Ada

Time travel/alternate dimension stories that don’t just use infinite dimensions as a cheap way of avoiding complexity. Once you have infinite timelines, it’s all meaningless, because whatever story you’re trying to tell loses all sense of importance, because whatever didn’t happen in one version still happens in another. Who cares if the character saves their family, when there are an infinite variety of worlds where they’re not saved.

It’s possible to tell stories about infinite timelines, where the weirdness of having infinite duplicates is an important part of the story (Dark Matter).

It’s possible to tell stories where there are alternate timelines, but only a finite number (The Peripheral/Counterpart/Alice)

And it’s possible to tell stories where there is only one timeline, and gracefully navigate the paradox (The Pern Series/All You Zombies/11.22.63)

I can’t get enough of stories that handle it well!

I think it’s a good thing, because it discourages centralisation. If we end up with a bunch of specialist instances, then diversity suffers, because everyone looking for a specific area will end up on the one single specialist instance dedicated to it.

And I say that as the admin of an instance focused on the trans and gender diverse folk. There is a reason that we don’t enforce specialisation on those topics in our instance communities though. Even so, we still tend to be “the trans instance”, when I’d much prefer it if we were just one of many, like we are on the microblog part of the fediverse.