More or less 0. Just like I don’t use my phone much, I seldom use any data. I don’t watch/listen to content on my phone, I don’t take much photos. I don’t even check my emails.

I just checked on their website, for January I’m sitting at an impressive 360 megs (130 giga available monthly) but this month is a massive increase in my usual data consumption as I’ve taken a lot more pictures than I use to (we’re visiting new apartments).

I pay 12€/m each for both my spouse and mine (each with a 130g plan that we never use, it’s the smallest plan we could get), plus 2€/m for a third line that has no data plan at all (that we use as a ‘trash/publicly shared number’ we almost never answer). This cheap plan could suit us if it wasn’t that limited when moving abroad (the reason why I pay for those 130g plans we don’t use is they don’t have those limits) and if it had some data associated to it for those rare times when we need it, like it just happened this month. Those plans are all without engagement (and we provide our own phones)

Here in France, customers need to regularly check their invoice to make sure the operator has not silently activated a new ‘feature’ free ‘for the first month’ that automatically switch to the paid tier the following month. Without the customer asking anything. It happens very often. And it can quickly ad up.

As much as needed for the story to exist? I mean, We’re not talking watching porn here, we’re talking watching a movie or a series, aka a story. Sex is a legit part of many stories but outside of porn I don’t think it’s that often required.

So, if there is no story or if the main selling point of the series is to show sex scenes or play with sex allusions, I will quit watching it very fast, no matter how soft/hard gay/straight/fluid/whatever the sex scenes in it can be. I don’t give a, you guessed it, fuck ;)

An apple among many other fruits, some salad with a light dressing.
I may also hunt for bare carrots, Bugs Bunny like ;)

A slice of handmade bread I just cut, too. Just the bread, it tastes so good.

Does anyone else feel this way? Have you found ways to reconnect with technology?

I’ve been stepping away slowly for a few years now. Back to low-tech and analog… and back to privacy/ownership/control. I don’t plan on giving up on tech at all, I just put it back at its place which is one tool in my toolbox that contains many more. One tool that, I quickly realized, was not even the most essential (pen and paper would be, for me).

Sure, not all communities are the same, that’s fine. There are plenty of communities I’m not interested or I see I won’t fit in. There are others I don’t have that impression.

. I like it a lot here but I feel like I need to engage a bit myself to create the great discussions I used to simply observe on Reddit.

+1

How to create great discussions on Lemmy?

I can’t tell about ‘great’ save that it has a lot to do with both the topic discussed and the people involved, but I consider being honest combined with 1) not being afraid (ie, no self-censoring) and 2) not trying to create polemics (throwing random shit knowing at least one will trigger some emotional reactions) as an excellent starting point to a potentially interesting discussion.

(Yesterday, I was reading (not commenting) a thread on some public transportation discussion. It was very interesting.)

Next to that, and equally important imho: don’t try to push new content for the sake of adding content. No matter how clumsy or simple, I prefer posts that the OP finds genuinely worth sharing or discussing with others. I don’t need to be entertained with constant new content. Like with eating, I prefer quality over quantity ;)

Can I reply after a day or two if I am too busy to reply immediatly?

Sure. Some like me won’t mind (I do that too) while others won’t like it, and some can’t even be bothered to click a discussion that is more than a day old. That’s fine. It’s their right to prefer freshness but they also don’t own Lemmy and they don’t get to decide how we should all use it.
Lemmy is ours to make it exactly what we want it to be. So, make if yours by answering/participating at your own pace :)

What you describe as “not feeling terrible” is what I would describe as “empathy”, aka what makes us humans. Our ability to feel emotions regarding what is not happening to us but to someone else.

There is no need to go seek trauma-like events to experiment empathy, no need to witness a war, a child suffering or something deeply unfair. It’s the same empathy that also makes us able to cry real tears when watching/reading a love story, and sincerely worry about what’s happening to a fictional character that is, by definition, not even a real person. That is the same empathy that makes us feel good when witnessing someone happy in front of us, even a perfect stranger (like this sweet couple sitting in front of me in the bus, yesterday), or feel happy when we see kids playing around on the street or in a park. The same empathy that makes us feel bad when we see those same people not being happy. And it’s the same empathy that makes feel like helping some random strangers that obviously needs help. To care about others, that’s what make us human beings.

So, would I take pills to stop being a human in order to not feel bad? No. At the very least because I know I would also not be able anymore to feel happy, as I would not be able to feel much anymore, if anything.

if everyone stopped caring, how would the world look like?

robot like. De-humanized. A billionaire’s dream I imagine. Even more so that they would make us pay for having access to those magical (?) pills.

Personal remark:

Ignoring real trauma here, just considering our emotional reactions to events happening around us. Imho, the real issue with bad/sad feelings is not in us feeling bad. The issue lies in not being educated to accept and to handle those kind of feelings as a legit part of ourselves. Exactly like so many of us now seem to have become incapable to handle any disagreement or contradictory fact, btw. It’s most likely the same issue.

No pill ever will replace education, or its absence.

Not knowing something does not mean one is dumb, refusing to learn about it would be a safer indicator. How did she react when you explained her Vietnam was still a country and has been so for quite some time?

Also, wtop worrying her being 10/10 (or 0/10) or being the reincarnation of Einstein or… not Einstein, maybe? Was she an interesting person, you had a great time with, or not? That would be the only reason to date/not date someone, in my book… But I’m old and I don’t date.

Indeed I should have been more specific and you’re right: most of them are, not all.

Have a nice day.

How many languages do you speak and why do you think there are more than one langue if words are universal?

lemmy is not reddit, people simply share what they want to share.

This is why it’s important to learn how to filer content you don’t care to see. Like I told you I barely see any meme, if at all, because my home page is only showing content from communities I’m subscribed to and those are not focusing on memes.

by default Lemmy’s home page displays what people are sharing (the ‘All’ option). That’s why my own Lemmy home page only display the content I’m subscribed to (no meme, or barely any)

As for the other part of your question why and how would people be forced to use memes? Memes are very low-effort, it’s to be expected they gather more traction than more demanding type of contents.

Fear not. The Internet was born outside of corporate greed and outside of state control. It can’t really survive under their control, its suffocating. Let it die. Later, it will be re-born outside of their reach, in another form and another place. And for a moment at least, once again, it will be a free place. Amazing and scary and naughty at the same time, but free.

Capitalists surrendered all over the world. They gave up acting like dicks, or were they assholes or cunts? Hard to say but what matters is that they all stopped being what they were, aka people willing to screw everyone and their mother in order to earn half a cent more. They stopped polluting our drinking water and our food, too. And all that happened under the bright leadership of the USA and its new emperor that suddenly realized he had it all wrong. That hate, anger, lies, manipulations and violence were not the way to go. A real change, from the dude we can all agree.

Billionaires are now distributing their fortune to charities, while firms like Apple and all the others have started designing 100% repairable and upgradable devices that will last for decades that they sell with almost zero profit margin. YT shows no ads (ads have almost disappeared online too, like tracking). Most news channels have been closed down for extreme toxicity. Most administrative and most of the teachers in universities have been replaced by competent leadership and teachers that, in a true revolutionary shift, focus again on teaching kids and students instead of pushing their own political agenda and ideologies.

Heck, even fast foods started selling quality food.

Really.

What? Is anyone here questioning what I just said?

edit: typos (that has not changed, as far as I’m concerned)

Wise, I wouldn’t know but since I’m not rich I know a lot of people will sincerely doubt it, instead considering I’m just another loser. They probably would be right?

• There will one Internet for us and one for the powerful people.

Theirs will be what they want it to be, while ours will be:

• Without any right to privacy (no pseudonym like mine, no VPN, no email aliases and obviously no true cryptography or fully encrypted whatever service: they will legally own the keys and the know the ID of all of us), and with constant tracking of our every moves and words. All of that because ‘think of the children’ and, like you rightfully mentioned, in the name of protecting every single individual so-called right to not ‘feel offended’. While in reality they just want us to remain silent.
• That Web will be the online version of what Malls used to be, just a lot worse. It will be a place to consume, not a place where we are allowed to think and discuss. With little room left to personal websites/blogs, or amateur content because…
• Like with access to VPN that is now being questioned, I doubt It will remain legal for a mere people like us to even own a personal website and a domain name. Businesses, sure. People? Nope (see the “think of the children” and the “don’t offend anyone” in the 1st point). Instead we will all be pushed toward using ‘social media’, those owned by a few well known-corporations not any Libre ones.
• Saturated with ads, obviously it’s the main use of that Web: to sell us stuff. With laws and regulations (like we already have against copying and removing DRM from what is supposedly ours since we purchased it) that will make it a crime to obfuscate or not watch said ads (making it a crime to use an adblocker, or at least one that really works). They may even manage to make it impossible to not display ads on one’s ‘own’ online space whether they want it or not.
• Filled with garbage content that will be deemed good enough for most of us which, coincidentally, will be made a lot easier since most educative systems, here in the West, have decided it was not useful to teach kids how to properly read and write, or how to properly use critical thinking anymore. So, stupid content for a stu… uneducated population, perfect world.
• Content written and made by AI, undoubtedly. Good enoughn much cheaper and with zero risk of letting escape any unwanted data or piece of information that would allow some of us to realize maybe things are not right the way they are.
• A lot of ‘amusing’ content, to keep us entertained (and not thinking).
• Probably a lot of (carefully selected) porn too, since lifelong celibacy seems it could become a real issue while people will still have ‘natural urges’ to satisfy even without a partner.

One day, while playing in their great-grandparents attic, a kid living in that society will find an object long forgotten. It will be all dusty and they will brush it to realize it has a shiny cover with bright colors. They will open it and gasp in surprise. The interior looks like if a pile of sheets of paper were glued together. They will flip those sheets and will wonder what use was there for all those black squiggly lines running all over them. What was it used for? And then, already bored with that odd object without a screen, with multimedia, that kid will put it back with all the other dusty objects not knowing this object used to be called a book and that those odd squiggly lines were called print. And that people were able to read books and they were used to help people learn and think better, or just have fun all by themselves. That kid will swiftly move back to the living room because the next episode of some series is soon to begin and, with everyone else in the family watching their very own content in silent, while they all wait for the meal to be delivered by some Uber drone. At one moment, that little kid will realize their fingers are all dirty from the dust in the attic, they will shrug and quickly move their attention back to their screen because its the ads playing, every 3 minutes, and they’re always the most exciting content of the show!

A perfect world.

How did you manage to notice me?

Kagi (of which I was a happy paid customer) is US so it wouldn’t fit into that scenario