Bad news for me, I use youtube a lot with an adblocker and it's essentially ad-free. It's going to be a bad day for me when they start cracking down. It doesn't surprise me, but it's a bummer.

There's a couple reasons why I use subtitles all time. Firstly I'm getting older and can't hear as well with background noise. If my wife is banging around in the kitchen I can't hear dialog from the TV. With subtitles on I don't have to mess with the volume.

Another issue is media producers (TV and film) have this idea they need to blast you out of your chair with sound effects and music. So if you turn up the volume enough to hear the dialog clearly, you're going to get blasted by everything else. Trying to manage that with the volume control is damn near impossible. Interestingly I've noticed "dialog boost" appear on occasion in sound track options from my streaming provider. I use it when the option is there. That kind of indicates a global problem.

An issue related to sound leveling is actors used to come out of theater where they learned to annunciate loudly and clearly. It seems actors don't get proper stage training anymore and now it's okay to mumble and fail to annunciate. A decent director should never allow that.

The wording on those applications would definitely raise a flag for me. They totally sound bot generated.

I've joined a number of instances looking for the best performer, hops, pings, server response. That's what I've been saying in my applications. Interestingly, my first sign-up was on Beehaw before I knew what I doing and they are the only ones that rejected me, about a week after I applied. Made me think, what did I say that was so awful? No biggie I already had some good instances to sign into.

That's pretty significant. Petition them to come here.

That's a good indicator when you find your instance blocked by a lot of other instances. I think the lesson is don't leave low hanging fruit out there.

It actually amazes me there's people out there doing these bot infestations. I mean there is some effort involved. Why go to all the trouble, what's the payoff? And how are they able to find new unadvertised instances so quickly.

Usually it takes a pretty big project to warrant a foundation, think like FreeBSD or Apache. Kbin is still pretty small. They've grown a lot recently like Lemmy, but not near as big. They don't have big development expenses since the project host is free and the developers are all volunteers. I think the devs are running kbin.social as well so that's probably where more of the expense is incurred. Still I'm sure donations are a help even though the project is not particularly expensive.

Yeah doesn't sound good, though pineapple can be good on pizza, might work. Anyway tomato sauce is one of my least favorite foods so I probably wouldn't eat it anyway. I actually love spaghetti, but not with tomato sauce. Gives me indigestion so now I'm averse to it. The one exception is pizza, I mean who doesn't love pizza. For some reason pizza never disagrees with me.

Man I have the in-laws from hell so I know what you're dealing with. Same problem, when they visit it's like non-stop activities and I don't want to spend the whole time with them. They're like supercharged tourists.

Fortunately my wife feels the same way and doesn't force me to participate in every activity. But if I didn't participate in some then like you say, I'd look like an asshole. My wife does what she can to give me space so it's tolerable. I do dread when they come to visit though. It's the polar opposite with my own relatives, we can lounge around and talk for hours in a relaxed way, it's very easy going.

I rely on my wife to provide some insulation, maybe that's something you could ask of your wife. If my wife didn't do that for me I don't know if I could tolerate the in-laws coming to camp out for several days at a time.

You'd need a way to cluster the instance and the software doesn't provide that. You'd have to use some kind of 3rd party solution which would be more expensive than simply upgrading your server. Better to just co-op people into a server upgrade.

This is going to happen a lot as Lemmy grows. There will be more communities with the same name over different instances. Though the full canonical name is the actual name of the community, not just the prefix name. For example !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com and !piracy@lemmy.ml are two different communities with two different names.

There's no federation wide rules about reusing the prefix name of a community. You can have as many repeats as people create. In other words you can't duplicate names on a particular instance, but the entire Fediverse doesn't care because it differentiates by instance name. It's just the nature of how the decentralized architecture works.

I have a number of duplicates I subscribe to and it's transparent when I look at the front page of subscribed communities. However I have to look at each duplicate individually when selecting a community to view. An option to look at communities in groups would be helpful. I think that's a reasonable feature to incorporate. It could be as simple as adding a checkbox to select more than one community to view at a time.

I don't think it will ever be possible to physically merge communities across multiple instances at a base level. It's likely something that exceeds scope of design.

Okay, let me say not blocked. Yes linking is automatic, but if an instance appears in the linked column, it can't appear in the blocked column. You want to check that neither instance is blocked, which is the same as saying both instances are linked.

Further more: what is exactly the purpose of knowing who is blocked by whom?

There's good reason as a regular Lemmy user. To properly interact with a remote community you need the instance of the community linked on your sign-in instance and you need your sign-in instance linked on the remote instance.

For example if I sign in on lemmy.ml and I want to interact with a community local to beehaw.org, I have to go to beehaw.org/instances and check lemmy.ml is linked. Then I have to go to lemmy.ml/instances and check beehaw.org is linked. It's kind of an unruly task with the /instances lists as large as they are so a tool to check that for you is very useful.