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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I mean, it isn’t meaningless, just culturally subjective and lacking a rigerous definition. Berries are a set of specific fruit, which fruit being included being determined by the culture in question base on percieved similarities and historic uses. We use it to quickly bring up the specific group and whatever vague characteristics we percieve them to share.

    So, the definition for berries that you seek is simply “the fruit people you’re interested in would point at and identify as a berry”, which is a vague definition and not rigerous at all, but most people would in fact think of the same thing you do if you say “I put berries on top of my cake”. If I ask my wife “hey, on your way home swing by the store and buy some berries, any type will do”, she will not bring a watermelon. She in fact will buy what we both agree are berries, and so the word has useful meaning.

    You’ll find most classifications humans have do this too. The real world is really good at refusing to fit into the neat boxes we made to classify it and the things in it, and yet we can still use them fine enough as long as we don’t get lost in semantics and wondering if a hot dog is a sandwich or cereal soup.







  • Its not that strange: people use what they are familiar with. Most people have a Discord account these days and migrating over there is as easy as clicking an invite link. In contrast Lemmy is relatively unknown and untested to the general audience, and is a step higher on the hassle scale, even if it is a similar service to Reddit - not counting the usual fediverse complications.

    People are drawn to go as far down the hassle scale as possible, the fewer steps between them and their goal the better.

    Not that a lot of communities did successfully migrate over here, partially or not. Lemmy is a lot more active now than when I started looking into it during the initial API struggle in June.