pokemaster787

Interesting, I know personally one of my concerns with self-hosting an individual Lemmy instance (after losing my first account to the Vlemmy.net shutdown) was the threat of being held legally responsible for things cached on the server. Say someone uploads something illegal and my server caches it. Seeing it as an option to turn that off is nice, and for an instance only meant to be used by one person I'd imagine caching won't have a huge impact on load times

We can if we tear up most of the cities and small towns that exist today, like I said.

The cost-benefit of doing so.... takes a long time to pay off (if ever) and forcefully dislocating people like that generally isn't popular. Public transit would be great, but the argument needs to be a lot more realistic to how we retrofit public transit for our existing cities, and focusing future growth on making it compatible with public transit. It's not realistic to say "We just need more public transit, Europe has it figured out" when our cities and towns are laid out way differently. Obviously re-zoning certain areas and moving businesses closer to suburbs is a start, but it isn't going to be as simple as "build cities like Europe" because the cities are already built.

Europ[e] has 700 million inhabitants on round about the same size of land as the USA

I'm not saying the other guy is entirely right here, but this is a pretty disingenuous argument. Both Europe and USA are around 4 million square miles in landmass (Europe is slightly bigger, US is around 3.8), but 1.5 million of that is Russia, where the population is highly clustered around a few cities. Russia having 40% of the total landmass but only 15% of the population of Europe makes it seem like the population density might be similar, but it isn't once you take Russia out of the equation. Population density is just way higher in Europe on average.

The point is that the USA has a ton of land, and cities and towns are spread very far apart. Yes, Europe has plenty of stretches of land that look similar, but most of the US is wide open space. Is that a great thing? Not really, but it's a consequence of history and a problem we just have to deal with.

I'd love to ditch cars and use public transportation and have walkable cities, but with the population so spread out it really isn't feasible in much of the country. Saying someone is giving "THE cliché answer from an us citizen who has never seen another part of this world" and then giving a statistic that is inherently flawed to prove your argument isn't going to get others to agree with you, it'll just make you sound like a dick. It is a real problem that US cities and towns are very wide and built very far apart, we can't just tear down those towns and build towns with a higher population density in their place to increase walkability. (Only within the town, mind you, this would increase reliance on cars if you need to go outside of your town)

You might appreciate the work done by purism to give us more control over our devices.

Based off this line I'm pretty sure you're trolling, Purism barely manages to ship a product in 5 years.

we have more empty houses than homeless people

This is true, but very few of those houses exist where homelessness is a major problem. Location plays a huge role in someone's life and we can't just ship everyone that's homeless or struggling to a dying small town in the US.

I feel like it's 100% a "they don't care," the vast majority of social media users couldn't give less of a shit who runs the service, just what the service does for them.

The average person didn't quit Facebook because it was a gross invasion of privacy and FB was caught doing plenty of suspect shit - Facebook declined because it wasn't "cool" anymore and that's it. People on Lemmy are more likely to care about who's behind the service, but the average user certainly isn't going to care much or at all.

That explains a lot, then. When I was on Vlemmy before it was deleted "All" seemed a lot more populated, now I moved to a smaller instance and it seems a lot more repetitive.

It's a shame it works that way since everyone says the "ideal" is a ton of small instances rather than big ones.

Thanks for the clarification!

Until someone subscribes, it doesn’t exist locally and posts don’t start to flow unless there is a subscriber.

So does this mean that if I'm browsing "All" I'm not actually seeing "All" but "All from the communities/instances members of my instance subscribe to"?