OpenStars

The Alt-Right Playbook: The South Bank of the Rubicon

Omg it’s amazing! Treat yourself enough to make an account. Once you see the sign-up wizard, asking you what your interests are and pre-signing you up to communities based on your responses, and it asking you how much content you would like to see containing the keywords “Musk” or “Trump” (importantly, not just All vs. None, but an intermediate Some as well), you’ll see what the Threadiverse has been missing!

After that, it does take quite some getting used to, coming from Lemmy and Reddit, but that’s a good thing bc it has so many more CHOICES that you can make, like not just All vs. Subscribed (vs. Local), but categories of communities. Like e.g. you could choose not to subscribe to any political communities so that you won’t be deluged with such every single time you log on, and yet all the News and Politics are available in the appropriately named News and Politics - which (it just keeps getting better and better) are also user customizable and shareable as well!

It’s not perfected yet - notifications are sometimes buggy and the search function sucks compared to Lemmy - but it serves my needs 99.9% of the time and for the rest there’s my Lemmy alt to fall back to anyway:-).

So yes indeed, try it and you’ll fall in love instantly, finding yourself using it more often until it’s your main. You’ll see.:-)

Oh and the developer team adds features practically weekly, plus is super friendly and responsive, so there’s that too.:-)

Me too. I found a post via browsing by All, and responded with something innocuous (I thought) to the effect that “Biden may not be perfect, but he did at least lower gasoline prices and that’s not entirely nothing”… and the responses kept coming for WEEKS and WEEKS. And then I did it again - once was on Lemmygrad.ml and the other on hexbear.net.

Even taking it as a given that I’m a dumb stupid idiot (am I though?), it was obvious to me how “consent” matters not at all to them. I was being “dunked on”, which tbf is literally written in the side-bar text of ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net!.. EXCEPT that I found it by browsing All, so had never seen that!?

So to clarify, it’s not that I think such places shouldn’t exist entirely, just that they are not a match to everyone else across the Fediverse, particularly the more mainstream normie, mostly centrists in the USA that were coming over from Reddit (including myself).

Mind you, PieFed provides full solutions to all of these issues: the side-bar text is shown down below EVERY post from a community (okay so someone could still find something via All and respond via comment without ever seeing it but… it’s something?), and more importantly it provides the ability to place messages attached to like URLs or more relevant here, Lemmy instances. Hexbear is fully defederated from PieFed.social but if it were not, then for one I wouldn’t be here, but moreover I would push heavily for such a message to be added that warns people who do not know the lore already. Also you can do personal defederations without needing admin support, by truly blocking all users from a given instance (I do it for lemmy.ml), unlike Lemmy’s horribly misnamed feature that would be better termed a community muting (that still allows those users to spam your inbox with notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS). Also, PieFed allows you to trigger notifications for anything at all - a user, a particular post, a singular comment (whether yours or by someone else), and thus CRUCIALLY allows you to STOP receiving notifications for something when you don’t want that anymore.

And those aren’t even the top features of PieFed:-). However, back then PieFed didn’t exist, so I can well understand all the people complaining in places such as r/RedditAlternatives (as I mentioned but I’ll bring it up again:-) why they tried out Lemmy and decided to abandon it. You and I almost did the same - and we are by no means alone in that, as, still yet again, many did do so.

Unfortunately Lemmy’s feature set in this regard have actively gone backwards lately - e.g. instance blocking used to not allow notifications, but now it does. And Lemmy.ml seems integrated heavily into the Lemmy processes, so much so that most instances don’t dare to defederate from it. This seems relevant since the OP was talking about “centralization”, and while in theory the Lemmy sourcecode doesn’t absolutely 100% mandate that a new instance be federated with lemmy.ml, in practice it is true that every single major instance has done so. i.e. we talk a lot about decentralization, even while we have this major centralization feature present in the Lemmyverse.

Thus forcing new users to be exposed to the anti-Western propaganda (e.g. “bOtH sIdEs SaMe”), before they learn how to block those communities and users (but are prevented from doing so for the entire instance) one by one…

Even so, if celebrities started using something, their users would follow them - as happened with Bluesky, and to a much smaller extent the Rexodus from Reddit to Lemmy over the 3rd party app debacle.

But there seem to be just too many problems to make it worth most people’s efforts. Like lack of content. And speaking of Lemmy, r/RedditAlternatives is full of people that came over here, but then went back - citing lack of content and presence of toxicity as their top reasons.

Tech people tend to make horrible salespeople, especially to non-technical normies.

The thing is, some people value different things… and that’s okay.

Thank you for explaining about the relationship=me links.

Email ofc is the same - e.g. BillGates@google.123 just maybe might perhaps not be the same person as BillGates@microsoft.com. Nevertheless, Bluesky makes this stuff trivially easy, as too does Reddit, by virtue of centralization.

So the task would come down to convincing people to prefer more effort on their part vs. less effort somewhere else - while also at the same time doing this on top of all the other criticisms as well (none of my friends are there, there’s barely any content, trying to find stuff is so very hard, why do the developers fight amongst themselves leading to an abysmally slow rate of improvements, and basically why should I care about this anymore then, if others likewise can’t be bothered to care either?). And the vast majority of people are going to choose the latter over the former.

It’s not even necessarily a bad thing, so much as it simply is, and we must make peace with it, or expend effort to overcome it ourselves, bc that’s just how the law of entropy works.

What else is there though? Mastodon by design is counter-culture, so why then are people surprised when “culture” in turn does not like it?

2023 article

As just one example, if a famous person makes an account, and then a spammer makes an identically-named account, just on another instance, then the famous person’s followers could get confused. Throwing out right or wrong, famous people worry about stuff like this, which would require a level of coordination and communication across the Fediverse - i.e. a type of “centralization” (even if accomplished via possibly decentralized means?). I’m not sure if I am remembering correctly or not, but I thought there was even a fix submitted to the codebase, which has sat for YEARS without being reviewed or approved. If not this feature though, other features have definitely followed this pattern.

TLDR 1: you snooze, you lose.

TLDR 2: ideological purity tests beatings will continue, until moral improves.

TLDR 3: FAAFO means, it turns out, that if you entirely ignore everything / most things that the users that you hope will use your platform ask for, they might just go elsewhere, where they feel welcomed.

Is Mastodon behaving similarly to an incel culture, demanding that people like what a “nice” man platform it is, rather than do the work required to make people actually happy with what it offers? And if not (due to other reasons, perhaps funding), then what is the functional difference really, between that vs. whatever it is doing?

So yeah, Bluesky it is then. If we want something better, we had best get to actually building it.

And the linked Bluesky post.

You… don’t want to know (if you know what’s good for you, capiche?:-P)

This isn’t the first time I’m hearing such, even just this very hour. Fareed’s Take: Trump’s revolution in foreign policy.

Step-leopard, what are you doing down there?

Gasp, surely you jest, surely they won’t eat their faces off as well? /s

Precious few others seem even to be aware of what is going on.

Except ofc for those cheering it along. 😢

It’s probably our internal modifications, but Jira especially iirc is known to be quite “fragile”.

Edit: ofc the main point here is that companies pay to test only on Chrome, then consider the matter settled, even while Firefox decides to strike out on its own in so many ways regardless. I have no choice but to use Chrome… or to find another job.

When that is the only browser that actually works for Jira, Confluence, and the like at work, then yes boo hoo we absolutely do! 😭

It alr… oh uh you mean in the future yes that might just be possible sometime in the future yes… :-)

Just think ahead to when they try to humanize AI by adding back in “personalities” - basically replacing the human answers offered freely (at no monetary cost), and freely moderated by humans, with for-cost versions that are 1/1000th as good as the real thing.

You will own nothing - not even your personal opinions - and like it.

Today the Great Decentralization is accelerating, with newspapers of record, Luke Skywalker and others as the latest high-profile refugees to lead fresh retreats.

For a moment I thought this was some kind of AI-written glitch, but apparently it was taking “artistic license” to use the name of the character rather than actor without acknowledging such - and is real (wow I hate trying to mess with Forbes, it kept changing the link to some other article entirely).

It seems like I’ve heard this story many many times before throughout history, and elsewhere besides.

It is much worse than that: the game and pieces are real, yet one side keeps chewing on the pieces and then rolling them as if they were dice.

I think… I think we might end up losing this one, everything else being equal (fortunately the latter is not the case, and I’m hanging on to that sliver of hope with every fiber of my being:-).