plisken
The Fifth Element
While I have in the past felt the emotional impact of passive negativity that down voting makes easy, I think down votes are an essential tool for online communities.
Look what happened to youtube when dislikes were removed.
First off, any language/framework is just a tool.
Second, modern PHP is quite different than 2005 PHP which is about when people started moving to other languages for web development (Ruby, Python, etc.). What you can and should write in PHP today would be almost identical to what it would look like in those languages (i.e. MVC frameworks, ORM for DB access, dependency management with lock files). Many language features were added too such as namespacing which allow for better/modern code organization.
PHP has always had (and never lost) it’s dead simple capability to just package up a tar ball, ftp, unzip and just… run.
Would I use PHP today, not unless forced to or for a lot of money. But if it’s a language a team knows, there isn’t a benefit to switching to something else.
I don’t know about the community. But from a protocol standpoint I think Nostr might actually be technically better.
At a high level, ActivityPub (and it’s implementations) imply there are many servers and to operate in a federated way, each server needs bidirectional communication. This is results in a exponential increase in traffic between servers and storage requirements. There’s also no requirements to identity so it’s up to implementations and currently that leads to many duplicate accounts.
Whereas, at a high level Nostr is a client and relay system. Your identity is constructed by public/private cryptographic keys (instead of as fractured identities registered on various different servers).
This is similar to email cryptographic signatures and also most blockchain implementations. Then content/posts are sent out to any number of message relays. Consumers of the content/posts do a map-reduce query against multiple relays to find content.
The benefits here is that if the relays go down, your identity is still safe as it’s manifested by your keys. This also means that there’s slightly less incentive for big centralized server dominance. Another benefit is that you don’t need bidirectional communication across all (most) relays thus reducing traffic and storage costs as the system scales.
With all that said. I have no idea what Nostr looks like in practice or what the community health looks like. Or what community moderation tools exist. But from a theoretical standpoint it’s a much more scalable architecture.
feddit.de (users active last day = 641)
civilloquy.com (users active last day = 1)
thesimplecorner.org (users active last day = 1)
Although it would be good to see someone’s karma with you. If I’ve downvoted someone more than 5 times, I’d like to know so that I can just block them.
Fight Club
I find this hard to navigate and use, but this should be able to show which instances block fmhy: https://lemmymap.feddit.de/
You can see what instances FMHY blocks by clickling the “instances” link at the bottom of the page (or just here: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/instances)
First of all, make sure you are treating your depression as best you can: talk to a professional, take medication if prescribed, work out (in whatever capacity interests you, I prefer lifting), eat well, drink lots of water.
Second, what are your hobbies and interests?
Third, why couldn’t you get a mind numbing minimum wage repetitive manual labor part-time job while still in school? I’ve found those types of jobs pretty good at motivating you to do something more interesting.
Lastly, why do you think you’re bored? What internal or external factors depriving you of motivation/drive? How can you remove or eliminate those factors?
Big Trouble in Little China