Is this like when they made the kilogram some function of the speed of light instead of the weight of a metal ball in a French museum?

This is not a good thing. Part of the problem is third-party apps like Sync and other Fediverse advocates that direct Reddit users to sign up on only one instance, lemmy.world. This is understandable to keep things simple for the Redditors but it hurts lemmy.world (cost and performance-wise) and the Fediverse as a whole (centralization) to have a lot of accounts on one instance. I hope lemmy.world can make an announcement or guide to encourage users to spread out to more instances.

That’s only true if there is a downvote threshold that automatically hides downvoted comments, which I don’t think Lemmy has implemented. I agree that downvoting can be used to censor and avoid discussion, but the justification for removing downvotes on Beehaw is something like “keeping a positive environment with no negativity from disliking” rather than making sure users have to voice their disagreements and not just smash the blue red arrow like cowards.

Ironic that three people downvoted this. But I agree, a “no downvotes” rule is designed to avoid disagreement and conflict, which is impossible on a public forum without extremely restricted expression. If the point is to be always be nice, why not disable open commenting and make users select their replies from a list of canned positive comments. 100% safety and positivity.

Sweddit hits /r/all

“Why is this appearing in my feed?” “What language is this” “I don’t know what this is saying but I like it!”

Vi behöver en egen instans. Hoppas att personen som bjöd på serveradministration igår fixar det åt oss. Jag donerar gärna.

The Fediverse is too new and decentralized to have its own sayings, so all we have is the memories of our old home. Besides, these sayings remind us of a better era of Reddit where it was just a bunch of techie weirdos asking each other “when does the narwhal bacon” and trying to bait newbies to click on /r/spacedicks. I still remember my first days on Reddit, when I was grounded from the family computer and stole my dad’s laptop to browse. Someone linked /r/spacedicks and convinced me that it was the NASA memes subreddit. I clicked on it and was waiting for the page to load on the terribly slow wifi when my dad stormed into the room, furious that his laptop was missing, and proceeded to beat the shit out of me with a set of jumper cables. It hurts so much to see the site I grew up with be destroyed by corporate greed like that, but life goes on.