I only see a couple of the most recent posts, but the number 2K seems to indicate that there are a lot more that it just is not showing me.

By contrast, I felt like looking at pictures of galaxies right now, so I went over to https://astrodon.social/tags/galaxies, and behold–look at all of them! So easy!

In fact, maybe the lesson here is that I should just give up on Pixelfed and use Mastadon for discovering cool things to look at in my downtime.

I just go to the web site, e.g. https://lemmy.sdf.org/.

The thing that I don’t get is that it seems like this should be a solved problem, because I can visit any Mastadon instance and see the content there just fine. Rather, Pixelfed seems to have gone out of its way to construct an artificial wall that prevents people from doing this.

But what if I want to be on a small instance or even self-host? Then I cannot see any potentially appealing hashtags because I do not start with a large library of locally downloaded content.

Yeah, I have to say that Lemmy has been a pretty great experience so far! 😀

ONE OF US!

ONE OF US!

ONE OF US!

But if a hashtag has not made its way over to my instance, then it effectively does not exist to me. Even if I do see it show up and decide I want to see more content related to it, if said content has not ever made its way over to my instance then I am still left out. The great thing about being able about able to check out what is on other instances is that I am no longer restricted to whatever the people on my instance are interested in.

This a completely different experience from Lemmy, where I was immediately able to go to a bunch of different instances, look through their communities, and go: “I want to subscribe to this one, this one, and this one!”

People are not generally as self-reflective as you might think; when someone settles upon a core belief, they tend to stick with it for the rest of their lives, with any challenge to it being treated as a threat rather than as a potential opportunity for growth. You might think that when a core belief is completely wrong and leads to disastrous negative consequences that this might at be enough to lead someone to give it up, but strangely the mind does not actually work this way.

(I mean, I am not saying that these people are not also evil and/or oily snakes, but I think that there is value in observing the mental fallacies at work in others so that we can better spot them at work in ourselves, since our own mind is the one thing that we have at least some limited control over.)

Clarification: it is actually The Ten MM Socket.

(In Middle Earth they do not exactly have machine shops, so they were only able to make one of them.)