tal

How else do you even find a community to sub to?

Hit lemmyverse.net, or check and see what people you talk to and find interesting are commenting in. Every subscription to a remote community had to start with at least one user on your home instance doing that.

There's also !communitypromo@lemmy.ca and !newcommunities@lemmy.world (the latter specifically for those communities just starting out) that will have a list of communities actively seeking new users.

I also try to recommend communities that I've found interesting when they're relevant and come up in my comments with the !communityname@instance syntax. Lile, the other day someone posted a question about dice on !asklemmy@lemmy.world, and I mentioned !clacksmith@lemmy.world, which is devoted to people making dice (and has pretty pictures of them). That last one obviously relies on people actually sticking those recommendations in their comments though!

Slate Star Codex has an article from back when, "I Can Tolerate Anything But the Outgroup".

It's talking about a variety of things, but one point at the core of it, a point that I think is pretty interesting, is that people tend to have social groups that are extraordinarily politically-clustered and highly non-representative of their countries as a whole...and often don't realize it.

There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn’t see right next to him.

This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.

I don’t mean the sort of light-matter conservatives who go around complaining about Big Government and occasionally voting for Romney. I see those guys all the time. What I mean is – well, take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.

And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.

About forty percent of Americans want to ban gay marriage. I think if I really stretch it, maybe ten of my top hundred fifty friends might fall into this group. This is less astronomically unlikely; the odds are a mere one to one hundred quintillion against.

People like to talk about social bubbles, but that doesn’t even begin to cover one hundred quintillion. The only metaphor that seems really appropriate is the bizarre dark matter world.

I live in a Republican congressional district in a state with a Republican governor. The conservatives are definitely out there. They drive on the same roads as I do, live in the same neighborhoods. But they might as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them.

To be fair, I spend a lot of my time inside on my computer. I’m browsing sites like Reddit.

Recently, there was a thread on Reddit asking – Redditors Against Gay Marriage, What Is Your Best Supporting Argument? A Reddit user who didn’t understand how anybody could be against gay marriage honestly wanted to know how other people who were against it justified their position. He figured he might as well ask one of the largest sites on the Internet, with an estimated user base in the tens of millions.

It soon became clear that nobody there was actually against gay marriage.

There were a bunch of posts saying “I of course support gay marriage but here are some reasons some other people might be against it,” a bunch of others saying “my argument against gay marriage is the government shouldn’t be involved in the marriage business at all”, and several more saying “why would you even ask this question, there’s no possible good argument and you’re wasting your time”. About halfway through the thread someone started saying homosexuality was unnatural and I thought they were going to be the first one to actually answer the question, but at the end they added “But it’s not my place to decide what is or isn’t natural, I’m still pro-gay marriage.”

In a thread with 10,401 comments, a thread specifically asking for people against gay marriage, I was eventually able to find two people who came out and opposed it, way near the bottom. Their posts started with “I know I’m going to be downvoted to hell for this…”

But I’m not only on Reddit. I also hang out on LW.

On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.

But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?

When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.

It gets worse. My formative years were spent at a university which, if it was similar to other elite universities, had a faculty and a student body that skewed about 90-10 liberal to conservative – and we can bet that, like LW, even those few token conservatives are Mitt Romney types rather than God-n’-guns types. I get my news from vox.com, an Official Liberal Approved Site. Even when I go out to eat, it turns out my favorite restaurant, California Pizza Kitchen, is the most liberal restaurant in the United States.

I inhabit the same geographical area as scores and scores of conservatives. But without meaning to, I have created an outrageously strong bubble, a 10^45 bubble. Conservatives are all around me, yet I am about as likely to have a serious encounter with one as I am a Tibetan lama.

(Less likely, actually. One time a Tibetan lama came to my college and gave a really nice presentation, but if a conservative tried that, people would protest and it would be canceled.)

For me, the "holy shit, I live in a bubble" moment was the first time I started looking up polls on ghosts. Like, if you asked me what percentage of Americans believed in ghosts, I'd have probably guessed...I don't know, somewhere south of one percent, maybe? I mean, just extrapolating from my social circle and my own experiences. Sure, if we were talking medieval times, people maybe believed in ghosts and witches and stuff, but in 2025? Nah. We know, more-or-less, how the universe works now, and the supernatural is just something fun to joke around about, right?

But that's not what polling finds at all. Depending upon how you ask the question in your poll, you'll get different levels, but it's a lot, north of a third of society.

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4400922-americans-ghosts-aliens-devil-survey/

Nearly half of U.S. adults, 48%, believe in psychic or spiritual healing. Slightly fewer, 39%, express a belief in ghosts, while between 24% and 29% say they believe in six other supernatural phenomena, including telepathy, communication with the dead, clairvoyance, astrology, reincarnation and witches.

Note that if you like DNS-over-HTTP, on Linux, systemd-resolved has support for it and can be set up to do it for systemwide resolution, rather than just having one's Web browser do it for Web browsing.

kagis

Some people setting it up:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1092498/dns-over-tls-with-systemd-resolved

Long run, my thinking is that the best approach is to have something like "user curation lists" and let other users subscribe to them. Could be posts, users, communities or whatever. Then you find something that approximates your preferences, subscribe to "Bob's community whitelist" and/or "Jim's community blacklist", and that reduces some of the human-time load to try to identify interesting content. My understanding is that BlueSky has something vaguely along these lines.

But I think that there are probably more-immediate problems on the Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin developer plates right now, like dealing with the scraper-bots that are severely loading all of the instances that permit anonymous access.

In general, I'd suggest browsing by "Subscribed" rather than "All".

First, "All" doesn't actually show you everything out there, because your home instance doesn't know about everything out there. It only shows you communities that at least one user on your home instance (lemmy.cafe, for you) has subscribed to. You're seeing content from communities on ".moe" TLD instances because at least one user on your home instance is subscribing to those communities. On very large Threadiverse instances, like maybe lemmy.world, with many users, this is closer to seeing everything, since odds are better that someone on your home instance has subscribed to it. But it's not everything.

But secondly, I've seen a number of posts from people who invariably don't like one type of content or another

yours isn't one, to be fair

complaining that lemmy defaults should exclude X from the All feed, for some X, because they don't like X and find it difficult to exclude X. And the problem is that there's no global X that fits everyone.

The Internet as a whole is a firehose, and invariably, there's stuff out there that people aren't going to want to see, and people who are going to create communities that someone doesn't like. Might be spam or just noise, might be test material, you name it.

If you really want to see everything out there, you're probably going to want a script anyway. You're probably going to want to pull down https://lemmyverse.net/communities or something similar

they spider the Threadiverse, and do actually build a list of all communities out there

which actually does list everything out there, then filter by whatever criteria you want, then subscribe to everything left.

EDIT:

on ".moe" TLD instances

Sounds like, from the other comment, that it's not ".moe" TLD instances that you're thinking of, but rather communities that end in "moe". Though in general, if the objection is to sexed-up young anime girls, I expect that it's most-likely inclusive of both.

looks at MEGA hat in image

I distinctly remember, back with early Trump, when the MAGA thing was being done, joking about how people could do it in Europe and call it MEGA. I did not expect it to actually happen.

Well...

From an evolutionary standpoint, we're basically the same collection of mostly-hairless primates that, 20,000 years ago, hadn't yet figured out agriculture and were roaming the land in small groups of maybe 100 or so at most, living off it as best we could.

From that standpoint, I think that we've done pretty well with a brain that evolved to deal with a rather different environment and is having to navigate a terribly-confusing, rather different situation.

I mean, you see any other critters that have been outperforming us on improving their understanding of the world?

The Russian government, at least as it exists in 2025, isn't going to run around killing every random person who publicly criticizes the government. In terms of political repression, it's gotten worse, but it's still not that bad.

Willing to assassinate people on grounds that that most other governments would not? Yes. But that's not "the government sucks, I'm leaving -> execution" territory.

At least some of this is due to the fact that we have really appallingly-bad authentication methods in a lot of places.

• The guy was called via phone. Phones display Caller ID information. This cannot be trusted; there are ways to spoof it, like via VoIP systems. I suspect that the typical person out there

understandably

does not expect this to be the case.

• The fallback, at least for people who you personally know, has been to see whether you recognize someone's voice. But we've got substantially-improving voice cloning these days, and now that's getting used. And now we've got video cloning to worry about too.

• The guy got a spoofed email. Email was not designed to be trusted. I'm not sure how many people random people out there are aware of that. He probably was

he was complaining that Google didn't avoid spoofing of internal email addresses, which might be a good idea, but certainly is not something that I would simply expect and rest everything else on. You can use X.509-based authentication (but that's not normally deployed outside organizations) or PGP (which is not used much). I don't believe that any of the institutions that communicate with me do so.

• Using something like Google's SSO stuff to authenticate to everything might be one way to help avoid having people use the same password all over, but has its own problems, as this illustrates.

• Ditto for browser-based keychains. Kind of a target when someone does break into a computer.

• Credentials stored on personal computers

GPG keys, SSH keys, email account passwords used by email clients, etc

are also kind of obvious targets.

• Phone numbers are often used as a fallback way to validate someone's identity. But there are attacks against that.

• Email accounts are often used as an "ultimate back door" to everything, for password resets. But often, these aren't all that well-secured.

The fact that there isn't a single "do this and everything is fine" simple best practice that can be handed out to Average Joe today is kind of disappointing.

There isn't even any kind of broad agreement on how to do 2FA. Service 1 maybe uses email. Service 2 only uses SMSes. Service 3 can use SMSes or voice. Service 4 requires their Android app to be run on a phone. Service 5 uses RFC 6238 time-based one-time-passwords. Service 6

e.g. Steam

has their own roll-their-own one-time-password system. Service 7 supports YubiKeys.

We should be better than this.

should have been a red flag for someone who literally works in an authentication role.

Maybe. But the point he was making is that the typical person out there is probably at least as vulnerable to falling prey to a scam like that, and that that's an issue, and that sounds plausible to me. I mean, we can't have everyone in society (a) be a security expert or (b) get scammed.

The first comment in response is probably the most important bit:

In addition: trust no inbound communications. If something is in fact urgent, it can be confirmed by reaching out, rather than accepting an inbound call, to a number publicly listed and well known as representative of the company.

I'm not sure if it's what was used here, but a lot of areas have some kind of generic "nuisance" law, which basically serves as a general purpose "someone is doing something obnoxious that affects us and we want to provide law enforcement with a way to make them stop" tool.

kagis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance

Under the common law, persons in possession of real property (land owners, lease holders etc.) are entitled to the quiet enjoyment of their lands. However this doesn't include visitors or those who aren't considered to have an interest in the land. If a neighbour interferes with that quiet enjoyment, either by creating smells, sounds, pollution or any other hazard that extends past the boundaries of the property, the affected party may make a claim in nuisance.

Legally, the term nuisance is traditionally used in three ways:

• to describe an activity or condition that is harmful or annoying to others (e.g., indecent conduct, a rubbish heap or a smoking chimney)
• to describe the harm caused by the before-mentioned activity or condition (e.g., loud noises or objectionable odors)
• to describe a legal liability that arises from the combination of the two.[2] However, the "interference" was not the result of a neighbor stealing land or trespassing on the land. Instead, it arose from activities taking place on another person's land that affected the enjoyment of that land.[3]

The law of nuisance was created to stop such bothersome activities or conduct when they unreasonably interfered either with the rights of other private landowners (i.e., private nuisance) or with the rights of the general public (i.e., public nuisance)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance_in_English_law#Public_nuisance

EDIT: Okay, found a news article that mentions what they're being investigated for:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/four-arrested-uk-projecting-photos-trump-epstein-windsor-castle-rcna231804

Thames Valley Police said in a statement Tuesday night that they arrested four adults “on suspicion of malicious communications following a public stunt in Windsor.” The police added they will conduct an investigation into the incident, and that all four people arrested remain in custody.

Probably this law, though it doesn't sound to me, on the face of it, like it'd qualify:

Malicious Communications Act 1988

It addresses communications "in electronic form", but I don't think that in the everyday sense of the word, a projection would count.

EDIT2: I also wouldn't be terribly surprised if they don't wind up with this actually going anywhere, and just wanted some sort of legal rationale to make them stop it for the moment.