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Joined 26 days ago
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Cake day: February 6th, 2026

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  • It’s the wall on the right – in the wide version (from felesteen.news) it’s all the same blue colour, and a corner, whereas in the Reddit version it’s a white concrete pillar with no corner.

    At the very least, someone’s done some infilling on one of them. My most charitable guess was that someone at the news site decided to “punch up” the image for an article header, but the third version and its timing make me think Occam’s razor is the way to go here.




  • I was gonna say it on the last thread but, before we start appropriating this image as a political symbol as you’ve done here, should someone… maybe… source it slightly better than “Reddit”? There’s plenty of evidence that the school was blown up, but this specific image – conveniently well-framed and poignant – cropped up very quickly on a few random social media accounts, with no photographer attributed, and as far as I know hasn’t actually been verified at all.


  • This definition of social media is new to me as well, thanks for sharing it. This sort of clarifies a term I really dislike, and which you’ve used: “the algorithm”. It’s always seemed a little murky to me which algorithms it refers to. It’s like saying “don’t eat food with chemicals in it”.

    Lemmy does have “an algorithm”, it’s just a relatively simple one based on communities one is subscribed to plus some vote/comment data for the various sort orderings.

    Lemmy also absolutely implements a social graph – the data about who has interacted with whom is all stored by the system. It’s not explicitly stored as a graph structure, but then we’re arguing database schemas.

    As I understand it, however, you’re saying “social media” arises when the “social graph” data structure is used as an input to “the algorithm”. That seems like a pretty robust definition to me.

    One bit of pedantry: user blocks on Lemmy are, by a general definition, a form of social graph, and they do affect what content people see. So Lemmy could technically qualify as social media by the definition I’ve written here. I’m not sure what a more precise definition could be that avoids this technicality.


  • I’m surprised how many people seem offended by this comic. I found it pretty relatable. That doesn’t mean I “don’t understand context”, or think the writers were bad people, or that the shows aren’t worth watching. It just means I find it personally unpleasant to find these jokes in a work I’m otherwise enjoying.

    When kids study older literature and media in school, generally when there’s a slur or racist reference or joke, the teacher will stop and explain the context and get the kids to reflect on it and why it’s probably not acceptable today. Even though I understand this and know it going in, I’m still kind of doing an abridged version of that in my head when something like this comes up in a show – I’ve been following along, laughing with the writers, and then suddenly I’m backing up and distancing myself from one joke or idea. It’s jarring, it pulls me out of the show, and it’s just not fun.

    In some cases it also comes across as incredibly lazy and unoriginal. So many sitcoms from that era have “the trans episode”, “the gay episode”, “the lecherous character” – and they all make the same unfunny jokes, and it’s a reminder than a lot of these shows, even in their time, were just not that creative. Plenty of modern shows have the same problem, but they don’t draw attention to it by having large classes of “stock jokes” that simply do not land today.