While it would he handy to have everything integrated, it’s not always vital. We don’t need to convert kilograms to seconds very often. Artificially enforced systems have always had trouble replacing older anachronistic ones that are otherwise still useful. Ask people in the UK about their cars’ efficiency and you’ll often get an answer in miles per gallon.

There’s nothing magical about 10, either, other than the accidents of evolution that left us with ten fingers. Base 12 is also extremely convenient, and comes from Sumerians counting with their thumb against each of the three joints on 4 fingers. Go through that process once for each finger on the other hand, and you get 60. And of course, in any industry where things are packed into packages, like nearly everything we buy, dozens fit better than tens. 60 divides very neatly into many convenient and geometrically simple fractions, and a lot of what we do with circles benefits from this.

We probably would have been better standardizing on a base unit that’s a power of two, which has more mathematical weight than ten does.

What a thought…we’ll have to form opinions of people based upon what they write, not on points that could always be faked or removedd. Popularity is an incredibly stupid measure of quality. I’d like to see the up/down arrow on threads replaced by a simple view counter, too.

That’s not the least of what makes me unhappy about the Google search experience lately. The thing I don’t like is how much it sucks. Like, really really sucks. It was the paradigm of mind-boggling usefulness at one point. Now it’s an ad server with occasionally marginally relevant results.

It’s a no-brainer. I was an early addict of Usenet, and never found the same utility and community when everyone left for the bright shiny corporate sites (and usenet became harder and harder to access since it wasn’t making any billionaires richer.) The Fediverse is what is needed to take the internet back. I just feel bad that it took me so long to start. I joined Mastodon in January and am a thousand times more active there than I ever was at the birdsite, because my account is growing and morphing to fit MY needs. The same will happen with Lemmy and Kbin, and I hope with peertube and all the others. I keep saying it…the Fediverse is what we should have been doing all along, rather than tolerating the billionaires because it was “convenient”.

In fairly short order, once I left Twitter for Mastodon, I became far more active than I ever had been on the birdsite. And already, I’ve found there is nothing on reddit that I was following that I can’t find with Lemmy. I suspect I’ll become a lot more involved here over time.

It’s not that the fediverse is a good replacement for twatter, Reddit, Facebook, etc…it’s what we all should have been doing all along. It’s like having old school usenet back.