But of course, that’s not always possible.

If I report a comment, is my report private?

They’re not public at least. Few things on the Internet are truly private.

Existence is meaningless and we just wobble around here for a little while and then we die. There’s nothing to it. Everything that happens is just a logical consequence; beauty is nothing but a tiny chemical reaction in your brain. Once you rot it’s all worthless.

Science is great at giving explanations, but not so good at providing meaning. For a lot of people, meaning is probably more helpful in order to facilitate a happy life.

Nietzsche writes at length about this stuff, most famously in the anecdote about the madman coming down from the mountain to inform the villagers that God is dead and that we have killed him. Everybody knows the three words “God is dead”, but I think it’s worth reading at length:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Nietzsche, whose father was a priest, recognizes that “God has become unbelievable”, but he does not celebrate it as the progress of science. Rather, we lost something that was fundamentally important to humans, and which science cannot easily replace.

Here one could start talking about the Free Masons, who attempted learning from religious rituals without the added layer of religion. Or one could dig deeper into the works of Nietzsche, and the contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian. It’s all fascinating stuff.

In short though, spirituality used to offer people a sense of meaning that is not so easily replaced by science alone. How do we bury our dead now that we know our rituals are pointless?