With no safeguards the users won’t know it’s a trap until it’s sprung.

And one became the Death Star.

Without R2 ANH would have gone very differently.

I’ve declined the opportunity to Mod a community on lemmy.ml, which is really not like me.

I think if more people took on tasks like running the communities while educating people the benefits of the fediverse, then we can see a bit more growth.

This is the way - be the change you want to see in the world.

Lemmy isn’t the size of Reddit, so it isn’t at a place where the vast majority of users can just passively consume content.

If there’s a niche for a community then start it. If you want more Mods, keep an eye out for active posters and ask if they want to help. If you are unsure about starting a community or want help from the start (as it might be popular) then start a thread on !fedigrow@lemm.ee. The more active communities, the more likely it is for the next wave of users to stick around and some of them might start new communities.

If you build it they will indeed come and stay.

Yeah, that’s tricky - I have Italian DNA matches (although they go back to the late Bronze Age) and my cousin married an Italian woman, so have had a nose around some Italian family trees and they seem to have solid records. I don’t know about Spanish or South American records.

Going by this discussion (warning: it’s on The Bad Place) (see also this discussion), there are good Spanish records but you’d need to talk to someone with expertise on where to look for the specific records you need. It may be worth tracking down Spanish language genealogy sites or try general ones and see who you can find - I have great luck with RootsChat who have a Europe board on their forum (although I was mainly after British help).

It depends on where they were from. If the big repositories don’t have the data (and you have clearly tried them) then:

• The data may have been destroyed or never written down. I am ¾ Irish but landing any of my ancestors in Ireland has been hard. The records burned in 1916 and, in some areas, there are gaps during the Potato Famine when no-one was around to write things down. One of my best DNA matches on my Mum’s side falls foul of the latter as we have matching surnames and know pretty much when and where our connection would be but the parish records just stopped in that period.
• It’s not in English. They are doing their best to fill such gaps but adding translation in can be hard. There are often regional family record offices but they may be in a language you don’t speak (I’m having trouble tracing my sister-in-law’s grandmother who was born in Estonia. I am also helping a friend whose grandfather was born in Malaysia and it is tricky even working out where to look). Scandinavian genealogy tends to be excellent, but you may need access to the “farm books” where the records are kept.
• It’s paywalled elsewhere - Scottish records need you to subscribe to a specific site.
• The names are badly transcribed - the British record keepers clearly struggled with some Irish names especially when being told them by illiterate peasants (possibly not helped by some being in Gaelic). I have one family whose name is written over a dozen different ways and it can be hard piecing it together. The names settle down after a bit (there was a big push for literacy in the late 19th Century) but there are two branches of the family that ended up with two different spellings of their surname.

Or any other issues. Without details it is tricky to point you in any specific direction.

If you hit a wall, try DNA.

You’re a saint, SatansMaggotyCumFart.

Pathetic, I know.

Fucking Belgium is probably paying some troll to post on Lemmy.

I’m open to offers from the Belgian secret services.

Yeah, I’m suspicious of people with high post counts too.

Accident it is then.

Yeah, I was pondering if it’d be possible to make it less of an issue. I presume the metal of the discs and chain is pretty thin, so you could get to work with tin snips, a file and some needle-nose pliers. Take them off, rework some and hang them back up. However, a) I’m not sure it could be done satisfactorily and b) that sounds like a lot of hassle for some, hopefully, cheap knickknack, so I’d probably just make it have an accident.

Make Gotham great again!

Turn them round.

Instead they are self-funding space missions, pouring millions into longevity research and buying a bunker in New Zealand.

You could try looking back through !horrormovies@lemm.ee but a couple of recent posts:

• The Best Overlooked Horror Movies You Must Stream in October
• 10 Underrated Horror Movies That Are Perfect From Start to Finish

I’ve seen it and that’s a fair summary.

I’ve seen it and that’s the high point of the film.

The Bumper Book of Magic has been in the pipeline that a number of contributors are dead but the novel he is promoting now is the first in a series, we already know the name of the next one.

He effectively retired from writing comics in mid-2019 but signed a book deal with Bloomsbury for his short story collection and the five novel series we are starting to get. At the time he declared himself to be “bursting with fiction”. I’m not aware of anything that suggests he is ready to throw the towel in quite yet. In fact, he seems reinvigorated.