BobQuasit @ BobQuasit @beehaw.org

Hypervigilant supertaster and bibliophile. I am not a bot! I am a human bei

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Joined

2 yr. ago

I don't care as long as they don't take away NotePad. NotePad has useful features I'd hate to lose - such as stripping out all formatting, and being able to search/replace wildcard characters as themselves, rather than as wildcards.

It was well before I turned one; I was still in a crib. It was dark, nighttime, and incredibly hot. Some sort of animal with glowing eyes stared at me from the floor.

I thought it was a dream, but decades later my parents confirmed that when I was a baby the thermostat had broken and we had a night where the temperature was 100°. As for the animal with glowing eyes, that was our cat.

So what? We'll create one!

Years ago the owners of GoodReads announced that Amazon had taken away their access to the Amazon book database. It was an existential threat, they said, and asked the GoodReads community to volunteer to create a new book database to replace Amazon's. Hundreds or thousands of us worked for free, donating thousands or tens of thousands of hours to the project.

And then GoodReads announced that they'd sold out to Amazon. Apparently they'd been in negotiations with those bastards the whole time they were lying to us about losing access to the database. Maybe proving that they could sucker their loyal users into donating free labor helped raise the selling price of GoodReads a little.

As for the database we created, I guess it's Amazon's now. Of course, if we create a movie database of our own, NOBODY will be able to buy it! And we can make it available for free use, if we want.

You have to pay a few bucks? How many and how often?

How ironic! I had just subscribed to several communities on those instances this evening. Go figure. I guess I should reproduce my community subscriptions over on kbin. But wait, does this mean I can't even SEE that I subscribed to those communities here?

Thanks! This was the first Lemmy post I shared with my son. Worked great, shared successfully and the picture appeared very legibly in Google chat. Also it was quite funny.

Hi! I'm not just a Reddit refugee, but an everything refugee. Or at least, that's how it feels. I've been online since the mid-80s, and I've seen platform after platform be acquired and burnt down under me. I'm pretty much used to it by this point.

That doesn't mean I like it.

I'm an old-time geek. Huge bibliophile, particularly fond of old science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, children's books, YA, classics, and humor. Oh, add graphic novels and manga to the list. I'm also a long time tabletop RPG player and GM. My system of choice is the Avalon Hill edition of RuneQuest 3; my RQ site might be the oldest one still existing. Of course I play other systems as well. I'm into deep role-playing, and would definitely like to find people who are interested in that sort of thing!

My primary activity over on Reddit was recommending books. I have a resource of nearly a thousand book recommendations that I have created over the years. Hoping to be able to make recommendations on Lemmy, too.

What else? I'm a pretty good public speaker, and was an invited program participant (i. e. panelist) at a regional New England science fiction convention for over 25 years. I'm an atheist, but I advocate tolerance and understanding between atheists and theists (and yes, I've done panels on that topic too; they were great).

I was a redhead when I had hair, with a redheaded son. I'm the single divorced father of a newly-adult son. I'm currently unattached. Oh, and I'm apparently demisexual.

I live in Massachusetts, USA. I like cats, cooking, walking, and well-written TV and movies. I've been refining my grilling techniques for about 35 years now, on a lifelong quest to make the perfect burger.

I think Lemmy desperately needs to integrate two things:

• The ability to search for communities across instances inside of Lemmy (I'm aware of the search option outside of Lemmy, but that's less than ideal)
• The ability to easily search within posts A) in all local communities, B) in all subscribed communities, and C) across all communities in the whole Fediverse. Yes, I'm aware that C) is a huge ask. But I think it's vital to the success of Lemmy.

It's not bad, but there are a couple of issues that concern me. One is that communities are fractured - that is, that communities about the same topics exist on different instances and don't connect with each other.

So I'm subscribed to a Books community on one instance, but that doesn't mean I'll see any of the posts on the same topic on other instances unless I subscribe to each of them. The total community of users on Lemmy who are interested in books are split up into small groups on different instances.

That's very limiting.

Of course there's also the issue of the relatively small user base overall. For some purposes a small community may be preferable, but for many others you really need a large user base. Looking for gamers for a face to face tabletop RPG, for example. Without a large user base, the odds of finding people within a reasonable real world distance of you is virtually nil.

All this has me wondering. Lemmy and other fediverse sites should be resistant to enshittification. But how could American corporations screw that up? Could they start their own servers and instances, and somehow make them dominant? Or would that not be worth it to them?

It seems to me that capitalism has pretty much been trying to take over everything, with a lot of success. So I find myself wondering if it could happen here.