I stopped using upvotes/downvotes at all on Reddit. Unless you were on New, exclusively, it didn’t matter how often you got on Reddit, anything you were seeing was at least fifteen hours old. Any conversation was already done. Any up/downvotes you put in wouldn’t matter at all and probably just got ignored by the system. Anything you had to say would only appear to you, in reality it just dropped to the bottom of the sea, never again to be seen. Thousands had already spoken, somehow, and you were just walking through a snapshot of the past, already said and done.

For now, it’s much smaller here. Sometimes I find myself upvoting a post just to let the person know that somebody actually came in here and gave a fuck about what they had to say, that they aren’t talking to themselves in an empty room.

It makes sense to care a bit more, for a lot of reasons. We’ll see how long that vibe can sustain itself.

What’s the learning curve like? That honestly seems like a much bigger hurdle than cost.

they gotta fight on what they train on

Servers: I’m tired boss!

Ruud: That’s too damn bad!

It’s not addiction, it’s entitlement. The blackouts hit hard across the internet, a lot of people have gotten used to just dipping into Reddit’s knowledge pool when they want an answer. I’m not talking about people you’d really call Redditors. These are the friends who only show up when they want something. When they’re with their real friends, they don’t have much good to say about you.

So when they lost that for just a couple days, they got pretty fussy. I’m trying to find the right words for somebody who considers themselves pretty Lefty almost but not quite ripping off the mask when they are expected to show solidarity with people they don’t really like but have become entitled to as a resource, because that was the vibe.

The only thing I can compare it to is when the Uber drivers tried to strike, and old women were up in their Twitter mentions like, “You better not make me miss work!” Once they rely on you, they expect you as a sort of right, even if your service isn’t a right. If you stop being their appliance, they get mad. They never, ever want to place blame where it goes, either.

That’s the thing, and that’s why Reddit is trying to IPO. There’s more to it than just people having a dopamine problem. It’s more like you’re their Uber driver, and you’d better not mess up their schedule. Fuck your strike and fuck you. Get back to work.

I think a lot of the people who made Reddit what it is and was may have learned their lesson by seeing their needs treated so dismissively, so they’ll be pretty gun shy to put themselves in that spot, again. Figure it out yourselves if that’s how it is. You mod the fucking thing, then.

I’m hoping that the overall lack of certain systemic encouragements from commercial socials that everyone has become horrifically used to interacting with will squash a lot of this kind of behavior over time. That is, the bullshit no longer serves the algo that doesn’t exist herre, and the lack of positive feedback will either cause them to change their ways or just leave.

I wonder if Lemmy’s upvote system overweights the first few upvotes the way Reddit did. That drove people to make high engagement posts since a sudden flurry of comments on a rage-bait post tended to slingshot stuff to the top reliably. If Lemmy doesn’t do that, it will help. The lack of eyeballs in Lemmyverse should discourage bots to some degree.

I’m hoping the same for Mastodon. A LOT of the behaviors that people have internalized come down to trying to game the algorithm with hot takes and such, but the limited virality of the Mastodon platform will hopefully discourage all their usual bullshit, or they’ll go.

I think the people who just want Reddit will return to it, at least for a while, since Lemmy was just their methadone and the heroin store is back open now. Me, I’ve been peeling away from both Reddit and Twitter for a long time so I’m ready to move on. There was a distinct culture on the Fediverse before all these sudden surges in users, hopefully once things settle that culture will get a chance to assert itself again.

It’s called slack tune okay

FYI the way you improve proprioception as a daily practice is that you play drums. They all count. Digi drums, rock drums, Djembe drums, any drums, anything that calls itself drums. So long as you trigger the drum sounds with your body, in time (fingers on a sampler counts) we’re after the whole body focusing itself around the hands to create precise enough results. Just hands on your belly works. Honestly all of music is good for this. It is actuating the whole of your body in space to achieve a result, and the human body loves it. Proprioception.

eh, just lurk. Look, don’t stress it. There’s no business model here. We don’t need growth. It’s nice, it’s cool, it makes it all worthwhile, but somewhere a greybeard sysadmin (sup Ruud) is running a server for the fuckin lols at his own expense and THAT is the fediverse. It’s just all those people chained together, and we need to spread that load across as many people as possible.

This Fediverse thing does NOT require, but it does accept that someday you might want to bite some hosting fees and do your own little part, just one more instance, one more server, picking up your load and that of a few of your friends. If somebody is hosting an open server, they’re already okay with you freeloading, so freeload to your heart’s content.

For every one person who is willing to nerd down and host something, we need like 100 people or more to fuck around in the thing being hosted and make it worth doing. It’s all set up so that if the person who is paying to host gets exhausted, well, those 100 people aren’t screwed. It’s set up so hosters can drop in and out at will. The Fediverse expects and plans for the person who is hosting your nonsense on their own dime to say fuck this, and drop out, and yet you have a setup that leaves you whole, you might not even notice. You can at least migrate elsewhere with minimum friction.

Just engage with shit. Updoot it or whatever. Fuck around and be here. Login and poke around. None of us will see it but the person hosting the instance (waddup Ruud) will see it, and that’s enough. Your engagement is not the difference between life or death. An exponential growth in users is a requirement for commercial socials to thrive but here? That just makes it more expensive for your gracious host to host you. If another 50,000 people show up tomorrow that will probably kill the whole damn thing, it’s why Beehaw is having problems, they were planning on 200 users a month and got 3000 because Reddit.

This whole Fediverse thing is what is left of the Old Way, where places to be online existed because some normal person wanted to put up a server for a forum or whatever and it was running out of a box in their bathroom.

The good news is that all those people are pushing 50 now, they have spouses and children, they aren’t crazy people. The deranged bastards who ran a box in the bathroom like they were the Emperor of Fuck Town have all died from probably substance abuse and what is left is sane people running servers out of their bathroom (for cooling purposes) on a remarkably high level because that’s their job. They run servers for like, Amazon Web Services or some shit, so running a Fediverse instance is child’s play. That is what you’re enjoying right now.

Or they’ve paid cloud hosting fees so that even though they have no idea what the fuck they’re doing some greybeard sysadmin is handling every thing that matters. That’s the situation. That’s why this clown show runs a lot better than it should.

So don’t stress lurking. If you were a lurker on Reddit, lurk here. Just hang. We already have a Shitposting subLemmy or whatever, so go post shit, or don’t. Don’t worry about it. If you don’t personally contribute to the exponential growth needed for a commercial social to thrive, nothing bad will happen. You could be here for a year just lurking and then get inspired to post your ass off, that works too. You got options.

Don’t worry about working for it. It’s not necessary. Welcome to nonprofit social media.

I was just poking around a bit over at beehaw, earlier. and I got the STRONG impression that they really weren’t in a position to deal with the sudden influx of users: not enough mod team, not enough money, not enough spare time in the day for the few people running it. I’m not holding that against them, that’s to be expected in Fediverse spaces, which I gather intend to spread the load across thousands of instances, not just one.

Is this just them trying to get things under control, or was there some other problem?

Everything in the Fediverse is self-hosted on somebody’s dime, if not yours, with the cool part being that you can host yourself and at least have some control for your money and hassle.

Fediverse users seem to tend toward the over-40 set, with lots of people who can eat a $25 monthly hosting fee for their own instance if it matters to them. I think we’re reaching the point as an internet community where a lot more people are saying fine, I’ll pay for the social media thing if I have to, goddamn, fuckit can’t take it with you. All we have to show for “free” social media is communities that turn sour again and again, and a sort of perpetual fleeing of the storm from one site to the next.