Skull giver

To prevent annoying trolls from digging through my post history, mostly. I’ve seen people do this on Lemmy, one person even had a stalker that would go server to server to reply angrily to their posts because he felt “wronged” somehow. Plus, nobody is reading this stuff after a month anyway, the only readership of old comments is AI scrapers trying to steal my words for their algorithm.

Of course, deleting stuff on Lemmy doesn’t mean actually deleting anything. You can trivially ignore deletion requests as a server and some seem to keep old copies of deleted content.

There’s no automated way to do it with Lemmy so I’ve written my own automation tool that occasionally runs.

It exists, if just isn’t a solid replacement for normal plastic. It’ll crumble to dust and dissolve before you can actually get any use out of the material.

The world before plastics also suffered more food scarcity. Cheap, easy, light, safe, food-safe, airtight containers won’t find a replacement in old materials, the food will just go to waste faster.

Traditional construction also wastes incredible amounts of energy. Wooden crates are much heavier than plastic crates. Bent metal structures much heavier than molded plastic. Just compare the weight of a modern plasticised car to a steel one from 100 years ago.

We would adapt and we would be fine (in rich countries) but without inventing solid replacements, we’ll be fucking ourselves and our planet over in new and exciting ways.

There’s also a balance to be struck with single use plastics. Many products don’t last nearly as long without single use wrappers. For luxury products like cookies that doesn’t matter as much, but for certain vegetables getting a plastic wrapping early on can give them much longer shelf lives. There are only so many cucumbers you can consume between harvest and consumption, and ditching plastic wrappings would reduce food availability and probably cause more food to go bad and get wasted.

The worst part is probably that rich countries getting rid of shelf-life-extending plastic will solve the problem by just importing food products from elsewhere when local harvest season is done and the supplies run out. Poorer countries with less purchasing power will find themselves with more aggressive competition. Even though rich countries have an abundance of food, reducing the accessible food supply will still have an impact on the world.

As for bringing your own containers: that may work for some places, but not all. No grocery store will let you show up with your ceramic container to carry one of those ready-made salads to the till. The risk of getting into trouble for food safety and the general theft risk is just too great. We can get rid of those single use plastics, but it’d also mean getting rid of pre-packaged meals like that. As for cookies, I don’t get them from my bakery, those cookies are twice as expensive and last half as long. The closest bakery offers mostly-paper bags (though probably covered in PFAS) already.

Speaking of, for loads of single-use plastics, there aren’t many good alternatives without spreading more PFAS around. Paper isn’t all that great for storing anything that isn’t dry (and it’s still terrible when it rains). Glass can be an alternative, but making and recycling glass requires enough heat to melt it, adding to the CO2 problem. You also can’t store carbonated beverages like soda above a certain volume in glass containers, or you’ll end up with the glass grenades that made the world switch away from glass decades ago.

Here, plastic bags are still everywhere, but by law they now cost money. Certainly saves on plastic bag usage, but doesn’t eliminate them either. That said, plastic bags aren’t necessarily single use, you can just stuff them into your pocket and reuse them next time you go to the store unless they’re made from especially terrible plastic.

Of course you don’t need prepackaged individual slices of banana to have their own plastic wrappers, but a surprising amount of single use plastics is better than the alternative when taking other environmental factors into account.

I’m not a parent (and I’m glad I don’t have to think about this problem myself). However, I’ve worked at a company that specialised in filtering internet services with many parents using it to protect their kids. I’ve also talked to plenty of people whose parents used to deny them whatever app the kids were on at the time. I can tell you that many kids will install apps and create accounts eventually, whether you permit them or not. I’ve seen the ingenious workarounds kids will come up with (using the browser app built into Windows Help to get around parental controls, combining web proxies and VPNs into an unholy homebrew Tor, or just using a burner phone outside the house), and while I appreciate the hacker culture that can develop around hiding apps from your parents, I don’t think it’ll be good for the relationship between you and your kids if you’re too strict about this stuff.

Snapchat is popular because other kids are on there. It’s mostly a stupid looking chat app. Every other chat app out there has cloned its most important features. Your kids won’t be missing out on anything on there, except for the network of friends and social activities that are there. That means you won’t find a Fediverse app like that, because most teenagers aren’t on the Fediverse. The other kids aren’t going to replace Snapchat with an app just to chat with your kids, especially not if it sends a copy of their conversations to their parents. Best case scenario, they install the app and share most of the stuff your kids are missing out on on the special server you set up so your kids don’t miss too much.

As for the point your daughter made, notifications can be silenced. If your kids are worried about phone addiction or getting interrupted by notifications, help them with whatever digital wellness tools their devices come with. Every major OS, desktop and mobile, now comes with tools to limit notifications during focus time, bed time, and the ability to silence notifications for certain chats or events. I find it hard to believe that Snapchat would solve that problem and feel like it’s more likely she’s using an unrelated valid concern to help her case for your permission to use Snapchat.

I don’t know how old your daughters are and what guidance they need, but if they’re creating PowerPoints to get their desires across (bravo), I think they’d be better served with guidance than with alternatives. Instead of rejecting them, consider permitting apps like Snapchat under certain conditions (time limits, no publicly posting pictures, no strangers, etc.). It’s probably also best to make the rules are clear and consistent (which means not taking away Snapchat time as punishment for arbitrary things), because that kind of stuff can cause trust issues that will still have them go behind your back. For this to work, they need to trust that you will honour the “deal”. I’m not saying you should let 12 year olds go ham on social media, but letting 16 year olds on Snapchat an hour a day isn’t going to kill them.

The biggest risk with these things is that kids will find a way to install these apps without you noticing, something bad happens (their online friend turns out to be a grown man, a classmate starts sending weird messages), and they’re afraid of talking to you about it because they might get in trouble for having a banned app on their phone.