Hi Horny, nice to meet you!

Well, good on him or her for being a music enthusiast, but what does this have to do with flirting?

I thought most people have tiles or vinyl/linoleum for their kitchen floor. Still, you do know that you can just remove and replace the damaged floorboard instead of sanding and varnishing the entire floor, right?

At this point you're not paying money for a diamond, you're paying money for a certificate.

If you want to know how much a diamond is really worth, go to any jewelry store and ask them to appraise the resell value of your natural diamond ring with certificate and all, no matter how much you paid for it, they're probably going to tell you only the precious metal setting is worth any money, and the rock itself is utterly worthless the second you received it.

Which makes diamond a terrible symbol for love.

I think this is a fake quote that somebody made up for an Internet comedy bit, since it seems unlikely for Hollywood actress Sydney Sweeney to have such uncharacteristically strong opinion on software version control, of all things.

Because she of all people would know that there isn't anything wrong with using git merge, and it ultimately comes down to personal preference to what you are used to.

I genuinely can't tell if the comic was added by somebody else to mock Musk's tweet, or if Musk is such a narcissistic prick with zero self awareness that he ""ironically" added this comic as part of his fellow-kids memelord act.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

Lemmy's biggest competitor at this point isn't reddit, it's Discord, or rather, the monster it has become. It seems to me that instead of creating a subreddit nowadays, every project now wants to use a Discord server for everything.

The problem with that is:

1. Asking messages in a big, open chatroom (over, say, 20 people) gets real messy, real quickly.
2. Conversations on Discord are difficult to follow when multiple of them are going at once.
3. The conversations containing solutions to problems in chat or threads are not search indexable, which is the reason why reddit became quietly dominant in search results, it is simply the biggest centralized repository of organized English language text conversations available.

So why do people insist on using Discord servers to build their community? Simple, it's the network effect. If somebody wants tech support, it's way easier to click a Discord invite on an account for group chat you already have than it is to sign up for yet another forum that you only use once. But Lemmy doesn't suffer from that problem of traditional forums because of federation.

Which brings me to my point, if Lemmy is to grow, it's better to sell Lemmy to disgruntled Discord admins and forum owners to move their community than it is to get people to move off reddit at this point, since people who wants to leave reddit has all done so at this point.

Let's look at some numbers and do some napkin math:

Currently, the top post of Lemmy can usually get a little more than 2K upvotes, which puts Lemmy at about late 2010 to early 2011 reddit level of activity, which is right before reddit hits its explosive growth phase in 2012 with SOPA, Kony, and the Obama AMA. While active user count has been going down, the amount of post and comments have both been steadily going up.

You also have to realize that in more than a decade, there was never a reddit alternative that has EVER hit this level of activity. (unless you count 9gag or the_donald for some reason.)

The best purchase I've made this year has to be the tickets for the "Barbie" movie on opening day July 21st. As I watched the movie in theater (the best way to watch a movie), I was literally moved to tears by the performance of the lead actress, whom I might add, deserves an Oscar this year.

Fellow lemmings, I, for one, will definitely be buying "Barbie" on Blu-ray to have it in my collection.

Multiple copies, in fact.

He fumed in another all-caps post that "THE CHILDLESS, UNMARRIED ABORTION ARMY MOBILIZED BY BARBIE, TAYLOR SWIFT, AND TIKTOK" was "CRUSHING REPUBLICANS AT THE BALLOT BOX."

You are goddamn right it is.

I am inevitable.

I don't really know how people can even use YouTube without ad blockers. Sitting through minutes of advertisement is not going to make me want to buy your product if I start mentally associating your product with frustration and annoyance. If these video ads are going to be repetitive and annoying, at least make them funny.

It seems like there is nowhere on the Internet to get away from ads currently, even here, where you thought you are safe, you are now reading an ad for my newest movie (you know the one), now also available on streaming!

And at the beginning everyone was worried about "Eternal September". It's only been two months.

People will come in waves, instances and communities will grow and die, just like how it was on reddit, we'll probably start seeing meme/politics free or even more specialized instances soon. But all of this is going to take time.

The turning point will be when companies/websites start spinning up their own Lemmy instances as their official one to replace their forums, which I think will happen.

So, being on Lemmy is a long term investment for me.