The wording of the title made it sound like authorities forced them to close. In this case the manager/owner decided to shut down because it was too hot for their own staff, so kudos to them.

Missed opportunity to drink from the Starbucks cup.

As a corollary, clutter expands beyond the confines of its container, given time.

Grand Moth

Put your seat back, you’ll get more room.

I wonder about them using terms like “oligarchy” and “fascism”. Is that going to work with the swing voters or republican base? Do they know what those words means or does it sound too much like the academic elite using fancy words they don’t understand?

Disappointing. If NPR wants to clickbait their titles, they should at least name the disease so it will maybe have some impact. “Measles outbreak kills 500 children”

Makes sense, it’s a day that ends with Y

For only $99.99/month!

Schwing!

The comments on that article are quite… Something.

That doesn’t change the issue here.

Keep in mind the best answer is still the size. The rest is my opinion.

Besides the obvious size difference already discussed, the biggest causes of Lemmy feeling like a ghost town, are the splitting up of communities, both by instance and by niche, and the lack of common defaults across instances.

The first split is inherent to the design but could be solved (I think I saw a proposal for aggregating like communities from different instances that aren’t defederated), but I don’t know what the interest level is.

I feel like the second is a mental issue for everyone coming from the likes of Reddit. With the number of people here and the amount of activity you’d see, people should be much more forgiving of “off topic” posts in any given community. I’m guilty of it too, so this isn’t meant to be a slight. But the answer to someone asking what community they should post in for some niche topic shouldn’t be “create one”. It should be “post in a popular related community, they’ll be fine with it”. I could go on about the nuances, but hopefully my point is clear: hardly any communities (if any) on Lemmy are big and active enough at this point to warrant gatekeeping to keep the noise level down.

The last one would be easier if there was a solution to the first one, but having five or six communities that everyone who joins Lemmy is subscribed to by default would go a long way to making this place feel busier.

Theatres hate it when OP takes a seat.

“Better” can be interpreted in more than one way. They’re better at exerting control without violently changing regimes. They’re better at establishing their own infrastructure and ingratiating themselves to the locals (or local governments). Now, I don’t know that everyone loves them there (I heard many side comments from locals about China) but it’s not like they’re scrambling for the Americans, British, or French to come back and overtly oppress them again.

Yeah… <blinks>

Well how’s it untypical?

I believe if there is a heaven and I end up there, I’ll be surrounded by computers I can play with on end without anyone bothering me. If there’s a hell and I end up there, I’ll be surrounded by people who need help with their computer.

Is people.