It’s a russian Margolin, or some variant. So yes, a .22LR.

Yep, once anyone can download an app on their phone and do something like this without any effort in realtime it’s going to lose its (shock) value fast. It would be like sketching a crude boobs and vagina on someones photo with MS Paint and trying to use that for blackmail or shaming. It would just seem sad and childish.

Practical, but not really equivalent though because of nil punning.

The locking down started with the original MacIntosh (or actually with the Lisa I guess). ISTR they had at least one bit more open period after that, but those have always been the exception.

Wouldn’t it be more correct to say that most Americans also use a messaging app (iMessage). The rest are just stuck with SMS to have compatibility with the iPhone users.

As the iPhone was (is?) not as popular in the Europe as it was (is) in the States that might also be one of the reasons why people here ditched SMS so fast once smartphones got popular.

Join and recommend smaller general instances like lemm.ee, vlemmy.net, and lemmy.one at random instead. Smaller servers have been upgraded for the surge of users too you know

That was basically my logic when I joined lemmy.world a few weeks ago. Oh well…

For years now I have only read ebooks on my phone, so one evening I decided to get back to the habit of reading real books.

So I take my time and carefully pick just the right book, gather some pillows, turn off the lights and lay comfortable on the couch. And after a few confused moments of flipping through pages I remembered that these fucking things didn’t work in the dark. And I really don’t like to read under a bright light anymore so back to reddit it was for that evening.

That said, I think I’ll skip this one, doesn’t sound too comfortable.

This now begs the question for me as a user: Which one do I subscribe to if I want to stay informed? An article on one side could be submitted or gain traction when it does not on the other. But subbing to both could lead to a lot of duplicate articles being fed to me.

Theres nothing stopping the client from offering a different or entirely customizable view to the content.

For example the client could allow user to place those communities under a common News category in their client. Then the client would combine all identical links in the category according to some criteria (e.g same link posted in the same day would count as identical) and either merge the comments or let the user pick which communitys comments to see, or preferably both. So comments section could have a buttons for “Comments at news@beehaw.org”, “Combine comments” etc.

I think it should be possible to build a client that hides most of the details about different instances and such so it would function almost the same as traditional RSS readers.

I don’t know, Reddit and Lemmy differ from common social media platforms (I wouldn’t really call Reddit style forums social media anyway) in that they are structured around different topics/categories and threads and in that way are closer to earlier newsgroups, bbs’s, forums and such. So the main concepts aren’t really that new and weird, we have had subforums, topics, groups, channels and such for decades now.

There are probably better solutions but I guess simplest way would be to solve that at the client end?

Give users the option to merge community views from different instances (maybe too much hassle for the average user), have the client do it automatically for some specified communities, or have a mechanism by which the communities can hint the client to merge their content with specific “friend” communities.

From users POV the last option would be the easiest (but it should be possible to opt out of it or customize the behaviour). To prevent trolling and harassment the merging would require an authentication from all participating communities. That doesn’t prevent multiple posts on the same subject but if majority of users see the same combined content the likelihood of double posts decreases. It would still spread the load between instances, and if they want the different instances could specialize on different aspects of the subject.

Just a thought. I don’t know if it makes any sense from technical point, maybe it would be easy to implement without any changes on the underlying protocols or maybe it would require some ugly kludges and would just overcomplicate everything or is something not many people would even need or want.