Honestly this was on my mind because I saw a clickbait YT title the other day claiming that the creator had one chance to do a thing or would have to “be a janitor forever” which…a) that’s ridiculous and b) doesn’t sound half bad to me at all 🤷‍♀️

I’ve done all kinds of random jobs but like to tell anyone who will listen that my time as a cleaner was possibly the best of them all.

I worked in a building that was entirely dedicated to operating and adminning a traffic tunnel, so there were normal office rooms but also cool control rooms full of flashing lights and interesting displays and friendly people who were only too happy to infodump about it all.

The top floor was entirely given over to a conference room featuring a massive scale model of our tunnel but also the surrounding road system, complete with tiny toy cars. That room also had a hot drinks machine that was entirely free to employees so most of my breaks were spent up there with a book drinking hot chocolate.

Yeah, cleaning toilets and buffing floors is not exactly going to keep your mind occupied, but that just means it’s free to wander to more interesting places. No stress, nothing to take home at the end of the day.

If you can get by on the generally lower pay and get to clean somewhere interesting there are a lot of unexpected perks, tbh.

As much as I love Lemmy, it’s just honestly not ready for another big influx yet. The 0.19 update broke so much, it really brought home how precarious this whole thing still is. Those of us who are here either a) kind of enjoy the jank because it feels like an adventure b) were morally outraged enough to make a stand against Reddit or c) both.

I have a very small amount of influence in the niche community of fibre crafts and especially cross stitch. Would I be able to explain Lemmy to my audience in a way that made sense and that they might even want to try out? Absolutely. Would I actually do that until it’s a bit more stable? Absolutely not, apart from a couple of specific individuals that I’m already working on.

Trying to force people to join platform B when platform A is already serving their needs makes no sense. You need to find the people who are dissatisfied, the people that would actually benefit from trying something new, and then make sure they’re aware of the option.

Don’t get me wrong through, I do encourage people to learn about and dip their toes into the Fediverse in general. Just last week I convinced a wave of fibre crafters (often older ladies who have barely ever ventured outside of Facebook) to try out Mastodon and Pixelfed and some of them have really taken to it! Alt text and content warnings and everything! One or two fellow YouTubers are even setting up PeerTube channels to bring over more crafting content.

Why did I tell them to join Mastodon over Lemmy? I’m literally moderator of !knitting@lemmy.world and !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works so surely it’s in my best interests to bring them over here?

No. I know the demographic, I know what they’re annoyed about with big social media, and I thought Mastodon / Pixelfed were the best replacements for them.

As much as we would all love to see Lemmy become huge, you have to meet people where they’re at. If Lemmy is genuinely the best choice for everyone who is currently in /r/adelaide or whatever, then brilliant, your strategy makes sense. But if it’s not actually in their best interests, if they’re just going to be annoyed by things breaking and not see enough value to make it worthwhile, then there’s no point doing it just because you wish Lemmy was bigger.

Maybe the moral of this story is that the real strategy you want to be looking at is getting tiny niche influencers on side! 😄

Downside is your next full size garment will seem like even more of a slog! Although, given how fast a knitter you are, maybe not 😅

Love the colours in it, this was a great choice of project for the yarn!

All hail the mighty donut tutorial!

Curse seasonal colour analysis and all of its surprising accuracy! I don’t want to be a bright spring, I want to be goth!

You live your best life in that blue dress kid and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Look at that heel turn! Like it’s no big deal at all! This is a lesson to all the other want-to-knit-socks-some-day-ers. Congrats!

Also, I was editing together a “sock construction 101” video to help you and the others who wanted to dive in this month, but obviously covid has kind of ruined that plan, but I’m happy to see it wasn’t needed anyway and you’re just blasting through it 👏

Being welcoming to people in general goes without saying. But we’re specifically in a thread about encouraging more women to join and making them feel safe to do so.

Woohoo! Get them over here, December is going to be SOCK MONTH it’s very exciting haha 😄

I’m a woman, and make no attempt to hide that fact in my posts. That said, I also don’t personally have much interest in talking about being a woman, so don’t sub to any of those places you linked.

Over on Reddit I just sort of let people assume I was male a lot of the time, since it wasn’t really relevant to what we were talking about. But from the start on Lemmy I’ve made sure to call out incorrect assumptions, downvote and give a talking to people stereotyping or being misogynistic, etc etc. And the more of us (of all genders) that make that same decision, the better things get.

I also mod !knitting@lemmy.world which as you might expect is largely although by no means entirely women. Any questionable comments over there are dealt with swiftly, I am absolutely not having it.

I don’t necessarily see it as a “problem” that Lemmy is seemingly male-dominated (I say Lemmy because my Mastodon is very much female-and-NB-dominated). It’s more just a fact of early adopters tending to the techy interests that skew male. But if someone does see it as a problem and wants it to change, there are basically two things to do:

1. Make sure you’re helping make Lemmy a welcoming place for non-males
2. Invite your non-male friends

All that said, other women may disagree but I don’t particularly feel like a minority on here and never really think about it until coming across something gross (which is a LOT less often than on Reddit, thankfully). There may be few enough women that I recognise their names often when they post, but let’s be honest Lemmy is a small world and that goes for most regular posters in general.

(And it helps that I’m middle-aged so if any little boy thinks they can upset me with comments about my gender or appearance or whatever, lol, the self-confidence of age is a wonderful thing 😉)

Edit: Just wanted to add, if you’re not a man and you’re reading this thinking “wow she’s lucky, I’ve had such a bad experience here” then first, I’m sorry you’ve had that experience, people suck sometimes. But also, drop me a DM let’s see if we’ve got any interests in common and I can maybe signpost you to some more friendly communities and people. Between my two accounts I spend WAY too much time on Lemmy!

It doesn’t directly answer this need, but I think the reality is most viewers aren’t on PeerTube at all, they’re on Mastodon. And they’re using whatever Mastodon client to watch PeerTube videos. Some clients support direct viewing and others will just show up as a link taking them into the browser.

A dedicated app would be a gamechanger for a very very small number of people, but until that number grows and while everyone is just using other platforms to watch videos, I can understand why nobody’s gone to the effort.

Thanks for this, largely common sense but it’s always good to have things explicitly written down to refer people to when needed. Sounds like a sensible approach!