People need to realize you can use alternatives
tbf people just wanna sign up and click on funny links, not browse through 100 rando instances to find the one that lines up with their exact interests and wait for approval and worry about uptime and whether their instance will still exist in a year
I feel that, while lemmy is still a work in progress, it is already pretty adequate for solving this need. If you want to subscribe to other instances you can do it from within your insance by going up to communities and searching. You can also click the all tab and see a bunch of instances from around lemmy that your instance is federated with.
I think mastadon struggled with this because the twitter model is to follow people and depending how far removed the servers are this can be trickier. Compared to lemmy where people interested in a single subject will likely target and find the subject theyre interested in and bring themselves together naturally.
Furthermore I think some people are splitting up and dividing into sub instances and tiny subjects a little prematurely. Reddit didnt get super esoteric with it’s subs until it got big and the larger subs either declined or got too noisy to talk about certain things. Like for example how beehaw has an operatingsystems instance instead of a linux, ubuntu, macos, windows, fedora, archinux, opensuse, openbsd, etc. Right now there arent enough of us that we dont need to subdivide.
I’ve seen people literally signing up here just to make like 50 empty communities and not post or comment on anything at all. Definitely a lot of folks just trying to stake some territory that they think will be valuable in the future.
Good thing this is pretty pointless, since I can have the same community name in another instance.
I’m pretty confident we’ll eventually see some form of voluntary synchronization between identical communities added to either the codebase or a popular client app. “Owning” an individual instance’s community will be worthless.
(Wish I had the !remindme bot right now)
Im sure some of it is staking out territory, but I think a good chunk of it is just that modern reddit mindset. The mindset is that of course you cant have good gaming discussion on gaming you need to have truegaming, and games, and linux_gaming, and patientgamers, and etc. The thing is you can and things are small enough on all instances even lemmy.ml and beehaw that you can talk about it in one place.
The reason reddit had so many is that it would rapidly homogenise into giant echo chambers with minimal community. Minority perspectives were supressed or drowned out by lurker voting.
New subs were being made to recapture giant subs’ original intentions, or specialise, yo put minority perspectives of the Hot page and curate a community as a result.
Lemmy isn’t big enough to homogenise like that, at least not yet.
I’m personally kind of hoping that the existence of smaller instances and multiple same-niche communities on Lemmy provides a way to avoid that phenomenon. Like, it’ll probably happen to communities on the Big Instances, I imagine, but on the more limited ones… maybe not?
I like how Beehaw is doing it. Slowly introducing new servers as there is demand for it.
I also like the beehaw has a mission for community in mind, supported by having an application process; and their having prepared umbrella communities that will prevent echo chambers.
Beehaw is definitely getting hammered too though; it’s probably the second- or third-largest instance atm.
Beehaw is most definitely an echo chamber.
Very true. It would be sad to build up a persona on a smaller instance to then have it go dark and take your user with it. Other than losing your collection of “upvotes,” you can just recreate a new user with the same display name on another instance and keep going. 👍
Holy crap, you can do Slack style emoticons? Huzzah! 🎉
Let me see if I underatand this correctly:
If I create an account on a random, small instance. And then go to the “all communities” feed. I can automatically see all communities that are in my instance. In addition to that, I can see all communities of other Lemmy instances, that are “federated”. But I cannot see other communities from other nstances, unless I go on there, find the communitis and manually subscribe to them (I believe there are other ways to get them to show up, like using the search etc.?)
So, as a normal user. Who’s just looking for a replacement for /r/all, wouldn’t joining the largest lemmy instance that is fedarated to many others (Just by how many users it has, because it’s the users who link instances by their actions?) make perfect sense?
The all communities tab should be showing you communities from every instance you are federated with. It’s true that they won’t show up in your feed until someone on your instance connects to the instance it’s on at least once, but you don’t need to be on a massive server to be connected to all the major communities right from the start.
This. There’s no need to join the biggest instance, as long as you’re not among an instance’s first users you won’t notice much difference.
Idk I kind of think it having a bit more complexity might help ward off enshitification
worry about uptime and whether their instance will still exist in a year
that’s the biggest thing for me, it’s hard to sign up on smaller ones without worrying about its long-term viability
I created my own server…
Me too. Gonna close registrations at about 100 users. I don’t want this to get expensive but I’ll contribute what I can
Based on my previous experience running a Mastodon server, 90%+ of people are going to concentrate on already popular servers, especially the “official” one. I suppose I will also close (or be strict about) registration at some point myself, but I have a feeling I am not going to have to worry about it for a long time. My goal now is just to get some friends and acquaintances to join any lemmy instance, bonus points if it is mine.
I’ve just started my journey into lemmy, but I have to say, the federation part definitely needs better tooling. Like exploring beyond the borders of my instance is (at least using Jerboa) relatively hard. It feels very much like distinct universes, and less like a single space (like Reddit).
Well, since I am one of the people who chose the “official” server on Lemmy as well as on Mastodon, I will tell you why I did it: The “official” server will most likely be the one, that has the least chance to be abandoned/closed at some time in contrast to a small server maintained by some student as a side-project (no offense :-) ). I don’t want to loose everything and start at zero, so I chose the most “reliable” server.
Yeah the people that say “what instance you join doesn’t really matter aside from your local page” when it does. It might be easier to get into an instance with only one other person, but that doesn’t mean that instance will continue to exist a year from now or even tomorrow.
I absolutely understand. I used to run a Mastodon server, and stopped when it no longer interested me. I never really used twitter anyway whereas I am on reddit most every day, so I am expecting this to hold my interest/attention longer. I run a number of services for myself already (git, password manager, media hosting, authentication, etc) so the burden of one more thing in my homelab is minimal vs someone who isn’t doing that sort of thing.
Overall, some manner of truly federated and distributed user identity is something the current fediverse seems to be lacking. Nobody has really adopted DID yet and most of its registries still rely on some sort of central authority for identity regardless.
There’s a big difference between hosting single user servers vs public servers though. If it’s just for you then you can do whatever you want with it and it can be a lot of fun (until something breaks that is)
Where is the content stored by the way? On the posting user’s home server, on the destination community server, on both, or on every lemmy server? It wouldn’t be so bad to lose a username on one server if it shuts down - just create a new one - but I want to be sure my contributions stay accessible indefinitely.
I’m not 100% sure, but I think the source of truth is the community’s instance, that instance then informs the instances of anyone subscribed to that community. (This is all based on my understanding of how the pieces in ActivityPub could be fit together to build the features lemmy has)
Same here. I only have a couple of users though so I don’t show up on join-lemmy.org anymore. Not sure how to gather more users now. I figure if I do actually get up to a hundred or so users I’ll set up a LibrePay account and expand based on available funds.
Wait I’m not there either anymore. I was. Why not?
The devs changed it so that you have to have 5 monthly active users to show up.
Welp time to make a few fake accounts
/s
How do you create your own server?
With some technical knowledge.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/administration.html
Its a bit techy right now, but hopefully some of the big name managed hosts will have scripts soon like they do for Mastodon.
This is the way. If you don’t like the moderators, don’t play on their servers. It’s that simple.
First I created account there and then landed on my current instance, because lemmy.ml’s admin views looks sketchy for me. Been living in ex-ussr for all my life I just cant accept all that communists and marxists and the fact that lemmy.ml has /c/Communism on it.
I know that’s silly but that’s why I’m not there anymore.
It’s not silly at all. I also made an account there before realizing the admins are tankies. It honestly sketches me out about Lemmy in general considering they’re the two lead (and currently only?) devs. Casts a big shadow over all of Lemmy when the devs are posting Xinjiang genocide denialism and their instance is at the top of the recommendations on join-lemmy.org. With lemmy.grad pretty high up there too.
Yeah that’s what Lemmy started out as. The thing is with all the Reddit refugees flooding in it is diluting out the tankies. Besides, lemmygrad.ml is blocked by many instances. As for the values of the devs the great thing is that Lemmy is FOSS so if they go rouge someone will just make a fork of Lemmy.
At least with the way Lemmy is designed it doesn’t seem like even the main devs can have much of an impact.
They even write themselves that if they made changes to the Lemmy codebase that some instance admins didn’t like, then those admins can decide not to upgrade their instance. The code is also open sourced so anyone with some tech know-how can fork the codebase and remove whatever they don’t like.
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Are you familiar with the Nayirah Testimony?
Profit motive ruined Reddit so you’ve come to a place created by communist then get upset that the people who made and operate it are communists. Yeah that’s more than a little silly.
There’s a difference between being a communist and blindly supporting authoritarian dictatorships wearing communist masks.
I’ve not really looked into it too deeply because every single mile-long screed about this “controversy” starts off by clutching pearls about communists. Can you link me to where this is happening without paragraphs of dissembling preamble?
This is the lead dev on Russia’s invasion, total support here and other comments:
A few months later, they’ve apparently flipped on the issue entirely and now support US aid:
I’m not very concerned with the “communist” or tankie part fwiw. And while I do have strong opinions on Russia’s invasion, I’m far more concerned with the 180 shift in position displayed here, and I have yet to find an explanation. I don’t think he wants to talk about it, but a quick “I changed my mind because xyz” could alleviate my concerns. Clear communication is important if you’re gonna have such strong opinions imo.
I’m not trying to villainize him or cancel lemmy, he seems like a decent person and we’ve even had a brief interaction here… But I hope you can see why I’m cautious about things. The whiplash is my main issue, not which side he picks.
And I’m not here to stir the pot, it’s just that you specifically asked and I had already personally looked into things.
Mods: I won’t be spamming this, just wanted to put it out there once.
However… if the platform prospers and attracts enough other devs, none of this even remotely matters, and that’s why I’m still here, I want to believe this can be set aside.
undefined> I’m not very concerned with the “communist” or tankie part fwiw.
Then why were you doing the “red fash” spiel just a single comment earlier if you don’t care about it? No one thinks Russia is communist except a minority of senile Republicans who literally forgot about the founding of the Russian Federation.
I’m not that_one_guy, this was my first comment on the topic. I suppose I changed the topic a bit, since I didn’t and won’t address the accusations of “authoritarian regimes under a communist mask”. My bad.
I appreciate it. This is not as damning as I would have expected, to be frank. I won’t say I fully agree with that interpretation of the war but it’s a lot more nuanced than just blindly supporting an authoritarian regime “wearing a communist mask”. Russia is not now nor does it even pretend to be communist in any capacity.
To be honest even with this hot take on Russia i’d say his politics are still probably more closely aligned with any given Redditor than they were to the people who run Reddit.
Yup, I’d agree. But again our politics shouldn’t need to align, that’s not my yardstick at all. It’s more the whiplash/volatility between such opposing strong opinions that spooks me.
Yeah, it’s just funny that some people are using that yardstick here and now when it never seemed like the political views of the Reddit admin were a problem until they took away the mobile phone apps.
Since they didn’t really answer your question, I can say that the people complaining are basically the type who are “As Progressive As They Come” who think it’s evil and indicative of brainwashing or ulterior motive to speak positively of China, Venezuela, Cuba, etc. They just can’t help but immediately jump to buzzwords instead of concretely describing people’s positions.
I’m not upset about their political views. For me its just too painful to read something like “Russia didn’t start that war, its NATO” while I’m currently fleeing from conscription to Russian army to fight against Ukrainian people I respect more than citizens of my motherland.
So, I make only choice I find suitable in that situation: avoid places where this behaviour is fine for mods and gains upvotes.
No that is not silly you got a fair point
This is why I didn’t choose lemmy.ml as my local instance.
Is it possible to move instances once I’m registered or do I have to create totally new account on other instance?
You’d need to sign up for a totally new account. There is talk of adding a migration feature but obviously that’ll require a bit of patience, they’ve got a long list of feature requests!
I just saw on GitHub it’s the feature is low on their priority list. I guess I’m gonna register to another instance. 🤷♂️
Understandable enough I suppose, there’s more crucial things atm! I do hope they get there eventually though, it’s a handy fallback feature over on Mastodon.
Unfortunately an account transfer feature is pretty complicated to develop so it might still be a while. Devs need to make sure it doesn’t cause issues with federation when content changes home instances and domains, and transferring live user content over while retaining points, interactions by other accounts, and while having the same timestamp but now being hosted on a different instance, while ensuring there is only one canonical location/URL of the content on the fediverse, is not easy.
Oh no ;_;
Any recommended communities? (or ones to avoid)
All I know is that you should avoid lemmy.ml. In their /c/WorldNews community, an admin gave a four day ban to a user for posting an Axios article about the Chinese succession plan for the reason of “Orientalism”. Those guys are tankie shills. In my experience, lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.one seem solid. Obviously I personally went with lemmy.ca. But you should check out the admin profiles before you join any instance. That will tell you most of what you need to know. That and the modlogs (found at the bottom of the page) that will tell you what posts have been taken down and what people have been banned by mods on various communities.
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China and Russia. Thus censoring legitimate western media articles about China. There’s also a lot of anti-NATO bullshit. Here’s the Axios article they banned a user for posting.
legitimate western media articles
anti-NATO bullshit
Out of idle curiosity, do you self-identify as a leftist?
I generally align with the left most of the time, but I hate making one label the basis for your entire political opinion. I am very against censorship. My greatest pet issues have to do with censorship and democratic principles. In terms of American politics, I will never vote Republican. If I feel a Democrat has let me down in a big way, I would consider voting third party, but 99% of the time I would vote Democratic. Centrist Democrats piss me off more than leftist ones. My foreign policy stances are probably the least in line with the further left. I am generally pro-NATO with the understanding that NATO isn’t perfect. I just worry way more about a world with China/Russia at the helm given their propensity for censoring opinions that oppose their majority parties.
I am generally pro-NATO with the understanding that NATO isn’t perfect.
I’m terminally-online enough that I am used to the paths of most arguments that have appeared on this website about politics, but – and I say this to be transparent – this one baffles me and I don’t know how to respond to it. I’ve seen people say it but, well, it gets hard to explain within rule 1.
Maybe if we agree that “NATO is an extension of US foreign policy” we can sidestep the issue for now.
I just worry way more about a world with China/Russia at the helm given their propensity for censoring opinions that oppose their majority parties.
This one I am much more used to. Remembering that NATO is a military organization and not, you know, “who controls the internet,” I’d like to just present you with a simple pair of questions:
-
How many of the past thirty years has the US been at war?
-
How many of the past thirty years has China been at war?
Beyond that, for all the fearmongering people do, China is remarkably less interested in unilaterally dictating relations than you might think, so explaining things in terms of “which country is the master of the unipolar world order” is not justified. Unipolarity has only been the state of things for a little over 30 years (and only obvious for a little over 40) and was unheard of before that. There is no reason to suppose that the future can only be unipolar, especially if the country that ushered in unipolarity and viciously guards it with world-historic levels of violence (the US) is no longer the strongest force.
China has shown every indication of seeking bilateral development and cooperation. An example in severe microcosm is the US banning China from the International Space Station and China responding by making its own space station which the US isn’t banned from, nor most other countries (though I think it is still a finite list and not totally open, owing in part to being a new program). Stories like “debt traps” from China are grotesque projection, as China doesn’t do things like forced restructuring or asset seizure, unlike the IMF.
I truly think this sort of “US is the least of the available evils” ideology has a hard time existing except in a subcultural bubble where it meets no challenge at all, because it is an astoundingly flimsy position.
-
I recognize you, you’re an old head around these parts, you were there during my battle with that one CHEF_KOCH fuckface, I like you.
That said, you’ve been here at least as long as I have, semantics regarding the word “shill” aside you know this place is (kinda was) a majority State Communist, or “Tankie,” echo chamber, and they pushed it relentlessly. It’s why you only ever saw me in c/linux, I don’t like political evangelism to the degree it used to be found here. C’mon lol.
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No I still disagree with them and it is through arguing with them, not “western propaganda” unless that is what they themselves are following. Not that I agree with the US gov’s atrocities either, but it is possible to disagree with more than one thing of course.
majority State Communist,
Is there any reason you don’t say Marxist?
Because as I understand it Marxism is a stateless society, but most of the people here were supporting State Communism, so not Marxism.
I would strongly recommend researching . Marxism before declaring self-proclaimed Marxists to not be Marxists.
Now do “State Communism”
Everything from beehaw.org is nice. Even stuff on lemmy.ml is okay as long you don’t bring up politics. Stay away from news or politics subs on this instance. And I hope we will get bigger communities on other servers than lemmy.ml or beehaw.org.
Beehaw is not nice. Just look at their “rules”
If you’re worried about how our rules are explicitly open to interpretation, that’s on purpose and I hope the text above helps to clarify the vision that I have (and others of the community share) around how I’d like to see this community evolve and what we’d like to think we’re doing differently on this website. I’m not banning people for no reason or simply because they don’t agree with me. I want people to disagree with me. I want diverse opinions in here. But I also need this place to be nice and members of the community need to be willing to hold each other accountable in creating that kind of space. Of note, I’ve never banned a single person without openly discussing what happened with other individuals who participate in this community and asking for their input. I can’t promise this will always be the case, but I can promise that I’ll be open to having a discussion with any community member who feels that something unjust happened with another user or to themselves.
Users from beehaw can’t even see this comment, nor yours if you reply to this one.
The rules being "We reserve the right to ban you whenever we want.” are not rules, just check their modlog, they’re ban-happy.
I’m currently on lemmy.world. You can create communities and people are chill over here.
Avoid any instance that bans/blocks other instances. As for communities, just find whatever you like.
I had the same exact thoughts. Liked the concept but was kinda sketched out by lemmy.ml. Hope kbin forms a nice little community
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Same, I found a place that I know I’l prioritize a lot so I joinded that instance instead of the official one because ran into a post pointing out just what you said.
Also I’ve seen admins and users in the most popular/main instances acting like if not allowing adult content will keep their instances safe from NSFL or troll content or as if that will save them from the problems to moderate that kind of content, which honestly is disingenuous and/or naive (at least until the instances actually have to deal with big constant activity).
Problem is that a) new users don’t know that they can join communities across servers, and b) it is intuitive use start with the servers that a lot of people like.
Instance browsing and onboarding is probably the biggest challenge to Lemmy’s growth. The current experience either scares new people away, or encourages them to congregate on a limited set of instances.
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I’m very tempted to switch to another instance, but from what I understand, you can’t migrate your account like you can with Mastodon? That seems like something that should be expected with fediverse apps…
Don’t look at me I’m on feddit.de
feddit.nl here. Hi, neighbor.
G E K O L O N I S E E R D
Damnit, Reddit is leaking again!
Well, here we all are now, all the lads.
waves over from 1-user instance heyo
2-user
only because I separate admin and non-admin accounts ^^
But that’s a German speaking instance, so it’s not suitable for everyone
Lern Deutsch du Lemmysohn :-*
Kommentarbereich: annektiert!
Ich kann deutsch, du Schlampenabkömmling
There are sooo many options tho Lemmy.one Sh.itjust.works Lemmy.world Beehaw.org Etc
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Nah just register at whichever instance that sounds the coolest to append to your name. Just FYI I’m from
programming.dev.I tried to make an account on lemmy.ml and it looks like their servers are (understandably) overloaded
I ended up choosing lemmy.world instead
My understanding is I’m not missing out on anything by chosing a less-popular instance. Did I get that right?
The documentation explaining how fediverse works is so bad. It’s so long and convoluted anyone new just can’t be bothered reading it.
Proud to be a sh.itjust.works user
This is something that lemmy devs need to better address. This is an “Eternal September” kind of situation. People (me included) are not used to the fediverse. They think you can participate only if you’re in that instance. And people want content, so they think "why’s the instance with most people? Ahh lemmy.ml? Cool, let’s join.
As someone who intentionally joined a different instance, the biggest issue is the “federation” doesn’t allow cross-authentication. Clicking a link to another instance moves me to that instance where I’m not logged in. Authentication should really be cross-instance.
I think this occurs because people haven’t gotten used to linking to communities on other instances properly.
They usually post the direct link like beehaw.org/c/technology . Instead they should start using the federated link which is more instance agnostic like this: /c/technology@beehaw.org . This link will load the community from your instance.
FWIW, on a browser the /c/technology link you posted isn’t a hyperlink, so I can’t actually interact with it. It doesn’t work in mlem either.
For now, as a workaround, you can manually make it a hyperlink: /c/technology@beehaw.org
Just use
[/c/technology@beehaw.org](/c/technology@beehaw.org). This should open correctly on all instances.Maybe a pull request can be made to change the auto fill behaviour. At least in the browser, start typing
!technologyand it will display a list of the technology communities. Unfortunately, selecting one, !technology@beehaw.org for example, autofills to[!technology@beehaw.org](https://beehaw.org/c/technology). This method opens up the Beehaw instance directly.Maybe it should autofill !technology@beehaw.org to
[!technology@beehaw.org](/c/technology@beehaw.org). This method opens the community through your current instance.
Seems like line 703 of https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/blob/main/src/shared/utils.ts#L703 is the relevant code. I’m away for the weekend so can’t do much myself at the moment
Yeah. A shorter-term solution might be a browser plugin that recognizes links like that and converts it to a hyperlink to that community on whatever instance you tell it. I’m not a programmer but that does seem like a relatively simple plugin for somebody that actually knows what they’re doing.
Yeah, I’m sure we’ll eventually get apps and such that handle it better.
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It also doesn’t work in the mobile app, I’d love to see it work there soon too
This is something I also find strange. If I click a link to an instance, I want to view their content and not visit their homepage, where I am not logged in and cannot do anything.
I agree with you
assuming the servers are properly federated you should be getting a link that is still on your server. i mean, you got to this lemmy.ml link alright at least
wait, i think i get what you mean, like if you get an external link while not browsing on your instance? you should just be able to paste that link into the search function to find your instance’s version of the post
From my instance, I’ve been crossing to other instances fine to post, upvote, etc.
If I click the link you provided, my browser takes me to Lenny.ml. There I am not logged in and my credentials from feddit.de are not working. So I cannot post there.
I think it only works if the link points to a community on another instance. Like !memes@lemmy.ml . Maybe this is the intended behavior.
The downside is, you can not visit an instance and view the local communities and their post and interact with them. This makes it a lot more attractive to join the instance where the communities are you want to frequent.
You can subscribe to those communities on your instance, and then interact with them.
Yeah, I can manually search and find communities, but hyperlinks move you to the other instance (on a webpage; browsing within an app like mlem seems to work)
links that you find while browsing on reddthat.com will send you to other instances? that’s super odd, I’m not getting that behavior with midwest.social or lemmy.ml, using mobile or desktop firefox. just pasting the links into the search to find your instance’s version of the post is a bit of a janky workaround but it should work. you might try posting in https://reddthat.com/c/lemmy_support@lemmy.ml
Can you elaborate on your experience a bit more? I can’t say I have had any issues as you’ve described. If something doesn’t look right, or isn’t working the way you expect, it might actually be a bug.
The hyperlink in the pic takes me outside of reddthat
The devs of kbin and Lemmy have that on their list of things to do, make cross-instance links work nicer. But they have a lot on their plate at a moment, so it could be some time before that comes about.
How would that work?
I chose lemmy.ml based on two things:
- I wanted a server that wasn’t likely to close I don’t really know for sure, but I imagine it’s easy to underestimate how much money or time is required to run a server. And I’d really prefer not having to worry about migrating. The ‘run by Lemmy’s developers’ part makes me think that either the risk will be lower or the people running the server will know how to prevent reaching a point like that.
- I didn’t want to join a very specific instance As I see it, there are two possible scenarios:
- The instance I join will affect the content I’m exposed (and not exposed) to, in which case I want to experience ‘the whole internet’ rather than a section of it.
- The instance I choose is irrelevant to the content I get, in which case, (apart from community rules) it shouldn’t really matter which one I choose, so I would just join the biggest instance.
Still something that could help with the choosing-an-instance process is to display in the list of servers the community rules and if they are blocking certain communities.
I’m on .world because I had no idea which to join. Seems to be working just fine for me; I can see tons of posts from other places!
My instance has a cool name 😎
Pff I think this one is cooler 😎
Hey, mine too!
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I almost joined yours! Very clever, I approve
Beehaw users thicc as fuck right now
Same, it was quick and painless to register.
Same
Same
