Wow -- So earlier today I posted a new Podcast series on #polytheism and I used the #religion hashtag.
So I decided to take a look at what gets posted on Mastodon under the #religion hashtag. WOW.
Not saying its not deserved frequently, but I have to ask -- what hashtags do people who actually want to discuss religion rather than just bash it use??
Do you think the energy of a stone can become dead or deadened?
Just as dried herbs lose potency after time, do you think the energy in stones/crystals also can lose potency?
We hear so much about "charging" stones by moon energy. What does this really mean?
A stone has been removed from the ground or its mother. It's then moved and shipped, often run through tumblers, packaged, shipped again, set on a shelf until purchased, then more than likely kept inside, on a shelf again.
Or a person walks through the woods, picks up a stone on the ground, carries it home, puts it on a shelf, indoors.
The terms "hard" and "soft" polytheism are relatively new in paganism. Scholars of ancient polytheism started using the terms in the early 2000s to differentiate these large disparities in ancient belief systems that before were lumped together. Naturally, pagans follow academics, and I believe it was Greer from ADF that first popularized the terms in modern paganism.
These words were meant to be a quick summation of how you see the gods, just a general idea. Instead of having to write out a whole essay on how you specifically think of the gods as beings, you could just slap this handy label on it.
They are not meant to be diametrically opposed, and therefore constantly debated.
They are not meant to be an entire identity.
You are not meant to choose either/or, it is a spectrum, and you might only lean one way.
Our labels are just simple, quick ways to connect with others. Because modern polytheists are so widely diverse, we have these little phrases we use to more easily talk to each other, no more than that.
Anyone want to discuss the commercialization of witchcraft?
I love that it makes it more accessible to those who can't easily venture out into nature.
I hate all the plastic and gemstone mining.
I've changed a lot since 1991, when I first self-dedicated myself to the practice and gods. Now I no longer use deities in my practice, my tools are minimum but have worked with me through so much magic.
@KentuckyConjurer It's what capitalism does to religions, all of them. Witchcraft has the sad thing that it has been injected with new agery, which I think of as a majorly capitalist religion.
@JWBananas Or maybe the antibiotic resistant genes are taking a hitch ride on larger particles? I don't know, that is probably unlikely, but we've seen they can hitchhike into the atmosphere.
So, I've been using mastodon a long time, several years in fact, and I never really understood all the folks complaining that it was too complicated; I mean, it was just always intuitive to me. Now maybe that's because I never really did the tweeter.
What I have done is a lot of reddit, and I gotta say, why the hell is this so complicated? :P
I'm only half kidding.
One thing that should always taken into consideration by software peeps is that when making a 'replacement' like this (dont tell me it's not a replacement for reddit, there's too much signal in the noise of this mag about 'reddit migration'), is that users that are relocating their operations will need extra handholding and assistance.
Unlike a lot of us, these peeps aren't casually learning how to do a new cool thing, they're typically perceiving some real and or imagined (Hey, both can cause a lot of stress and anxiety!), they're fleeing something, and trying to settle into a new, safer place; or so they hope.
I may sound like I'm 'asking for a friend', and I am, but that friend is me :D
Please, we need some kind of FAQ that says 'this is the reddit thing you want to do' and 'here's how to do it on kbin'. We need the next section to say, 'You can do these things on reddit, and not on kbin' and one more section in the FAQ that says 'These are cool things kbin does that reddit doesn't'.
A HUGE ask would be user style sheets to make it look and act more or less like reddit; really, as far as I can tell, there's only really a couple of big differences. Hell, it might suffice if we just had a FAQ that pointed out the substantive differences.
The biggest problem is, y'all just kinda 'sprung' the whole microblog/People/Threads on us; those single word descriptors are really only useful if you're 'in the know' already.
I've been posting off and on at kbin now for several months, hoping I'd eventually just soak it up; but it hasn't happened. I still keep screwing some things up here and there; just yesterday I was off to the races posting about some things, and managed to editorialize a title when I thought I was using post body to introduce the link. It's been sent to the ether, now.
I'm not in desperation about anything. I'm not a 'migrator' or refugee, or any of that. I do have a couple projects on reddit I'd like to bring here, I think this is the future of social media, and I think I will get a higher quality engagement here. I also have some projects already here that I'd like to get supercharged, and I can't really do stuff until I know the ropes..
So yeah, it would be great if the devs would drop some smooth pdfs or single page html or damn just if they'd 'own' a markdown document that could be loaded off any kbin page or something, that would be bad ass.
In the absence of that though (or something like it) what do y'all have out there, in userland?