I understand that this is a doomer sub but man. When you manage to get away from all this social media bullshit for a while then try to poke your head in you realize how relentlessly negative it is at all times, because nobody wants to actually do anything about anything, including go the fuck outside and forget about it for a bit, and everyone with any ambitions of sanity leaves.

Could we start discussing credible strategies to reverse this situation, or at least improve that number somehow? Absolutely the fuck not, never, ever ever. The shit is very literally crazy, I don’t know what I was trying to expect.

But this post is so much like the other posts on the rest of the site it took me a minute to notice where I was. Might as well stop acting like this is just one community, it’s everything.

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The word “troll” just kinda doesn’t mean much anymore, huh.

F me I just went on my facebook for the first time in a couple months and motherfuckers are posting Robespierre quotes on there.

They fuckin misspelled it as Rabespierre and of course it’s a screenshot of letters on black fuck sake.

I been free for a while, buddy. I never cared to play Farmville and otherwise I’d get bored in 20 minutes and leave, so now I have to login every three months and change the password to keep my account from getting stolen and then I’m gone again.

Notice that I am typing this on an open source Reddit clone that has probably sucked down 2 hours of my life tonight somehow.

So, like, all the addicts are over here, I hope facebook is handing out blowjobs or something and I just don’t know about it.

For real though, last time I went on FB there were AI generated panty shots of Jennifer Aniston for some crazy reason that shit’s getting interesting like a dead mall now.

For the record, on Windows 10, I’m using 9GB (rounded up from 8.something) to run Firefox and look at this website, can’t forget Discord inviting itself to my party in the background, and the OS. I had to close tabs to get down here. Streams really eat the RAM up.

Throw a game in there, with FF open for advice and Discord running for all the usual gaming reasons, and yeah, way over.

Notice I haven’t even touched any productivity stuff that demands more.

8? Eat a penis, Apple. Fuckin clown hardware.

It would be weird if I just eat the dill all by itself.

I’ve started calling this stuff “commercial Leftism”. It doesn’t care if it gets results, and it absolutely will not look for a way to interface with the power structure to change laws or force actions. It just keeps running the same ineffective, counterproductive playbook again and again and again because all it cares about is attention, and never results.

This situation and Ukraine are both filthy with propaganda, the real thing, backed by governments or their adversaries, and they already caught The Guardian using a fake AI picture of a weapons cave under a Gaza hospital that isn’t real so why would I believe this? I can’t afford to intake anything about this war/genocide as actual information.

Auto-lock doors have been a nightmare in general. I always roll a window down at least far enough to stick an arm through every time I get out of a running car because of the one time forever ago that I left a 90s Pontiac Skylark running, shut the door, and it autolocked with the keys in the ignition and the motor running. I had to get my girlfriend to drive me back to my apartment for the spare key while the car was humming away, and I never forgot that. If I wasn’t close to home, with a helpful ride nearby, and a spare key on hand, I’d have been screwed.

Talk about features that need regulated out. All because suburban whites don’t want to remember to lock the doors as they drive through the black neighborhood so the car locks itself whenever you put it in Drive.

I miss the internet where we tricked our friends into looking at a picture of a man’s gaping asshole with zero consequences instead of the one where you have to put a little manual strike through “tits” just in case somewhere an algorithm will autoban you for it.

Honestly who keeps doing that crap because things aren’t that locked down fuck sake.

Right when we literally need to chill, they keep inventing nonsense that is somehow worse. Crypto is literally just machines wasting energy on purpose to create false scarcity, it was already a worst case scenario for truly pointless excess emissions but by god, they managed to top it, this place is going to be a raisin with dead oceans.

Of course, anyone who does anything less than suck the dick of this AI is a reactionary ignorant peasant, at least with crypto everyone agreed it was lame, now we’re back to the iPhone fuck-you-only-change-allowed-keep-up-granny bullshit that lead to everyone but you knowing everything about you, so they can exploit and even criminalize the behavior your phone tells them about. Never the change we need, though. Just whatever makes your stupid line go up.

I guess. Glad I’m not having kids. That’s the only fucking downward pressure on future emissions that’s happening, on any meaningful scale. I can’t wait to see what sort of shitty boilerplate copy and fake fucking pictures makes all this CO2 worthwhile. I’m sure the problem is me, and my Luddite, unseasoned irrational fear.

I stopped using upvotes/downvotes at all on Reddit. Unless you were on New, exclusively, it didn’t matter how often you got on Reddit, anything you were seeing was at least fifteen hours old. Any conversation was already done. Any up/downvotes you put in wouldn’t matter at all and probably just got ignored by the system. Anything you had to say would only appear to you, in reality it just dropped to the bottom of the sea, never again to be seen. Thousands had already spoken, somehow, and you were just walking through a snapshot of the past, already said and done.

For now, it’s much smaller here. Sometimes I find myself upvoting a post just to let the person know that somebody actually came in here and gave a fuck about what they had to say, that they aren’t talking to themselves in an empty room.

It makes sense to care a bit more, for a lot of reasons. We’ll see how long that vibe can sustain itself.

Servers: I’m tired boss!

Ruud: That’s too damn bad!

I’m hoping that the overall lack of certain systemic encouragements from commercial socials that everyone has become horrifically used to interacting with will squash a lot of this kind of behavior over time. That is, the bullshit no longer serves the algo that doesn’t exist herre, and the lack of positive feedback will either cause them to change their ways or just leave.

I wonder if Lemmy’s upvote system overweights the first few upvotes the way Reddit did. That drove people to make high engagement posts since a sudden flurry of comments on a rage-bait post tended to slingshot stuff to the top reliably. If Lemmy doesn’t do that, it will help. The lack of eyeballs in Lemmyverse should discourage bots to some degree.

I’m hoping the same for Mastodon. A LOT of the behaviors that people have internalized come down to trying to game the algorithm with hot takes and such, but the limited virality of the Mastodon platform will hopefully discourage all their usual bullshit, or they’ll go.

I think the people who just want Reddit will return to it, at least for a while, since Lemmy was just their methadone and the heroin store is back open now. Me, I’ve been peeling away from both Reddit and Twitter for a long time so I’m ready to move on. There was a distinct culture on the Fediverse before all these sudden surges in users, hopefully once things settle that culture will get a chance to assert itself again.

It’s called slack tune okay

eh, just lurk. Look, don’t stress it. There’s no business model here. We don’t need growth. It’s nice, it’s cool, it makes it all worthwhile, but somewhere a greybeard sysadmin (sup Ruud) is running a server for the fuckin lols at his own expense and THAT is the fediverse. It’s just all those people chained together, and we need to spread that load across as many people as possible.

This Fediverse thing does NOT require, but it does accept that someday you might want to bite some hosting fees and do your own little part, just one more instance, one more server, picking up your load and that of a few of your friends. If somebody is hosting an open server, they’re already okay with you freeloading, so freeload to your heart’s content.

For every one person who is willing to nerd down and host something, we need like 100 people or more to fuck around in the thing being hosted and make it worth doing. It’s all set up so that if the person who is paying to host gets exhausted, well, those 100 people aren’t screwed. It’s set up so hosters can drop in and out at will. The Fediverse expects and plans for the person who is hosting your nonsense on their own dime to say fuck this, and drop out, and yet you have a setup that leaves you whole, you might not even notice. You can at least migrate elsewhere with minimum friction.

Just engage with shit. Updoot it or whatever. Fuck around and be here. Login and poke around. None of us will see it but the person hosting the instance (waddup Ruud) will see it, and that’s enough. Your engagement is not the difference between life or death. An exponential growth in users is a requirement for commercial socials to thrive but here? That just makes it more expensive for your gracious host to host you. If another 50,000 people show up tomorrow that will probably kill the whole damn thing, it’s why Beehaw is having problems, they were planning on 200 users a month and got 3000 because Reddit.

This whole Fediverse thing is what is left of the Old Way, where places to be online existed because some normal person wanted to put up a server for a forum or whatever and it was running out of a box in their bathroom.

The good news is that all those people are pushing 50 now, they have spouses and children, they aren’t crazy people. The deranged bastards who ran a box in the bathroom like they were the Emperor of Fuck Town have all died from probably substance abuse and what is left is sane people running servers out of their bathroom (for cooling purposes) on a remarkably high level because that’s their job. They run servers for like, Amazon Web Services or some shit, so running a Fediverse instance is child’s play. That is what you’re enjoying right now.

Or they’ve paid cloud hosting fees so that even though they have no idea what the fuck they’re doing some greybeard sysadmin is handling every thing that matters. That’s the situation. That’s why this clown show runs a lot better than it should.

So don’t stress lurking. If you were a lurker on Reddit, lurk here. Just hang. We already have a Shitposting subLemmy or whatever, so go post shit, or don’t. Don’t worry about it. If you don’t personally contribute to the exponential growth needed for a commercial social to thrive, nothing bad will happen. You could be here for a year just lurking and then get inspired to post your ass off, that works too. You got options.

Don’t worry about working for it. It’s not necessary. Welcome to nonprofit social media.

I was just poking around a bit over at beehaw, earlier. and I got the STRONG impression that they really weren’t in a position to deal with the sudden influx of users: not enough mod team, not enough money, not enough spare time in the day for the few people running it. I’m not holding that against them, that’s to be expected in Fediverse spaces, which I gather intend to spread the load across thousands of instances, not just one.

Is this just them trying to get things under control, or was there some other problem?