I don’t knit. I’m saying this based on multiple factors:

1. Videos of people who knit trying to use a dodecahedron. Like this one or this one. They use the holes, they use the knobs, but the core shape of the tool itself is practically irrelevant, and if anything it gets in the way. Also note the end result, it’s way crappier than a good knitter could do by hand. (I might not knit but I do see people knitting all the time.)

2. The existence of a similar icosahedron. It could be used just fine for cyphers, but not for knitting - note how the holes are too small. (Also, you wouldn’t need so many faces.)

3. The Romans assigned manual labour - like knitting - to slaves. And slaves aren’t exactly the sort of person a Roman would waste precious bronze with, specially not for a tool with an excessively specific purpose, like this one.

4. Wool production in Rome was mostly around Gallia Cisalpina:

And yet those dodecahedra were mostly found around Germania, Belgica, Lugdunensis, some even in Britannia:

If anything the distribution hints more something military.

I think it’s unlikely to be a knitting tool, as you could achieve the same with a simpler tool.

For example, I’ve seen people saying it’s for wool gloves. But a bar with five holes and some knobs would do the trick, no need for an intricate form like a dodeca.

…fuck! And my little chunk of sanity goes away like this, like a speck of hummus.

I’m picking #7 to make my life slightly less insane, since I live with a muppet who leaves empty containers in the freezer.

Not necessarily a pea brain, but certainly clueless on why Reddit, Digg, Slashdot etc. went downhill.

Lemmy is nonsensical fediverse bullshit.

Lemmy will never take off due to their idiotic federalism approach.

See those muppets looking for the next Digg / Reddit 10 years from now, after their alternative “with no federated bullshit” gets enshittified the exact same way as Reddit did. 🍿

My guess for the dodecahedra is that they’re a tool to aid with cryptography. This video explains it well, but TL;DW you’d use the dodecahedron with two concentric circles full of letters, and rotate one to know which letter to replace with which. It’s a slightly more advanced and secure version of Caesar’s cypher, and I could easily see the Romans doing something like that.

On the other hand I wouldn’t expect them to be used for knitting or jewellery, as simpler devices would do the same job.

…but to answer your question, I think that most decor items will give those archaeologists a hard time. Stuff like this:

I was almost going to say “yerba mate bombillas”, but they’ll likely detect saliva DNA in them and guess that they were used as straws:

I’m sure plenty exceptions exist - that’s why I said “typically”, it’s that sort of generalisation that applies less to real individuals and more to an abstract “typical user”.

Duplicates are a minor issue. That said, solution #2 (multi-comms) is considerably better than #3 (comms following comms).

The problems with #3 are:

• Topics are almost never as discrete as the author pretends them to be. Often they overlap, but only partially.
• Different comms have different rules, and in this situation rule enforcement becomes a mess.

There’s no good solution for that. On the other hand, the problems the author associates with #2 are easy to solve, if users are allowed to share their multi-comms with each other as links:

• a new user might not know which comms to follow, but they can simply copy a multi-comm from someone who does
• good multi-comms are organically shared by users back and forth

Additionally, multi-comms address the root issue. The root issue is not that you got duplicate communities; it’s that communities in general, even without duplicates, are hard to discover. Also note that the root issue is not exclusive to federated platforms, it pops up in Reddit too; it’s a consequence of users being able to create comms by themselves.

About #1 (merging communities): to a certain extent users already do this. Nothing stops you from locking !pancakes@a.com with a pinned thread like “go to !pancakes@b.com”.

This is a minor part of the text, but I feel in the mood to address it:

I post once to gauge interest then never post again because I got choice paralysis

The same users who get “choice paralysis” from deciding where to post are, typically, the ones who: can’t be arsed to check rules before posting, can’t be arsed to understand what someone else said before screeching, comment idiotic single-liners that add nothing but noise, whine “wah, TL;DR!” at anything with 100+ chars… because all those things backtrack to the same mindset: “thinking is too hard lol. I’m entitled to speak my empty mind, without thinking if I’m contributing or not lmao.”

Is this really the sort of new user that we old users want to welcome here? Growth is important, but unrestricted growth regardless of cost is cancer.

As in, the Italo-Western Romance language?

Yup, that one. Numbers are not to be trusted, but estimates are usually around 500k speakers in Brazil alone. There’s also a bunch of them in Argentina, and even in Mexico (more specifically Chipilo, Puebla).

Under Brazilian territory Venetian is often called “Talian”, and sometimes partially creolised with Portuguese. The name is a misnomer though, the language has little to do with the Tuscan-based standard Italian.

When you said there are about 200 other languages, I was expecting indigenous languages and maybe some Spanish, but certainly not other European languages

There are a few other colonial languages among those 200, like Eastern Pomeranian (Low German; extinct in Europe after WW2), Hunsrik (German too, but in the Franconian group). And I wouldn’t be surprised if here in Paraná some Polish- or Silesian-speaking clusters survived.

Additionally, some folks down north use Kikongo (a Bantu language, brought to South America due to African slavery) as a liturgical language for their syncretic religion (candomblé).

That said the “bulk” of those 200 languages I mentioned are Amerindian languages indeed. Typically Macro-Ge and Tupi-Guarani families.

What’s the history there? Were there Italian colonies in Brazil, or a notable migration of Italians to Portuguese colonies?

Yup, immigrants. Not just in Brazil; Latin America as a whole got a lot of them in the XIX and early XX centuries, and since Italy was in a ruckus a lot of them were from Italy. Mostly Gallo-Italic speakers in a “belt” between São Paulo and Buenos Aires. Both are tendencies though, and there are plenty exceptions - São Paulo city for example got also a bunch of Calabrians and Sicilians, and as I said there were Venetians even in Mexico.

Other common groups of immigrants in LatAm were Iberians, Germans, Levantine Arabs, Japanese. But the distribution changes heavily from place to place; for example here in Paraná we got quite a few Poles and even a few Ukrainians and Lithuanians, but up south in Chubut (Argentina) there were Welsh immigrants instead.

See, this is exactly the sort of conversation I had hoped the original thread would lead to. Interesting linguistics, history, and geography. Until dessalines came in with the toxicity.

There’s !linguistics@mander.xyz for any topic involving language. [Disclaimer: I’m one of the mods there.]

That backtracks to the main subject: the community was originally in lemmy.ml. One of the reasons why I migrated it to mander.xyz was the notoriously poorly way that .ml admins enforce rules in their instance - with the straw that broke the camel’s back, for me, being !anime@lemmy.ml. (I wasn’t a mod there but I’m a weeb so…)

Now thinking, if I didn’t do so, I bet that I would enter in direct conflict with dessalines and cypherpunk. What if someone wanted to talk about the Uyghur language? Or surzhyk (mixed Ukrainian/Russian) varieties? Bloody hell, even Proto-Indo-European (the Late PIE homeland is right where the war is happening now). Even mentions of lavender linguistics (i.e. how queer people use language) would become a ticking bomb.

[Info dump that sounds like an “ackshyually”, but doesn’t contradict what you said, nor tries to. It’s just that you touched a topic that I enjoy talking about.]

Under the territory controlled by the Brazilian most people do speak Portuguese but there are ~200 other languages; for example a good chunk of my family speaks a Venetian variety. Spanish is among those, and it’s actually spoken by a few people born in the territory controlled by Brazil due to border changes. Other varieties besides PT and ES can be roughly split into colonial (e.g. Talian, Hunsrik, Pommersch, Polish) and Amerindian (e.g. Mbyá, Kaingang, Laklãnõ).

On the other hand, Portuguese sometimes pops up even in territory controlled by other governments than Brazil. Ciudad del Este (Paraguay) and Puerto Iguazú (Argentina) are an example, but as well some northern chunk of Uruguay. And then there’s a bunch of “portuñol” mixed varieties that IMO should be protected by the statal governments (because the federation certainly won’t).

The thread itself is a shitfest that boils down to idiocy on the same level as “is tomato a fruit or a vegetable?” and “ackshyually water is not wet it wets things”. And that includes both your comment and the comment that you’re replying to. Specially the later, as the guy found some weird hill to die on.

Even then, PTB. As typical for lemmy dot ml.

I’ll also address what estefano is saying in another comment in the same thread, as it’s outright misinformation:

In Brazil, we use USians or Statesians

Most people in the territory controlled by Brazil refer to people in the territory controlled by USA as “americanos” (lit. “Americans”). People who call them “estado-unidenses” (lit. “United-Statians”), like I do, are a minority. And people certainly do not call them by anything remotely translatable as “USians” (EUAnos? That sounds awful*) or “Statesians” (estadenses?).

I used the second one on an academic paper and it went through.

You can submit a lot of crap on academic papers and it’ll still go through. Welcome to Latin America. No, even better - welcome to the world in 2025, the institutions supposed to defend science against the Sturgeon’s Law are busier counting money than doing their job.

As such, “they accepted it” is NOT grounds to claim shite.

Ma que djanho.

*EUAnos sounds like “eu ânus” [I anus] for most Portuguese speakers. (It doesn’t for me but it gets really close.)

NPC means “nihilistic proletariat/customer” now. Prove me wrong.

My neighbour is almost 60 and she still lives with her mum! (And when she married the husband moved with them.)

I think that it’s fine to still live with family. As long as nobody is a leech or a control freak.

I’ve seen a lot of LW users behaving like this.

They want a single comm per topic, preferably in LW; and everyone should go to that comm, no dissidence allowed. Always talking about “not splitting efforts”, or some FUD like “unless we gather together Lemmy will never succeed”.

And, when you tell them a clear “no”, they throw a tantrum. Like Serinus did there.

I think that they got out of Reddit, but they didn’t get Reddit out of themselves. They still behave like this was a Reddit-like monolithic platform; so when they see decentralisation - like multiple comms for the same topic, in different instances - they treat it as a bug, when it’s a feature.

Anyway, I’d call that FAPTB (failed attempt of powertripping). EDIT: wow, they removed your mention of the other comm! Talk about pettiness. PTB.

And the scorpion vowed “I’m not going to sting you” to the frog.

It’s all fun and games until venture capital kicks in, and exploits that central user data store to further centralise the rest of the network. Even then yes, I think that Mastodon has a lot to learn with Bluesky, on how to make user experience smoother.