The Victorian Internet: about the societal impact of the telegraph

Isaac’s Storm: about the 1900 Galveston hurricane

Open: about the early history of Compaq and IBM PC clones

I think there are two problems with modern social media. First is centralization. The fediverse helps in that regard, but the second problem is how ephemeral it is, which is a problem with how one interacts with and consumes content. Since the fediverse is largely made up of clones of corporate platforms, that problem is inherited here. There’s no space for long-form, and long-term, discussion. Things drop of the front page in a few days never to be seen again.

I know I’m saying the same thing to probably the same people, but traditional forums were way better at this sort of thing. Lemmy is better in some ways but it’s still strongly biased toward recent content rather than old but still relevant content. In any case, Discord is a terrible replacement.

IDK, I just block NSFW posts in settings, haven’t seen anything really objectionable so I think it’s working. From there I block all the politics and news communities., that helps my blood pressure. After that it’s just a matter of filtering the stuff that simply doesn’t interest me. I honestly wish you could just whitelist comms or users to show up on your feed rather than having to block everything.

I watch archived news coverage of tornadoes on YT and I’ve seen it used live. Pretty sure it has some broadcasting-specific features especially when streamed to an Apple TV.

Every day I curse Tim Cook for getting rid of the simple headphone jack. Now I can’t just hand cheap dollar store earbuds to people on the bus. Not that I ever did that, but I’ve sure thought about it.

This is going to get buried, but I miss Bill Cosby, or rather my mental model of him before all that nastiness came out.

Try viewing it locally. It does appear empty from your instance.

[email protected]. I want other people besides me to post there more often.

[email protected] Me krog want more cave man make cave painting there!

Lemmy is ephemeral in part because the redditlike format is designed to be ephemeral. You have a topic, you discuss it for a few days, then it drops off the front page never to be seen again.

Then you layer on all the issues listed in the OP and they combine to make something very impermanent indeed. Server flakiness in particular is something I don’t see ever going away. It’s part and parcel of the fediverse. The folks hosting the server aren’t a big company, they’re a small group of volunteers running off donations. They don’t have the means to guarantee five nines of uptime in the same way a big corporation can.

Ah I didn’t realize it went beyond the devs being tankies. Yeah if they won’t take feedback that will just cause things to stagnate. Maybe I should check out Piefed.

EDIT: as a non developer what’s the deal with rust and those who use it?

Personally I don’t care what the devs think as long as it doesn’t trickle down into the software itself. If they somehow hardcoded censorship of things critical of China and Russia then I’d be worried. But I can see your point. Commie devs attract more Commies which leads to a Commie echo chamber where non Commies don’t feel welcome.

I know I’ve said this multiple times but a fanatic is someone who won’t change their mind and won’t change the subject, and there are a lot of fanatics here. To me, there is inherent value in attempting to create a neutral space where people who otherwise may be on opposite sides of the political spectrum can talk about shared interests.

To drag out my tired example, say Alice is a gun nut and Bob wants to seize the means of production. But both of them like vintage computers. They talk on the vintage computers community about their mutual love of vintage computers, and they realize that the “other side” is also a human being with hobbies and interests and thoughts and feelings. Alice may not put on the hammer and sickle and bob might not go out and buy an AR-15, but they both realize that the other isn’t a monster. Surely there’s value in that.

The concept of twitter was never appealing to me, so I naturally won’t like platforms that ape it. I joined Reddit at the time because the Minecraft sub seemed like it was getting more attention from Mojang vs the forums. I stayed because the entire IT industry is on Reddit. I left because of the API nonsense in 2023.

Honestly the two big problems I see with the fediverse are the political stridency of the userbase and the friction of picking an instance when you don’t know what that even means. The first problem, as I’ve said elsewhere, is somewhat a result of fedi users self selecting (again I include myself in here) and might resolve on its own if mainstream platforms enshittify to the point that even the normies can’t take it anymore and we figure out a way to onboard people better. These problems are probably why I don’t try other fedi platforms.

But I’m rambling again. I haven’t slept well in days.

Tim Follin albums always came with a free game inside, that was pretty nice of him.

A YouTube comment under the Pictionary video

Advent wreathes are a thing in the US, but mostly a religious thing. Traditionally the 3rd candle is supposed to be pink and the others purple

You’re a grownup when you groan when you get up.

“I used to be ‘with it’, then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’, and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary to me”
—Abe Simpson

I’ve always been an old soul, and unfortunately an old body as well. I had shingles when I was 10, developed cataracts at 30 and arthritis at 35.

EDIT:

I think it was 12 not 10 that I had shingles. I also had shingles again a few years ago.

Perhaps related, but when communicating over the radio (including via digital printing modes like RTTY) you have to declare that you’re done transmitting and yield the frequency to the other party. This is because your signal may fade, appearing to the other person like you stopped transmitting. This is the purpose of the ubiquitous “over” seen in movies and TV, though in ham circles you use the more casual “go ahead” or “back to you”.

I imagine a period sends the same message, but because you don’t have to manage turn-taking with texts the way you do on the radio the period can be seen as redundant because they already know you’re done speaking. So sending a period may seem like you’re emphasizing the finality of your message.

In radio, you signal the end of a contact (QSO) with “out”, but again, in ham circles you just say “73”.

Is any of this relevant? I have no idea I’ve been up since 1 AM this morning.

It won a Grammy.

IIRC it was the first song from a video game to do so.