Acc. to my grandma, my mum almost got herself killed in a similar way, as a kid. Except that she was inside the wheel (a truck tire, more specifically). My aunt rolled the tire from a hill, and it rolled, rolled, rolled… and it stopped in the middle of a highway. She almost got flattened by some car.

[I miss grandma. She would always tell me stories like this, from my mum, aunts and uncle’s childhood.]

Both are good but one is considerably better than the other.

We (people in general, across the globe) need to reduce the number of cars, regardless of what fuels them. In rural zones for example I do think that public transportation could work way better than it does. (…although coming from a Latin American “X could work better” is always true. Nothing works properly in Latin America.) Then in cities it’s the same as above plus making things more walkable, bikeable, etc. Reduce the infrastructure needed for cars and you’ll reduce their demand, in a virtuous cycle.

If the leftover is fuelled by greener energy, so the better. But once you reduced the need for cars, the pressure for this is considerably smaller.

Let us not forget that electric cars do have a fair impact on the environment, through lithium mining. Although recent Chinese developments make sodium batteries more viable. And the source of the electricity is also a concern, if you’re simply burning coal for electricity you aren’t solving the problem, only moving it elsewhere.

Also it’s relevant to note that the fuel in combustible cars does not need to be petrol. For example where I live ethanol cars are a thing - sure, they’re a wee bit annoying in winter, but they work.

Dentolabials (lower teeth vs. upper lip) are extremely rare, except in individual disordered speech. I could only find a single reference of them, some Southern dialects of Greenlandic using [v͆:].

I’m not sure why this happens. Perhaps the lower teeth are more prone to be misaligned, increasing the effort necessary to pronounce them? Specially in pre-industrial societies, people losing teeth wasn’t exactly uncommon.

Interesting. I’ve never had an interest in anime. What happened with that community?

It’s a long story.

lemmy.ml defederated ani.social (an instance focused on anime and manga) under the false accusation that ani.social would host child sexual abuse material. And, at the same time, dessalines removed ani.social from the join-lemmy page. Eventually nutomic reviewed the join-lemmy change and reverted it, but both instances stayed defederated.

Some time later, an anime series called Mahou Shoujo Whatever was airing. For Western standards the series is nasty; I think that it showed 14yos in sexualised positions or crap like that, I didn’t watch it. But within Japanese standards it’s still not considered porn / hentai. Someone commented about that series in !anime@lemmy.ml, and the comment got deleted, under the claim that the comment violated rule 3 (no porn).

But then people started talking about a potential migration of !anime@lemmy.ml to ani.social to avoid situations like the above. Then shit went downhill, with the admins wrecking the discussion threads about the potential migration under bullshit claims like “linking to instance featuring pedo content” and “doxxing”. (I remember that a mod was forcibly removed, too.)

In the meantime, the very same ani.social instance was linked in the sidebar of !anime@lemmy.ml, one of lemmy.ml admins explicitly acknowledged it, and they never did anything about it.

And the same applies to “doxxing”. Back then I moderated !snoocalypse@lemmy.ml; and users there (incl. me) were often referring to Reddit’s CEO by his full name, and nickname, and the epithet “greedy pigboy”. “Curiously”, that is not doxxing for the standard of lemmy.ml admins, since they never took any action against it.

So note the pattern:

• linking ani.social in a sidebar - OK
• linking ani.social while discussing the migration of a lemmy.ml community - not OK
• referring to someone by full name, nickname, and “greedy pigboy” - OK
• saying who did what in a neutral/positive way, while discussing the migration of a lemmy.ml community - not OK

That’s a bit too much of double standards for my taste, and it shows that lemmy.ml has a hidden rule - “don’t discuss the emigration of lemmy.ml communities”. In the meantime I was already noticing issues with the admins in the !snoocalypse@lemmy.ml modlog, such as deleting any comment that might remotely cast two certain governments in a bad light. (Guess which ones.)

Ah yes, I completely forgot about the Japanese/Brazilian relation. I did have familiarity with it previously, though.

There’s also a really big community of Japanese descendants around Lima, Peru. To the point that they even formed a distinctive cuisine, called “nikkei” (lit. “second generation”).

I know that’s one reasonably well-supported hypothesis, but I thought there were others with some reasonable support that place it further southeast, around Armenia and Georgia?

Based on recent genetic studies, both hypotheses are correct. But they refer to different stages of the language:

• Early Proto-Indo-European - spoken in the Caucasus, 4500~3500 BCE, by a population nicknamed “Caucasus - Lower Volga” (CLV)
• Late Proto-Indo-European - spoken in the steppes, 3300~2600 BCE, by the population responsible for the Yamnaya culture. 80% of the genetic pool of the Yamnaya comes from the CLV; the other 20% are likely locals, from a Pre-IE population.

To be frank such large time period makes me think that we shouldn’t even be referring to both languages by the same name, or trying to reconstruct them as it was one thing; that’s a lot like trying to reconstruct Classical Latin and 2025 Spanish as if they were the same thing, or perhaps Proto-Germanic and English. Perhaps that’s why the current reconstructions are such a mess.

Humans are a bit more private when it comes to excretion, but we also tend to make some activities “unnecessarily” social - eating, manual tasks, even chilling.

I feel like most news about Microsoft nowadays can be TL;DR as “this would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.” Including this one - it sounds like Microsoft is trying its hardest to raise the walls of its own walled garden, and failing hard at it.

As in, the Italo-Western Romance language?

Yup, that one. Numbers are not to be trusted, but estimates are usually around 500k speakers in Brazil alone. There’s also a bunch of them in Argentina, and even in Mexico (more specifically Chipilo, Puebla).

Under Brazilian territory Venetian is often called “Talian”, and sometimes partially creolised with Portuguese. The name is a misnomer though, the language has little to do with the Tuscan-based standard Italian.

When you said there are about 200 other languages, I was expecting indigenous languages and maybe some Spanish, but certainly not other European languages

There are a few other colonial languages among those 200, like Eastern Pomeranian (Low German; extinct in Europe after WW2), Hunsrik (German too, but in the Franconian group). And I wouldn’t be surprised if here in Paraná some Polish- or Silesian-speaking clusters survived.

Additionally, some folks down north use Kikongo (a Bantu language, brought to South America due to African slavery) as a liturgical language for their syncretic religion (candomblé).

That said the “bulk” of those 200 languages I mentioned are Amerindian languages indeed. Typically Macro-Ge and Tupi-Guarani families.

What’s the history there? Were there Italian colonies in Brazil, or a notable migration of Italians to Portuguese colonies?

Yup, immigrants. Not just in Brazil; Latin America as a whole got a lot of them in the XIX and early XX centuries, and since Italy was in a ruckus a lot of them were from Italy. Mostly Gallo-Italic speakers in a “belt” between São Paulo and Buenos Aires. Both are tendencies though, and there are plenty exceptions - São Paulo city for example got also a bunch of Calabrians and Sicilians, and as I said there were Venetians even in Mexico.

Other common groups of immigrants in LatAm were Iberians, Germans, Levantine Arabs, Japanese. But the distribution changes heavily from place to place; for example here in Paraná we got quite a few Poles and even a few Ukrainians and Lithuanians, but up south in Chubut (Argentina) there were Welsh immigrants instead.

See, this is exactly the sort of conversation I had hoped the original thread would lead to. Interesting linguistics, history, and geography. Until dessalines came in with the toxicity.

There’s !linguistics@mander.xyz for any topic involving language. [Disclaimer: I’m one of the mods there.]

That backtracks to the main subject: the community was originally in lemmy.ml. One of the reasons why I migrated it to mander.xyz was the notoriously poorly way that .ml admins enforce rules in their instance - with the straw that broke the camel’s back, for me, being !anime@lemmy.ml. (I wasn’t a mod there but I’m a weeb so…)

Now thinking, if I didn’t do so, I bet that I would enter in direct conflict with dessalines and cypherpunk. What if someone wanted to talk about the Uyghur language? Or surzhyk (mixed Ukrainian/Russian) varieties? Bloody hell, even Proto-Indo-European (the Late PIE homeland is right where the war is happening now). Even mentions of lavender linguistics (i.e. how queer people use language) would become a ticking bomb.

I will not dig into this specific case because it’s simply too much info that I’d need to know before saying “yup/nope, they’re a/no troll”. So, focusing in the question in the OP:

I define a “troll” as online community user with consistently disruptive behaviour, that griefs the experience of a meaningfully large proportion of the users of said community.

So, when applied to this case:

1. Which community is the user allegedly trolling? “Lemmy as a whole”, that instance, or a specific comm?
2. How are they allegedly trolling it? Shitposting, off-topic, unnecessary adversative remarks…?

At least from my part my issue is the conflation of topographical and cultural/political/economical terms, where the former gets shoehorned into the later. Except that the former is fairly stable, and the later changes as some weird hairless chimps go back and forth.

For example, if I were to define “Central America” as a subcontinent (i.e. a topographical division of another topographical term), I don’t think that putting the line between San Diego and Huston is sensible, because it’s simply too contiguous. A better boundary would be between Coatzacoalcos and Unión Hidalgo - it splits the territory controlled by Mexico into two, but that’s fine because it’s a political boundary.

As usual fxomt doing a great job with this stuff! I’ll probably suggest some stuff to add to the FAQ, like the question in the OOP.

You’re in the right direction. The only missing piece is the word “fruit” referring to two, partially overlapping, concepts:

• botanical - “fruit” as a part of the plant as opposed to stem, leaf, flower etc.
• culinary - “fruit” as an ingredient as opposed to vegetable, meat, seasoning etc.

Tomato is a botanical fruit, but not a culinary fruit. And this means that all those “mmh, ackshyually tomato is not a vegetable” claims you see in those discussions are simply a four terms fallacy.

And, more importantly, when people talk about fruits, you typically know which of those two concepts they’re talking about, due to the context (are we talking about plant development? or cooking?). And the same applies to “America” referring to the country bordering Canada versus the continent that country controls some territory of. (If you see the whole thing as a single continent, that is. That’s roughly as useful as to talk about Afro-Eurasia as a single continent.). And all those “ackshyually” tend to diverge the discussion from shit that matters into things that don’t matter.

There’s even a new full thermosynthesis implementation meaning you can use temperature to generate energy

Does this mean they reworked the thermoplasts? Because thermosynthesis was already in the game.

Now here is a hill I die on: most Central America is part of North America, except the eastern half of the territory controlled by Panama.

Still not as important as saying “European peninsula”.

[Info dump that sounds like an “ackshyually”, but doesn’t contradict what you said, nor tries to. It’s just that you touched a topic that I enjoy talking about.]

Under the territory controlled by the Brazilian most people do speak Portuguese but there are ~200 other languages; for example a good chunk of my family speaks a Venetian variety. Spanish is among those, and it’s actually spoken by a few people born in the territory controlled by Brazil due to border changes. Other varieties besides PT and ES can be roughly split into colonial (e.g. Talian, Hunsrik, Pommersch, Polish) and Amerindian (e.g. Mbyá, Kaingang, Laklãnõ).

On the other hand, Portuguese sometimes pops up even in territory controlled by other governments than Brazil. Ciudad del Este (Paraguay) and Puerto Iguazú (Argentina) are an example, but as well some northern chunk of Uruguay. And then there’s a bunch of “portuñol” mixed varieties that IMO should be protected by the statal governments (because the federation certainly won’t).

Do you mean this one?

If yes: that FAQ is a good start, but it’s mostly help for people already registered. I was thinking on something to clarify how Lemmy works for people who are considering to register on it. Stuff like:

• What is federation and why should I care?
• Decentrawhat?
• [as in the OP] where do we meet?
• How do I contact people in different servers?
• waah tankies pls fix
• etc.

If there’s something already in this direction we could/should advertise it a bit more, and if it doesn’t I’m seriously considering to start it.

I love your chicken stories; the way you tell them is great, not just the events. The last one I ran across, you were struggling because your rooster wanted to be held but you got some back pain.

I can even picture the whole thing:

• Bantam rooster: “I wanted lovin’ and adventure. At least I got some adventure! And food.”
• Bantam hen: “Oh no. Oh no no no. I know that creepo. I don’t know what he’s doing here but I’ll be chilling away from him.”
• Marans hen: “…eeeew.” [inserts long rant on how the Bantam rooster sucks.]
• Your rooster: “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! INVADER DEFEATED! I’M THE KING OF THE PLACE! Eh, who cares about chickens, my true waifu is the crocs.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a big chicken running full out, but if you haven’t, you gotta hit YouTube and see it. I’d try and film it, but the jumping part makes it difficult, and I’m kinda paranoid about showing my house and yard anyway.

I’ve seen it a few times in my childhood - got some relatives in the countryside. They raised mostly pigs, but they also got a dozen free range chickens for their own consumption. My cousin would ring a bell every time before feeding them, so when they heard that bell they would go ballistics towards the house.

I propose a way to fix all this shit:

• Rename NA to Tacoland
• Rename SA to Empanadia
• Rename USA to Northern Mexico
• Rename the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of the Mexicos and Cuba”

Done! Now nobody fights over Vespucci’s name.

Give those great people a prize for such amazing discovery. Preferably an Ig Nobel prize.