tj

Not at all. There is a huge difference in proving a positive (i.e. that God exists) than prooving a negative (i.e. that God is IMPOSSIBLE).

EXAMPLE: Could Trump be a lizard alien in a skin suit as some might believe? Absolutely. Am I gnostic by stating in a matter of fact tone that he isn’t (and thus dependant on “faith” by extension of your argument? Probably not.

Just because someone once made a wild claim about God existing, doesn’t make me require “faith” to call out he obviously made up story with absolutely zero facts to back it as such.

That logic is flawed. Just because we don’t understand why there is something rather than nothing, there is no logical implication that there could be a higher being. “Coincidence” would seem to be a much more likely reason (until/if we understand why) - much like coincidence being the reason for most (all?) observed miracles

Elon Musk: “Hold my beer”

Also,

• What is your mother’s maiden name?
• What is the name of the street you grew up on?
• What was the name of your first pet?

It is indeed. Main consequence of this is that if you join a new or small instance, you will see less of the fediverse without actively seeking it

By that logic, how do you learn to talk? Before you understand language, no one can explain the meaning of words to you.

I imagine this happens the same way. You “bootstrap” language by introducing a few touch signs and go from there.

What’s an instance?

An instance is a server running the Lemmy software (or some other federation software such as Mastodon, Kbin, Pixelfed, and others). Instances can talk together (similarly to how you can send email from gmail.com to outlook.com), so you can sign up on one instance and subscribe and comment to communities on other instances

What’s a community?

A community is to Lemmy what a subreddit is to Reddit. on

What are federations?

Federation is the machanism allowing different instances (servers) to talk together. Federation is automatic, so two instances becomes federated, when you as a user on one instance subscribe to a community on a different instance

Whats the difference between all these?

Many instances are general but have somewhat different values and rules for what you can post or not. “lemmy.world” is a good choice for a general instance. There are also topic specific instances, such as “mander.xyz” that is science focused.

What’s mastodon?

Mastodon is like twitter but is part of the federated universe (the “fediverse”).

What’s Kbin?

Kbin - like Lemmy - is like Reddit. The impelemntation is different and focuses on different fetures. Some (myself included) like Kbin more than Lemmy - others the other way around.

What’s ActivityPub?

ActivityPub is the common technical protocol that allows all of the software in the Fediverse to talk together. Both Mastodon, Kbin and Lemmy (and others) are build “on top” of the ActivityPub protocol.

Hope this helps