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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • I don’t know where gamers’ hard-on for Valve comes from. They’re a monopolist software developer whose biggest product is a middle-man DRM platform masquerading as a game library utility. Their whole schtick is increasing the cost of your games, and limiting your right to access those games how, when, and where you want. Yet somehow, they’re the darling of the gaming scene.

    It’s fucking bizarre.





  • Difficulty speaking, severe tension running through my shoulders, neck, and jaw. Fist clenching. A lot of rocking with some spastic shaking. Very similar to what you’ve described, save for the sweating.

    Sometimes, I’m actually able to dissociate myself from them, so I can sit there and mentally call play-by-play while my body remains locked up and over-stimulated. That’s a bit of a wild ride.


  • If what you mean by centralized apps is apps having a default website, or a hard-coded website that it accesses, then that’s also going to lead to centralizing the website.

    The fediverse is just the web. It’s not really suited to an app-first model of operation. Like, imagine having a blog-viewer app that only let you read one blog. We see this kind of behaviour from the business world, and people kind of hate it.

    The only reason it would be different here is if the network collapses, and if it does, it’s going to collapse into lemmy.world.

    Which, apparently, is a “deal breaker”.






  • But it’s better from many angles that they are. Discoverability alone. Consistency of instance level rules. Theme.

    It just makes sense on some level that sports communities would be on a sports-focused website, and such a website is where people whose primary interest is in discussing sports would have their accounts. From there, they can follow other topics they’re interested in, but their primary focus is still on, I don’t know, basketball or whatever.

    Same for cars. Some of the most active forums on the internet are car ownership forums. If you could access CivicForums from IoniqForums, then it would make sense to do so. Much more sense than finding people discussing Hondas on lemmy.world and Hyundais on sh.itjust.works.

    Just because you don’t give a shit where these discussions are taking place, doesn’t mean it makes sense for people to just shit them out anywhere.


  • Being decentralized and there being a significantly higher bar of entry aren’t intrinsically linked. The only things easier about Reddit compared to a phpBB forum are that Reddit a) generates you a username, and b) has a mobile app that only works with reddit.com. Name generators can be included in the signup process, but we can’t really drop having to point an app at a particular website in a distributed model.

    The fact that “Lemmy” isn’t a website or a single, definable place on the Internet is where the friction comes from. You can point to Reddit, and say you “saw x, y, and z on Reddit this morning” and it be a meaningful statement. You can’t substitute “Lemmy” into that sentence, though, because there isn’t a Lemmy.

    There’s a thousand Lemmys.


  • This.

    There are rough edges to the actual onboarding experience, of course, but the joinlemmy and joinmastodon and joinwahtever websites really aren’t a part of it. They’re more of an ad for admins, demonstrating that there’s an active network of sites already using the product. The fact that not even the product develoeprs seem to understand this is a real issue, though.

    Honestly, we need to stop sending people to “Lemmy” or “Mastodon” or whatever. Those are website engines. It’s like sending someone to “WordPress” when you want them to read your blog.


  • Honestly, I think federation being (mostly) invisible is actually part of the problem. Trying to make these spaces look like something they’re not makes people believe they work in a way that they don’t. It makes “Lemmy” look like wish-dot-com Reddit, and Mastodon look like temu Twitter.

    This is all something new. This is a thousand Reddits, where you can see over the fence at what each other Reddit is talking about. It’s ten-thousand Twitters, where you can talk to people on other Twitters.

    If you could post on Facebook articles from Twitter, people would get that maybe they don’t see every single comment, or every single Facebook article all of the time. This would be understood. Twitter and Facebook look like, and are discussed as if, they’re two totally different websites. The same would be true of AVForums and CivicForums, if they could cross-post.

    But fediverse platforms go out of their way to hide what they are, and to strip each website of its identity. And that seems wildly fucked up to me.