You’re still right, though - talking about closest planet on average isn’t very useful, because it’s always going to be the closest planet to the sun. Asking “what planet can get closest to some [Planet]” is more interesting and enlightening.

Aye, it seems like a dumb thing to say out loud rather than just do. That said, they’ve been saying a lot of dumb things lately.

Spez is a symptom of reddit’s problem, not the problem itself. Put someone in who wants to help the users more than the investors, and the investors will just kick them out. Which is why I’m more sympathetic to the Marxists around here.

So far as a ban list goes, it’s better to be hard-coded than a database call for performance reasons, and if it stops 95% of bad actors, that’d be a good thing. Problem is that it won’t, they’ll find a way around the regex. So yeah, this is something that should be handled by mods or communities.

It provides a minor inconvenience to people wanting to set up alt-right instances, and makes them feel unwelcome, so maybe that’s enough to justify it’s existence.

Yeah, I can get their desire to vet users before they can join their instance, but for me (and I suspect a lot of other people who are just starting with Lemmy, or just shy people) the effort of making a social interaction with a stranger was enough of a turn off that I went elsewhere. Beehaw still seems nice, I may still make an account there at some point. But, to figure out if a place suits me, first I lurk, then I engage by voting, then I engage by commenting, and eventually I may eventually post. I get applications, but they feel intrusive to how I use the internet.

I also get why they defederated, frankly there’s a tonne of low effort from the big new instances. However, everyone should expect low effort right now because users are antsy from having left reddit, and the low effort posts are the anxious laughter of people new to the party who don’t know anyone yet. So the defederation isn’t a good look, and will cause bad feeling with and within beehaw, so their mods have my sympathy. Better to have enabled downvoting and let the community handle the low effort posts.