Captain Aggravated

I think “forums” is what Lemmy kinda shoulda been. I’ve had people argue against me at this point, but…

lemmy.nsfw and the other couple of porn instances are the only ones that are focused by topic. Everybody else tries to be a general purpose instance, which results in that “Which instance do I pick? Will it matter being on sh.itjust.works or lemmy.world?” issue and the “there are currently 94 communities with the name Linux, 20 with more than 250 subscribers and 12 that have seen some kind of activity in the last month” issues.

Lemmy could be used like a good old forum engine. Create an instance around a particular branch of discussion, but now they’re federated.

I’m dubious about that last one.

Advertisers have ways of measuring which ads are effective. I’m most familiar with how it works on Youtube, click on a link in a bio or use offer code AGGRAVATED to get 10% off your first purchase, and they can identify which creator they’re sponsoring generated that sale. Part of the point of targeted advertising is avoid spending money to advertise to incompatible audiences.

“Hey look, Facebook has 4 billion users!” “Great. Here, we represent McDonald’s, users who click this link will get coupons for combo meals. Run it in the United States.” soon “The McDonald’s ad was clicked on 94 billion times, yet the coupons from this campaign were redeemed in restaurants a total of 164 times nationwide. Can you explain to me how you achieved complete and total failure to sell cheap cheeseburgers to Americans?” “Yes I can, see, practically none of our active user accounts are owned or operated by organisms.”

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I genuinely don’t understand the business model they’re going for here. Which means one of three things: 1. Meta knows something I don’t know and this is going to work spectacularly, 2. It’s one of those engineering decisions made by MBAs moments and it’s going to come crashing down, or 3. it’s an Enron moment and within 18 months the name of the crime they’re committing is going to suddenly become a household phrase.

That modern? Not carrier pigeon or calling card delivered by one’s gentleman’s gentleman?

A group chat…on what platform?

A platform to communicate specifically with IRL friends?

I find it’s about 5 pages in, sometimes as little as three depending on whether or not someone on lemmynsfw started a new community and self-spammed it.

neither did I see star trek

I don’t believe you.

I type on a more or less standard QWERTY keyboard (a Cooler Master MasterKeys Pro M; an interesting board because instead of eliminating the numpad, it eliminates the arrow keys in a very clever way). I’m not a particularly big guy so standard key spacing is fine for me. I do touch type in a very classroom keyboarding class kind of way so I’ve thankfully avoided any repetitive stress injuries thusfar.

Sometimes I think I’d be interested in a split keyboard especially if it could combine my thumb ball mouse in the right side so I didn’t have to move my hand around as much but meh.

If I go down that route of ergonomic controls and weird keyboards and such I’m eventually going to build myself this whole HOTAS cockpit with controls at the ends of the armrests, foot pedals, the works. I’ll need some bedsore cream.

Enjoy being the only one posting.

Pack it in now then. This platform isn’t going to see huge influxes. Normies are too stupid to pick a server. I don’t really mind it being somewhat of a niche space, maybe the advertisers will continue to mostly ignore us.

The Fediverse is virgin territory. The trails aren’t blazed for you here; it’s your job as an early adopter to make it the way you want it to be. You want a community? Start it and participate in it.

sh.itjust.works has a much funnier name.

Yeah, and it outright isn’t documented.

“That you can self-host” Does a budgeting tool need to be a service that’s constantly running and not an application? I struggle to see how having it running as a service on some box somewhere is going to help. “It’s so you can access it on your phone elsewhere.” Oh great. It’ll have a garbagepuke mobile UI.

I do kind of like that they call messages “toots.” That’s my kind of stupid.

That format was pretty good for “Come see us live at the Sodbury Theatre in Glurpfortshire, Feb 32nd @9PM!”

I remember an instance where a Cracked.com article pointed out something like “5 creepy places on the internet” one of which was a dicussion forum in which one account was posting over and over, many times a day, about public appearances and such of the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and readers showed up en masse to harass this person. Turns out she was off-label using a forum engine as her own little microtwitter to publish alerts to a fan club. But when the Cracked author rejected that context and substituted his own, it smelled a lot like Humanbeing151.

But yes in general I find discussion boards to be more useful; I think it’s why they were invented first; Reddit and Lemmy are basically just different approaches to implementing Usenet.

Then abandon the platform as doomed.

Those are your options. Open one or more accounts on one or more existing instances as an ordinary user, run your own single-user instance to federate and defederate from who you want to, or GTFO.

I’ve seen people grousing about this topic since I’ve been here “uuh uuh what if too many defederations because tankies? uuh uuh…”

This happens on or to other platforms already. Either you get the “r/popularthing” vs “r/actualpopularthing” dichotomies where if you vote red you go to one and if you vote blue you go to the other, or if you’re politically extreme enough to be a problem for ad revenue you get kicked off the platform entirely and end up on the likes of Voat. Engagement algorithms already sort people into information silos, so each platform is already actually two or more that intersect only at right angles in the fifth dimension.

If pinching off the occasional Maoist or Nazi instance means I see slightly fewer reposts of the same news articles and memes everyone else reposts, I’m willing to accept those terms.

Something I think would be healthy for the Fediverse is for instances to be a bit more interest-focused rather than attempting to be general-purpose. I think that would knit a tougher non-political fabric with which to hold the fediverse together, then we can just pinch off the problematic extremists.

make your own instance then.

So? We’re federated.

So far being a sh.ithead is working out pretty well.