You bring up a really good point about how Facebook once provided a really good and convenient service. Being able to have automated reminders and a place to send well wishes for birthdays is convenient. The same for having a central place to share photos with contacts rather than having to maintain a personal webpage or print slides and gather everyone over for a viewing party with a slide projector. It’s easier to say “follow my Facebook/Instagram/Twitter page” than it is to say “subscribe to my mailing list” and then maintain it.

That’s why the platforms became so popular in the first place. If that was still the primary function we’d probably still be there. But instead we have the choice to make. Whether we will put up with the enshittification in order to maintain access the neglected vestiges of what of what once made these platforms great; or if we maintain our freedom and go back to the old less convenient ways.

The fediverse won’t ever really be a replacement for those functions, the network effect is a filter for that. But it’s also not really designed to be, it’s meant to be pseudo-anonymous, decentralized, distributed, and portable and ephemeral. Great for being able to make arbitrary posts to a small network, easy to pick up your things and leave. It’s not great for putting your personal details on it and hoping your friends find you (there could be issues with federation keeping them from finding you, there is nothing keeping someone from impersonating you on the network)

I believe the fediverse is healthy for its use case, I don’t believe it will ever fully achieve the use cases of the platforms it’s replacing and that’s ok with me. I (and 1M+ of MAU on the the fediverse) find it perfectly fine for its use case

Edit: I may have misread your point and gone on a huge aside but my point is that I’m ok with the threaded platforms not chasing users to get to critical Reddit mass, I don’t see how mastodon can really be any easier to use, and friendica is more translating the fediverse experience to a familiar Facebook like interface than being a Facebook replacement. I think that maintaining the network is more important than recruiting people outside of it. If it’s a good experience, people will come in their own time.

If someone is looking for a place that has “everyone” then the fediverse is not going to be the place for them.

The important part is that there is enough people here that the network is healthy. Overpopulation is as bad for the network as underpopulation.

If someone is looking to connect with their relatives and close friends… Call them! Send some pics in the group chat. Shoot them a text and ask how they’ve been. The best part of getting off corporate “social” media is actually getting to socialize with your contacts again!

Damn I guess I’m going back to keepass again since I am not really interested in hosting a vault

This is unprovable so whatever the readers preconceived notions about feddit, db0, and Zionism are, will probably determine what they believe really happened.

This nazi instance can just make up accounts they claim are the db0 admin and say they have infiltrated other instances. That’s what they do, just say shit to upset people.

Personally I think the screenshot is real but the “plot” is just fake or trolling

If you called them out someone could show support if so inclined.

He did lead off with he enjoyed Reddit. The Lemmy corner of the fediverse is a very different culture than today’s Reddit (although I think it feels just like 2012 Reddit).

If a new users were to be outside these norms on Lemmy (such as a AI slop enjoyer or Windows 11 user) then it would probably feel hostile.

I guess the question would be for OP, are you willing to stick around and possibly change some of Lemmy’s culture, your own mind, or possibly both? Or are you just looking for a corporate approved hivemind echo chamber clone of Reddit?

Not that this place can’t be an echo chamber, but federation prevents that so much more than on Reddit. Lemmy has no financial incentive to push an agenda or rhetoric; it’s all grassroots

Is that Kurtis Connor lol?

Yes, pretty much every active server on UO has one. This one is ours if you feel the fancy to hop on sometime (I go by VE_AG_RA on UO [long story])

I remember the good old days of the 300 pingers either being people on dial up or Aussies getting a morning game in. Yeah it’s be hard to scrim with that ping for sure. Thanks for sharing the game date URL. It’s a nice little site, we’ve used it a few times

Don’t know if you are interested in COD UO but we have biweekly pugs every Tuesday and Sunday evening. I think the cod1 scene is pretty much like us. CoD2 seems to be the active community with a running league with like 9 teams or so.

Trying to build the community up on these old games

I am skeptical that it can grow to be a network the size of twitter, be ran as a for-profit, and not enshittify. I can’t think of a single example that hasn’t. Bluesky has ran as a public benefit corporation so far, but it has to keep the lights on somehow.

It took twitter years to run somewhat profitably. Even then Twitter was enshittified before Musk bought it. Premium subs are probably the least enshittified way to raise revenue, but ads and algorithms meant to raise engagement towards those ads are very much enshittification in action. That “normal people” have a high level of monetization they are willing to tolerate, is just grease on the wheels toward enshittification.

I admittedly have a limited understanding of the full operation of ATProto so please correct me if wrong. Appviews/lists/feeds are supposed to be the defense of ad/algorithm enshittification, anyone could write an appview with a different algorithm.

And this is why I assume that the network can only be run without enshittification, is by a benevolent provider. If Bluesky becomes hostile to an Appview that allows users to bypass ads or engagement farming, users can move their PDS to another relay that isn’t hostile to it. But there still remains the underlying reason that Bluesky would theoretically have become hostile to it. I don’t see how blacksky, for instance, wouldn’t also have to eventually take the same steps.

If twitter but with less right wing voices is what the people wanted then they will be sorely disappointed when bluesky enshittifies with no real recourse to prevent it. If everyone just hops on over to blacksky or whatever other 3rd party relay exists, they’ve still got the same problem. All the power resides in a single entity. Bluesky’s basic defense of their platform is that if they enshittify then ATProto allows some other benevolent corporation to take their place but has one major flaw. Corporations are not benevolent

I don’t pay for the Verge, and if I did and still saw ads, I definitely wouldn’t renew. “Maximizing profit” only works, if we fold. If we fold to ad supported journalism, then companies will plaster their sites with ads. The market regulates itself if the consumer is principled enough. The problem is that your average consumer is weak willed and less-than-principled. I’m fine going without even if it ends up being a pointless endeavor.

I get it, but reader-funded journalism is always better than advertiser-funded. But if the reporting isn’t worth paying for to you, I don’t blame you for skipping them. I feel the same way some times. One article might be worth paying for but I’m not so interested in what they report to justify a full subscription.

This will probably be unpopular but the leftist - liberal infighting is my least favorite part of the fediverse and why I usually end up having to give people a warning before telling them to get on the fediverse.

This drama is kind of the epitome of that

Since coding isn’t my day job. I use slickedit as a nice fully featured text editor. Or notepad++ in a pinch.

Personally haven’t used a full IDE since netbeans 15 years ago in my university days

9000 IQ programmer starts every project rolling their own debugger instead of dedicating 8GB of RAM to vscode

They’ve played us for absolute fools

On purpose? Not likely. Also I don’t expect them to be able to handle save and open of files using the web versions of M365.

But I think they would use libre office and not question that it wasn’t Microsoft office since it would open their files like they are used too.

Apple computers, which is a higher market share than Linux, are more expensive. That’s what I was getting at.

Windows became dominant because of enterprise software sales 20 years ago. Now everything runs in an electron wrapper that can run on any platform or in the browser.

PCs don’t even have optical drives anymore. No normal consumer even knows how to install a program today, let alone is considering legacy program compatibility when making a computer purchasing decision

I am qualifying my statements based on interactions with my coworkers of whom I deploy and manage their PCs. I could probably install mint on 50% of their PCs and the only reason they’d notice is because Microsoft office looks different and is called Libre Office for some reason