Felt like I was having a déjà vu when watching Tom Scott’s latest video (https://youtu.be/TFpzps-DCb0) but I dug a bit deep to find where I read it. He spoke about the same thing!

This was a problem on reddit too. Anyone could create accounts - heck, I had 8 accounts:

one main, one alt, one “professional” (linked publicly on my website), and five for my bots (whose accounts were optimistically created, but were never properly run). I had all 8 accounts signed in on my third-party app and I could easily manipulate votes on the posts I posted.

I feel like this is what happened when you’d see posts with hundreds / thousands of upvotes but had only 20-ish comments.

There needs to be a better way to solve this, but I’m unsure if we truly can solve this. Botnets are a problem across all social media (my undergrad thesis many years ago was detecting botnets on Reddit using Graph Neural Networks).

Fwiw, I have only one Lemmy account.

That’s genuinely very cool. I wonder how many of them are duplicates (same link across different communities on different servers). Regardless, I’m pretty happy that it appears that Lemmy is quite active. It really does feel like reddit when you see posts with hundreds or even thousands of upvotes.

Huge thanks to the lemmy devs and instance admins.

You’re right that it’s probably easier (and more reliable) to call the city’s emergency number. At that time, I knew that the Twitter account existed and had nearly-realtime emergency updates which is why I chose to check there. I’ll check the city’s website now to bookmark it for later - thanks for that idea :)

Was it hard to get this standardized back in the good ol’ days?

Do you think it would be as easy to do it now? If not, what challenges and hurdles would a RFC have to overcome?

The last thing I know that was pretty “significant” is the GNU Terry Pratchett header (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett#Death) and that was a community effort.

Batman Begins.

https://youtu.be/LstIgtkEe50

Finally. The other day while I was on a call with my girlfriend, she received an emergency alert on her phone (in the US) and wasn’t able to read it / find the message for some reason. Fearing the worst, I rushed to the city’s emergency Twitter account to see any updates, only for twitter to ask me to f-ing log in.

What a terrible feeling to have while going to the password manager, hands trembling with fear trying to sign in to the bloody & now-bastardized platform. Thankfully, it was just something related to bad weather.

Oh man, this is something I definitely hope to never see again. I’m so tired of the unbelievable TIFUs, AITAs, and/or OffMyChests with thousands of upvotes that had obviously-fake stories.

The worst one (in recent history) was that TIFU with the student who slept with their professor’s daughter.

Part 1: https://libreddit.de/r/tifu/comments/1379pge/tifu_by_hooking_up_with_professors_daughter/

Part 2: https://libreddit.de/r/tifu/comments/137u9bk/tifupdate_by_hooking_up_with_professors_daughter/

Part 3: https://libreddit.de/r/tifu/comments/1391lmj/tifupdate_i_cuckolded_my_professor/

I hope this kind of bullshit never happens here.