Employee at the Black Mesa research facility in New Mexico. Recently we’ve dealt with 2 aliens trying to steal snacks out of the pantry outside the laboratory.

Hope your day is going well.

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  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I don’t personally use Linkedin so I can’t really comment on how a federated alternative would work or be useful for professionals and networking.

    What I will say is that paid/business-related and the general fediverse culture/design seems like oil and water. Especially the paid part. It simply won’t take off unless there is a mass exodus of people from Linkedin (very unlikely). And even then, having multiple instances for something as focused on Linkedin doesn’t seem viable. It’s probably better off centralized and disconnected from a large network like the Fediverse, in my opinion.

    The closest the fediverse can get to this is professionals using Mastodon or something in the same way they used Twitter before it imploded. Interesting idea though.




  • Tech geeks and nerds (no offense, I’m one too) tend to be the first people to populate any sort of new online social network. Just the way of the internet.

    While I do like Linux and talk about it pretty often on the fediverse, I do realize that 96% of internet users don’t care about it and the lingo is…incomprehensible for most people. Even I get kind of sick of talking about Linux on here sometimes lol but unfortunately many of the things I wish I could build a community around simply don’t have the fanbase needed on the fediverse to begin a community for the moment. While not impossible, building a community for relatively niche subjects on a small platform like this that is in direct competition with sites like Reddit is very difficult and easier said than done.

    My advice is just try to search around and find things as close to your interests that have active people as possible. Looking for broad communities can help out here, for instance, just go to /c/art of whatever instance instead of trying to find a /c/painting. Also, for Mastodon especially, use hashtags if you haven’t begun to already. Mastodon was wack until I started using hashtags extensively, they somewhat make up for the lack of a recommendation algorithm.

    Its pretty rough around here if your interests aren’t related to tech/FOSS/linux, but that should make things a little better. Hopefully there will be more diversity in subjects on the fediverse in the future.


  • I use my laptop 55% of the time, phone 25%, and tablet 20% (don’t have a desktop specifically). Whenever I’m at home I barely use my phone beyond listening to music and podcasts. I just like having a big screen, so I only really use my phone when I’m not home.

    In terms of Kbin itself, I used Reddit half and half between mobile and PC but mostly scroll Kbin on desktop since there aren’t any dedicated apps for it yet. Hoping the API comes out soon, the web interface on mobile is great but nothing is as cohesive as an installed app.



  • Saying this as somebody just reading the post, I don’t know the whole context.

    Being somebody who is BIPOC, you’re not doing us much of a favor either by having an outrage across multiple corners of the fediverse. Take a breather. Seriously, zoom out and just consider what you are writing right now.

    Hatred of politics is a transphobic, sexist, and racist trope.

    …what if I just don’t like seeing news that only makes me feel angry or bad on my feed. People have different things they want to participate in and see. Just because you like it to discuss it doesn’t mean you should jump to accusations when someone doesn’t want to. Its a sensitive topic to begin with. I just come here to see tech, cars, and art.

    I started out by attempting to educate them on what politics actually means.

    This comes off very pretentious. Just let this one go bro.

    Look, I don’t know what’s going on with this blahaj place’s moderation or whatever and its not my business. Just based on what I see here, you may want to take a good proof read at what you are saying and spreading around before you lead yourself somewhere that you regret. If you don’t like this blahaj server’s rules or anything, just leave. Its just the internet. You might find somewhere better suited for you if you just move your account to another instance. If you want to voice concerns, spreading posts like these across multiple communities isn’t the way to do it.


  • I always love to see attempts to see people making the Fediverse more friendly and open for all, but I can’t see this one working.

    I’m not really a huge fan of the name Mastodon personally, but I don’t have any other better ideas. The branding right now works, there just isn’t enough people actually hearing about what Mastodon is to begin with. We need to push Mastodon, the name that people may have heard of before but never bothered to look into. Changing it now won’t really do a whole lot. If they wanted to get the name out there, I feel this could be done through other ways like a massive update or something.


  • I’m for this idea. Large sports communities could bring multiple new instances and also just a flood of active users in other communities. If we were to pick a specific community to come join, these guys and people in tech communities should be the first choices.

    Communities centered around sports teams like r/chelseafc or r/lakers could warrant an entire Lemmy or Kbin instance with separate communities about that particular team (trade/signing rumors, live games, social media posts, etc). For them, federation actually has some huge benefits.

    Plus as a side note, I’d love to have the regular diehard sports bickering on the Fediverse. Seriously. They’ll be quite the counter to the current culture of the Fediverse, however. Arguing about Mbappé’s longevity or whether the current NBA champions will win again would drown out the politics anyway, which is a massive plus in my book.


  • It is social media that allows privacy and stops Corps selling your data is its USP.
    If the person you are talking to does not care about the above, they have no reason to move.

    Seems like the Fediverse’ existence is trying to to send a message at the end of the day. If I were telling somebody about it and stopped as soon as they said the good old “I have nothing to hide” it would be kind of pointless to begin with. Might as well give the whole spill since that phrase likely is to be a given anyway.

    The problem is that in all other aspects of social media: ease of use, userbase etc the various flavours of federated social media are last.

    I do agree, they are behind the centralized social media. However, I don’t think it would help federated social media’s case if we didn’t at least try to simplify it somewhat and show the appeal.

    Personally, I am a bit sceptical about the long term sustainability and scalability of data storage for data intensive (images and video) federated services.

    For images, I suspect that something like this would only be a major issue for federated platforms (besides Pixelfed) in the case of a massive influx of users from another platform all at once. Otherwise, the infrastructure would likely catch up eventually. Kbin, for instance, eventually scaled despite at one point being run by a single person on software absolutely not meant for that many people. Video, on the other hand, I do also feel skeptical about on the Fediverse unless a massive organization were to host an instance.








  • I actually joined Tildes before the API changes, back in February of this year. Before that, I had been a lurker on the site since 2020, so nearly 3 years.

    Tildes is…interesting compared to any other social media. Its completely its own thing and there is a heavy focus on the philosophy of the site and the Tildes docs, which is basically the constitution of the website. Long form discussion is encouraged, posting images isn’t even an option, and its very focused on providing for its users a great, streamlined experience. The interface is my favorite of all the Reddit cousins, its simple and it loads extremely fast. The software is great, no bugs at all and the interface is simple and lighting fast and the voting system is really well designed in regards to maintaining activity on threads that can be days or even weeks old. The people there are friendly and I’ve never even seen a bad interaction on Tildes.

    However, this comes because the whole site is heavily moderated and controlled by the admins and mods. Long form discussion just isn’t really my thing when it comes to online discussions, so I don’t talk there much. I don’t really like writing a paragraph or more in response to every question online versus having a long in-person discussion or on a real-time messenger like Discord (I’m doing it now of course, but I don’t like doing it for every post). I would if every topic there interested me, but that’s just not the case and that won’t be the case on any site. My last post was 2 months ago, and I’ve just been very inactive there since making my account. I like reading on there occasionally, but not contributing much. Unfortunately, that’s the nature of the site. Like another poster said, its very tightly controlled. While that prevents many trolls from appearing despite the few moderators that are actually on the site and encourages long form discussion, it also hampers the diversity of the people there. Sometimes I criticize the whole “We don’t want people from Reddit or other social media” take when it comes to Kbin/Lemmy’s growth, but its much worse on Tildes because the site actively wants a certain type of individual. No image support on purpose already filters out a lot of people who could bring great content to the site, and the lack of an ability for users to create topics affects it more. You can’t make a topic on Tildes like you can on Kbin or Lemmy, there are strictly defined ones created for you, and they are quite general. You won’t see much OC as you will just links and random conversation topics, and that kind of just makes for a lukewarm experience in my opinion. If you want to talk about a specific niche, you’re out of luck. Kbin/Lemmy/the Fediverse and Reddit have that, and its a large part of the appeal for me. The lack of user diversity in interests also just makes the experience a little worse. For example, I like space and anime, and the space and anime communities on there aren’t the most active, maybe a post weekly or biweekly. I’m also interested in tech, and you can imagine that community is booming 24/7. Compare the ~space community to /m/space, and you’ll see the difference. This issue went away somewhat while the Reddit migration was in full effect, but now its returned as activity on the site has dwindled down a bit.

    Tildes cares about the users, no doubt, but it doesn’t really give them much power over the site. I wish it were less controlled.

    I highly suggest you just take a look at it and lurk for a few days on there. What you see is what you get. Its not ultra politically focused like you said Raddle was (I have 0 experience with any of these sites other than Tildes, Kbin and Lemmy), its has equal activity in most of the communities. However, there are only 20 or 30 to actually choose from, and if you want something niche you’ll just have to post in one of the communities and see if someone knows about it. If you don’t like it, I wouldn’t be expecting it to change much, the site culture isn’t dynamic like the Fediverse or Reddit for instance. The conversation there is unparalleled by any other platform though. You can find some truly inspiring and deep conversations on there. Its not for me, but you may like it a lot. Its a flawed approach, but the site fulfills what it intends to do very well. For me, Lemmy and Kbin, while not perfect, are the best alternative to Reddit. Tildes is open source and anybody could make an instance of it, but it hasn’t happened yet as far as I know.

    Ironically, that’s the longest thing I’ve ever typed on Kbin.