Karu 🐲

Microblogging is a terrible social media format when what you want from social media is to read and discuss stuff you’re interested in. In Mastodon, I can scream into the void, but I have no guarantee that anybody will be interested in what I have to say. If all you want is to keep tabs on people it works fine I guess, but as soon as you want to follow topics it becomes incredibly clunky.

You can search keywords or hashtags, but all you get is an unmoderated firehose of loosely connected posts about the topic you want, and other topics for which people use the same words. You can follow hashtags, but then you just get said unfiltered firehose on your TL. Unless everyone somehow agrees in how to use the hashtag, it’s pointless.

Frankly I think all microblogging platforms would improve if there was a closed set of possible hashtags you could use in your posts. Hopefully there would be a unified name convention for each topic, and each hashtag could have a dedicated curation team of some sort, that could remove or relocate posts. Likewise, users should be able to submit a new possible hashtag for everyone to use. This way, I would be able to subscribe to a hashtag, be sure that all the content I receive will be relevant to a topic I care about, and I could post to it knowing that other people who subscribe to the hashtag are guaranteed to be at least somewhat interested in what I have to say. Oh wait, I think I just reinvented Lemmy communities.

While we’re at it, Mastodon is not 2008 Twitter anymore. No one posts via SMS. Inline hashtags should not be a thing, because it lets people optimize the way they phrase their posts for discoverability, and abusing them makes posts very uncomfortable to read. I have not seen as many people on Mastodon doing this as on Twitter, but why even keep inline hashtags at all nowadays? Just keep tags separately from the post’s content.

Say you hire a company to build a house. You don’t have the skills or the know-to, but at some point, you’ll have to deal with some inevitable aspects of building a house, if only to discuss them with the workers. Say they “force” you to deal with plumbing, for example by including it in the budget. Imagine if you not only don’t know how plumbing works, but also what plumbing is. Maybe you’ve never had to think about it before. What would you do? Would you go to another company that doesn’t force you to deal with it, perhaps by not even providing it in the first place?

Say for the sake of argument that this becomes a generalized problem, and companies use it as an excuse to no longer provide plumbing in new houses, as a cost-saving measure. Most people don’t seem to care. Over 10 years pass by, and people have gotten used to expect not having running water at home. “It sucks, but that’s the way it is I guess”.

Now, a community-driven initiative arises to build cheaper houses, complete with running water. Can you imagine most people refusing participating, because building a house with running water implies having to know that plumbing supplies water? That the mere thought of it is already too complicated, and that maybe having fresh water at home is only for people whose special interest is plumbing?

You need some elementary knowledge on things, if only to exist in the world. The Fediverse, and I mean this wholeheartedly, is not that complicated once you grasp the most basic concepts of the internet.

While I won’t deny outright that open-source devs most of the time don’t think about making their software accessible to the wider public, and that some aspects of decentralized social media still have to be ironed out (duplicated communities on Lemmy are a pet-peeve of mine); these issues are often heavily blown out of proportion. Besides people honestly not understanding some concepts, I think there is also some deliberate anti-intellectualism going on with this topic in particular. People who spend their afternoons troubleshooting Windows just so that their computer games run at 60 FPS suddenly don’t know what a website is when Mastodon is mentioned.

I’m pretty certain that this “Fediverse is too complicated” mantra would not have worked at all before 2010.

While I understand and largely agree with your point, I think it’s worthwhile to question whether it’s reasonable that this is the way people expect the Internet to work.

Companies have spent the last 15 years o so making their best efforts at obscuring the stack, so that unless you’re somewhat tech-savvy, you can’t tell the concept of app apart from the concept of server. Not unlike how Android and iOS have been obscuring many basics of the system to the point that some people don’t even know what a filesystem is.

Perhaps this situation should be regarded as a problem to be solved, rather than just “the way things work” and that we need to cather to it. Mostly because FOSS services will always, invariably, struggle to adapt to a conception of the internet optimized for consumption and nothing else.

I agree that people nowadays might struggle to understand what, for instance, a third-party app is, but I also think it’s too an unreasonably low bar to just let it be, and have FOSS forever playing acrobatics to somehow adapt to it.

Whether Lemmy should be the one leading this struggle is a whole another argument lol. Somehow forcing people to understand this with Lemmy in particular, without changing anything of the larger culture, will just cause people to not use Lemmy outright.

But this cannot be the way it works. Everyone using the internet needs some bare minimum tech literacy.

Doraemon is incredibly popular in Spain, to the point that basically everyone no matter the age knows at least the premise and the main characters. It baffled me when I found out that it was largely unknown in other western countries.

Edit: I just remembered Shinchan, another anime that is huge in Spain but not very popular elsewhere.

I check TV Tropes from time to time because it is useful to have a database with media tropes and to my experience it’s mostly exhaustive.

But man, that site really irks me. I hate the overly casual, witty, irregular style that every page has while attempting to be funny, and I hate when they do incomplete hints at stuff (ex. “in some episode of show X” bruh, which episode??). For a wiki-style site, I’d really prefer the more neutral tone Wikipedia has.

And on a less important note, I also hate how the articles in TV Tropes pretend that the trope names are some sort of agreed consensus in the scientific community, when most of them are never referred to by those names outside of that site.

Last I checked, KDE Connect can be installed on Windows as well. It’s not locked into the KDE ecosystem or even Linux.

An HR’s purpose is to find a way to have the company give the least to employees while still complying with the law. They can be nice to you, and most will be because acting nice is part of their job, but if they find out the company will do 0.0001% better without you they will let you go immediately.

In today’s society where 99.9% of the people need to fall in line to their company if they want to not die of hunger or homelessness, it takes a special kind of cruelty to mediate conflicts in favor of the company, undermine any attempt on the side of the employees to improve literally anything of significance, or make the decision to take away someone’s income because they are not being 100% exploitable. Most people cannot do this. So if they become HR while having a heart, they won’t last long in the job. This leaves only the most ruthless, unempathetic removed in the long run. All of which wear humane masks because it’s their job to do so.

Since the only good HR is an HR that quits, AHRAB

Conceptually, I think the way Lemmy and Mastodon would be able to interop is pretty straightforward: Each thread in either is basically just a tree of replies. They are just shown differently depending on the platform. Furthermore, Lemmy communities show up as Mastodon groups, and Lemmy threads show up as retoots from those groups, which I think is the most elegant solution.

The only issue that makes this interoperation unusable really is that Mastodon groups representing Lemmy communities just “retoot” every single comment, obliterating the TL of anyone who dares to follow those groups. Which as far as I know only happens because Mastodon refuses to be cooperative and properly follow the standards.

As for the other comments asking “why even care about this”: I think it’s worth as a long-term goal for the Fediverse to entirely separate the “view” aspect from the “content” aspect of platforms where reasonably possible, so that each user can browse all the content in their preferred platform. Not all fedi platforms need to conform to some absolute feature parity, but as I just said, there’s basically a one-to-one relationship between Lemmy and Mastodon content, so it is reasonable in this case. I’ve seen enough people here claim that they very much prefer the Lemmy format to read conversations.

Personally, my Mastodon account has different vibes from Lemmy, and for that reason alone there is a bunch of Lemmy communities I wouldn’t subscribe to, but would follow from Mastodon. The only reason why I don’t do that is because Mastodon’s side of the interop fucking sucks.

You’re absolutely not the only one. My first Lemmy instance was .world, but I eventually left when I noticed that they were kinda manipulating their userbase to consent to an eventual defederation from .ml, on the grounds that it’s a “tankie” instance. The .world admins are really quick to ban any communist instance or community, and if all of them are banned, they just outright make shit up.

That was the red flag that made me jump ship, but honestly I don’t regret it at all. I didn’t truly realize the scope of .world manipulation until I started seeing Lemmy from a different instance.

Oh boy, I love telling this story.

So, back in 2013, I signed up for a now defunct local website, where I met this kid from Aragón. To respect his privacy, I’ll call him S. There wasn’t much going on at the time and eventually we grew apart.

Fast-forward to 2016, I move to Madrid to start college. In my first year class, there was this guy I’ll refer to as L, a trans man from the Basque Country with really chaotic energy, who kept doing really cursed things for the sake of it. One morning he arrived at the class claiming that, the previous day, he cooked a few bean stew ice pops, and hid them across the campus. Obviously the people who found them weren’t thrilled and, to no one’s surprise, didn’t eat them. So, at the end of the day, he picked up all of the bean stew ice pops, and shoved them off into the freezer at his rental flat.

Sadly, the next year, L moved to a different campus and to a different flat. Though he remained involved with a gamedev association at the same university.

Fast-forward to 2020, I’m almost done with my degree and the pandemic hits. My old friend S and I reconnect over Discord and tell each other about our lives, then share some funny memes. At some point we begin discussing cursed food, and S proceeds to tell me this: «I had a friend who went to Madrid for college, and when he first arrived at his rental flat, can you guess what he found in the freezer? bean stew ice popsicles».

What were the odds? How many flats in Madrid would have bean stew ice pops, of all things, in the freezer?

Bonus: S and I shared this story with a common friend, call her C. C stated that she wanted to greet L. After all, she was involved with the same gamedev association, and she did know of a trans guy from the Basque Country with that name and degree. But when C greeted him and told him about the ice pops, he had no idea what she was talking about.

It turned out to be a different trans guy from the Basque Country with the same name and degree that was also collaborating with the same association.

Wagamama Fairy Mirmo De Pon!, an obscure anime that is basically The Fairly Oddparents if it was a shoujo. When I was in elementary school, it was on regional TV right after classes ended, and I loved it. It was the first ever media I could get my hands on that had an intriguing plot that I wanted to follow. I missed the series finale, tho :(

Some time ago I went back and rewatched it, complete with the finale and all. It was nostalgic but also kinda hard to rewatch because it’s so clearly made exclusively for children. It was so obscure that the only full download I could come across online even had the logo of the regional TV channel where I originally watched it as a child.

Hi, really late sleeper here. I naturally fall asleep between 3 am and 4 am. If I go to bed earlier, I’ll just be staring into the ceiling until that time; and if I go to bed later, I’ll typically fall asleep within minutes. Then, if I’m left undisturbed, I wake up at 11 am to 12 pm. However, if I have to wake up earlier to go to work or something, I greatly resent it 😅

I can force myself to go sleep earlier, but it’s a constant effort that I need to do everyday, and as soon as I stop making that effort, it’s immediately back to falling asleep at 3 am. It’s also something that I’d rather avoid doing because the time when I’m the most active/productive and get the most things done is around midnight, and the days I go to bed earlier usually become wasted days.

Some people say that it’s unhealthy to stay awake that far into the night, or lazy to get up that late. But honestly? My sleep schedule is really stable and consistent when left alone. On non-work days I rarely ever sleep more or less than 8 hours. If anything, what’s unhealthy is that I keep being expected to get up really fucking early at a time when I can’t get anything done anyway.