[…] Even a voluntary survey is defeating the purpose of avoiding corporate forums. Why are they gathering the data? What are they going to do with it? How can we be assured they’re destroying the data even if we are okay with their goal? Nah. It’s a step in the wrong direction for lemmy as a whole.

I could certainly be misinterpreting, but your statement seems to imply that the census is intended to be non-anonymous and that it won’t be publicly released. For clarity, I am proposing a census whose data is anonymously collected, and will be publicly released by the admins once completed. Although, from this statement:

How can we be assured they’re destroying the data even if we are okay with their goal? Nah. It’s a step in the wrong direction for lemmy as a whole.

Perhaps you don’t trust that they’ll release the data? If so, perhaps there would be a way to publicly host the data live as it comes in?

[…] Why? Because they don’t need to know shit about you, me, or the cookie monster as long as we follow the rules. […]

You specify that they “don’t need to know”. I was specifically proposing a hypothetical where they only had some level of desire for the data and not a need.

[…] They might want it, but they don’t need it

For clarity, if admins do want (not necessarily need) the survey data, you would still oppose it? If so, why?

Thank you 😊

[…] Either something is solved or it isn’t, but it shouldn’t be marked ‘solved’ with links to answers of questionable accuracy.

This is a fair point, I think. Do you propose an alternative word? At what point would you say that it is justified to use “solved”? I used “solved” because, for my purposes, the question is answered (I know now that SJW has a max username length of 50, which is the only information that I personally needed).

I think you can be an outsider to a particular system, and still be able to provide valuable information about it. […]

I completely agree! It is also illogical to argue otherwise ­— sort of an appeal to authority, imo.

For clarity, I wasn’t claiming that you were incorrect due to your self-professed insufficient level of expertise. I was simply responding to your argument that “it’s silly to ask you for advice because you don’t use Lemmy” by arguing that your premise is unjustified — your argument is valid; however, I don’t think that it’s sound. I interpret your logic as follows:

1. (By your argument) If one is inexperienced with Lemmy, then it is unwise to ask their opinion.
2. You claimed that you are inexperienced with Lemmy.
3. Therefore, it is unwise to ask you for your opinion.

This is a valid argument, as it follows by modus ponens; however, it is unsound, as the premise is not epistemologically justified, as I cannot know, pior to you telling me, what your experience is with Lemmy. Hence why I said:

I don’t know you, so how would I know what your level of expertise is regarding Lemmy?

[…] To my mind, though, what I said wasn’t a claim. A claim would be if I’d said “lemmy.world is 26, sh.itjustworks is 50” with no further info. Instead, I gave command-line instructions for you to run yourself, so you could get the answers for those instances (and any other instances) from Lemmy’s backend itself. […]

Eh, this is becoming rather pedantic, imo. I’m not sure what point you are trying to make.

I saw your edit, yeah. […]

Then what is it about me using your comment as a source makes you think that I viewed your response as “not good enough”?

[…] Admins don’t need demographic data at all.

What makes you so certain of that?

[…] It seems fairly likely that we will get a lot of junk data mixed in with the real data, making its usefulness questionable. […]

I am by no means an expert on the subject, but I presume that there are methods that can be employed to filter out bad-faith respondents.

[…] this isn’t official (yet). […]

Fair point! ^[1]

[…] I think OSM shouldn’t just go out and follow every random suggestion any politician makes. […]

I think there’s some use in including a countries official names for specific features, in some way. I’m not saying that the primary name should be that, but it’s at least a name that is known and conceivably could be searched.

[…] Let’s wait until anything actually changes officially […]

Hm, I would argue that there is no such thing as “officially” in regards to OpenStreetMap. Or are you referring to the name “Gulf of America” changing officially in the USA?

[…] Let’s wait until anything actually changes officially before we start going with some wild claim

I wasn’t claiming anything — or, perhaps I misunderstand what you mean? Would you mind clarifying?

[…] You shouldn’t have to be relying on guesswork by amateurs, irrespective of how many ‘references’ they can quote.

I think you are misunderstanding how I am using references. They are only being used to point to the origin of a bit of knowledge. Their existence does not guarantee any level of accuracy.

[…] What you should be asking, is - “How come when I post a question to Lemmy’s support community, on the instance owned by Lemmy devs, it looks like they just ignore it?”. […]

I have no reason to expect any obligatory answer from anybody. IMO, it would be very entitled of me, or anyone else, to expect otherwise.

[…] I don’t even use Lemmy, so - in my opinion - you’re asking the wrong question to the wrong person. […]

I don’t know you, so how would I know what your level of expertise is regarding Lemmy? You are the one that commented on my post…

[…] I give you reproducible command-line instructions, which match up with your own findings, and it’s apparently not good enough. […]

Did you perhaps not see that I cited your comment’s findings as a source for the solution…? Or is it that you can’t believe that I would dare to exhibit any amount of skepticism of your claim?

You’ve accepted […] one link to a years-old migration as [an] answer,

[…] as that migration shows […]

I’m not sure what you are referring by “migration”. Could you clarify?

[…] You’ve accepted your own unscientific prodding of one particular instance as an answer […]

What exactly do you think is unscientific about it?