• 9 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: December 16th, 2025

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  • For context:

    This is the home of the Tiny Awards, which, since 2023, has celebrated the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web.

    The Tiny Awards exist because we thought it was important to shine a spotlight on the sorts of personal web projects that tend to get overlooked by more traditional, larger or more commercial awards.

    The link is for voting, but it also gives you links to the sites to vote on, so even if you do not want to vote, lots of cool small sites here.















  • Okay, I just realized that I posted my comment in !memes@lemmy.world. I screwed up and made a false assumption the person I replied to was posting in !wholesome@reddthat.com. I’m on PieFed, where crossposts are shown together, along with comments from each community it was posted in. Must have missed the giant header preceding the comments from !memes@lemmy.world explicitly telling me I am looking at lemmy.world comments. Sorry!

    I do want to reply, too, though, because I do feel defensive about the more-roughly/unflatteringly-worded interpretation of my comment or its implications.

    If it makes you feel better, I haven’t made anything up myself personally, though I admit I have posted things without fact-checking unless it seemed fishy. I do think a lot of wholesome posts tend to be personal anecdotes, and people tend to project their own experiences on the rest of the world, which can lead to a lot of “this could never happen. It is unthinkable in my experience with the world, or this particular corner of the world” (in this case sales) even if the anecdote is real. But I have thankfully never worked sales or customer service, so I don’t know for sure. I do have a tendency towards believing people instead of calling “fake, r/thathappened”. I do have huge concern over misinformation when it comes to facts. But I am not quite as concerned with falsely believing wholesome story anecdotes, though I know they too can lead to harms (though probably not as dangerous in this case. Maybe if this story is as fake as a commenter claimed, someone thinks sales can be chiller and more compassionate than it truly is, and apply or recommend someone else apply and then they burn out and waste time applying for and working a job they hate, and now they have to do the hiring process again? Or that people are friendlier to the lonely elderly than they truly are? This is far less damaging than an anecdote that casts aspersions on other groups. I can imagine one that talks about helping someone out, but also falsely attributes the reason they needed help to misdeeds of a marginalized group).

    I think I am not so mad as you because I really don’t believe anyone’s gaslighting here, and even if they are I do not think the harms with false wholesome anecdotes are quite as bad as the harms when saying untruths during discussion of $hotButtonTopic.

    I also frankly grow tired of someone always always having something negative to say in a Big Serious Real Life Issue Plaguing Society way, even when I aggressively try to curate my Fediverse feed to avoid the hot button topics and big life issues (I only look at Subscribed, for one). I already deal with it enough irl and am doing my part with trying to participate in Big Political Actions to make life better, I want to just have fun online and relax after real life, hopefully help and contribute to a FOSS place and feel good about that instead of using one of the big tech platforms, and always end up getting assblasted by someone having to bring up the life issues anyways, even if only as a throwaway joke. I really have to learn to stop going in comments at all. Just post, never comment. Unfortunately I seem to never learn my lesson on that front, and should probably think about how to actually make that behavioral change. I mean, just look at the paragraphs I just typed to you! I hate that it is true about anger producing more engagement than good feelings, and wish I wasn’t vulnerable to that too.


  • so many wholesome posts and communities attract comments like this, pointing out why it is fake or not actually this wholesome. and I wonder where the healthy balance is between “facts and truth is important, actually; and so is not letting people wholesomewash awful experiences” and “party-pooping on an already-negative, very-happy-to-get-angry-about-politics platform in one of the few positive places doesn’t feel great”






  • The people at !wholesome@reddthat.com and !nicememes@sopuli.xyz and !thelittlethings@lemmy.cafe would probably like to know about this. !thelittlethings seems to overlap in intent too, although it does not seem very active from what I see on my instance, so you might want to message the mod. Thanks, I really appreciate positivity communities.

    part of why I appreciate it, mentions negativity and depressing stuff

    Joy is resisting, especially if you are vulnerable to doomscrolling bad news about how people are treating folks like yourself without humanity, how you are going to be in the firing line next… if you are happy instead of constantly miserable from people treating you as lesser, that’s definitely not the will of certain powers that be. Examples of happy people who are like yourself are necessary too. Especially ones you can meet in your community instead of them being some story you read online, so you know it’s an achievable possibility for you too, not someone on the other side of the planet. Also, it means you are giving your time to yourself and your joy instead of endlessly getting stuck in distressing news loops and doing a tiny bit of enriching others via ad dollars.


  • Birthdays and the like used to feel inherently special as a kid, as an adult no longer and it just feels like another day. But I still like to celebrate because it’s a nice excuse to see people I care about or treat myself to something nice, or to just relax. I don’t believe we should always do things just because that is what is done, but this is one place I’m happy to just do things because the rest of society does and thinks I “should.” We get something nice out of it, and those who are not interested in celebrating are free to opt out (which I’ve done a few times too, and didn’t regret it.)

    For example, I don’t think Valentine’s Day itself is all that important, but it’s a good reminder to pay attention to your loved ones and spend time with them, and because it is enough of a societal thing there are things done (think a couples’ dinner special at a restaurant or something) to help you do just that. So a lot of people do celebrate on the day. Some will celebrate on a different day to avoid higher prices on the day of the usual celebration. Some will totally disregard.

    But that’s just me. It might be different for others.






  • As a certified “Reddit wasn’t so bad actually” person, as someone who wishes society weren’t so prudish, I still wish we left the NonsexualtopicPorn naming convention behind.

    Adding extra NSFW to a title for things that are not actually NSFW does not seem like a good idea to me. Tells people who are not in the know about the naming convention and who do not have a sexual interest in Nonsexualtopic that the space is not for them, shrinking the audience. Don’t have to be a prude, just a newbie, to see “MistranslationPorn” and think “cool for people who have a fetish for mistranslation, but even though mistranslation is a cool topic I’m not interested in it as kink or a sexualized version of it, time to scroll by”. Also looks bad for browsing where people might see, and then having to explain “no it’s not porn porn, it’s just a silly naming convention”…