I wouldn’t now but I 100% would have when I was in college. Although I would try to get away with making fake email accounts.

Congrats

I used to live in a house that looks almost identical to the Baltimore one.

Anyone else struggle to not read defederate as defenestrate?

But if we just included the blockchain think of the shareholder value we could be generating. We could be decentralizing the blockchain with crypto NFTs in the cloud or whatever.

When did Trump beat Mittens Romney?

You are here in bad faith. You’re not asking a question you just want to vent.

That’s a good point although with smart phones, I wonder how much of the teenager traffic is baked in year round now. Summer Reddit was terrible but then it just became Reddit.

How many people are less engaged in the internet at the beginning of summer because they’re on vacation or partying? I would think drops like this as the weather improves are pretty normal.

That hurts my heart

How stupid was it?

I don’t think it’s inevitable Threads will have a better user experience than non-corporate apps. Meta has different goals and will optimize the user experience to drive profits. Look at how they continuously make Facebook and Instagram worse to drive engagement.

Also, see Reddit. Apollo was one dude’s project that blows the official app out of the water. And all the other apps scrambling to support Lemmy benefit from apps like Apollo and Reddit is Fun lessons in UX. It’s early days but we’re already seeing Lemmy apps with a lot of potential.

Linux is another example. Technical issues for new users aside, there’s a lot of beautiful, easy to use desktops that blow windows 10/11 out of the water. And other less new user friendly options for power users are available as well.

The community driven approach has been demonstrated to work because it’s only goal is to give the community a good experience.

Can we get it to nuke your Facebook account too?

This has always been true of course but we used to have much faster turnover in social media sites. The current players have been around so long they seem like they can’t fail. But it’s not a coincidence that we’ve been riding a wave of cheap capital since about the time the current players started to dominate. Now that the free money tap is shut off, everyone’s scrambling to be profitable. The grow as fast as possible and never care about making money paradigm is over.

We’re basically in the ??? phase of “steal underpants, ???, profit” underpants gnome economic model.

I think we’re also seeing the ad model start to break down. It was always a Ponzi scheme. Everyone hates ads and goes out of their way to avoid them. If less and less people engage with ads, no one is going to pay as much because it’s not worth it. This forces companies to be more and more invasive in their data collection and ad targeting which erodes trust in the companies and degraded the user experience.

We’re seeing both these things converge and it’s shaking up the entire internet order.

If I have to have a computer, imo it’s not open. It should just be in the air or it’s literally an impossible barrier for anyone to get past.

Oh yeah, teenagers getting smart phones is a big piece of it. We used to joke about summer Reddit when all the kids were off school and everything got dumb and horny. And then that became the normal.

On yeah, teenagers getting smart phones is a big piece of it. We used to joke about summer Reddit being terrible with the influx of teenagers and then summer Reddit just became the normal

It’s kinda tricky because you can get a VPS set up really cheap. Like 5 dollars a month cheap or a bit more if you want something more feature rich. But the more instances you federate with, the more storage you’ll need since you’re basically mirroring all of the content you can see. So your cost for storage will go up every month pretty much forever.

Outside of those issues, which does make it worse, the massive amount of users and karma system creates perverse incentives that make any real discussion impossible. Anyone trying to actually engage in discussion is drowned out and the top comments are just people trying to input the right combination of words to make the internet points come out. And if you dare go slightly against the hive mind, your dog piled with people trying to virtue signal harder than everyone else to collect the points. I generally agree with the hive mind and I still find it completely insufferable and uninteresting.

It’s not even just a political thing, go to the guitar subreddit and try to suggest wood makes a difference in tone and see how indignantly you get attacked.

Sure you can find niche communities that are better if you really dig but in my experience, they tend to just fizzle out or get big and succumb to the site wide problems.

Reddit was way better 10 years ago and this place is already starting to kinda feel like that. I would be very happy if we could stay that way.

Reddit is stupid but do we really want to be as big as Reddit? The quality has tanked in the past several years in large part because of how big it is. I think we’re on a good trajectory. Looking at it as a zero sum game where Reddit has to fail for this to be successful will only leave you disappointed. Reddit doesn’t need to fail for Lemmy to be good.