Here’s my primary claim: “This article is debunking the idea that there are probiotic benefits to eating dirt, which isn’t what we’re talking about at all”

Your claim starts with a misunderstanding. So you should start out by reading the citations more thoroughly.

My claim was that the page you linked is clearly talking about digestive health, not the immune system.

This is incorrect. And they are tightly interwoven.

So it’s worse than I thought, immediately, right off the bat, this page is already jumbling the concepts of digestive health and immune system. Just odd.

It’s not odd, it’s ignorance on your part, so read the citations more thoroughly so you get a better understanding.

That’s not how sources work. You should read about how to vet sources for accuracy before making foolish statements like that.

Stop spreading misinformation. Pretty much everything you just said is wrong.

What you’re doing harms people. You should stop.

You may be suffering from heavy metal poisoning.

Stopped there. Because that’s how your immune system learns.

“I chose to stay ignorant and re-state misinformation that you debunked”

And the bit with heavy metals is bull.

It cites the CDC, so you should contact the CDC and tell them to stop spreading “bull”.

It’s dangerous misinformation, regardless of how you want to phrase it. You do not need to eat dirt or play in dirt.

That’s dangerous misinformation. Debunked: https://humanmicrobiome.info/faq/#is-dirt-good-for-your-microbiome

Yes, common knowledge that is actually dangerous misinformation. Debunked: https://humanmicrobiome.info/faq/#is-dirt-good-for-your-microbiome

I don’t think it compares well to vaccines.

Hopefully people will start going back to independent forums. Google just added a “forums” tab at the top of their search, so they seem to want that too. It’s not good for them that so much information is private on chat programs like Discord, other big social media sites, and concentrated on Reddit.

Lemmy never shows up in search results for me despite some instances having good domain authority, but more people should start using it when it starts showing up.

I use Ecosia instead of Google, but I know that Google recently added a “forums” category to the top of their search. Have you tried that? Hopefully it will help bring back to life independent forums.

none of the major providers will deliver your email without your mail server having first built a reputation

There are definitely major, and easily-abusable “features” being implemented by the major email providers, but I don’t think your statement is correct. I have a Hetzner server, and I can receive email from it (to Gmail) just fine, as long as I have SPF, DMARC, and DKIM set up. I can also create a new server with a new IP and not have any issues. The issues may arise with shared IPs/ranges that are also being used by spammers. Otherwise, if you’re planning to send bulk email you just need to warm up the IP.

I’m wondering, is this still your opinion?

I’ve been thinking about updating that blog post but I’m not sure where to add the updates.

I just added a bunch of updates and info at the bottom to help people who are new to the fediverse. Thanks for the nudge.

Yes, I think so.

There are public instances: https://searx.space/

This is one someone previously suggested, and the one I tried that seems to work well: https://search.disroot.org/ - I see it’s not in the list above though. Not sure why.

I’ve been testing other search engines, and I found that SearX/SearXNG and Mojeek both turn up results for smaller websites that Google puts in 50th place for the exact title of the website/page.

About the votes, it might have been because of the opinion I quoted above.

Na, I don’t think people on lemmy are that averse to criticisms of the UI, features, etc. And by “astroturfed” I don’t mean “my thread was downvoted”. The thread was flooded with hostile comments making personal attacks, etc., most of which completely ignored the substance of the blog post. Virtually the entire thread was filled with comments along the lines of “How dare you attack reddit, you are [insert random ad hominem]”.

All the comments making personal attacks on me were greatly upvoted, and other reasonable and on-topic comments were downvoted. There was a delay before it occurred, and then all the comments were up/downvoted the same amount, and new ones met the same fate, so there was clearly a group of people who were notified about the thread at some point who then continually monitored it and voted on new comments.

I guess at the time the mods removed your blog post by mistake, because they didn’t expect personal blogs here.

I doubt that. But if that’s the case, that’s horrible moderation that they would allow all the personal, off-topic attacks against me and then “remove the post by mistake because they didn’t expect personal blogs”. They should have removed most of the comments in that thread and banned the users.

I’ve had a better experience with the reddit@lemmy.ml community so far. I’ve seen lots of criticisms of lemmy.ml, and even attempts to [dishonestly] attack the .ml developers. I wonder how much of that is from the same group/type of people who just want to cause problems and make people leave lemmy. I wonder if the reason I experienced it less on the lemmy.ml comm is because those users are banned there, and that’s why they’re spreading FUD about lemmy.ml.

I really dislike the bloated UI they’re all using, but it looks like there are solutions on the way.

I’m wondering, is this still your opinion?

I’ve gotten used to it and I like that many instances default to a dark mode. I used to use the old.instance UI, but I think I ran into problems with it and ended up just using the standard Lemmy UI.

Regarding lemmy being complicated, I’ve mostly learned how it works and I definitely think it’s the #1 reddit-alternative at the moment, and the most promising option for the future as well. Along with independent forums of course.

I also set up a Mastodon account, but unfortunately most people are still using Twitter. I also petitioned the Xenforo developers to join the fediverse, and I like that other forum software like Discourse, etc., are joining the fediverse. I definitely think federation is the future.

I’ve been thinking about updating that blog post but I’m not sure where to add the updates.

I agree. The best option now is to look for specific sources of trustworthy reviews.

Regarding rtings, the two monitors I purchased myself had completely different results from the monitor RTINGS showed. What does that say? RTINGS is totally unreliable? I got ridiculously unlucky? https://hardforum.com/threads/why-are-ips-monitors-popular-the-ips-glow-ruins-a-third-of-the-screen-along-with-any-color-advantage-it-may-have.2032852/post-1045814690

I agree about reddit, but unfortunately, I don’t think lemmy is free from astroturfing. Myself and others have noticed that there are many users on lemmy who seem to be purposefully antagonistic towards other lemmy users. The possible reason may be to drive people away from lemmy and hinder its growth.

I’ve experienced pro-reddit astroturfing on lemmy. I posted this criticism of reddit on the reddit@lemmy.world comm, and it was heavily astroturfed and then deleted by the mod for a bogus reason.

A year later, someone used that post to attack me while insinuating purely from the title that I was at fault because the reddit admins would never do something like that (despite all the public information to the contrary).

I’d like to read this because I think one of the biggest problems with reddit is that it’s now basically a free-for-all for disinformation. So I’d like to see their arguments and evidence that decentralized alternatives are superior in this regard. Unfortunately, the article is paywalled.

I ran into a similar problem with snapshots of a forum and email server – if there are scheduled emails when you take the snapshot they get sent out again if you create a new test server from the snapshot. And similarly for the forum.

I’m not sure what the solution is either. The emails are sent via an SMTP so it’s not as simple as disabling email (ports, firewall, etc.) on the new test server.