Buelldozer

As an American I fully agree. I’ve completely had it with our politics infesting everything, everywhere, all the time. For everyone’s sanity it needs to stop. More communities need to have and enforce a “No US Politics” rule. No Trump, no Elon, no AOC, no Bernie, no State Senator from bumblefuck Alabama or Los Angeles, California. None of it. Just.Fucking.Stop.Already.

but breaking down what’s different I can’t pin anything concrete down.

One big difference is scale. The 2000s Internet was primarily centered around single(ish) interest forums with relatively low user counts. The entire Lemmy-verse, which is itself quite tiny in 2025, is still WAY larger than nearly any of the 2000s era forums ever were.

Another other big difference is why the user base is online. The majority of them aren’t participating to discuss a shared interest anymore, they are doing it for general entertainment or to earn money.

Those two things explain nearly all of the change. Way more users congregated into a handful of websites with many of them, including the sites, attempting to get rich doing it.

The 2000s web was a much smaller number of users spread across a zillion websites / forums with nearly all of the users and site operators doing it without money as a motivator.

MySpace was social media and had none of the toxicity.

Usenet was Social Media and it had allllll the toxicity.

At some point, the NRA forgot that and only funded one side.

As the article notes after '94 the number of Democrats the NRA could support steadily dwindled. These days the Democrats purity test their candidates to ensure that they fully support Gun Control and there are various Democrat PACs that will oppose Pro-Gun Democrats in the primaries; making it increasingly unlikely for there to be any future Democrats at the federal level that the NRA can support.

The 2nd Amendment is a wedge issue and both sides do their best to take maximum advantage of their position.

That left them vulnerable when there was widespread financial fraud in the organization…

They were vulnerable because they were up to shady shit. No one should have been going to bat for the NRA during their corruption scandal and the fact they had one is entirely the fault of the NRAs Board of Directors. They knew what was happening and ignored it. No amount of political donations to Democrats, or anyone else, should have insulated them from the consequences.

I’d like for all of the Pro 2A groups, not just the NRA, to get back to donating to non-Republican politicians but they kinda don’t exist anymore and I don’t know how to change that.

The modern NRA is near useless but what you’re accusing them of hasn’t been true in a long time.

The NRA that supported The Mulford Act ceased to exist on May 22nd, 1977. The membership was fed-up with their organization supporting Gun Control and in an event known as the Revolt at Cincinnati they removed and replaced the entire leadership then set the organization on an entirely new course.

Post '77 it’s been very rare for the NRA to support any kind of Gun Control, to the point that they’ve spent the last three decades getting torn up in the media for staunchly opposing any limits on 2A rights for anyone. They’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time, money, and energy winding back all of the gun controls and policies that they supported prior to '77 and to my knowledge they’ve made no attempt to limit 2A rights for non-whites.

Now some of the NRA members and 2A associated politicians are certainly racist / sexist / 'phobic fuckheads but the organization itself hasn’t cared about any of that for decades.

The biggest knock on the NRA in modern times, basically the WLP corruption era, is that they completely lost the willingness to go against the Police regardless of the circumstances. The '90s (Cold Dead Hands / Jackbooted Thugs) era NRA would likely have already been in the streets at this point.

The NRA is very nearly a failed organization at this point.

In regards to recent events there was a time back in the ‘90s where they were pretty willing to get involved in stuff like this. Ol’ WLP himself let fly with phrases like “Jackbooted thugs” and Charlton Heston proudly declared “From my cold dead hands.” The NRA of the '90s was a fiery organization that was increasingly positioning itself as an anti-government force.

Then it stopped. I’ve never seen confirmation as to why but my supposition is that after the “jackbooted thugs” comment that WLP got a tap on the shoulder from the men in black suits and a deal was struck.

If today’s NRA had the spirit it did 30 years ago they’d likely already be in the streets.

f the reason EE is shutting down due to lack of staff why would anyone go to a smaller one/one run by a single person?

Small instances can have far less drama and workload. Just because an instance isn’t popular and has a small admin team doesn’t mean it’s in danger of folding up. 😀

If you are looking for a small and stable instance you should evaluate lemmy.today. It’s hosted in the U.S. (Pacific North West) and has a high degree of federation.

First Used - Apple II

First Owned - Commodore Vic 20

It’s not a TERF thing. Nearly no one cares about who goes into a “Men’s” Restroom and it’s always been that way.

I’m GenX, my entire childhood was dangerous.

You should also be changing with time to take advantage of such technological growth.

Whoo boy that’s funny, thanks for the chuckle. I’ve been technology professional so long that I literally predate NAT. To say that I’ve changed with the time would be an understatement.

TVs are admittedly geared towards single wide screen tasks like the obvious: media consumption.

Huh, media consumption. You mean like Lemmy or any other web media?

That’s what additional monitors can be used for; but the point is with a single wide monitor you don’t have to run a second monitor.

Here’s where we diverge and despite considering the issue for several hours now I’m still not sure if this is a generational issue or something else. Obviously I’m from the time before widescreen and it looks like to me like you’re trying to use a workaround (multiple windows on a single screen) to justify what is objectively a downgrade in display technology.

You are in essence saying “Yes I know the monitor doesn’t have enough vertical space but you are supposed to use the extra horizontal space to overcome that.” I am going to counter by saying that computer monitors shouldn’t be 16x9, that’s a TV / Movie format forced into the computer industry by display makers who wanted to leverage their investment in television panels to produce cheap computer monitors. In short you are forcing yourself to find ways to work around display tech that doesn’t fit the use case; the screen is wider than it needs to be while not being tall enough.

Amusingly I was discussing this with a peer about an hour ago and he brought up ultra wide monitors like the Samsung Odyssey QD-OLED G9 (5120x1440) and after looking at it we decided that a monitor with the same physical width (48") but double the physical height (20" vs 40") and double the horizontal resolution (2880) would be near perfect. With such a monitor there would be so much real estate that app windows would stay large enough to be readable while still being capable of displaying lots of data vertically.

You could mount one vertically, you could use different sized displays, you could stack them.

Ahhh, now we hit the rub. I do a lot of remote GUI work and what I’m dropping into expects widescreen and uses all of it. Downscaling that into an app window makes the problem worse because it leaves large areas unused horizontally and there’s still not enough vertical. I could flip a monitor to portrait but then it’s too narrow to be handled correctly because what was a lack of vertical resolution has now become a lack of horizontal resolution. This is another symptom of 16:19 being a bad aspect ratio for computer displays.

Be your own person.

This person is seriously considering a pair of frameless ultra widescreen displays in a vertical stack. Expensive AF but potentially oh so usable.

You do you with multiple app windows squished to fit into today’s displays. If it works for you then it works for you.

Enjoy your day.

Saying “You’re using it wrong” is blaming the user for using the computer the way it was presented out of the box.

It’s also the way we’ve used computers for nearly fifty years and the way we interact with every other display in our lives. As examples almost no one uses less than the full wide of their TV, Smart Phone, or Tablet. There’s no reasons that computer displays should be any different and they weren’t until pretty recently.

If you’re using anything full screen, you’re doing it wrong

I’ll make sure to start watching YT videos in tiny little boxes like we did in the 90s and 2000s. 😜

I have 3 curved monitors in the home office. Left monitor is browser, center monitor is primary task, right monitor is comms or secondary task. I can’t track more than three things at a time anyway and I bought these big ol’ curved monitors for a reason.

This is how computer monitors have been used since I first touched an Apple II+ in 1980. It’s how you use every other display in your life. The problem isn’t with people using apps full screen.

Stop making a single browser window full screen and use the additional space on the side for something useful.

So stop using monitors the way I’ve been using them since 1982? Stop using them the way that literally every other screen I interact with functions?

A chat application, a notepad, a calculator, file browsing, a second browser window, documents, etc.

That’s what 2nd and 3rd monitors are for.

Or rotate the display to be tall instead of wide if you really want the extra vertical space.

That’s not so easy when you’re using multiple curved monitors with a stand or mount.

I get what you’re saying, I really do, but from my point of view it’s incorrect. It breaks the usage paradigm that’s been in place since these things were invented and there’s no other screens in our lives where we intentionally use less than the full width available for a single task.

But web devs seem universally to assume that if it’s a tall narrow screen, to show the mobile version.

Web Devs are also highly allergic to using the 25% of the screen on both the right and left so only the middle 50% is useful space. It’s god damned infuriating!

With that in mind; a wide monitor is useful for … web browsing

Are you serious? As I’m typing this comment Lemmy has just over 4" of totally unused space on the left of my monitor and 3 1’2" of unused space on the right!

Seriously, see for yourself!

Granted that’s not the fault of the monitor but not only does widescreen reduce the amount of viewable area top to bottom modern web hackery doesn’t even fucking use all of that extra space side to side!

I have about the same viewable area now as I did in 2000 with a 20" “square” monitor!

XenoForo is a bit spendy but they’re providing the software, hosting and data storage. IIRC the forum I’m talking about is on the “Business” plan due to how busy it is.

there’s no persistence or community.

That’s it right there, that’s what you are missing. The older forum communities were small enough that you could keep track of whose who, something that isn’t possible when the user counts are in the tens of thousands to tens of millions. I think a lot of us olds would like to go back to that but its impossible; our monkey brains can’t handle communities of that size.

To use an extreme example, if I saw someone just spamming the hard-R I would want their comment immediately removed.

In the forum days those users would get attacked and / or blocked by other users. If they caused enough havoc for long enough then the mods / admins would step in. The expectation NOW is that the mods / admins will actively monitor every post and comment in order to remove disagreeable content before it can be seen. That’s quite the change over the last 20 years!

The funniest part is that this mirrors real life. If someone did that IRL, I would just leave.

“Mirror” is probably more apt than you realize. IRL you would leave but on the internet you want them to leave. I’m not blaming you or saying that you’re wrong, I’m just pointing out the difference.

I agree that all forums require some level of moderation in order to keep from turning into total troll-fests however there’s a wide chasm between moderating someone because they won’t stop posting racial slurs and moderating someone because they’re going against the grain / hivemind.