Even basic recycling of things like plastics is not done well.

Government using contractors as part of the system is fine, but not having a system at all seems to be the problem. Government should at the very least be setting up effective frameworks for management, recycling and disposal of all types of waste. Instead they set up a few guidelines and leave it to “market forces” and wonder why we end up with dodgy systems geared towards profit for company owners at the expense of the health and safety of the general public and the workers involved in the industry.

In the past decade or so in Victoria alone there have been: warehouses full of soft plastic being stockpiled, warehouses full of contaminated “mixed recycling” being stockpiled, warehouses full of toxic chemicals stockpiled and being stored incorrectly, a massive property being used as an illegal dump for huge volumes of toxic waste being secretly buried, an old landfill site leaking dangerous levels of methane into houses in a nearby housing estate

These are just the ones that were big enough to be in the media that I can remember off the top of my head. This is what “market forces” and weak regulations get us

I have about three possums per square metre where I am. I hear them carousing across the roof nightly, one lives (and raises baby possums) in the blocked off chimney in the bedroom, and I regualrly hear them disputing territory in the back yard. I recently lost a staring competition with a possum sitting on the fence outside my kitchen window. I’ve also had a possum come inside the house on three separate occasions.

I like possums in general, but I’d be very happy to have a few less of them around, I’m completely outnumbered and the garden suffers from their nibbling as well.

It would be nice if you could have more than one category of bot. There is a huge difference between a bot which makes regular posts like daily threads which are part of the organisational structure of a group and bots which crawl through content to make replies, reposts etc. Even just a difference between general bots and ones which are also moderators of the group would help.

I chose to not label the bot I use to create daily posts, not because I want to stop people being able to filter it out (if they want to they can just block the bot easily enough), but because I don’t want to remove the ability of people in my group to filter other bots. Given that the group consists almost entirely of chat in automatically posted daily threads by marking the bot as a bot I would be effectively forcing people to chose between participating in the group and blocking more general bots.

I did the GardenSafe one earlier this year. It also gives you a report on the composition of your soil, which confirmed my own soil analysis I did in the gardening course I am doing which was nice. Also confirmed no contaminants to be concerned about which is nice to know.

It is a mystery. All I know is that generations of possums have been raised in my blocked off fireplace without drowning, and there is no sign of any moisture coming from the fireplace to the inside of the house. At this point I’m just assuming there is an invisible force field that keeps rain out but not possums.

If someone refuses to clean up after themselves I stop inviting them to my house.

I have a brief description of what the group is about, then links to posts containing the complete rules/guidelines, FAQs and discussion posts, and a feedback and suggestions post. The posts (except for feedback) is locked to users so they are for reference only.

Putting them in seperate posts allows me to add more information without overwhelming the sidebar, and I am slowly adding information to the FAQs etc so it becomes an ongoing information reference - it may end up being copied into a Wiki or similar at some point.

It is not my local feed that concerns me, it is the fact that we will become part of theirs. It will be like when a post is popular enough to make it onto the front page of Reddit - suddenly a post that was crafted for a local community, with users that have a shared culture and background, becomes exposed to a random audience including trolls and bullies who take 2 seconds to judge it and have no barrier to putting on their own comment and starting a pile on.

I think that is a commonly espoused but problematic philosophy. It always sounds inclusing and like the morally right path, but it actually puts all of the onus one one party to educate the other, and none on people to educate themselves. Which in practice gives all of the power to one group and the responsibility to the other. Why should we educate Meta users? They have access to the internet, to the same information all of us do. They can educate themselves.

Putting out more information about how the Fediverse works is a great thing to do, but Meta users are not some gated community that we can only interact with by joining it. All of the content here is visible to anyone and if they want to participate they just need to create an account, it is not a big ask. The issue is not “do we want to interact with these people” because they are not exclusive groups, many of their users are users here too. The issue is whether we want to automatically allow a Meta group’s users a passport to act freely in our communities.

I feel that the large number of users is a problem, not an asset. What makes a platform good is the engagement level of the users, not the volume. A user who does not want to engage enough to create an account is not likely to be engaged enough to add significant value.

I moved away from Reddit because I don’t want to be part of one monolithic site, I want to be engaged with a smaller group that has more creative energy. There is no exclusivity clause that prevents people from using both sites and accessing all the content, but having them federated will lead to homogonisation and ultimately destroy what makes this site different. To extend the milk metaphor, we are the cream, mixing us in with the milk will make it richer, but destroy us.

I can’t speak for what the guidelines allow, but my take is that it is something that should be handled at the instance level. Lobby to have them defederated, and if they are not it is time to look at moving to another instance.

If you are still looking for this answer, you probably just need to go into the post rather than clicking on the main page, there will be more options once the page is open. Although I had a glitch on one of my sites where most of the options disappeared, so if it could also be a bug.

From the Lemmy documentation

“Admins and moderators are organized in a hierarchy, where the user who is listed first has the power to remove admins or mods who are listed later.” Otherwise all the permissions are the same.