Bandcamp is still OK for me and I listen to some fairly obscure stuff.
Just to offer a heads up - there’s a new solution/site which is currently in Beta but is backed by good people (musicians). It needs an influx of music diversity (lots of metal at the moment) but if it gets that when it comes out of beta then it could very well be a good Bandcamp replacament - Ampwall
Mate, I was simply extending an analogy you introduced. I neither know (nor care) what the presence of a McDonalds does or doesn’t do so don’t Sagan me. Nor am I claiming mainstream social media is all arseholes. What I’m saying is that mainstream social media most certainly has the ability and propensity to make people into arseholes due to constant enshittification - part of which is the influencer phenomenon in my opinion and the need for growth at all costs.
I most definitely have reached out to lots of good people on the fediverse and had lots of great exchanges that follow both professional and ‘hobby’ based interests I have.
But here’s the thing - you want growth? OK. I also have no issue with growth. But the best sort of growth in my experience comes organically. It happens at its own pace. The minute you start prodding it along with managed algorithms and all the other stuff mainstream social media now has you end up with an extended hate room. I don’t miss Reddit or Xitter at all. I genuinely mean that. No more ‘suggestions’ of people to follow, no more manufactured outrage getting pushed to my feed, no more clickbait. Instead what I have now is a curated feed across multiple different types of experiences that I spent some time getting how I want them and dipping in and out of when I want to.
You’re using words like ‘ambition’ and ‘irrelevant’ like the Fediverse is some sort of corporate entity. It’s not - that’s a point very much in its favour in the opinion of quite a lot of people on it. Contrary to your opinion that no one cares, lots do. What some of us don’t care about is catering to a set of people who are paid to express opinions and who, it seems to me, over a period of time end up becoming Andrew Tate or Russel Brand.
There’s no McDonalds in the town I currently live in, which is 20 minutes away from one of the largest cities in the country. It might come as a massive shock to you but I - and I think the majority of people - can survive just fine without a Mickey D’s. Not having one doesn’t make a place desolate, it makes it healthier. And if someone really wants a Big Mac, they can go and get one from elsewhere.
Do you see what I’m saying? This isn’t the same place as that - it’s quite nice to have a place online that still isn’t. And for those that do want that, they can still spend time there if they chose to.
Strangely comforting for something I’m sure you thought was a snappy comeback,
I genuinely don’t care about influencers. Like, at all.
Maybe they should stop caring about visibility and engagement and concentrate on participating in, building and y’know enjoying a community?
I can vouch for whisper.cpp . It’s not 100% perfect but it’s good enough to transcribe a half hour podcast with numerous speakers and which requires pretty minimal fixing afterwards.
Looks like yunohost with a nicer interface but less apps and less config options.
Sure, but the body of the post mentions donating to devs and instance owners. I’m being pedantic I know, but I think it would be a more informative post if it’d made clear what the donation numbers refer to and what they don’t.
As an add-on (sort of) to Borg, I was told about Vorta yesterday and installed it to run scheduled, encrypted backups of my local machine to an external drive, but you can also ssh to a remote server if you wish. Works like a dream.
Right. My instance maintainer accepts donations via Ko-fi, which isn’t even listed here.
Maybe not right now, but when shareholders start demanding action over NSFW subs or subs that discuss illegal activities or subs that discuss the evils of capitalism or subs that just aren’t profitable and those subs start getting shuttered, then they will.
How is this surreal? Journalists critical of Musk/Twitter have been being banned since he bought it.
Is this journalist really so self involved he thought it was OK they all got nuked as long as he didn’t?
I think it’s something that app creator invented.
Not Only Instant Messenger.
Markets are greedy and never satisfied. A fracturing of services has led to situation where it’s impossible for the average person to be able to afford all the streaming services they need in order to watch their stuff. And even if they could, they now have to pay extra to exclude adverts - the lack of which was a major selling point for streaming services. Pay extra to watch in high quality and no matter what service you use and what content you’ve bought - music, TV, books, movies. games - it’s all stuffed full of DRM that can literally remove the media from your devices. You don’t even really own the stuff you’ve bought.
So yeah, I fully appreciate why some people pirate stuff.
In my own personal experience, Nextcloud;
I’m not suggesting hateful content wasn’t edited or removed, I’m saying when I went back there was a lot of it that had obviously just been posted. I’ve no doubt it’s mostly gone now if I went back and looked (which I really don’t want to do unless I absolutely have to) but my point is that it happens so much and so often that its often there for awhile if a mod or mod team is a bit slow off the mark. It’s indicative of the type of user on there.
I also don’t understand this infatuation with “old reddit” when that allowed subreddits like coontown to exist.
I guess when I think about ‘old reddit’ I mean reddit as it was before there were even subs or when subs first launched. Reddit was created by Digg users who were annoyed with Digg’s direction. There was a lot of hope and effort put in to it being ‘better’ - not just technically but also in terms of ethos. I’m the first to admit I stupidly just ignored the influx of bad subs like the one you mention or jailbait etc. But it’s become impossible to ignore to the point where it feels like its a constant drip-drip of hate content that mods are barely on top of.
And even without that outright race (or gender, or sex, or sexuality etc) based hate, reddit just feels to me like there’s a constant undercurrent of aggression and sneering. Maybe, like I said before, it’s always been there and I was just so used to it I became inured to it but revisiting it after several months away it was impossible to not notice.
It is different. I had cause to go back a week or two ago to look for an old post of mine and I did have a bit of a poke about in my old subs too. It was like a war zone. Blatant no fucks given racism, incel level women hating, transphobia and ableism of the most vitriolic kind. And these weren’t just the massive general subs, some of them were niche interest subs where I felt I belonged at the time. Has it changed to become like that since June or was I just so used to it before that that I’d never noticed how toxic it was? Did I just used to shrug and say to myself ‘well, that’s just reddit’. Literally everyone seemed angry and hateful.
I’m not claiming the fediverse is perfect or free from that sort of shit but either through the practicalities of federation, or better moderation or a smaller userbase or a more mature userbase or a mix of one or more of those things it doesn’t feel exclusionary to me. I often see on posts like this some people calling Lemmy a left-wing echo chamber and whilst I do agree there’s more people of a left-wing bent on here I think echo chamber is a bit much and is a phrase maybe used by those who live in a country without a functioning left-wing political party. I’ve not encountered a communist or tankie since Hexbear fucked off back to their kindergarten.
As for the Guardian article, they’ve fallen into the same trap as I’m concerned the fediverse might fall into by federating with Meta - assuming high numbers equal success or victory. If you have corporate/economics based mindset I can see how that works, but to me success equals a popular, useful community site entirely free from algorithms and other forms of manipulative control. One that isn’t gathering data via ads and tracking on its userbase to sell on (lets remember that reddit weren’t upset that AI were scraping reddit, they were upset that the company weren’t seeing any money from that). A community that grows organically, with all that that implies - sometimes growth might be very slow, it might stop entirely for awhile, maybe even reverse - but the emphasis should be on the people making the community better.
Reddit forgot somewhere along the way that it was the users who made reddit what it was. Look at the stats for r/askreddit - in particular the posts per day and comments per day - look at the trend since 2020. There may well be the same amount of users on reddit, but we all know a certain percentage of them are bots and even if they weren’t, just looking at those two graphs tells you everything about people’s level of interest in participating on reddit.
The only thing high user numbers guarantee sites like reddit is ad revenue. Nothing else.
I pay Bitwarden the tenner a year as I have no reason to distrust them and they’re definitely providing a more reliable, securer service than I can self-host.
I also do an encrypted export once per week and store that export to an encrypted cloud based service and an encrypted USB stick. Takes 2 minutes.