Not a feat of engineering, a feat of marketing

Oh, the global economy is going to break regardless. China is physically and economically collapsing right now, and it’s going to have huge knock-on effects

Meanwhile, we still don’t even have a consensus that long COVID is a thing. I definitely feel slightly foggier long after the fact, it seems to me that it might be less about COVID doing something special - maybe all illnesses chip away at long-term health, and COVID put a lot of people in a state much worse than the flu and got us thinking about it.

Or maybe COVID has unique mechanisms, but it seems to me there’s an assumption - why do we assume that once we recover, we get all the way better? If anything, I think it might be the opposite - there’s plenty of people in my life who never felt the same after getting an illness, but no one talks about it in a unified enough way to give it a name

Because immunity varies by disease.

Chicken pox? Pretty much one and done. COVID? Falls off rapidly after 3 months, whether you catch it or get the vaccine

Plus, every mutation is a dice roll on how much existing immunity will apply. It could be exactly the same as the last strain, or the old immunity might not help at all

More than that - it would strain the nascent communities

Already we’ve started to see it with defederation - admins don’t truly grasp the level of seriousness it represents, and are using it as a mod tool. It’s one thing to use it against bots and malicious nodes, it’s another to use it like a ban hammer

Plus, if you go on different servers, the experience is like a different site. Sh.itjust.works feels like shitpost central (not a criticism), lemmy.world feels like Reddit from a decade ago, lemmynsfw.com feels like a porn site built for tens of thousands and used by dozens.

I think it’s great - half the draw of the fediverse is finding a new home, soon I’m going to start trying out some small servers and hopefully get to know some people alongside my accounts replacing the endless posts of Reddit (but with better quality IMO)

If a big wave comes all at once, it’ll change the culture overnight. Small servers might close registration to preserve what they have, bigger ones might grow into it, but it also might be enough people to give the entire fediverse the feel of Reddit refugees

Once the culture becomes more stable, we’re more likely to teach them the Lemmy way rather than rebuilding Reddit… It’ll change no matter what as it grows, but the more gradual and organic the growth the healthier the community

My big thought is this: one bot-infested instance could get anyone up to infinite “karma”. So, direct “karma” doesn’t work.

Now, you could do some simple stats, and be like “how many lemming’s worth of karma do you have, taking an instance’s active population divided by your share of ‘karma’”.

IDK - I like stupid internet points. I never cared how much other people had of them, but it’s fun to watch mine go up. It’s gamification in the most pure state - quantifying something to make it more pleasurable

I think it’s best they remain pointless, and someone’s ‘karma’ only appear when you click on their profile… but it’d be a shame if there was no way to earn them. Even if you received a total per-server, it’s just fun