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hetscop hetscop @kbin.social
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Comments 29
Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t
  • Imo part of the problem with mastodon, at least in my experience, is that it's sold as a twitter replacement while still being devoloped and largely populated by people who don't like twitter (because it's too "toxic"). This means that you can't really have the twitter experience on mastodon by design so people coming from twitter mostly wanting to get away from musk bounce of. Bluesky has been a more successfull twitter replacement and I think that's largely because it basically is twitter with feeds.

    I think that mastodon should either commit to being more like twitter (which it is propably too late for at this point since I don't imagine that their current userbase would be into that) or people should stop trying to make it the new twitter and instead let it be it's own kind of different thing.

  • Twitter alternatives for the Musk-averse
  • It's gonna go public eventually, this is like a closed beta kind of thing. The purpose seems to be more to get people curious about it and foster a certain culture which I must say that they've been pretty effective at. They strategically handed out invites to a lot of black twitter users for example, which is smart since black twitter has historically been an important cultural force on the internet

  • Twitter alternatives for the Musk-averse
  • They've been invite only since before that, it's unrelated

  • Is PeerTube a good Youtube alternative?
  • Depends on in what way you're looking for a youtube alternative!

    I think peertube might be fine if you're looking for a way to host your own videos, but it's propably not a good place to just browse for video content the way you might with youtube. I think the most solid alternative for that is Nebula. It costs like a dollar a month IIRC and has a couple big name video easayist kind of types. It doesn't really have anything to do with the fediverse or anything, but a majority of it is owned by the creators and from what I understand it is more generous per view than youtube, plus it has a buissiness model that doesn't rely on serving you adds and selling your data.

  • What if Reddit joined the Fediverse?
  • There have been talks about tumblr joining the fediverse which seems like a similar scenario!

  • So why do you perfer Kbin over Lemmy?
  • One thing that I like about kbin is that it's not trying to be "x, but federated" like lemmy or mastodon for example. It's more exiting to try to make something new! I think it's very apparent how some parts of lemmy are full of redditisms on purpose which I disslike.

    That said, I do have a lemmy account that I use for posting about other stuff. There are a tons of website sprouting up as contenders for a space in the new internet landscape and I'm having a lot of fun trying them out without really binding myself to one too tightly

  • Which cutscene is and will forever be burned into your memory?
  • It's from Mass Effect, this is the character Mordin Solus catchphrase. CosmicApe is almost certainly refering to a (very good) cutsceen from one of the possible endings to the Tuchanka chain of missions in ME3.

  • French authorities ban protest against police violence in Paris
  • "You can't protest agains police violence because we don't have enough police officers". I'm sure that will stop them

  • Thai cave survivor reunites with rescuer at high school graduation 5 years later
  • Five years ago does not sound right to me at all, but I looked it up and apparently it was in 2018, so I guess it has been five years after all. Total mandela effect moment for me.

  • Bluesky allowed people to include the n-word in their usernames
  • I think that the main thing this reveals about the bluesky admins is that they haven't thought that hard about harrasment, which is weird to not do if you're trying to launch a new social media platform.

  • Is it just me or are there 0 recent news articles about reddit's status after the fiasco?
  • I don't think reddit has taken a very large hit by many messurable metrics as of now. The damage that is done is more cultural and will have downsides for the website more long term.

  • *Permanently Deleted*
  • I think reddit will remain in a sort of zombified form for quite some time. I don't know if there will be any more outright migrations of subreddits for a while, but hopefully kbin (and lemmy) will become interesting places to post and read all on their own and maybe eventually take the place on the internet reddit had. Reddit started out as a small place dominated by tech nerds and eventually grew to the place it is today, so it's possible that kbin/lemmy do something similar. I don't know if this means an outright takeover, and I don't know if that's what I'm hoping for either to be honest. I would rather see kbin become it's own thing on it's own terms.

  • People with total colour blindness able to see red after gene therapy
  • I wonder what it's like to sudendly be able to see a new color, that must be an interesting experience

  • (Opinion:) You're So Vain, You Probably Think This App Is About You: On Meta and Mastodon
  • While I think that the article is correct in stating that mastodon isn't currently a serious competitor to facebook, it's possible that it (or something else based of activitypub) might become that one day. I think that there's a decent chance that facebook might want to prevent fediverse spaces from potentially becoming serious competitors, and even if that's not the main reason why their implementing activitypub, if e.g. mastodon ever does get to a point where it can challange meta (which I think most of us are hoping!) then facebook will use the position of power they will have over activitypub to try to prevent that. I think it's a misstake to give facebook any power of our spaces because that means essentially giving up on the idea of an internet not controlled by large corporations like facebook.

  • Do we have anything to be concerned with from the Lemmy compromise?
  • I don't think there's any risk of someone stealing your kbin account with this, however I do think that admins can access more data than normal users, including from federated instances. They where only logged in on the web, and I think you can only access that kind of data by accessing the database more directly, which the exploit wouldn't have allowed the hackers to do.

  • Let the Platforms Burn by Cory Doctorow
  • It's honestly amazing that perhaps the aspect of technology that has most profoundly shaped peoples lives during the 2010s has turned out to be almost completely financially unsustainable

  • Instagram’s Threads surpasses 100 million users
  • Having a single player control most of the market - like meta - means that they will have a lot of sway over how the protocol is developed. This is propably a bad thing since meta har different goals than people currently using the fediverse and also have financial incentives to get people to move over to their platforms instead.

  • Rant: I hate the term “normie”.
  • Hey, glad to hear that we're mostly on the same page!

    I should clarify that I'm just grouping fun friends and racist uncles together in the sense that they're both groups of people who might only join the fediverse through threads in the forseable future. This is obviously a very hetrogenous groups so it's not surprising that it contains very different kinds of people.

  • Rant: I hate the term “normie”.
  • I just read a comment about someone grouping a racist uncle and funny friend into the same category of normie because they aren’t up to date on the fediverse or super tech savvy or whatever.

    Hey, I think that was my comment!

    What I was trying to say is that the barrier of entry for joining the fediverse is too high for some people, and one appeal of threads is that people who wouldn't otherwise join might, so in my mind I was doing the opposite of gatekeeping! It was a normie-positive comment, if you will (although not without caveats).

    I was also using the term somewhat ironically although maybe this didn't come through well. People have different connotations with words and I can't expect everyone to share my connotations.

    What I think is important isn't the exact wording (if I hadn't written "normie" I would have used a different word to refer to people who wouldn't otherwise join the fediverse) but to not use your fediverse instance as a way to build some sort of upside down social pyramid where you use your outsidernes as a status symbol against people who are well-adjusted irl. This happening or not happening isn't contingent on a certain word being used or not, although arguably normie is a word that has strong enough negative associations to push people away. I don't have those associations with that word so that doesn't ring true for me, but as I said, not everyone has the same connocations.

  • YSK: Pixelfed replaced Instagram for me, the same way Lemmy replaced reddit.
  • I feel like instagram is one one of those apps - at least the way I use it - that relies on a lot of your irl friends having it as well. I would love for them to be open to signing up to some fediverse platform but we're not there right now sadly.