May I ask whether you’re and english major? You say so much grammar so confidently, are you a teacher perhaps? The thing about agents I only heard once or twice in English class.

Nah, I’m just a college dropout who has weird interests lol! It has been my sincere pleasure to help out another learner 😊

I’m Hungarian btw, and I know how hard our language is, so I figured I could be of great help. It’s probably for the best as even I don’t know how to speak this shit culture rich language correctly :/

Greetings from across the ocean in Atlanta, GA!

Like the alternating long/short. Imma start paying more attension to that maybe ppl actually use it, and I’ve just been ignoring it.

This is basically just a trick to sound more natural with less grammar, so feel free to pick and choose when to use it. So far I think you’ve struck a pretty good balance!

Is it correct to phrase it like: “the increase in X tells me” or “the increase in X leads me to”?

Yes, both of these sentences sound very natural to me. I think you’ve gotten the hang of it

Also what is that “new language” that you been trying to learn, maybe just maybe, it’s mine :)

Japanese! I’m a mega-weaboo lol

I’m fucking ashamed that probably the single largest info drop that I got for speaking tips came from me being a fucking slob… (I should change)

Yeah, you might want to work on your hygiene… It’s OK, though. We all have our circumstances and other people on the internet are rarely as perfect as they claim to be!

Does the focus have to be on X (only giving it adjectives, I believe you’ve done that)?

It’s less about the pattern of the sentence and more about a grammatical concept called the “agent”. The agent is the “doer” of the sentence. In English, the agent is usually (not always!) based on the sentence subject and native speakers will use one of several different tricks to shuffle the agent around when talking about an inanimate subject. I’ll list a few additional ways of doing this below to help illustrate:

Unnatural: My shirt wrinkled

This is a normal type of sentence, so the agent is the subject (“my shirt”). An inanimate agent sounds unnatural, so try to avoid this

Natural: My shirt is wrinkled

In this sentence we’ve introduced a copula (“is”) as the main verb of the sentence. Copula-based sentences like this one describe states of being and thus contain no action at all (e.g.: “My shirt is red” – no action!). No action means no agent. No agent means no problem!

Natural: My shirt got wrinkled

This is a way of speaking called the “passive voice” which implies a hidden agent as the true doer of the action. Since the agent is hidden, it won’t be based on the subject, so an inanimate subject can be used without sounding unnatural.

Natural: My shirt wrinkled itself

This is a way of speaking called the “reflexive voice” which you can use if the verb in question also has a transitive form (AKA: if it’s a “labile verb”). In the reflexive voice, all agents automatically become animate. No inanimate agent means no problem!

Natural: The sun rose

Some non-living things are still considered to be animate. These are almost always things which appear to move of their own volition, such as celestial bodies (“The moon shone”) or vehicles (“The boat sank”). There’s no problem with using animate things as the agent!

I think any true “bot” would be flaired correctly.

Just FYI: The bot checkbox an opt-in thing with no enforcement, so it’s basically guaranteed that some developer will eventually either forget to tick the box or deliberately choose not to. These are still early days for Lemmy, so who knows how the situation will eventually evolve… but for now it’s basically the wild west.

I’m not the guy, but I’d like to challange my English by talking about this topic.

I vibe with that. I’ve been trying to learn a new language as well, so let me try and provide you with the kind of direct feedback that I wish more people would give me. Overall your writing is good enough that I would believe you were a native speaker, albeit a sloppy one. To take your writing to the next level, here’s what I’d change:

I brush my teeth on a “when I remember to” or “when it’s really dirty”. so like twice weekly probably.

This can be rephrased slightly into a more natural expression:

I brush my teeth on a “when I remember”/“when it’s really dirty” basis, so like twice weekly probably

Why: Saying that you do something “on a X basis” is a very common pattern for this type of expression. I switched to using “/” instead of “or” here to because this particular pattern is so strongly fixed that we can’t add extra words to it without sounding unnatural. I also combined the sentences together because one single compound sentence is generally more pleasing than two simple ones.

except of a bit of tartar (hopefully correct word, the hard stuff that acumilates and sticks to your teeth)

Yup, that’s exactly the right word. It would have also been acceptable for you to say “gunk”, since “tartar” is a specialized word that not everyone will know.

The scary part is thst the dentists I’ve been to did not say anything about it, which leaves me to think they didn’t even see it, that leaves me again to, what else didn’t they notice?

You’ve made excellent use of the trailing question mark! This is exactly the right tone for what I believe you were going for here, though your verb tenses are a little mixed up. Here’s what I’d change to bring the tenses back into alignment:

The scary part is that the dentists I’ve seen haven’t said anything about it, which leaves me to think they didn’t even see it. It makes me wonder what else they didn’t notice?

Why Part 1: You’ve combined “I’ve been to” (present perfect tense) with “did not say” (past tense) inside of the same clause. Mismatches like this sound quite bad because native speakers have a strong intuition for tense construction. Here the issue is fixed by simply changing the entire clause into the past tense, though we could have just as easily done the opposite and made the whole clause present perfect (i.e.: “the dentists I’ve been to won’t say anything about it”).

Why Part 2: It gets difficult to read sentences when they become this long, so I broke it into two. Note the much shortened second sentence. I did this because English speakers tend to favor a kind of long/short/long/short rythm in speech and writing. Less grammar on “down beats” feels better. It’s a pretty cool trick to use once you get the hang of it, don’t you agree?

The thing that I notice and hints that I should brush is the frequent canker sores (again, let’s hope the right word, little annoying ass white spots that, apears, hurts than dips)

This sentence is actually a really good learning opportunity because it reveals something about English-speaking culture: we hate attributing actions to passive objects. Yes… it’s not technically wrong to say “the things that hint I should brush are canker sores”, but it still feels wrong unless you’re writing poetically. Here’s how I’d write it instead:

When I get frequent canker sores it’s a hint that I should brush.

Why: Canker sores no longer do the hinting. It’s you who gets the canker sores and they merely exist as hints. Alternatively, you could even phrase it like this: “Increasingly frequent canker sores tell me that I should brush”. If we anthropomorphize “canker sores” as actively intelligent beings, we’re allowed to attribute actions to them without falling into the “passive object action” trap. Yes… this stupid language really works like that. We will go so far as to pretend that canker sores are sentient if it means we can blame stuff on them. I am sorry 🙏

So that’s what those gadgets are called! Thank you for teaching me something new.

can recommend electronic tooth brush

Important caveat: just because electric toothbrushes are good does not mean “more power = better”. For natural teeth, you should always brush gently. Don’t go ham just because you’ve got a powertool in your hand!

If your brush has multiple intensity modes, always use the lowest. Same thing goes for your grip! The whole point of an electric is that it can get you clean with almost zero pressure. Seriously: apply no more pressure than necessary to get full bristle contact. It will extend the natural life of your teeth and gums by years.

The brushing just before bed is the most important one, so you picked a good bare minimum to uphold. No shade, just curious: how old are your teeth?

What’s an interdental brush/brushing?

Not as big of an issue as you’d think. In 2015, the entirety of Reddit could be archived using ~2TB of storage space. Keep in mind that this is the size when saving everything as uncompressed JSON, so the actual DB size would have been even smaller than this!

You’re much more likely to see this DDOS-like effect coming from ActivityPub traffic volume. High activity = Lots of messages = Lots of processing demand. As the Fediverse grows, the baseline processing power necessary just to keep a small instance afloat will steadily rise, but it’s not yet clear how big of an issue this will actually be.

We already saw a pretty major rash of Lemmy instances getting overwhelmed back on July 1st, but a lot of that bottlenecking was caused by quirks specific to Lemmy (which can be ironed out) rather than overhead inherent to the ActivityPub protocol itself (which, to be fair, is still relatively heavy).

Well… that’s just kind of how it has to work. Storage is cheaper than bandwidth and it’s not a close contest. Historically, storage costs have fallen faster than networks have grown and it is probably safe to assume that this trend will continue indefinitely.

FWIW: The stuff that gets federated is all text. Image uploads aren’t federated at all – those are just shared as URLs which point to the instance wherein they were originally uploaded. This is actually why things like avatars are currently so unreliable on Lemmy – they can’t scale well without there being local copies.

There’s no reason why activitypub would be considered any different from email

Are you sure? Email only sends your message to servers which you explicitly ask it to. If you only trust protonmail, you can choose to only send emails to other protonmail addresses. If protonmail chose to share your emails with other third parties regardless, I can’t help but think maybe that breaches the GDPR.

Lemmy, by design, propagates copies to instances based on opaque factors outside of the user’s control, even when the UI suggests that you are sending content locally. In the case of posting a comment to a community hosted on your home instance: Lemmy will send a copy to whichever servers happen to have users that are currently subscribed to that community. It’s a very opaque outcome and pretty far from the outcome you’d experience when sending an email message to someone using the same email provider.

even search engines and internet archives

Yes, but these are genuinely disconnected entities who come across the data as a user might. Lemmy doesn’t personally phone up Google and send them a copy of your comment as soon as you post it, but that’s basically exactly what happens when Lemmy federates a comment with other instances via ActivityPub.

FWIW: I think Lemmy as a piece of software is actually very aligned with the interests of the EU more generally and I think it would be a bad idea for them to come down on federated social media as a GDPR issue. I nevertheless worry that it represents untested waters and can certainly imagine a reality where it receives a raw deal from regulators.

As far as the federated server is concerned, the copy it has is canonical and kept forever until such a time that it receives an edit/delete signal from the original instance. I’m not really sure if you could plausibly call that caching, but I’m not a GDPR lawyer (or any variety of legal professional, for that matter) 🤷

Has this actually been court-tested? I get the feeling that this is all really quite grey until something in the Fediverse actually gets sued over this.

For example: when you create something (a comment, a post, a community), the “true” version exists on your home-instance, but copies also get sent and saved across the entire Fediverse. Is an instance really able to be GDPR compliant if it’s constantly “backing up” data to non-compliant instances?

On the one hand, you could make the case that these outside instances are separate entities. Like the equivalent of a webarchive. Simply being public on the internet means other people can save copies and that’s obviously all fair play under the GDPR.

On the other hand, you could make the case that saving copies to the outside instances is a lot like using third-party cookies. It’s not technically “strictly necessary” for the instance to send your data to outside instances, even though it would seriously complicate the underlying design to allow specific users to opt-out of federating their content specifically.

The Economist. Despite the insufferable name, it’s really quite good. It’s one of the only traditional publications that I actively pay for and read weekly.

As we’ve already seen, there remains a pretty strong impulse for users to centralize on a single instance (as evidenced by lemmy.ml and mastodon.social). Ads can be wielded as a way to drive users to less burdened instances while also serving to help mitigate operating costs – it’s actually a rather elegant solution when you think about it from a problem-solving perspective rather than a profit-making one!