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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2024

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  • I think that we need to talk about the history of software and social software here, because the current status is kind of crazy:

    • Most of the big platforms didn’t invent what they are currently doing. Reddit is basically a forum. They had a great innovation with their voting idea, but functionally there is little difference between the many webforums we had before and Reddit
    • Twitter is a microblog, which already tells you about its origins. There were blogs before twitter, on their own servers, talking to each other with pingbacks and RSS
    • YouTube, well, basically just shows you videos, which of course was done before by people on their own servers

    So basically most fediverse is not emulating existing platforms, but trying to go back to an internet we had before the big platforms took everything over. And with ActivityPub we have the protocol to ease some of the pains that the decentralized internet before the web 2.0 era had. F.e. you had to create an account for each individual webforum, which really sucked if you just wanted to ask a question or share something. Reddit with its one login totally took over, because you could participate in many subforums. It was easier to just hop into /r/cooking to ask a question about your lasagna then to find the relevant lasagna forum and register there.



  • The fediverse offers a noncommercial alternative and that can be a draw. A “normal” Reddit user might not want to join us, but there will be users fed up with all the ads on Reddit, some of Reddits policies, tolerance of nazis and abuse and so on. Mastodon always was in the shadow of Twitter, a nice, but blew up when Musk started to destroy it. It offered a way out and that is worthwhile. And if Zuckerberg is starting to transform Instagram into a rightwing horror show, Pixelfed is there as an alternative. And if you want out of YouTube, PeerTube is working and ready for you.


  • A few things:

    1. It gives manufacturers a blueprint for their devices. You will see a lot of handhelds running SteamOS from different manufacturers. You will also see a lot of small “gaming boxes” with SteamOS to plug in your TV. That’s great!
    2. Game Developers will have one distribution to test their games on. One of the bigger problems linux had before SteamOS was the big clusterfuck of different distros. Great for users, but a big headache if you’re developing for it. Now you can say “it runs on SteamOS”, test on SteamOS and you don’t have to deal with bug reports from people running RedStarOS
    3. It’s Valve. It’s a company. They are the biggest store selling games and they are building their moat to protect themselves against Microsoft, Apple, Epic & Co. That not exactly great for users, but also explains why Valve is doing this linux push. To prevent Microsoft from abusing their Windows monopoly to crush them

  • I would question your focus on growth. Yes, we all want this place to succeed. But do we really want this unlimited growth like Facebook, Reddit and all those other companies? Small communities are great, they give you a connection between users, they spark friendships and great discourse. Those are great. Yes, they are smaller than those multimillion user subreddits, but we’ve all seen those big subreddits slowly burning down. Dying to bots, to marketing spam, to low effort, popular comments, to reposts, to karma farming, to US politics. We’ve seen subreddit after subreddit dying to moderator burnout - because big subs are really hard to moderate, people will burn out. They are sacrificing their free time to deal with trolls, shills, putins guys and receive no compensation for that.

    So maybe … let’s don’t replicate Reddit? Let’s focus on creating small, helpful communities and people will come.


  • You should remove old posts & comments from every site you post to on a regular basis. There is no reason for those pictures from 2007 being on Facebook. Your old Twitter comments from 2011 might bit you in the ass in a few years. Nobody in their right mind is looking at your 2014 Instagram posts and you don’t want people out of their right mind seeing those. Why should that comment about Obamas election still be available for the world? Just nuke your old stuff on a regular basis - nobody looks at it and if people are searching through your old posts, they want to harm you.