Yes, phages are the natural “antibiotic”/population control for bacteria. https://humanmicrobiome.info/#bacteriophages-phages

Antibiotics can make phages go extinct. https://humanmicrobiome.info/antibiotics/#virome

Phages were being researched as an alternative to antibiotics, but antibiotics seemed easier and cheaper, so they grew in popularity and use. Unfortunately, antibiotics come with pretty severe collateral damage.

Something similar, that you can (and should) get involved in: https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/the-fda-and-fmt-regulation-part-2-jul-2024-humanmicrobes-org-i-met-wit.520/#post-1370

“It wouldn’t surprise me that improving people’s health this way actually slows down the ageing process,”

Then you may be allowing preconceptions and biases to prevent you from processing new and contradictory information.

Your entire argument is climate change?

No, it’s not. You should click the link.

Nonsense. That’s an extremely ignorant statement. The current population level has been doing massive damage to our planet. https://github.com/MaximilianKohler/Archive/wiki#some-of-the-major-problems

largely to no avail

Great news. It’s insane how few people seem to care about the damage occurring from overpopulation.

General poor health has been increasing. Obesity rates and rates of lots of other conditions have all been increasing. It can’t all be due to microplastics.

Resistance is not the most concerning aspect of antibiotics, despite it being the most covered in the news. We need to be moving away from antibiotics.

https://humanmicrobiome.info/antibiotics/#harms-of-antibiotics

Have you discussed how it’s dangerous for a single entity to control so much public information? For example, Youtube now randomly removes comments, including from the channel owner. So it’s impossible to have discussions and share information on Youtube now. Yet moving away is so difficult since they have a huge monopoly + the network effect.

Explaining to people that they should take steps to prevent this from happening on other platforms like Reddit should hopefully motivate some more people.

You may also want to mention that Reddit’s automated systems are faulty, and many people are at risk of losing their accounts and subreddits, and thus years of their work.

I listed my reasoning here https://maximiliankohler.blogspot.com/2023/06/reddit-is-dangerous-humanity-needs-an-alternative.html for why people should be moving away from reddit and other large social media companies.

You could even include examples of how Facebook and Twitter have declined and become problematic. The same principals (enshittification, etc.) put the entire internet at risk.

We have regular posting here now, often with topics not on the sub-reddit. My hunch is that an approach like - “Like r/futurology? - come to our other site for extra content” - might work better.

Yeah, that’s not a bad idea at all. You could create an automod sticky in every thread that says “Many of our content creators moved to our Lemmy instance for X reasons, so feel free to join us there for extra content”.