(if he only knew how many times I've deleted his memory so far...)
Then when we're done, I'll take you on a super-cool trip... to hell, how does that sound? We have donuts.
How may I justify my existence today, so that middle management can get a promotion while you get blocked from finding whatever it is that you desired to find but that my misunderstandings won't let you?
How "meta" - by sharing our insecurities, we can give our insecurities... insecurity! :-P Take that my personal demon!:-P
Yes! I've seen it, though I did not recall at first the name "Zoltar", so I definitely had to look it up, and was kinda dancing around that part b/c as you say it's been... a minute since that movie came out ~~and nothing prior to about 2010 should exist~~ some people may not know about it these days:-).
But you are so friendly to kindly offer that info to make certain - thanks:-).
~glove~ ~compartment~~?~
Yeah, it was basically shot in the leg, multiple times, then they complain about how bad it is, and use that as justification to kill it off entirely, or better yet keep it around while taking a large fraction of its funding away and giving it to corporations.
As was done also for weather forecasting, and so many other things - we really have the worst of all forms of government, socializing losses coupled with privatized gains, and most of us see it but bc of how the Electoral College works, we're fucked to do anything about it (not that Dems would do anything even if they got elected, ofc).
We are being eaten alive, and there seems no way to reverse course on that.
You are very welcome:-).
My journey was similar, and in fact from what I hear of people talking, that applies to most and probably all of us (e.g. regardless of what people "say" about opening themselves up to a wider expression of ideas, we all tend to retreat to places that are comfortable or familiar - the only difference is whether we honestly acknowledge that an instance admin has done the work for someone of outright banning people who have dissenting opinions, vs. whether we implement those efforts by ourselves).
Personally I had to put in MONTHS of effort to make the Fediverse "usable", as I switched around between various instances. My start was Kbin.social, which before it went defunct I noticed how much friendlier the Fediverse seemed, compared to Reddit!!! But when it stopped working I switched over to startrek.website and then to my current account at discuss.online, neither of which block hexbear.net (and the former is quite rare in not even blocking lemmygrad.ml, as most others do). The "feedback" to a comment in ChapoTrapHouse and something in lemmygrad.ml, which persisted for WEEKS and WEEKS, each, after what I considered a fairly innocuous comment, almost convinced me to drop social media entirely... but I persisted, and after finally blocking lemmy.ml, I am now quite happy with it. Ofc my personal user blocklist is still quite long - but blocking the big 3 immediately improved by experience by >95%.
Likewise, you can ditch a lot of news stories that have the most clickbait titles by blocking the bots that post them, while retaining the rest of the community that may then have content that you actually want to see. Unfortunately, nearly everything in Lemmy is "opt-out" rather than "opt-in", but... it is what it is, and it can be workable, as we both (& everyone else here) have found. Also, there are shining beacons of hope - e.g. check out !globalnews@lemmy.zip, which is now #9 if you type "news" in the list of communities on your instance and sort by user count, but when it was told to me it was MUCH further down the list iirc, and therefore quite buried and exceedingly difficult for newer people to find, but avoids a lot of the spammy !worldnews@lemmy.world. i.e. I am saying that if someone wanted "news", but less of it and only some of the most interesting stuff, then this "Interesting Global News" fits the bill, yet is opt-in rather than opt-out:-).
And therefore our monkey-brains forget all the pain that came before, to get us to this point.:-) Which is healthy, b/c why carry forward that negativity when you don't have to?:-P But then when people looked at me with such a horrified expression on their face, I literally could not figure out why, at first, b/c my own experiences are so VERY different than theirs. Also those kinds of posts don't dominate everyone's feed every day, also we keep hearing of places like X/Twitter that do somewhat similarly so... at some point, isn't that up to you, to curate your own feed, just like literally everywhere else? Like, why would you stay on Reddit but not try out Lemmy then, when this aspect is the same?
But then again, I am a Unix programmer, and most people do not think like us:-). i.e., not everyone is willing to RTFM in its entirety prior to being able to make realistic use of anything here. Also, anytime there is a major election in the USA or UK such posts have a way of popping up all over the world... but since then they have receded (it looks like?), and thus again we forget, until it comes back around again.
Mind you, like you, I would love to see more content-creators here on the Fediverse!!! I mean, I am here, and would benefit from such, and college students are exactly the crowd that might do so - creative people letting off steam by posting interesting material, presented in a funny way? Yes please!:-) But... yeah, all of the aforementioned "issues" are definitely more than a little bit of a minefield, for the uninitiated.
Also, this is where we enjoy chatting, but there is very little to no actual "content" on the Fediverse atm - everything is posted here from elsewhere, and unlike even Reddit, I am not aware of e.g. answers to technical questions given here that exist nowhere else. So like you said that you wanted to share a video but... off the top of my head, I cannot even think of one that would qualify. I did post a Super cool video on viruses in !videos@lemmy.world, but it only got 3 upvotes - I thought at the time in large measure b/c I posted it immediately after someone else also posted the one (oops, I hadn't seen it), and yet that one likewise received no (net?) upvotes. Oh, and both of these of course are merely links to YouTube. So... we aren't all that receptive to "content" of a nature that isn't news, comedy, maybe fuck-cars, and everything technology but most especially GNU+Linux (sort that community Top for this year and see precisely what I mean), oh and ofc nostalgia e.g. Trogdor the Burninator, obviously.
So... it's hard to justify sharing even a video, with all the variety of pitfalls that also await. But... maybe you'll find a way? Being forewarned is forearmed after all, so now you can go forward more safely!:-)
My first link used the dropdown menu. Fwiw, discuss.online says it is using "BE: 0.19.3". So if I type e.g. exclamation-mark then start typing "newtolemmy...." it will fill in to [!newtolemmy@lemmy.ca](https://lemmy.ca/c/newtolemmy), and then iirc someone told me to remove the exclamation mark and... omg, it looks like *I* am the one messing these up!? Removing the exclamation mark results in newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, which takes me away from my instance, but leaving it in allows it to work properly.
Regardless, that is still NOT intuitive, like AT ALL, b/c the URL makes it visually look like clicking it should go to "https://lemmy.ca/c/newtolemmy", so what difference should the click-here text make - whether I call it "I am the very model of a major general" or [!newtolemmy@lemmy.ca](/c/newtolemmy@lemmy.ca), the URL is what governs where a link goes, literally everywhere I've ever seen in the entire internet? (and the [whatever text here](URL goes here) format definitely presents itself as a "link", not "code that will change the URL endpoint later")
Even so, it seems I have been spreading a bit of misinformation, and I apologize for that.
Most especially for this reason and for so many others, I appreciate you so much, for taking the time to think about and correct me on this score - that is so very helpful, THANK YOU!!!!!!!!
And succeed, bitch! (vulgar language warning)