Sadly, there's just not a critical mass of users in most of the communities I'm interested in. I pop in here every once in a while to see what's going on, but it's currently lacking the diversity of content that you get on Reddit. I'm still rooting for it to succeed.

I have a feeling this was "inspired" by that original video. Uses the same $100,000 increments + the example of how little you would notice buying a Lamborghini

Exactly. Keeping our platform as open as possible helps us to grow as a community.

If you hate Meta and love Lemmy, the best thing to do is to federate with them. We stand to benefit far more from their massive user base they are from our tiny one.

I honestly don't understand the benefit of defederating. The argument seems to boil down to "Meta bad".

The thing is, we're not doing much to hurt Meta by defederating -- they're far too big to care. On the other hand, by silo-ing ourselves off as a tiny community, we're actually just preventing our own potential growth.

How does Meta do a "takeover of the fediverse"? The whole design of the fediverse prevents it from being controlled by any single entity.

Yeah, just like big companies like Google use email protocols with Gmail. It's actually good for adoption. The alternative is that FB uses its own proprietary and competing protocol, making everything more fragmented.

Inexperienced players like bringing the queen out early because it's a powerful piece -- you can attack many things with it, and maybe even set up a quick checkmate.

As you get more experienced, you realize that it's usually foolish to expose the queen too early. You are giving your opponents the chance to develop their pieces with tempo by making theats against your queen, and while you are busy moving her around, you are failing to develop any of your own pieces.

For example, in the above position, you have all your pieces out and are almost ready to castle. White doesn't have a single piece out, except for the Queen. The initiative you have is worth more than a pawn, practically speaking.

That's all true. I do also think that there needs to be a certain amount of built-in stability in order for federated communities to grow. People are less likely to stick around if there is a high risk that their favorite communities becomes fractured into isolated instances.

Interesting. It seems like dubious sharp lines, like the Englund gambit, lead to the shortest games. If you don't know what you're doing, you can easily go wrong. But if you know the refutation, your opponent quickly gets a losing position as well.

Neat!

I feel bad for the Titanic expert on board. His love for the Titanic probably clouded his judgment about how unsafe the whole operation was.

If the other passengers were aware of all the red flags with the sub, they'd all be terrified. It was just a matter of time before that death trap claimed its victims.