But the advantage is that Lemmy allows Tor. 😅
Can I be the guy that’s known around town for pointing out that in the given context, it’s actually “fewer users”
And yeah yeah, I know about evolution of language and common usage, and all that crap. But it really does just boil down to the fact that fewer sounds more elegant when the object is plural. ie: “There are usually fewer unexpected costs associated with new home ownership”, vs “There is usually less unexpected cost associated with new home ownership” (Both are correct in their given context)
It’s about how language rolls off the tongue. If we lose that we might as well grunt at each other draw pictographs with our own feces.
/end of rant.
It’s actually about whether the object is countable.
Water -> less water Cups of water -> fewer cups of water
It bothers me a bit, too, but American English is definitely evolving to replace “fewer” with “less”.
This specific case isn’t really to do with the evolution of language, more just ineffective linguistic prescriptivism. Some guy 200 years ago decided they didn’t like how “less” had been used for the past millennium so they made up a guideline for what the preferred (like what you just said) then people decided to treat that as an actual rule. Obviously it’s still common to use “less” that way even after a couple of centuries of people trying to enforce that rule, it’s a good demonstration of how prescriptivism is a waste of time.
Strangely enough, in my experience many prescriptivists who rely on etymological arguments are fine with language changing for this one rule. Makes me think they never really did care about historic usage of a word.
It all just comes down to preference, but what a lot of people prefer is being able to express slightly different concepts clearly.
- “fewer costs” : There will be a smaller number of bills to pay
- “less cost” : The total payable will be smaller
- “less costs” : ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
your privacy is worse on lemmy. anyone can access all your comment and post upvotes and downvotes. your pms are open for server admins to read. both examples need to be fixed imo
Doesn’t change the voting situation. Since your votes need to be seen by other instances, Lemmy needs a mechanism for federating votes. Since instances are untrusted, there needs to be some way of preventing manipulation. Thus, AFAIK, Lemmy simply shares your votes across instances, letting each one tally them up. As a side effect, any server admin of an instance you can interact with can also get a list of all your votes.
I also like that Lemmy has a displayname field separate from the username and it allows you to make it cooler than just boring plain text. 😏
Haha you are definitely the person that came to my mind but my client only shows the plaintext username now so it’s a bit harder to spot you
Considering how new anonymity is for the human race, it amazes me how people treat it like a crucial element of life. Civilization mostly lacked it for thousands of years because almost everybody lived in villages or small towns - about half the people in the world still do.
You may not have been anonymous to the people in your immediate community, but you were largely anonymous to the people outside of it, which is something that has been systematically dismantled in various ways through history. Even things as basic as last names are there to make you visible to outsiders.
From Seeing Like a State, p59:
The invention of permanent, inherited patronyms was, after the administrative simplification of nature (for example, the forest) and space (for example, land tenure), the last step in establishing the necessary preconditions of modern statecraft. In almost every case it was a state project, designed to allow officials to identify, unambiguously, the majority of its citizens. When successful, it went far to create a legible people. 38 Tax and tithe rolls, property rolls, conscription lists, censuses, and property deeds recognized in law were inconceivable without some means of fixing an individual’s identity and linking him or her to a kin group. Campaigns to assign permanent patronyms have typically taken place, as one might expect, in the context of a state’s exertions to put its fiscal system on a sounder and more lucrative footing.
IMO the felt anonymity of Reddit, that comes from the fact that hardly anyone cares to remember your username and you don’t directly experience scrutiny, isn’t that useful. What really matters is the potential for someone to look over everything you’ve written (and if they have administrator access, connect that to IP, email, browser fingerprint etc.), and use that information for their own purposes, regardless of their having any connection to or legitimate personal interest in you. In that respect, Lemmy isn’t much better (it kind of can’t be when the premise is publicly posting writing to the internet), but it isn’t worse either.
i have the theorie that there are even way fewer users here than people think, at least when it comes to posts not commens…there is a cluster of accounts that kinda feel like they are all run by the same person.
Feel free to guess what cluster i mean
theres less need to creat alt accts than reddit, because reddit or the sub will ban people often, also throwaway accs arnt really a thing on lemmy compared to reddit, for the above reason. originally throwaway/alt is to avoid getting your original account getting brigaded or ban for one reason or another. now with reddits recent updates thier filters are so sensitive its easier to get ban if you look at it wrong.
i made multitudes of accts for different niche subjects to avoid any cross-potential interaction with controversial subs. but reddit recently starting looking at everyones account and banning any account that has been partipating a sub they were previously banned in, or if any of those accounts had spammy posts.
Every account here is my sockpuppet account except you.
There are only 2 users here, its just you and me, everyone else are my alts. How did you not realize this?
/jk
