[–] 19 points 2 months ago* (12 children)

Mercator projection was favoured because it was useful for navigation due to preserving rhumb lines, representing them as straight lines on the map, and has been around for like 400 years.

Given that barely anyone does navigation like this any more it's not that important to keep it as the default view for world maps that aren't used for navigation such as a simple wall map. Web maps and the use of pseudomercator have definitely kept it relevant in modern times and as the most recognizable projection.

There isn't much basis to say it's used to "make colonial countries look bigger and Africa look smaller" except for people virtue signaling in blog posts over the last decade. If anything then it's a psyop by Big Greenland.

As this post explains, you can just look at a globe if you want accurate size representation, because all map projections are distorted and there is always a tradeoff.

E: Oops I can see several people already explained this since refreshing the post.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    IDK if it's a thing elsewhere but it's been a running joke on Reddit and Lemmy for years mostly because Arch was the more popular, bare bones distro, i.e. you had to set it up yourself without a guided installer like Mint or Ubuntu, so was used as a signal to be like "I know what I'm talking about".

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  •  

    Greetings fellow Manderites,

    Has anyone else noticed a degradation in performance over the last few days?

    I checked https://lemmy-status.org/ a bunch of times and it seems the instance is mostly up and healthy..

    Issues I had:

    • All feed types loading very slowly or timing out;
    • A number of hours yesterday where Jerboa gave a message that my account was being verified and my profle not loading;
    • Receiving API errors posting comments but then the comment being posted.

    Apologies I didn't screen shot anything.

    Alt account on another, larger instance seemed fine.

    P.S. Is this the correct community to post about this? Apologies in advance if not.

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