I’m almost sure.

Your typical instance only defeds another as a last case scenario, due to deep divergences or because of blatantly shitty admin or user behaviour. But, past that, they’re still willing to let some shit to go through - because if you defederate too many other instances, with no good reason, you’re only hurting yourself.

That’s simply not enough to create those “corners”. Specially when all this “nerds vs. normies*” thing is all about depth - for example the normie wants some privacy, but the nerd goes all in, but they still care about the same resources.

*I hate this word but it’s convenient here.

That’s one of my cats.

The other wants to be cuddled 25h/day.

I get what you say, and I agree; but when it comes to the average user I wonder if they’ll even get it. They don’t think on the grounds of a “protocol” or a “platform”, it used to be “site” and now “app”. They do it even with email, of all things, even if it’s one of the oldest cross-platform protocols out there!

They tolerate each other enough to get each into a corner and not interact much.

And yet that is not what we see in the Fediverse. Those “corners” don’t exist here.

The people here and their attitude towards people who don’t agree with them are the problem.

And that’s a structural problem. The ActivityPub was supposed to allow both the “average person” and the “nerd” to coexist in the same platform, without one getting too much in the way of the other; it doesn’t.

I’m not sure on a good solution for that.

It’s all fun and games until venture capital kicks in, and exploits that central user data store to further centralise the rest of the network. Even then yes, I think that Mastodon has a lot to learn with Bluesky, on how to make user experience smoother.

I’d gladly post Batatinha’s pics if he was my dog, but my cousin would probably get annoyed, it’s a privacy matter.

But, basically: picture a huge dog. By “huge” I mean, he probably weights 40kg or so. Mostly black, with some tan; it doesn’t follow the same pattern as the Rottweiler or the German shepherd, it’s different. Short hair, floppy ears. Rather intimidating, I wouldn’t go anywhere close to that dog without my uncle or my cousin nearby.

My relatives do it all the time. On purpose. Cue to

• Átila - named after Attila the Hun.
• Batatinha - roughly “little potato”.

Guess who’s the toy poodle and who’s the shepweiler.

Federation woes?

Your comment has a different take though, and adding value to the discussion, it isn’t just the same as I said. Both are complementary.

Even more accurately: it’s bullshit.

“Lie” implies that the person knows the truth and is deliberately saying something that conflicts with it. However the sort of people who spread misinfo doesn’t really care about what’s true or false, they only care about what further reinforces their claims or not.

AI sheep.

When it comes to how people feel about AI translation, there is a definite distinction between utility and craft. Few object to using AI in the same way as a dictionary, to discern meaning. But translators, of course, do much more than that. As Dawson puts it: “These writers are artists in their own right.”

That’s basically my experience.

LLMs are useful for translation in three situations:

• declension/conjugation table - faster than checking a dictionary
• listing potential translations for a word or expression
• a second row of spell/grammar-proofing, just to catch issues that you didn’t

Past that, LLM-based translations are a sea of slop: they screw up with the tone and style, add stuff not present in the original, repeat sentences, remove critical bits, pick unsuitable synonyms, so goes on. All the bloody time.

And if you’re handling dialogue, they will fuck it up even in shorter excerpts, by making all characters sound the same.

Predictable outcome for anyone not wallowing in wishful belief.

The image is simplifying it, but Italian borrowed the word from another Romance language, called Venetian. Latin sclauus /'skla.wus/ “slave, serf, servant” → Venetian scia(v)o /'stʃa(v)o/ “slave”→“bye”. Then Italian borrowed it from Venetian, and it ended as ciao /tʃao/ because Italian hates that /stʃ/ cluster.

The meaning evolved this way because of mediaeval humility expressions, like “mi so’ sciavo vostro”. It means literally “I’m your servant”, and it implies that I’m eager to fulfil some request that you might have.

A similar expression pops up in Southern German; see servus.

Sorry! I have a tendency to shift to technical vocab midtext, so it’s likely my fault.

I’ll use the comment to clarify some terms:

• Proto-Germanic: the ancestor of English, German, Icelandic, Gothic, etc. Spoken from 500 BCE to 200 CE.
• Proto-Celtic: the ancestor of Irish, Welsh, Gaulish, etc. Spoken from 1300 BCE to 800 BCE.
• Proto-Italic: the ancestor of Latin, Umbrian, Faliscan etc. Spoken around 1000 BCE. (Since it’s Latin’s ancestor it’s also the ancestor of every Romance language, kind of like their grandmother.)
• Sanskrit: one of “the big five” languages of the Old World, spoken in Indian subcontinent. Attested as early as 1500 BCE. Not quite Hindi’s ancestor, but close enough.
• Proto-Indo-European: ancestor of all languages that I mentioned above. And a lot more.
• If it’s written ⟨like this⟩, I’m referring to the spelling. If it’s written /laɪk ðɪs/, I’m referring to the phonemes (basic units of the spoken language). The symbols used are IPA, for a full list check this. For example /t͡ʃ/ is as in ⟨chill⟩, /θ/ is as in ⟨think⟩, /kʷ/ is as in ⟨queen⟩ but Latin handles it as a single unit, etc.
• Cognate: a word with a true common origin. Basically they used to be the same word but time happened and each language got its own version of the word.
• Affix - something that you plop into a word to make a new word. For example the un- and the -ing in ⟨undoing⟩ are two affixes.
• Trennbare verb - I wrote it half asleep and couldn’t remember the English term for this sort of verb. It’s “phrasal verb” (a verb where the preposition is part of the verb). Gonna fix it. Latin used something similar, but instead of letting the preposition roam free as in English/German it glued the preposition to the word, the de- in ⟨desertum⟩ is an example of that.
• feminine ending - in the case of Egyptian it’s a suffix (-t) that appears in a few words, like that “dšrt”. In this case it’s mostly for grammatical purposes, and not plopping it makes you sound like “then who was phone?”, but in Egyptian instead.

If anything else is unclear feel free to ask away!

Yesterday morning, the side neighbour’s cat decided to take a walk on my front yard. Kika saw it and got furious, as someone invaded her territory, she had to mark it… and so she did. By peeing on Siegfrieda’s scratching plank.

The plank was stinking so I had to dismantle it, wash the rope, and the weather is wet so it takes a while to dry. Frieda is trying to scratch everything and a bit more, including my leg.

On another matter, my other neighbour’s cat passed away. She was 20 already. May the kitty rest in peace, she always greeted me when I visited them.

Ah, I finally got a picture of Frieda’s cute fang:

This is the reason why I often call her “meine Orkin” (my she-orc).

I also wonder if some of these are actually false cognates, or if there is a much earlier common origin with false associations that came afterwards

Common but old origin tends to make words diverge over time. Compare for example:

All those eight are true cognates, they’re all from Proto-Indo-European *pénkʷe. But if you look only at the modern stuff, those four look nothing like each other - and yet their [near-]ancestors (the other four) resemble each other a bit better, Latin and Proto-Celtic for example used almost the same word.

They also get even more similar if you know a few common sound changes, like:

• Proto-Italic (Latin’s ancestor) changed PIE *p into /kʷ/ if there was another /kʷ/ nearby
• Proto-Germanic changed PIE *p into *f (Grimm’s Law)

In the meantime, false cognates - like the ones mentioned by the OP - are often similar now, but once you dig into their past they look less and less like each other, the opposite of the above.

They also often rely on affixes that we know to be unrelated. For example, let’s dig a bit into the first pair, desert/deshret:

• Latin ⟨deserō⟩ “I desert, I abandon [unseeded], I part away” - that de- is always found in verbs with movement from something, or undoing something. It’s roughly like English “away” in trennbare phrasal verbs like ⟨part away⟩, ⟨explain away⟩, ⟨go away⟩
• Egyptian ⟨dšrt⟩* “the red” - the ending -t is a feminine ending, like Spanish -a. And the word isn’t even ⟨deshret⟩ in Egyptian, it’s more like /ˈtʼaʃɾat/

Suddenly our comparison isn’t even between ⟨desert⟩ and ⟨deshret⟩, but rather between /seɾo:/ and /ˈtʼaʃɾa/. They… don’t look similar at all.

* see here for the word in hieroglyphs.

Other bits of info:

• ⟨shark⟩ - potentially a borrowing from German ⟨Schurke⟩ scoundrel. Think on loan sharks, for example, those people who chase you over and over; apply the same meaning to a fish and you got a predator, a shark fish. Note that the old name of the fish (dogfish) also hints the same behaviour.
• Turkish ⟨kayık⟩ - the word is attested as ⟨qayğıq⟩ in Khaqani Turkic. I might be wrong but I think that the -yık (Old Turkic “guk”) forms adjectives, as the Azeri cognates that I’ve found using this suffix are mostly adjectives; see qıyıq, ayıq, sayıq. Kind of tempting to interpret it etymologically as something like “sliding boat”, with the “boat” part being eventually omitted.

My concerns about the “immigration leftover” is not their opposing views, but their behaviour. I don’t want to deal with the “waaah the world revolves around my belly, why are you too stupid to understand that?” crowds and their incessant whining.

The drop is slowing down considerably:

And given that March was a peak, I’m tempted to interpret it as newbies not sticking around. I think that it’ll plateau around 40k users, then provided that the conditions remain the same it won’t increase or decrease.

That’s why I say that it’s stable - the core userbase will likely stick around.

That said, these numbers may particularly be bad, e.g. if anyone left Lemmy and went to Mbin and/or PieFed, then I think they would not be counted in those charts?

They wouldn’t be counted but I don’t think that this introduces a lot of inaccuracy. Mbin has 1.7k MAUs, and PieFed has 104.

The number of instances dropping is far more concerning IMO. It means that smaller instances have a hard time becoming sustainable.

I agree with you that both things have their upsides; and frankly, I don’t even think that we should be pandering to the immigration leftover wallowing in Reddit. Growth is good, but growth should never come at the expense of the community that you’re trying to grow.

However I feel like those points help to explain why the “lol lmao” crowds hate this place.