Right‽ I love it.
Found it while listening to the audiobook for American Prometheus, and it was when I realized I was going to seriously enjoy hearing snippets of Oppenheimer’s writing. Dude was brilliant in so many ways.
Going in with the aim of making Lemmy “more popular” is not the best approach.
This (and the rest of your excellent post) reminds me of a fantastic quote from a letter J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote to his younger brother:
“Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one’s living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.”
Similarly, Lemmy being popular is not a specific aim which we “may learn to attain.” Rather it is a description of the adequacy of the content. Build the community we want, the popularity may follow, or it may not! But to try to make a popular website “is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.”
I’m not confident that tool works perfectly, unless I’m using it wrong. It shows Lemmy.world being blocked by no one, but it also shows that beehaw blocks Lemmy.world.
There are dozens of us! DOZENS!