Yeah, I had to run mine with lights and humidifiers.

I grew them in green houses for years. If you can keep the humidity high (60%+), they’ll grow, but you’ll won’t get flowers.The leaves will be very diminished, and the plant less robust. Two things very different about vanilla compared to other orchids: they aren’t an epiphyte; and they grow as a vine.

Typically, in the wild (and many of my cuttings are from ‘adventures’ to abandoned plantations) Vanilla has a “grow and fall over” vegetative habit. It grows tendrils down to the soil (which turn to accessory roots) following a support plant or structure. Its also extremely apically dominant. It barely branches, and it really, really wants to grow ‘straight up’. It takes a substantial amount of training to get them to grow sideways. That was many words to say they do best in high humidity, regular potting soil, and need lots of space (especially vertically).

If you are still interested let me know or DM me. I’d be happy to send some cuttings.

it just comes across as patronizing to say the only reason my hobbies don’t have traction here must be because I didn’t try hard enough.

It is absolutely patronizing for people to say that. And you are right to feel that way.

Maybe think about it like this. I collect and propagate one species of orchid as a hobby. Its an obscure species among orchids, which are relatively obscure plants among plant collectors, and plant collecting is a relatively obscure thing among people growing with and interacting with plants, which is a relatively obscure thing in the grand scheme of all things.

So lets assume a 5% conversion rate at every step: There are maybe 40k active users on lemmy?

So of 40k users about 2k are into plants.

Of the 2k users into plants in some manner, about 100 are into plant collecting.

Of the 100 users into plant collecting, maybe 5 are into collecting orchids.

And of the five users collecting orchids, I’m the quarter of one user who collects Vanilla planifolia and Vanilla planifolia var. tahitensis.

So if I acknowledge this, I’ve got a couple options. First, I could just start a vanilla community. But I really shouldn’t expect other people to participate, because I recognize that I’m probably the only vanilla grower on all of lemmy. If I do that, I should probably think about it as a place more like a personal blog or place for me to record my story. And maybe over time, it can grow in popularity and get a following.

Alternatively, I can share my exploits on larger subs, like c/plants, where I’ll probably do well because there are more users, and the content I’m sharing is interesting and unique because so few people are into/ do what I do.

So if you can adjust your exceptions, there absolutely is a place for you here. But we’re the flea market to Reddit’s mall of America approach. But remember, Reddit too started as a flea market. It was a place for internet weirdos with weird hobbies and senses of humor. But appreciate you’ll be a lone diamond here, but that gives you a chance to stand out.

The toxic down voting is coming from the same cult who lost the election for us.

Name, shame, and ignore Blue MAGA.

And look at the downvote to upvote ratio’s on these comments. Kind-of a gross community here too.

The article is effectively arguing that the left didn’t cheer-lead hard enough, and its voters fault for wanting more from a candidate. And a significant portion of Lemmy drank the kool-aid and believed the exact same thing. Quite literally from the head down, moderation on this platform editorialized the front page with decisions unsupported by the posted rules of subs to skew the presentation of information in specific directions. Subs like c/PolticalMemes and c/News were crafted into echo chambers to support moderation biases. And its not a unique thing happening on Lemmy. The same things happened Reddit and other social media platforms, and mainstream media platforms. Its effect was to severely hurt the campaign because shielded them from the legitimate criticisms that they needed to be hearing. And when their staffers go in and check on social media and only see cheer-leading, this colors their impression of how things are going.

The fact is you can’t abuse people into adopting your position. If you want to actually convince people of something you need to meet them where they are and address their concerns on their ground, within the context of their frame of reference. There are some deeply toxic members of this community and media writ large who skated by the previous 9 months using the ban hammer/ exclusionary practices to sculpt some very popular communities and platforms into echo chambers of their own design. And it has blown up in theirs, and all of our faces.

I can’t blame them, because they’ve been conditioned to be consumers of content. While they idealize creators, they also put up barriers in their minds as the the level of quality a given comment, piece of content, whatever, needs to achieve before getting involved.

I try and think of Lemmy as the equivalent of the Linux. We’re just going to have lower adoption because there isn’t a corporate juggernaut behind us promoting this thing.

But if people really want to know why reddit was able to become reddit, it happened here yesterday with cats. It’s bean memes. Its Stör. Its us developing culture of our own as a community.

So its fine. I’m not too worried. We’re doing great.

Yeah this opinion piece is 180 degrees orthogonal to reality. In its content, every accusation is an addition.

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he said. That’s a pretty patronizing take for someone who claims to be a champion of workers.

The whole article reads like Blue MAGA fan fiction.

you gotta realize reddit didn’t just “appear” one day with those obscure niche topics built out. There is a network effect large communities have. We need hundreds of thousands more members before that is possible.

I think you probably weren’t there for early reddit, but most of the active posters here on Lemmy were. It was tiny. Like Lemmy.

You can’t force those niche communities to exist here. It doesn’t work. But what you can do is post and create valuable content. and eventually we may get there.

This is such a hilariously fantastic view of who Biden is. Like with pretending that abusing people with Blue MAGA rhetoric was going to win an election, you do elicit this choice at all of our peril.

Biden isn’t on your side. Neither are the Democrats.

Right?

For a party with no shame…

These people are not who you think they are.

🤡 administration. Who gives a fuck about a genocide supporting Zionists opinion about this?

huurrr hurr hurr

And just when I thought we wouldn’t be getting any positive news for 4 years.

Department of Transportation.

something something trans athletes?

/s

Yeah pretty much. We’re 2-3 generations deep into a cultural expectation that “some one else” will deal with all these problems.

The constant threat of this being “the most important election of our lives”, when the party making that argument campaigned as if the outcomes were irrelevant (because from their privileged perspective, the outcomes are irrelevant).

Back during covid a boat got turned a bit sideways in a canal and it seemed like the whole world economy was going to collapse. The system we have is actually incredibly fragile and built largely on trust, both in one another but also in institutions and systems. Not only the US, but western Europe is about to get smacked up-side the head by the 2x4 of failing to maintain a civil society (US at fault within its borders, EU at fault beyond its borders).

can some one explain this meme to me?

I can’t find Saddam Huisen

What I find interesting is the seeming need to replace it with something similar. Why?

Oh yeah. Why? Yeah… yeah I could never imagine leaving one toxic social media and then trying to find a similar replacement…