Employee at the Black Mesa research facility in New Mexico. Recently we’ve dealt with 2 aliens trying to steal snacks out of the pantry outside the laboratory.

Hope your day is going well.

  • 2 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle

  • I don’t personally use Linkedin so I can’t really comment on how a federated alternative would work or be useful for professionals and networking.

    What I will say is that paid/business-related and the general fediverse culture/design seems like oil and water. Especially the paid part. It simply won’t take off unless there is a mass exodus of people from Linkedin (very unlikely). And even then, having multiple instances for something as focused on Linkedin doesn’t seem viable. It’s probably better off centralized and disconnected from a large network like the Fediverse, in my opinion.

    The closest the fediverse can get to this is professionals using Mastodon or something in the same way they used Twitter before it imploded. Interesting idea though.



  • Tech geeks and nerds (no offense, I’m one too) tend to be the first people to populate any sort of new online social network. Just the way of the internet.

    While I do like Linux and talk about it pretty often on the fediverse, I do realize that 96% of internet users don’t care about it and the lingo is…incomprehensible for most people. Even I get kind of sick of talking about Linux on here sometimes lol but unfortunately many of the things I wish I could build a community around simply don’t have the fanbase needed on the fediverse to begin a community for the moment. While not impossible, building a community for relatively niche subjects on a small platform like this that is in direct competition with sites like Reddit is very difficult and easier said than done.

    My advice is just try to search around and find things as close to your interests that have active people as possible. Looking for broad communities can help out here, for instance, just go to /c/art of whatever instance instead of trying to find a /c/painting. Also, for Mastodon especially, use hashtags if you haven’t begun to already. Mastodon was wack until I started using hashtags extensively, they somewhat make up for the lack of a recommendation algorithm.

    Its pretty rough around here if your interests aren’t related to tech/FOSS/linux, but that should make things a little better. Hopefully there will be more diversity in subjects on the fediverse in the future.



  • Saying this as somebody just reading the post, I don’t know the whole context.

    Being somebody who is BIPOC, you’re not doing us much of a favor either by having an outrage across multiple corners of the fediverse. Take a breather. Seriously, zoom out and just consider what you are writing right now.

    Hatred of politics is a transphobic, sexist, and racist trope.

    …what if I just don’t like seeing news that only makes me feel angry or bad on my feed. People have different things they want to participate in and see. Just because you like it to discuss it doesn’t mean you should jump to accusations when someone doesn’t want to. Its a sensitive topic to begin with. I just come here to see tech, cars, and art.

    I started out by attempting to educate them on what politics actually means.

    This comes off very pretentious. Just let this one go bro.

    Look, I don’t know what’s going on with this blahaj place’s moderation or whatever and its not my business. Just based on what I see here, you may want to take a good proof read at what you are saying and spreading around before you lead yourself somewhere that you regret. If you don’t like this blahaj server’s rules or anything, just leave. Its just the internet. You might find somewhere better suited for you if you just move your account to another instance. If you want to voice concerns, spreading posts like these across multiple communities isn’t the way to do it.


  • I always love to see attempts to see people making the Fediverse more friendly and open for all, but I can’t see this one working.

    I’m not really a huge fan of the name Mastodon personally, but I don’t have any other better ideas. The branding right now works, there just isn’t enough people actually hearing about what Mastodon is to begin with. We need to push Mastodon, the name that people may have heard of before but never bothered to look into. Changing it now won’t really do a whole lot. If they wanted to get the name out there, I feel this could be done through other ways like a massive update or something.


  • I’m for this idea. Large sports communities could bring multiple new instances and also just a flood of active users in other communities. If we were to pick a specific community to come join, these guys and people in tech communities should be the first choices.

    Communities centered around sports teams like r/chelseafc or r/lakers could warrant an entire Lemmy or Kbin instance with separate communities about that particular team (trade/signing rumors, live games, social media posts, etc). For them, federation actually has some huge benefits.

    Plus as a side note, I’d love to have the regular diehard sports bickering on the Fediverse. Seriously. They’ll be quite the counter to the current culture of the Fediverse, however. Arguing about Mbappé’s longevity or whether the current NBA champions will win again would drown out the politics anyway, which is a massive plus in my book.


  • It is social media that allows privacy and stops Corps selling your data is its USP.
    If the person you are talking to does not care about the above, they have no reason to move.

    Seems like the Fediverse’ existence is trying to to send a message at the end of the day. If I were telling somebody about it and stopped as soon as they said the good old “I have nothing to hide” it would be kind of pointless to begin with. Might as well give the whole spill since that phrase likely is to be a given anyway.

    The problem is that in all other aspects of social media: ease of use, userbase etc the various flavours of federated social media are last.

    I do agree, they are behind the centralized social media. However, I don’t think it would help federated social media’s case if we didn’t at least try to simplify it somewhat and show the appeal.

    Personally, I am a bit sceptical about the long term sustainability and scalability of data storage for data intensive (images and video) federated services.

    For images, I suspect that something like this would only be a major issue for federated platforms (besides Pixelfed) in the case of a massive influx of users from another platform all at once. Otherwise, the infrastructure would likely catch up eventually. Kbin, for instance, eventually scaled despite at one point being run by a single person on software absolutely not meant for that many people. Video, on the other hand, I do also feel skeptical about on the Fediverse unless a massive organization were to host an instance.













  • I’m pretty sure most of the people who will come here as a result of Reddit are already here. All the new Reddit refugees are probably getting over the hype with Lemmy/Kbin and are finally not pouring so much time into the platforms. And as a result, slowing growth numbers and tapering engagement. Its pretty natural and nothing to be worried about. There’s still plenty of engagement here (just look at what happened to Threads a couple weeks after it came out).

    Regardless, we should focus on making Lemmy/Kbin a fully fleshed out platform and draw in users the natural way rather than relying on Reddit falling off for new users. At this point in time, the Reddit blackout is pretty much over.

    Might as well throw in my rant here, as I’m against this sentiment of not wanting Lemmy/Kbin to grow more and possibly even get mainstream. I get keeping out the undesirables of Reddit and other social media to prevent an Eternal September situation, but I also want more people of different backgrounds and interests rather than the same Reddit critic/tech enthusiast type of crowd. The great thing about federation is that if you want a smaller and more tight knit/topic centered community, there are smaller servers to join (not so much for Lemmy/Kbin at the moment since they are new, but it should get better over time). We can’t seriously want Lemmy/Kbin to develop well if we voice desires to keep people out and rebuild echo chambers. Lots of smaller communities and topics have little activity because there’s really only one group of people here right now.