Manually: I had lemmy.world open in one tab and the other server’s community page in the other.

Logically, I want to say no, not really, but I also would have thought the blackout and ongoing protests wouldn’t really affect Reddit and they’d ignore it. Reddit itself, however, seems incredibly determined to pursue a course of action which requires performing This Does Not Affect Us At All as dramatically and publicly as possible given the slightest opportunity whether anyone cares or not. This doesn’t even include the admins playing subreddit roulette that encompasses actively rebelling subs, subs deep in malicious compliance, and subs that have no idea wtf is going on they just want to talk about their weird NSFW fetish in peace.

So no, I don’t think so, but I’m beginning to wonder if Reddit thinks there is and what they’re seeing on their side that I’m not.

I semi-regularly distro-hop, but Xubuntu is the distro I keep coming back to between hops to take a break or when one goes (temporarily) dormant. It’s currently running on my primary server/linux machine.

Reasons: 1.) It’s light on resources 2.) It’s very simple and clean. 3.) It works with all the programs I use regularly; only one needs to be hand-compiled (but that one has to be compiled for literally any Linux machine). 4.) I know it. Scrub/partition/install/configure in under an hour. I can pick up any of my projects again immediately where I left off.

The only reason I have social media accounts under my wallet name is to avoid anyone wondering why I’m not on social media (also: grandparents). Everyone IRL who I care enough about to actually explain know I login once a year in a separate browser (under incognito) and check every privacy setting from my checklist and update if it’s important (like job change). LinkedIn I check regularly, but that’s because a.) I only connect with people from work and a lot of them do think it’s important to have strong networks (and they could be right, no idea) and b.) LinkedIn has an education section that my job really likes because it has free classes and when I get bored at work, I can do a quick class in something (nothing they actually want us to do; I have to work in the nightmare that is Agile, do not make me take yet another class about the benefits of this software development hellscape, thanks).

Honestly, I try to give the impression I’m not into social media IRL; there are like, three people in my daily life who are allowed into my online life and one because we more or less both got the internet at the same time and started a mailing list together. Don’t get me wrong, I know a lot of nice people IRL, but not the type I want to introduce to the friends I made online.

I kind of think that’s how it’s supposed to go in my made-up-right-this-second knowledge of the evolution of open source Federated social media sites. Pick the largest/most active/most variety to get your feet wet and make any weird mistakes you need to make in a crowd where you’re one of many and sheer speed of posting means you’ll be forgotten in like, hours. Then you get comfortable and see if this is a forever-fit or just a okay-right-now fit.

I mean, I hard-bond to my first and pretty much settle immediately for life unless something is seriously awry, but even I made a backup in another one that I mirrored all my favorite communities in and I am seriously getting one more in a smaller, more specialized server. Yes, I do get the point of Federated, you do not need to explain, but here’s the thing: intellectually I know that actually, the population of the Fediverse is orders of magnitude smaller than reddit or pretty much any other social media site, but feelings do not agree: Reddit was like a large, slightly hostile country with a lot of states you avoided always but especially between dusk and dawn; the scope of Fediverse is like being on a very small planet in an expanding universe you can watch growing in real time and it never stops. It’s great, but there’s something very unsettling realizing you’re eight servers from home surrounded by kpop or wake up to find you posted in three communities in servers you don’t recognize at two AM and if you can get a reputation for that kind of thing.

My ADHD is living the dream, let’s go, but I can see how it would throw people a little.

Yeah honestly, wafflemaker is one of those things that if you want waffles not in frozen form, that’s pretty much your only choice. If there is a manual way to do it, I’m honestly scared of the person who worked out how and what they have to do to make it happen.

I am tempted by your grill, though. Hmm.

I started vaping seven years ago as a way to quit smoking; I smoked my last cigarette literally outside the vape store before walking in and asking what to I buy to pull this off as nothing worked. The transition was seamless; not only did I never even crave a cigarette again, I very quickly learned to loathe the smell of cigarettes once my full range of smell came back. There’s not even a temptation to start up again.

It also helps that I choose vapes that smell amazing.

I am still vaping, yes, but I’m stepping down my nicotine pretty much every two years. I started at 24 and am now at 15 (I was stuck at 18 for a while). Those transitions I can definitely feel, but I can start with adjusting my mod’s wattage, air flow, use different coils for a bit, and ease into it so once I step down, there’s no chance I step back up, and then reward myself sometimes with a new fancy mod with a touchscreen with more leds or a cooler tank or something. All that and I am spending an order of magnitude less than I ever did on cigarettes and I have the math to prove it.

It’s certainly not ideal and yeah, it’s slow and basically only progressively reducing harm, but it’s a process that for me is guaranteed to work with no backtracking and progress is assured.

Egg boiler. On the surface it’s just the most gadgety pointless product invented but I literally wore it out because suddenly I could have hard boiled eggs and no risk of setting my apartment on fire because I forgot about the eggs. After I move, it’s the first thing I’m getting for my kitchen because low-risk hard boiled eggs are totally worth it.

There’s a lot of seemingly ‘useless’ kitchen gadgets like this: full size food processor, waffle maker, breadmaker, even my ridic large instapot. I don’t use them every day or even every week and no, I don’t need them for daily life. Yes I can mince fifty thousand vegetables for this really complicated soup by hand or make bread from scratch or do whatever you do to make a pot roast without them–but I won’t do those things. I know me pretty well now; if I want to make that soup, make some fresh bread, or do that thirty-step fancy pot roast, I need those tools or I’ll default to frozen pizza and maybe have fresh Italian bread if I went to Central Market recently and remembered to grab it from the bakery.

Oh thank God. Normally I know how to read (since kindergarten) but in the time between posting and your reply, I hit a very unwilling thirty-six hours awake so I low-grade panicked that actually, it only read normal to me and I was lecturing people on becoming a vegan fascists or something.

I am still thinking on the article but it’s going to need a couple of times to put it in context. I’m still trying not to form really firm opinions on much yet on Fediverse since I seriously do not know enough and yes, even I find it hilarious when I have to backtrack from a really stupid position, but I can save public embarrassment for later. Lemmy’s still young, I have plenty of time for that.

Sweet Roko’s Basilisk, so I wasn’t missing some mysterious reddit setting where I ‘new’ was translated as ‘wtf’ and ‘crap’?

It’s a whole new world.

Okay, I apologize for missing something; I don’t disagree with any of that. Did I give the impression I did?

I’m a QC analyst and we are fully Agile, so I’m required to attend ever. team. meeting. Discovery, story point estimation, design spikes, any day can be poorly handled emotional regulation day and whoever’s feeling it is making it everyone’s problem when all we want is to finish a few maintenance items and maybe add a comma to some text. Though the testers have nothing to do with this after story point until there actual code migrated to one of the testing environments, we are forced to bear witness to entire dev teams made up of people from three to eight countries, whose only common language is English and as often the only native speaker, I am the only one who can’t mutter not very goddamn quietly in my native tongue that no one else understands; this may have been my motivation at one point to learn Welsh on Duolingo. A Project Manager making three times more than anyone else in the room sometimes swoops in during SCRUM two weeks into our sprint cycle to be perky at us and–on far too many occasions for this to be random–informs us the acceptance criteria had a couple of updates before swooping back out to PM something else’s life. We all hate her quietly until someone who went to check JIRA notes there are double the number of criteria and the user story is not the same in any way;. then everyone but me gets to hate her verbally with no one the wiser. I maintain bitterly grudging silence because everyone in the room speaks English, sometimes better than I do, and they have been in Texas long enough to pickup conversationally hostile Spanish. Our scrum master will either grimly pretend it’s always been this way or very blatantly not care.

At final demo as the tester, I will perform a dramatic rendition of ‘page with comma’ and ‘title:justfication left’ or run batch scripts in terminal while they watch absolutely nothing happening and nod wisely. Half the people in attendance wears suits for a living and have never used a computer; they have secretaries for that. Two worked with my mom and are quietly judging my performance and find me lacking. One stakeholder will ask a thousand questions, five of which have any relation to what we’re doing and I am expected to answer with no discernible change in my performance. Someone is watching TV and can’t be fucked to turn down the volume. Everyone else sits in eerie silence and I might hear a snore. Every one of these people are considered qualified enough to decide if we’re did a good job and sign off on it so we can finally end the sprint and the code can be added to the next release to production. No one feels a sense of relief or satisfaction; at least one dev hasn’t slept since the PM destroyed our lives and may be clinically insane.

Our sprints last four weeks with a prep week in between; we will experience some version of this cycle of dev hell roughly eight times a year and sometimes involving the legislature making their lack of time management all of our problem. Only one sprint will go as planned. One.

The worst part is; despite this, knowing full well what hell is before me, I went back to college for software development of my own free will.

I don’t mean that things are badly made, just that the resources to enter lemmy are targeting a specific audience still.

You don’t say. What a weirdly easy to fix problem that only requires the ability to add links and text to a webpage: that’s a rare combination of skills indeed.

You first need to learn what lemmy is, how it works (because nerds can’t simply tell how you can do it, they need you to understand how it works first), and then where and how to register.

Bold choice: I can honestly say it never occurred to me to insist someone attend a mandatory lecture (is there a quiz afterward) to have the opportunity to join a server so they can post memes and find people who are into baking bread and Smurfs meta.

Yes, I am being sarcastic–because everything you observed is alarmingly accurate to the point one might be forgiven for saying it’s a pattern-- but I’m also beginning to wonder if I’m having a some kind of break with reality on how the joining a Federated server works.

The process is as follows (I think):

• 1.) Go to Join Lemmy. Click “Find a Server”
• 2.) Make sure language is set to [your language]. Click on a cute animal icon; it genuinely does not matter which one. This is not a lifetime commitment; it’s a first date.
• 3.) Click on Sign Up on [Server Name].
• 4.) Enter a username, email (maybe optional) your password twice, and do the Turing puzzle. [Optional: three to four short answer questions on your name, your interests, why you’re here, and possible some recreational math] Check NSFW for porn as desired. Click the clearly marked button Sign Up.
• 5.) You’re a Lemmite now; go with God and experience the wonders of the Federation’s shitposts and feelings about cats.

I am genuinely wondering what it is I’m missing about the shortest, easiest social media sign up process I’ve done and my body count is greater than twenty at minimum and some places, I had multiple accounts [excluding: usenet, mailing lists, messageboards et al]; tumblr was like three pages of cross-examination and required me to expend effort to think up easy to remember lies to get through too many mandatory questions; Facebook wanted me to write a detailed autobiography with exact dates covering birth to present day in their multi-page questionnaire of my life and times and I did this while scanning for surprise privacy settings and feeling exposed.

Non-sarcastically: reading this, it makes me wonder what would have happened if I’d asked someone what mastodon is and how it works instead of googling and excitedly jumping into something new to see what happened.

If i had been told before I even googled the website that picking a server/federation is way too complicated for most people, that to sign up I needed to do my homework on the origins and history of the Federation so I’d be able to understand it, as the process to create an account is complicated and confusing. For most people, that is.

I’m pretty sure I would have done it anyway, but I don’t think I would have seen it as a brand new adventure, something new to learn about and explore and be part of and helped grow. I wonder if i would have posted an intro and started following people who were doing the things I went back to school to learn do and finally get my degree so I could learn from them. Or would I have read my feed wondering what to do; everyone here knew all about the Federation and I couldn’t ask them because then they’d know I didn’t belong; I was just a college dropout who learned to script and linux and design websites because it was fun and went back to school with some serious overconfidence in my skills. I wonder if I would ever have posted a single word before I finally realized this is not an after school special, I am not a tragic victim of mean people, so cheer the fuck up and do your homework already

Or: if I’d just take my ritalin, because if I remember correctly, I was compiling my very first kernel, on my own, outside school lab conditions (Raspberry Pi 4 8GB, 64 bit: Eurydice) so yeah, I would have like an hour earlier, I would have immediately realized this person was telling me that this place is not for me and I did not belong. And I would have agreed; buddy, I’ve been condescended to by literal geniuses with PhDs in fields I can’t spell. Whole servers of them exist? Christ. Thank God for the warning, I’m gonna dip. Not that I would have said that: depending on how the compile went, i would have either devoted a twitter thread to performing a melodramatic interpretation of it or forgot about it with a vague hostility toward Mastodon and that weird Federation thing.

Talk about the road not taken.

So after twenty-something years on social media, along with mailing lists, messageboards, usenet, this is a topic I think about literally every time I have to add, change, migrate, delete my account as I migrated from platform to platform like some virtual vagabond between text-driven city-states. A virtual vagabond with no worldly goods, no name, no history, and completely invisible to all. To exist, I must apply to the City Leader, and if accepted, I get a name, a nice studio apartment, and visibility as well as contact with other humans after watching a short commercial every five or so humans. If I leave, am thrown out, or the city is burned down, I can’t take anything the city gave me with me. By ‘gave’, I mean ‘loaned’ btw; none of those things were actually mine.

All the discussion of whether or not to federate with Threads were interesting in that in general, it’s kind of pointless. A server instance isn’t a democracy; the owner’s opinion is the only one that matters. If you don’t like it, leave. And I don’t argue their right to do so; they’re paying the bills, doing the upgrades, eating grapes with robot butlers, I don’t know their lives. Federated means anyone can run their own not-twitter or not-reddit; go for it. All you need is money, free time, and the knowledge of how to register a domain name, get, run, secure, and maintain servers, and install and configure the program, lure people in, and avoid breaking any national or international laws. Like I said: I really seriously do not argue the owner’s right to decide anything for their server. i know how to do all those things and I ran several websites and archives: I wanted a nap before installation step.

Fediverse is a massive step in loosening the stranglehold megacorporations had on our ability to shitpost in peace and talk about our cats without feeling stalked by people wanting to sell us shit or sell our browsing habits, blood pressure, and underwear size to those who will the try to sell us deeply individualized shit; it’s the circle of life, man.

Wow this got long but feelings.

So at this point–two decades and change of social media, the rise and fall of social empires, so much virtual vagabonding across the virtual desert to find a new city-state…I don’t think it’s too early to consider getting around to a productive discussion of how we go about separating the individual identity from the community and define what is theirs to keep no matter where they are. If there was ever a place and time to start building a model, it’s where all the city states are allies and the individuals can interact with each other no matter what city they’re in. The account transferability in Mastodon is a really good start, but it’s not a solution, much less the solution. It’s a beginning.

I don’t expect to have a working, finished, flawless product in six to eight weeks or six to eight months; I expect it to slide in three weeks and two days after the announcement that it’s ready for alpha testing and immediately break the first time a tester opens it; it’ll be another month before it goes into testing again. I expect it will be a weird buggy mess of wtf after months of virtual warfare and everyone will hate it before the rough draft of the design documents are even released. I expect there will be one weird guy who really thinks everything should be written in Rust because he’s insane and never sleeps. Five to eight devs will dramatically quit; one will quietly move to Utah and farm emus. None of them will be the Rust guy; you’re stuck with him. I expect the working version after testing is done will be hated by everyone and probably kind of crappy. But it will also be amazing, because as of it’s release–no matter how shitty, buggy, or how many inexplicable design choices are made–the individual exists outside of being community property and that no matter where we go or how much we pissed off that admin or if our city-state was nuked from orbit, there are things that are ours and we get to keep them.

Uh, I see a problem; where are the LAN cables? Are they…are they just using wifi?

I’ve been thinking on that and assuming fosstodon and lemmy.world both agree to defederate with Threads, I’m going to go ahead and set up regular donations. I only use DW a few times a year, but I renew my premium membership every six months and it’s not cheap. I want to keep supporting it because its model does not include ads at all (premium gives you lots of icons, too, and I used to be a huge icon person, so I can’t say that’s not a consideration). Unless I lose my job or something, I’ll keep paying until death or dw closes whether I ever use it again; it’s worth supporting.

I was already considering it–when i joined mastodon I bought their stickers to show my appreciation–but this is been a wake-up call. If lemmy.world decides to federate, I mean, I’m not going to leave, but I am going to email lemmy.ml about why my application is still pending and use that for my primary.

Fortunately I have never had instagram and have a policy of never, ever using my wallet name online except as needed (exception: usenet my first year online; I was young and reckless). LinkedIn and Facebook were quite literally because a.) grandparents and other family, b.) my job, and c.) I realized early on that I needed an official web presence under my real name because there would be questions if there wasn’t something out there.

So I made an instagram account then made a threads account, got a friend who had it to follow me, and did a quick dive.

I mean, it’s literally a minimalist twitter real doll; I deactivated to keep my name intact, logged out, and deleted instagram and Threads on the phone in under five minutes and took a shower because I never realized the uncanny valley applied to an app’s aesthetic. It’s just–I mean, no. No no no.

I mean, I try and test drive all new social media platforms that don’t actively make my skin crawl, but. I’ve really bonded with it super fast, and not the way I did with Mastodon where I really sat down to make myself adapt. Don’t get me wrong, I love it and pretty much use constantly, but there’s always an adjustment period; the very worst was tumblr’s hellscapy postingness, but reddit was a very close second. My first social media was livejournal, so for me, everything is compared to that. When I went to dreamwidth, I had enough experience scripting and remembered enough from doing web design to build my own layout and theme straight from the available source, so my friendslist there (dw: circle) is literally customized as close as my skill level then could get to exactly how I want to read, and the right sidebar is customized to only want I personally want there that aren’t distracting to me, which is basically a fancier and more idiosyncratic version of my livejournal friendslist. I do me, okay.

Back to Lemmy: from the first, it was super comfortable and familiar. Community posts to the left, right sidebar, almost the exact amount of white space I need, so it was effortless to follow along and add communities and post comments. No weird distractions, nothing unnecessary or fancy to take my attention from content, and I can open up pictures directly in my feed and close them there without having to go to the community or change my scroll rhythm much. Joyous.

I just went back to DW to search for one of my posts and while there, I paused on my circle page and took a moment to realize: oh. They are not the same, no, but Lemmy is basically a less idiosyncratic minimalist version of my specific reading aesthetic; the base elements of both are the same.

(The only thing I might want to change is coloring the post titles since I’m very trained to see plain uncolored black text as text and not links, but three entirely different colors on a general feed page like this one might be a dealbreaker for me; I can adapt to seeing ‘post title is link even if black’ but tossing in a green or something with blue and orange in close proximity feels like a nope and I do like the blue for user and orange for community very, very much.)

So tentatively: this may be my new community-oriented home.

Hard agree.

I don’t really think federating with them is doomsday, tbh (though I go back and forth on this one), but that doesn’t affect my primary reason for my nope. Threads consolidates everything I hate about corporate social media–and for that matter, all social media–without a single part I actually liked and made dealing with the other parts worth it. This is not a twitter clone; it’s like someone asked chatGPT to create a social media network based on twitter for other chatGPT bots to talk to each other. For fuck’s sake, it doesn’t think its users should control what they see on their own feed.

I am perfectly willing–even eager–to perform melodramatically about things that annoy me in public for fun and when I’m bored and applaud others doing the same; it’s fun times for all and possibly my favorite thing ever. This is not that.

Threads makes my skin crawl on concept. This is not ‘they do not align with our values’ because come on, Fediverse contains a multitude of values and invents more and i bet if asked, everyone here would list off a different set of values they believe encompass Fediverse and now I’m tempted to see because it would be hilarious. But we can’t even get that far; Threads has no values. This would be a marriage of convenience to a real doll fueled by Facebook’s algorithms and sponsored by Wal-Mart; whether or not it’s a danger to Fediverse shouldn’t even have come up because the first question that should be on anyone’s minds is ‘wait, this is actually a serious question?’ and have been answered ‘lol of course it’s a joke, I just forgot to add the /s’.

I’m still waiting for that /s.

I love when we normal humans have normal conversations in public areas with other humans! [insert store name here] is one of my favorite stores! Their deals are so good that they have to give your money back give your money to the One Above and Below somethingiswrongheiscomingwemusthurryforgiveme have good deals and I like them a lot.

I hope your hands are warm!

_{heisheresaveyourself}