RxBrad

RxBrad, 11 months ago

I was actually noticing that my profile image no longer has those “flat spots” on the top & bottom of the circle. So it does seem to be improved.

RxBrad, 11 months ago

Yep, I see now… looks like your image isn’t square like mine, so that’s likely the issue. Would need to crop a lot more out to make it nice & circle’y.

RxBrad, 11 months ago

It seems to work for me…

Are you picking a color in the right column? If you’re only choosing one of the ones on the left, you’re only halfway to choosing the theme color. https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c8fad9a5-0f68-4de7-aedb-e06388ab9bbd.png

RxBrad, 11 months ago

What if I don’t want to immediately pigeonhole myself into one specific niche?

As a non-LGTB / non-furry / neurotypical / multiple-interest-having / boring-ass white guy in his forties, there really isn’t a sub-sub-microcommunity for me.

And picking these communities is like throwing a political sign in your front yard, saying, “HEY! I know there are some people out there who hate this stuff! Argue with me! Troll me! Make my experience here as terrible as possible!”

RxBrad, 11 months ago

I know that technically you can interact with Mastodon from Lemmy (and vice versa).

But should you? It’s kind of a mess, even when it works.

RxBrad, 11 months ago

Or…

“Normie” shows a hint of self awareness that the people on this platform aren’t representative of the general public. We’re a bunch of tech weirdos.

We’re the “abnormies”.

RxBrad, 11 months ago

Why? Because I don’t expect a person who’s not entrenched in a specific hobby to understand the ins-and-outs of that hobby?

It’s not condescension. It’s setting reasonable expectations.

RxBrad, 11 months ago

To me, normie just signifies a person outside a given niche hobby.

I’m into having a Plex server in my basement. People not into that are normies in a conversation about having a Plex server. I don’t expect them to know how to setup QuickSync hardware encoding in a Plex Docker container.

I don’t like anime. To people who like anime, I’m the normie. I think Trunks is just a really cool Mastodon client. I only vaguely know it’s also a Dragonball character. If you expect me to know more than this, you’re going to be disappointed.

There’s no judgment involved.

RxBrad, 11 months ago

This might be what finally drives me to roll my own instance of Mastodon, and potentially Lemmy. I just worry that it’ll pummel my internet bandwidth and/or limited server capacity.

All of this yearning for drama and tribalism is exhausting… I thought I escaped it by leaving Twitter/Reddit, but it’s just bubbling its way back to the surface.

RxBrad, 11 months ago

Also normies is a ridiculous elitist term

I just think it acknowledges that we’re abnormal in how we’re approaching all of this.

RxBrad, 11 months ago

I dunno. I just stumbled on a movement to push instance owners to defederate any instance that doesn’t defederate Threads.

This seems very much in the vein of dictatorialism / authoritarianism. It’s honestly just gross. This whole “you’re either with us or against us” tribalism is what has made social media so awful these last several years.

RxBrad, 11 months ago

The problem comes from the 1000s of other instances that ping you to extract the content you’ve created.

I kind of wish there was a simple reference saying what the required resources are for just a single-user Mastodon & Lemmy instance. That’s really all I want. Will the 3GB of free RAM & few hundred GB of free SSD app-space on my NAS be enough?

(it probably exists… I just haven’t found it…)

RxBrad, 11 months ago

lemmy.world/post/1101330

RxBrad, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Threads already has over 10 million 30 million users who mostly haven’t even heard of the Fediverse.

Nobody will kill it in its giant cradle by blocking from their few-thousand-user instance.

RxBrad, 11 months ago

I don’t know about profitability, but in one day it drew 4x as many users as Mastodon gained in 7 years.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/29613ecb-90c3-4e48-97ad-44af6771a9fd.png

RxBrad, 11 months ago

They’re already over 2 million in like 2 hours.

RxBrad, 11 months ago

Yes. But they’ll scrape our Mastodon info whether they’re federated or not.

Probably already are.

RxBrad, 11 months ago

I don’t know about everyone else here, but my social media use involves me actively trying to avoid The Algorithm™. I subscribe specifically to what I want to see, and actively avoid everything else. You can’t do this in the Threads app. So this is why I’ll be using Trunks or Megalodon over the Threads client.

Every social media platform, UseNet, BBS, and forum – and the planet Earth itself – has had it’s clique of garbage idiots, off in a corner, doing garbage idiot things. They’re inevitable. They’re even here on the Fediverse – in our own precious instances – already. If you don’t engage them – don’t follow that person you hate the most, or sub to the community that stands for everything you hate – things are actually pretty nice. All of this defederation talk feels extremely short-sighted, and is just going to torpedo the Mastodon platform we’ve started to come to enjoy.

If anything, the public declarations of political & social allegiances via choice of instance could just torpedo it all, and attract the trolling idiots like flies. But, we’ve already opened up that can of worms.

RxBrad, 11 months ago

Maybe I’m completely misinterpreting it… but my impression is that if my Mastodon instance defederates Threads, then I cannot interact, in any way, with anyone on Threads from my account on the defederating instance.

I’m on mas.to. The admin already publicly stated that Meta invited them to talks. They declined. And they even blocked Meta’s access to anything mas.to before Threads was even a thing. Defederation is probably a foregone conclusion there.

RxBrad, 11 months ago

But the other side of the coin is that if they don’t defederate, my instance remains completely viable. I will continue to happily chug along on mas.to in my Trunks app.

If we federate now (i.e. don’t actively defederate), even the normies will learn early-on that they can sign up on a non-Threads instance & use a non-Threads app, and not have The Algorithm crammed down their throat like it is now on Threads. And they can still see Taylor Swift or Paris HIlton or whoever’s posts, if they choose. Additionally, if they see non-Threads content up-front, normies have something to be upset about if Meta splits from the Fediverse in a likely inevitable dick move. And if our first move isn’t to chase every normie off a non-Threads platform, there will be stuff they actually value not-on-threads-dot-net.

If we defederate from the beginning, normies don’t know what they’re missing, and they don’t care about non-Threads instances. Anything not Threads fades into obscurity as more & more people trickle away to where the content is. And we just make the doomsday Meta takeover actually more possible.

RxBrad, 11 months ago

The Mas.to admin claims to have “blocked Meta’s domains” already. Maybe that could prevent the scraping? Maybe not.

RxBrad, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Most of what I followed on Twitter was RSS feed type stuff from websites. And a few gaming/tech journalists – people who are generally not awful.

When Elon bought Twitter, the journalists were falling all over themselves to go somewhere else: CoHost, Mastodon, whatever. Almost all of them have bailed on those platforms and reluctantly gone back to Twitter, because their livelihood is dependent on them having visibility to the masses.

Last weekend with the tweet view limit announcement, there was a wave “here’s my Bluesky account” tweets from those same journalists who came back to Twitter. But that runs them into the same wall they had with Mastodon. Almost nobody actually uses Bluesky. In this case, because Jack just won’t let the normies in; rather than due to lack of interest or inability to figure out the platform.