Bear necessities you say? All that a modern bear needs is a pic-a-nic basket and a trusty sidekick.

The thing is though, with traditional forums you get a LOT of controls for filtering out the kind of users who post such content. For instance, most forums won’t even let you post until you complete an interactive tutorial first (reading the rules and replying to a bot indicating you’ve understood them etc).

And then, you can have various levels of restrictions, eg, someone with less than 100 posts, or an account less than a month old may not be able to post any links or images etc. Also, you can have a trust system on some forums, where a mod can mark your account as trusted or verified, granting you further rights. You can even make it so that a manual moderator approval is required, before image posting rights are granted. In this instance, a mod would review your posting history and ensure that your posts genuinely contributed to the community and you’re unlikely to be a troll/karma farmer account etc.

So, short of accounts getting compromised/hacked, it’s very difficult to have this sort of stuff happen on a traditional forum.

I used to be a mod on a couple of popular forums back in the day, and I even ran my own community for a few years (using Invision Power Board), and never once have I had to deal with such content.

The fact is Lemmy is woefully inadequate in it’s current state to deal with such content, and there are definitely better options out there. My heart goes out to @Chris and the staff for having to deal with this stuff, and I really hope that this drives the Beehaw team to move away from Lemmy ASAP.

In the meantime, I reckon some drastic actions would need to be taken, such as disabling new user registrations and stopping all federation completely, until the new community is ready.

The Reddit-style presentation of topics and ranking comments isn’t really conducive to lengthy, quality discussions that persist over a period of time. The Reddit-style works for following current events and posting links to new things etc, but as a result, old topics - topics even a couple of days old - falls off the engagement radar. Once it’s gone from the front page, it’s gone from people’s consciousness. This is bad for a small community with few posts that value quality of discussions over blind sharing of links. For instance, say I create a topic called “share your favorite vegan recipes” - I may get some replies in the first couple of days, but then the topic will fall off the frontpage and completely die. This is further exacerbated by the voting system. On Reddit/Lemmy, topics and comments which have a higher number of votes get more visibility, and this creates two issues - one is it encourages group think and creates an echo chamber, the other is that it drowns out less popular topics or comments. This sort of intentional drowning of posts and comments actually may be a good thing - and even necessary - on high-userbase systems like Reddit, where a single thread could have thousands of comments - but it works against low-traffic communities like Beehaw, where every comment is valuable (unless it’s off-topic/spam etc of course).

Whereas in a traditional forum:

• A topic gets bumped to the top when someone posts a comment, which encourages threads to live longer
• There’s not as much importance given to the “newness” of a post
• The lack of votes on a topic would give equal importance to all topics
• The lack of votes on comments would encourage people to actually chime in if they agree or disagree with a comment, instead of just blindly voting
• Forums also allow you to show a categorized homepage, where you can have several sub-forums appear on the homepage all at once. This is a better approach than blindly unifying the entire feed in one page, because this allows threads in low-traffic subs to keep their visibility and compete against high-traffic subs. For instance, consider a current news sub which may get a lot of posts ever single day, vs a niche sub such as gardening. With a unified feed, you’d almost never see posts from a gardening sub, unless you went into that sub.

With all the above reasons, forums are therefore more conducive for encouraging discussions, over a place which simply acts like a feed aggregator. Traditional forums are the solution to the doomscrolling issues that plague modern social media. Plus, they offer better moderation tools, with better granular permissions granted to mods, so you could grant various levels of access. Also, you can place several restrictions on users to reduce spam, for instance, you could grant a user rights to post a topic only after they’ve read all the rules, and maybe participated in a quiz or something. You could grant additional rights to people who’ve gotten a certain number posts in their bag. You could have a “trusted poster” system where a user could have mod-like abilities. There’s so many ways a forum is a lot more flexible than a system like Lemmy.

So overall, I think Beehaw’s ethos and vision would align better with a traditional forum, over a feed-aggregator style forum like Lemmy.

Would be cool if Beehaw switched to old school forums, like Invision or phpBB. Invision have now moved to a hosted forum model, so you don’t need any technical knowledge to set it up.

My favorite part of that site was discovering this site: https://simone.computer/#/webdesktops

I already knew about Windows 93 and 96, but didn’t know there were so many of them out there!

That’s a nice thought, but personally, I’m not a big fan of creating unnecessary waste - even if it’s recyclable. After all, it takes a lot of water to recycle paper/cardboard, and for such a small piece of cardboard, it’s more than likely that it’ll just end up in the landfill instead of even being recycled.

Personally, I think just wishing or greeting someone can achieve the same thing and still make a big difference. When I moved here, people used to wish me “good morning” if I crossed paths with them during a morning jog, and that was such a huge mood booster for me (back where I lived previously, people would just ignore or even completely avoid you if they saw you across the street). I also make it a point to greet and thank my bus driver every time I catch the bus, which can be a very thankless job, and I’d like to believe it helps.

Maybe if you want to do something more visual/physical, you could perhaps give them a high-five or a hug? Like hold up a sign saying “FREE HUGS”… although I’m not sure if there would be many takers in this post-covid world. If you want to so something more impactful, I’d recommend checking out some of Improv Everywhere’s videos. Maybe even get in touch with them, to see if there are any agents where you live, and then you guys could organize something big.

I don’t really care about politics, so I don’t watch/read mainstream news. For local news, I usually come across it it via local subs/chat groups/people, but I don’t go actively looking for it. For everything else, I use various news reader apps, all tuned to deliver my main interests (none of which contain any anxiety inducing stuff).

As for dealing with anxiety in general, over the years I’ve found a combination of things work for me. I used to have bouts of anxiety in the past and used to blame it on external factors, but really, I was the one to blame for not taking care of my body.

You’ll probably ignore this advice like most people do (I guess people hate to admit they don’t have a healthy lifestyle, or they’re are after a quick fix, or want to blame everyone/everything else but themselves)… But I’ll post this regardless, just in case someone finds it useful:

- Breathe: Anything from taking conscious, steady and calm breaths when you’re feeling anxious, to having a daily morning breathing yoga exercise routine, helps immensely. Check out some articles or YouTube videos on pranayama to start off with.

- Meditate: Meditating anywhere from 10-40 mins daily can reduce stress, boost your mood, improve emotional and mental health.

- Exercise: Pretty self-explanatory, get at least 30 mins per day. Exercise is a massive stress-buster.

- Foods to consume: Make sure you’re eating a balanced diet, in particular, ensure you’re getting enough Magnesium, Zinc, Folafe, Vitamin C and D, to combat anxiety. Bananas in particular are excellent at reducing anxiety because they’re natural beta-blockers - they prevent adrenaline from binding to beta receptors. This slows nerve impulses to the heart and counteracts the effects of adrenaline to keep a lower heart rate and calmer state of mind. Other good foods to have include Asparagus (for Folafe), Berries (for Antioxidants and Vitamin C), and Chamomile tea for extra calming effect. As for Vitamin D, most people in the world are deficient in it, so you may need to take supplements. Check with your doctor or a nutritionist to see how much you need. In fact there’s a ton more nutrients/foods you can (and should consume), all of which have an effect on reducing anxiety, but I won’t list them all here. Eating right is one of the most effective ways to combat anxiety and everyone should spend some time into paying closer attention to what they’re eating.

- Foods to avoid: Avoid, or limit consumption of alcohol and caffeine. If you must consume caffeine, drink in moderation and do not consume any after lunchtime, as that affects your circadian rhythm. Also avoid junk food, sugary drinks, processed foods and excess consumption of salt in general.

- Sleep: If you’re following all of the above strictly, then you shouldn’t have any issues getting quality sleep for 8 hours a day (unless you’ve got other medical issues like sleep apnea, or external disturbances like blue light or noise). Lack of sleep is a big contributor to anxiety (and other health issues), so use a sleep tracker on a fitness band/smartwatch, or an app such as Sleep As Android, to keep an eye on your quality of sleep.

This may all seem like obvious stuff so most folks will ignore this, but if you’re succeptible to anxiety, I sincerely urge you to read the above and take a deep look at your lifestyle. You don’t need pills, you don’t need to block off all social media etc to combat anxiety, nature has given us all all the tools, it’s up to you to use it, and learn to respect and pay attention to your body and mind.

Forget PFAS, a much more concerning issue is micro and nanoplastics, which are far more prevalent - and have even been detected in the air even in places far from civilisation, like polar regions. This shows how widespread they are. No place on earth is safe from micro/nanoplastics.

Nanoplastics permeate living cells and damage DNA, causing everything from minor inflammation to organ failure and cancer.

PFAS is nothing compared to micro/nanoplastics.

Exciting. I miss going to Linux User Group meetings and meeting other OSS enthusiasts and seeing all the cool projects they were working on. Sadly, all our LUGs died out and are no longer a thing in my country, and I suspect it’s the case in many parts of the world.

As I mentioned, I don’t have an issue with people like the woman you mentioned, people who eat meat for survival.

My issue is specifically with people living in an urban environment, who are well-off enough to afford decent food, who claim to care about animals, yet don’t see a problem with eating factory farmed meat, whilst simultaneously having a problem with people in certain countries eating dogs etc and shedding crocodile tears. That’s just double standards, hipocrisy, and cognitive dissonance at its best.

conversations we wouldn’t risk trying to have on reddit, conversations you don’t have people around willing to engage in but would work well here

Ooh, alright you asked for it. If this were Reddit I’d probably be downvoted to hell, but since the website protects me, here goes my controversial opinion:

I find people who describe themselves as “animal lovers” - you know, the kind who’d love to have all sorts of animals as pets if they really could (not just cats and dogs), the kind who love going to the zoo, the kind who’d look at pics/gifs of say cows playing on a grassy field or something and go “awwwww so cute!!!”… and yet have absolutely no problems eating these animals, completely hypocritical. I mean, lying to others is one thing, but how could you lie to yourself, for years? Do they not see the fallacy of their existence? Do they not have a conscience? Do they never stop to think that the cow they’re eating could’ve very well been the very same cow that was in that gif, who’s life was cut short just because people like them have no control over their carnal instincts?

I’ve known a few people like this IRL, and I don’t get them. I genuinely don’t understand how their mind isn’t in a constant state of conflict when they’re either eating an animal or aww’ing over them.

To clarify, I have no problems with people who eat meat in general, especially if it’s for survival. I just don’t get the people who also claim to actually like animals, claim to care about animal rights, claim to care about whether the chicken they’d eat were raised in cruelty-free free-range farms, but also don’t see an issue with killing them.

I really don’t get them. If it were me, my brain would self-implode. My conscience would kill me, I’d lose my appetite. Which is exactly what happened to me as a little kid, when I walked past a butcher store and saw a chicken getting killed and it suddenly struck me where meat came from and what it really was - I felt disgusted, and lost my appetite for life. I just wonder why these so called “animal lovers” have yet to go thru that phase, why they didn’t feel the way I did and continue to ignore their conflicting feelings.

Just curious, do you dislike cooking? Or are you really short on time every day? Because if you don’t hate cooking, and you love eating, then there’s no reason not to just cook fresh and something different daily. If time is an issue, then there are plenty of quick recipes with simple ingredients that you can use to whip up a dish in no time at all - Jamie Oliver has a few books and shows on this (15 Minute Meals / 5 Ingredients – Quick & Easy Food etc), if you need some inspiration.

Once you get into the habit of cooking fresh daily, then you won’t really differentiate between weekends and weekdays. Instead, you may even see weekends as a chance to cook those elaborate and fancy dishes you don’t have the time for during the weekends, or experiment with a new cuisine or even a cooking technique that you haven’t employed before.

Having the right gear also helps save a lot of time, such as a pressure cooker or an instant pot, an air fryer etc. Try and get your kitchen equipped with all the essentials, optimize the way you organize and access your ingredients, spices etc. Watch a few cooking shows like MasterChef to get ideas on how to streamline your kitchen and workbench, how to multi-task etc to get things done in the shortest possible time.