Apologies if you took it as judging, that was not my intention. I'm just pointing out they only listen to whatever their authority figure is. The ability to reason about something is not in their toolbox
I feel like it's been like this for about a decade for me
Feels like every year which has passed since about 2015 has left us (as a species) in a worse place than we started. On top of that, so many of the choices we made along the way to make things categorically worse, were very clearly going to go the way they did... and we did them anyway.
Using the word "convince" means you might not fully realise what you're facing.
You can't convince the brainwashed, it's not about what is said, but rather who said it. Unless you're one of the authority figures they take their instructions from, there's nothing you can say to convince them because as far as they're concerned, you're just a lyin' lib'rul Satanist or some other bullshit.
That's kinda a different case than what everyone is referring to when they're talking about this
However, it's an interesting point: do we know those voice actors are being paid the same as if they did the lines all themselves or is this a studio cheaping out on paying actors to do the job?
There might have been a load of actors who turned the job down before they found someone desperate enough for the money or naive enough to not realise it will likely drive down wages for voice actors if this becomes commonplace.
There's no shortage of games that are fun to play, you can just select for studios that don't rely on the Grand Plagiarism Tool to get you to give them money
I'd hope you have more value to your kids than a chunk of money.
Sure money is always helpful, but I'm in no rush for my parents to kick the bucket. I'd rather they run my inheritance down to zero if it meant they got to stick around a bit longer.
Frankly no, don't even take advice directly from research universities unless you're a qualified doctor or have cleared it with one. Just because a paper is written in the same language you speak, does not guarantee you will understand it completely, and you may not even realise you're missing something important.
Your doctor will be able to tell you what is right for your body, a random medical researcher has no idea you even exist. Everyone is different and there are plenty of changes to your lifestyle you can make that could cause problems if they're not right for you.
Fair play, I was more coming from a place of you maybe wanting to do something about that if you're gonna have a button that sends people to a random instance.
I should have said at the start btw, thanks for all the work you guys do
I thought about the ping-instances-from-different-regions, but figured it would be impractical to do this for every country, and would potentially end up hitting false positives/negatives around bot detection tooling such as the cloudflare captcha screen with some instances.
Definitely not a simple one to solve!
NSFW instances are already excluded from the list.
You may have a regression in prod then, I added that point to my comment because I got lemmynsfw at the top of the list on one of my refreshes somehow
I highly doubt the idea for invading Greenland comes from him, but rather the people manipulating him who would perhaps benefit from the instability caused by a war between the US and EU.
I imagine we're one of the main demographics affected by this in terms of Lemmy traffic share, but I'm sure there must be other countries that face similar blocks
The country blocks are tricky [...]
Yeah I had a bit of a think to try and come up with a practical solution that was less of a manual exercise, but I couldn't think of anything simple. The other solution I came up with is much more involved, where Lemmy offers geoblocking as a built-in feature to allow the instances to self-report their geoblocking config in a consistent way.
If it's too impractical/too much of a maintenance burden to solve, we will probably have to live with it, but I wanted to raise it for visibility regardless.
What do you think about renaming the button "Join a server" to "Instance selection wizard" or similar?
So from a UX point of view, I went for the most obvious CTA to get me started from my perspective.
Just had a look again and the quick join is behind the hamburger menu on mobile, so I'd say add a CTA for that of equal prominence next to the wizard CTA.
I'm not a copy guy so I'm not sure what's the best wording to use to make the two options distinct. It needs to offer the "sign me up quick" Vs "I want to customise my choice" user journeys clearly
Brainstorming, perhaps the "just sign me up" button could even take you straight to the sign up page of the random top instance in the list. Perhaps with a self-redirecting interstitial page to let them know where they're going if that's not super old-school
Another semi-related issue, perhaps you want to consider down-weighting nsfw instances in the list too, as I'd guess the average user would probably not otherwise choose one of those as their home instance.
Because I've not looked at it since I signed up 2.5y ago, just went through to see how many clicks to get to a sign up page.
5 clicks is maybe slightly on the "too many" side. Perhaps language selection could be auto selected by browser language and/or default to multi.
Though randomness highlighted a 2nd issue that might not be especially visible. I got Lemmy.zip as my top suggestion so I hit the sign up button and I was greeted by a "blocked in my country because my government are idiots" page. Now I understand why the admins have made that choice, but for a new user who stumbles onto Lemmy by accident, does the 5 clicks and gets greeted by a user journey terminating error page, it's probably going to result in a fair amount of bounce.
Now I know it can't be perfect given instances don't declare by API where they are available, so I guess it would need to be a manually curated list, but maybe a feature to push instances down the list if they're geoblocked in the user's IP country
I mean, patriotism is inherently a fallacy of illusory superiority used by countries to brainwash their citizens into, frankly, accepting less than they deserve. That and it's a pretty smooth entrance in a pipeline toward nationalism and xenophobia
The modern law continues: if Elon says it's good, it is bad; if Elon says it's bad, it's good
So the reason he's come up with is literally just he thinks he'll lose?
That's a very good reason for there to be an election, Donny