Boz (he/him)

I’m happy to see people thinking about this, but I think that the existence of Meta’s Threads makes any use of the word “thread” an unnecessary association with Meta, if not an outright advertisement. Deeper meaning has, historically, never been as important for controlling how a term is used as sheer numbers. Way more people are using “Threads” to refer to the Meta product than are talking about the fediverse at all, and none of them are going to care why we should have dibs on “thread” as part of our name. They’ll just go, “threadiverse? Is that like Threads? Threads is just ads, I don’t know why you’d want to use it.”

As an alternative, I like “forumverse,” because Lemmy and kbin remind me of old-school forums, and it still links up with “fediverse” because of the “verse,” and because the word has the same rhythm. But I usually just tell my friends I’m on Lemmy, since I browse through a Lemmy instance, and that greatly influences my experience. I don’t mind adding that Lemmy is just one platform for accessing the same content, because it launches me into an explanation of how this is not a corporation-owned discussion space.

U.S., and I don’t know how many businesses here use it, but I think it’s quite possible to avoid using it socially here. I’m not sure if I even know anyone who does use it, and certainly no one has asked me to get one.

Relatable content, sigh. I get good mileage out of a pill caddy for things I take the same time every day (I can see that I have pills for all the days until Thursday, or whenever, and plan accordingly) but that doesn’t work for everything.

Paid in IOUs, maybe. I think Reddit is too cheap to pay for people to mod large subs when it can just let the large subs turn into large shitholes for free.

I think Huffman may have gotten rid of the “other people’s opinions matter” part of his worldview, due to decades of everyone in his life telling him that he sucks, and needs to get his shit together.

I knew there was something else I should be adding to my box of cake mix! Turns out it was “fuckspez”!

I like “[insert magic-user class] is a stage magician,” whatever that means in the particular setting. IMO it works best when “stage magician” is well-defined and distinct from authentic magic (again, consistent with setting, like “Vegas entertainer” in the late 20th century, “spiritual medium” for early 20th, “medicine show [salesperson]” for the 19th, “alchemist with patrons” for Medieval to early enlightenment, and so on, though inauthenticity or bad reputation are usually an important part of the fun for me). It can drive some excellent dramatic irony.

That’s definitely a case where absolute numbers matter, yeah. I miss the shared-experience subs most, too, though there’s a surprising amount of stuff here already. You might try posting about narcolepsy in some of the broader health [or whatever category you’d put it in] communities, and see who’s there. That’s the kind of thing people might not expect to find at all at this point.

But I think a lot of people are talking about hobby communities, which can be made active by either a large number of people who post rarely, or a smaller number who post frequently, without having to change the overall content very much (I think a lot of people who share any projects could share more projects than they do). The number of people required for “critical mass “ in a forum is a lot lower than people think, and also, a lot more affected by who the people are, and the climate of the community. It’s something I (and I’m sure many others) remember from before massive platforms existed, but apparently it is not obvious to people who didn’t see it. Different experiences, different internet, but I think the essential desire for community is the same, and small communities can flourish in the same way.

Yep! I think it’s also a great example of how well a simple message can propagate. The whole emotional force of about six weeks of emotional drama has boiled down into eight letters, repeated by… what would you say, thousands?… of individuals.

Yeah, I am not sure if this is actually news. I got the impression from what Android Authority dug up that this new thing was going to be regular USD. It looks like they’re going to be asking for bank account information and tax forms for anyone who wants to become eligible for payouts, and I don’t know if they would be doing that for crypto…?

The real business model here is to win the race to the bottom, and stream re-enactments on Twitch.

Why? I mean, technologically, why couldn’t a more standard payment platform work, and then just pass around those payments among instances? PayPal is not crypto, but you can use it almost anywhere online.

You’ve lost me on the precise breakdown of growth types, but I don’t think there’s any kind of growth that can be sustained indefinitely without fundamental changes to a business. If you sell widgets, you are eventually going to hit the limit to how many widgets are going to be purchased anywhere, by anyone, and then you’re going to have change something in order to grow.

And sure, I’ll accept that it could be all right to grow past the point where your business model has to change. Some businesses do spread into multiple fields and do reasonably well in all of them, although at a certain point it might start violating anti-trust laws. My point is just that “infinite growth” as a long-term strategy can go down some bad roads, regardless of how innocent the starting point is. Even a benign tumor can be life-threatening if it grows in the wrong place, and I think that can apply to growing businesses as well.

If they want to pretend they’re not doing it, sure, I’ll pretend I don’t see it. If I think they’re fudging the dice too much, and it bothers me, I might bring it up with them privately, or I might suggest a group discussion, or I might just leave.

In general, I try to evaluate a GM as the whole package, rather than just the individual choices they make. If I like their campaigns, there’s no point in picking on individual decisions (beyond obligatory mild grumbling, of course, lol). Sometimes, they’re going to get results using techniques I wouldn’t choose, which is fine. If I don’t like their campaigns, there’s still no point in picking on individual decisions. I would rather drop out as soon as I realize something isn’t working out than stick around, lose my temper, and say something I will regret.

Tough crowd, I guess. :-(. But you did have a couple people join, which is a couple people more than would have joined before. That’s not zero.

We’re all used to these massive platforms with 9-digit numbers of users, but there’s no need to be that big for everyone to have a good experience. I doubt anyone on Reddit regularly interacted with more than a tiny fraction of the total userbase, even if they hung out in the big subs.

I’d say it’s mostly formatting, and what brands have to do to get them. Sponsored posts are the ones disguised as regular posts, which is easier on some platforms than others.

You mean if the stable state is to have a layer of management on top of daily operations, and the management never mixes with operations? Yeah, although to be strictly fair, someone has to do the annoying financials, and those people would not be helpful to people doing other kinds of work. I think that’s just a way of restating the problem.

I think another part of the problem is that business don’t want to have a stable state, they want to grow constantly, which becomes a problem for an increasing number of people no matter how a business is structured. It never really surprises me when ambition gets businesses in trouble, though sometimes I wonder how they manage to make the mistakes they do.

A company whose billionaire quits can usually get a millionaire replacement, without much loss of utility. CEOs get shuffled around all the time without any particular effect on the company they “run.” I think they mostly run lower executives, who run managers, who run lower/middle managers, who run supervisors who know something about what the company actually does, and run the people who do tangible work. The CEOs who get into the news for doing something dramatic to a company are the exception.

She’s not just chilling, she made a press release saying Twitter just had its most successful day (I think by user engagement, I don’t remember the metric she mentioned) right when Threads was blowing up. If she wasn’t straight up lying, she was looking at some reeeeallly well-massaged data.

…of course, there’s a market for CEOs who do that, too, but I admit, I was a little shocked. I thought she was supposed to be the Responsible Adult ™ here.

No, they’re going to start with some kind of sponsored post arrangement similar to Instagram’s, iirc, and put in ads when they get a bit bigger.