Algorithms are not universally good and helpful. They should be designed to boost engagement only in that they serve to find content you wouldn’t be able to see otherwise, not to boost engagement at all costs by feeding you things they think you will click on. It’s an important distinction.

Discord is bad because its forums are not world-readable, therefore not indexable. It’s very useful to the rest of the world to have conversations be public. The youngest users here may not even remember but searching Google in the 2000s before Facebook went huge and when forums were all world-readable, it was a different experience altogether. You could find somebody who was talking about your niche issue/product - no matter what it was. It was kind of magical. No matter what thing happened to you, you could be pretty sure it had happened to someone else and they were talking about it somewhere and Google would see it and point it out to you.

Not anymore. Everything’s on Facebook now and Google can’t see it, nor can anyone else - except Facebook. All that legacy knowledge just tucked away in Facebook’s data vault and essentially useless to anybody but Facebook, which makes it less than useless.

Try not caring. The more Reddit users come here the more it’s going to suck.

This is just bot-driven FUD anyway, Lemmy is nothing like old Reddit and it wouldn’t be disqualifying if it was.

Frankly, whatever secret sauce it is that makes social media popular is also what drives them to be such shit and be so shit for society. I like Lemmy way more than I like Reddit, and even though I have to go back to Reddit from time to time to fill the needs of my niche interests (which can get no traction where there are not mobs of participants in the greater whole) I never ever look at my interactions there and go “I wish Lemmy was more like this.”

It’s a conundrum.

The iPhone came out in 2007. That was the year the worm turned, imo.

And the only comment on that article a bot decrying the horrible cold blooded murder and that a figure as visible as Burr should invoke the name. We’re all cheering the murder you fucks and no amount of pissing on us and telling us its raining will make us stop.

Nobody said they are. However, “a great fediverse alternative to Facebook” does not mean, in the minds of most people who might read it: “you could host a website that would serve as a great fediverse alternative to Facebook.”

Thanks to the work Valve has done shoring up gaming support with Steam Deck, it will be for me. When Win10 support ends on October 14, 2025 I will end my final tiny bit of support for Microsoft: my desktop gamer.

Removed by mod

o well

Same, Slackware, went over to Red Hate for a while then Debian - am using Ubuntu now. I’ll never forget (in 1998) setting up Slackware as a server on an old spare 486 the company I worked for had laying around. It had a SCSI hard drive. Oh the pain. USENET was the only good reference, and you’d sometimes have to post and wait a day for a response if you just couldn’t figure it out.

Got that server running and saved the company hundreds of dollars a month - they had been paying egregious fees to host brochureware. They thought I was Superman.

Reminder for Windows 10 users who can’t upgrade to Windows 11

/s/can’t/won’t

Huh. Well, everybody I hung out with knew about it. IIRC moderation was tacked on after USENET had already taken off. If a newsgroup wasn’t proposed with moderation then it couldn’t be moderated, so most of them weren’t. It’s pretty wild that they didn’t understand how desperately necessary it would be. In order to get a group to be moderated you’d have to get a proposal for an entirely new group through the committee, which was nearly impossible. The process was so slow and bureaucratic that the web literally just showed up and stole it all in what seemed like overnight. I remember when I switched over… it was like 2002, 2003? I’ve never had as much fun on any web forum as I had on USENET though. Those were fun times. And don’t get me started on the web’s lack of threaded discussions. Drove me NUTS.

Yes pardon me I left off the word “largely” before “unmoderated.” We all knew it was possible, but it didn’t matter because, as you point out - nobody really did.

Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.

Well that and the fact that it was unmoderated which eventually led to it being populated almost exclusively with mentally ill troll savants. USENET by the end was the digital equivalent of a horror zoo of abused monkeys slinging shit all over everyone and themselves.

You forgot to escape.

Yeah. He must be talking to a crowd that he figures can take a guess, but I wouldn’t think that such a crowd would find it very funny. A normie crowd would just have no idea wtf he means at all.

Can’t. Google shanked them all with anticompetitive behavior. So instead, I think I will do all I can to punish them for that.