Well there’s the dilemma. We all thought Reddit was The Good Place until we realised it was actually The Bad Place. With Lemmy it may depend on your instance.

I think if more people took on tasks like running the communities while educating people the benefits of the fediverse, then we can see a bit more growth.

This is the way - be the change you want to see in the world.

Lemmy isn’t the size of Reddit, so it isn’t at a place where the vast majority of users can just passively consume content.

If there’s a niche for a community then start it. If you want more Mods, keep an eye out for active posters and ask if they want to help. If you are unsure about starting a community or want help from the start (as it might be popular) then start a thread on !fedigrow@lemm.ee. The more active communities, the more likely it is for the next wave of users to stick around and some of them might start new communities.

If you build it they will indeed come and stay.

I wish I was that young!

Their loss, our gain.

Welcome to The Good Place, you won’t look back.

Yeah, that’s tricky - I have Italian DNA matches (although they go back to the late Bronze Age) and my cousin married an Italian woman, so have had a nose around some Italian family trees and they seem to have solid records. I don’t know about Spanish or South American records.

Going by this discussion (warning: it’s on The Bad Place) (see also this discussion), there are good Spanish records but you’d need to talk to someone with expertise on where to look for the specific records you need. It may be worth tracking down Spanish language genealogy sites or try general ones and see who you can find - I have great luck with RootsChat who have a Europe board on their forum (although I was mainly after British help).

It depends on where they were from. If the big repositories don’t have the data (and you have clearly tried them) then:

• The data may have been destroyed or never written down. I am ¾ Irish but landing any of my ancestors in Ireland has been hard. The records burned in 1916 and, in some areas, there are gaps during the Potato Famine when no-one was around to write things down. One of my best DNA matches on my Mum’s side falls foul of the latter as we have matching surnames and know pretty much when and where our connection would be but the parish records just stopped in that period.
• It’s not in English. They are doing their best to fill such gaps but adding translation in can be hard. There are often regional family record offices but they may be in a language you don’t speak (I’m having trouble tracing my sister-in-law’s grandmother who was born in Estonia. I am also helping a friend whose grandfather was born in Malaysia and it is tricky even working out where to look). Scandinavian genealogy tends to be excellent, but you may need access to the “farm books” where the records are kept.
• It’s paywalled elsewhere - Scottish records need you to subscribe to a specific site.
• The names are badly transcribed - the British record keepers clearly struggled with some Irish names especially when being told them by illiterate peasants (possibly not helped by some being in Gaelic). I have one family whose name is written over a dozen different ways and it can be hard piecing it together. The names settle down after a bit (there was a big push for literacy in the late 19th Century) but there are two branches of the family that ended up with two different spellings of their surname.

Or any other issues. Without details it is tricky to point you in any specific direction.

If you hit a wall, try DNA.

You’re a saint, SatansMaggotyCumFart.

Pathetic, I know.

Fucking Belgium is probably paying some troll to post on Lemmy.

I’m open to offers from the Belgian secret services.

Yeah, I’m suspicious of people with high post counts too.

You could try looking back through !horrormovies@lemm.ee but a couple of recent posts:

• The Best Overlooked Horror Movies You Must Stream in October
• 10 Underrated Horror Movies That Are Perfect From Start to Finish

In no particular order, genre shows include:

• Babylon 5
• Firefly
• X-Files
• Fringe
• Buffy/Angel
• The League of Gentlemen
• Dr Who / Torchwood
• True Blood
• Utopia
• Supernatural
• Third Rock
• Ash vs Evil Dead
• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
• Peacemaker
• The Nevers

It’s a long piece (his Coming Storm is worth a listen too) but keeps getting worse:

At some point during the day-long pitching session in Amsterdam, a young man in a grey hoodie slouched on stage. His name was Dryden Brown. He said he wanted to build a new city-state, somewhere on the Mediterranean coast. It would be governed not by a giant state bureaucracy, but on the blockchain, the technology underlying cryptocurrency. Its founding principles would be ideas of “vitality” and “heroic virtue”. He called it Praxis, the Ancient Greek word for “action”. The first citizens of this new nation, he said, would be able to move in in 2026.

…

For now, though, the “Praxis community” exists mainly on the internet. There is a website where you can apply for citizenship. Who, exactly, these citizens are, is unclear. Dryden flashed up another slide with his remote. It was a Pepe meme: the sad-looking cartoon frog that became an “alt-right” mascot during the Trump campaign in 2016.

In this niche world of startup nations, Praxis had a reputation for edginess. They hosted legendary parties: people spoke of candle-lit soirees in giant Manhattan loft spaces, where awkward computer coders mixed with hipster models and figures from the “Dark Enlightenment” – people like the blogger Curtis Yarvin, who advocates a totalitarian future in which the world is ruled by corporate “monarchs”. His ideas are sometimes described as fascist, something he denies.

…

The place was almost empty, with a few Praxis people laying out copies of their magazine around the bar. I flicked through it: expensive, heavy paper; lots of advertisements for seemingly random things: perfume; 3D-printed guns; one for just… milk. Like Pepe the Frog, milk is an internet meme. In “alt-right” circles, posting an icon of a white milk bottle signals white supremacy.

…

Azi said he was excited to be “on the precipice of what I think is the next renaissance”. But before this renaissance, he predicted a “Luddite movement” against new technology that would destroy millions of jobs and monopolise the global economy. The Luddites would fail, Azi said. Yet he predicted that the transition period to what he called the “next stage” of human societal evolution – the “network state” stage – would be violent and “Darwinistic”.

Far from being perturbed by this prospect, Azi seemed excited at the thought that out of the smouldering ashes of democracy, new kings would emerge: corporate dictators ruling over their networked empires.

…

At this point in the film, the screen shows an animated figure pointing a pistol straight at the viewer.

“Contemporary media proclaims that having any ideals is fascist,” the voice continues. “Everything of conviction is fascist.”

Was it an invitation to embrace the label of fascism? This movement seemed to yearn for a specific conception of Western culture - a Nietzschean world in which the fittest survive, where disruption and chaos give birth to greatness.

“Let’s try setting up our own fascist state?”

“It’s been tried and they get a bit genocidey.”

“But has it been tried with blockchain?”

“I’m listening…”

First order of business is to thrash out the subscription model ASAP. Perhaps have tiers hilariously named after the grades of passenger on the Titanic - get steerage right down in the belly of the berg. We’ll then want a meeting about the minimum number of lifeboats we can get away with - possibly making them available in a bidding process.

The Kingdom of Pykrete.

A fucking spook cut-out trafficking mercenaries from Afghanistan to Ukraine

Or just another one of the oddballs, liars and sociopaths who are the focus of the article.

I watch a lot of horror but that managed to unsettle more than anything in a while.

That was my reasoning.

Ahhhh, I didn’t check… Now I feel bad.