You’d think if it was all basic biology we would just have a unique gender for every one wouldn’t you?

Nothing in biology is exactly identical between individuums. A common eye color is brown, although there are as many shades of brown as there are people.

It is just practical and how language, or even perception works, that we tend to categorize similarities, and strongly favor common occurrances over outliers.

the doctor is describing your phenotypic sex based on observable characteristics.

Your doctor is assigning you a gender.

Maybe you two aren’t even disagreeing?

I’d say the doctor tries to assign the new born into male or female according to biological sex, and gender is inferred from that.

He calls you either a boy or a girl based on your genital configuration

Yes, that’s what I mean. A two-step process. First, biological expression is assessed. Next, based on #1, social gender is inferred.

relatively homogenous

Some may be surprised by the cultural diversity this rather small country packs:

It has four main linguistic and cultural regions: German, French, Italian and Romansh. Although most Swiss are German-speaking, national identity is fairly cohesive, being rooted in a common historical background, shared values such as federalism and direct democracy,[15][page needed] and Alpine symbolism.[16][17] Swiss identity transcends language, ethnicity, and religion, leading to Switzerland being described as a Willensnation (“nation of volition”) rather than a nation state.[18]

Due to its linguistic diversity, Switzerland is known by multiple native names: Schweiz [ˈʃvaɪts] (German);[f][g] Suisse [sɥis(ə)] (French); Svizzera [ˈzvittsera] (Italian); and Svizra [ˈʒviːtsrɐ, ˈʒviːtsʁɐ] (Romansh).[h] On coins and stamps, the Latin name, Confoederatio Helvetica — frequently shortened to “Helvetia” — is used instead of the spoken languages.

I also think the local traditions differentiating down to single villages are more important and alive than in other countries.

But yes, “national identity is fairly cohesive”, maybe you meant that.

“And, as Putin said yesterday, one of the tasks was to demilitarise Ukraine. In fact, this task is largely completed. Ukraine is using less and less of its weapons. And more and more it uses the weapons systems that Western countries supply it with.”

Ah, the subtle differences between demilitarization and upgrading to NATO standards.

If his statement had ever anything to do with reality. Probably just feel-good words directed at the domestic audience.

**Thank you **for the excellent and detailed explanation in both post and this comment! This helped me so much to better understand how lemmy works and what the implications can be. It is especially useful and interesting to see it demonstrated on a current example, although that’s a sad circumstance.

I have only one last question. What happens if they ever decide to re-federate? How will these desynced threads merge? Will votes merge? Will users know content is merged or will that be another cause for confusion?

Post saved, great resource. :)

The idea is that every instance is basically responsible for their own users.

It’s correct what you say, but the idea bugs me the more I understand it.

It feels like guilt by association. The actual cause is the behaviour of specific, individual users but the repercussions are equally felt by other users from the same instance. These other users can have nothing in common with the causing users, or might have even opposed them in their wrongdoings.

There is also a level between users and instances; communities. Maybe the problem was with one specific community, yet all other communities who happen to live on the same instance feel the same consequences.

Defederating individual communities would feel better for me, but ultimately I think a problem caused by individuals should be solved with these individuals, not with groups which are more or less meaningfully associated with those individuals.

go to search and type in !wowthislemmyexists@lemmy.ca

“No Results”. Tried a couple of times over a couple of minutes.

Ironically, I get

404: couldnt_find_community

I’m trying to access it from my home instance (to be able to subscribe). I place both your and my link side by side:

    https://lemmy.ml/c/wowthislemmyexists@lemmy.ca
 https://lemmy.click/c/wowthislemmyexists@lemmy.ca

When following your link, I can view the /c but not subscribe. I could subscribe to other /c’s just a few minutes ago.

What’s wrong, what’s a solution?

That’s great! Coming from a game designer / UX perspective, these were exactly my thoughts. The current process does not put the new user in the center, and the experience suffers accordingly. If lemmy wants to grow, this is one major aspect to improve (and I want it to grow!). The sign up process has probably the biggest impact on growth.

1. Sign up: Yes, make a basic default version and a less visible advanced option. Side benefit: Lemmy can choose where new users should (not) be registered, which allows some lemmy-wide load balancing. This can be achieved decentrally by individual instances accepting new registrations or not. Also do not talk about setting up an instance on a page directed to new users, who mostly just want to register an account. Make this option even less visible. People willing and able to set up a server will find the info. People unwilling and unable to understand advanced registration will be overwhelmed and put off by server talk.

2. Subscribed/Local/All: Also agreed, ‘local’ is the least useful option (is it even useful for anyone besides instance admins?) and should not be the default. I have worries making ‘all’ the default; people could get the impression their subscriptions do not work. How about this: Make ‘all’ the default for users with 0 subscriptions, and ‘subscribed’ the default for users with > 0.

3. Links between instances: I wish this was simpler and more usable. Currently I don’t understand all the options and cases and cannot begin to describe the problem or propose a solution. I wish there was a non-techie way to post a link which works out of the box for anyone, no matter what instance they call their home.

Edit: I think I understand now how to make instance-independent cross-instance links to communities. Say you want to link to https://midwest.social/c/cats.

1. transform into “email-syntax”: cats@midwest.social
2. add /c/: /c/cats@midwest.social
3. use it as a URL in a link: lemmy does the magic

I wrote: [lemmy does the magic](/c/cats@midwest.social)

1. You don’t want a view instance to get all the traffic.

Random assignments would “ensure” not a single instance gets all newcomers. They would be spread across instances.

I also did not understand what you mean with “a view instance”, can you please explain? New to lemmy.

2. You want people to choose a server that fits their interests.

Why, and how? I thought we have federation so we don’t have to do that. My interests will be all over the place. If I had to side with one specific instance, I would probably rather leave lemmy altogether. It is already small as a whole, a single instance does not suffice. I’m here because I was promised I would not have to do anything on my home instance apart from being registered to it.