Weirdfish @ Weirdfish @lemmy.world

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Man, it's a damned good thing my posts and comments never add any value to the conversation.

Seriously though, while I haven't deleted my account yet, in the hope that maybe thing could shift, if/when I do I would like to remove my content.

Is there a known way to remove posts and comments from reddit? I guess they can always just restore from backups. Maybe instead of replacing with "." or gibberish, making a simple copy pasta to replace them with so it isn't so obvious.

I really need to sit down and practice what I preach, but let's be the change we want.

One day soon I'm going to go through my giant list of reddit subs, and recreate them here if they don't exist.

Even if they are mostly empty, at least show there is an interest, and give people a place to post.

As a late 40s skateboard, r/oldskaters was a joy for me, and I'd love to see that and many other communities here.

Linux is wizard magic, which is why you need your wizard hat.

If you have a spare machine gathering dust, I highly recommend installing one of the modern desktop versions and giving it a try. It is still not a replacement for the every day office machine in most environments, but for personal daily computer use it can be fantastic.

Was explaining it to my girlfriend last night, and I'm sure I'm repeating myself on here, but hey, content.

Lemmy feels so much like the early IRC or Fark days. In '93, if you were in a chat system, there was a damned good chance you were nerdy college student.

The channel I frequented most at the time was 'teensex' on IRC, and it was populated by nothing but college aged kids who thought the channel name was edgy and funny.

Anyone creeping to actually chat up teens for or about sex was immediately banned and laughed about. Even posting A/S/L got you auto banned.

One time we had a meet up, and 20 or so channel members met at a local college campus for a party.

It was a very eye opening experience for me. Not only was it a wholesome group of people, it was fascinating to me to compare the online personality with the in person ones.

The guy who was mister internet tough guy was a 5'4 scrawny kid, and the kind soft spoken guy shy guy was a 6'4 football player.

It forever taught me that what you are reading in no way represents who is sitting behind the keyboard, and that you could make real friends in the virtual world.

I try to imagine attempting a gathering of the users from any internet space named teensex now, and just don't think you'd draw the same demographic.

Maybe that is the bias that makes me enjoy Lemmy so much, being a 30-50 year old programmer who loves linux fits me perfectly.

No ads, no spam bots, no lame repeated meme responses to posts, just a small community of seemingly smart people talking about common interests.

I have no idea how long it will last, or what it will evolve in to, but the longer we can keep out the unwashed internet masses, and avoid the pitfalls of ad driven algorithm based content, the better.

I would have happily paid $5 a month for baconreader, probably as high as $10.

In both time and quality, I used it far more a month than netflix, hbo, or hulu.

I don't know what it would have cost to keep baconreader active with the API changes, but from what I read the price was intentionally design to be unsustainable.

It wasn't about making 3rd party access to the api profitable, it was about making 3rd party apps go away to push ads and harvest user data.

In the final weeks, myself and many others said we'd be happy to pitch in to keep baconreader alive, and the feeling I got was that just wasn't an option.

Oh well, I'm here now, and can watch the whole mess from the sidelines while getting to be part of a new and growing community, instead of a bloated dying one.

Quality over quantity everytime for me.

On top of that, I feel far more incentive to comment, upvote, and just generally engage here.

Overall this feels like a less hostile environment, without the clickish groupthink that had an army of bots or trolls out to downvote you.

People have mentioned the higher complexity of getting set up on instances as a barrier to entry for the masses. I say wonderful. I'll take a small community of diverse, engaged people over the mobs of span, trolls, and parrots.

Leaving reddit for lemmy feels like finding a nice person who cares after being in along abusive relationship. Never realised how bad it was, or how good it could be.

Is it temporary? Who knows, but I'd rather spend my time making this into what I want then ever looking back.

My completely unknowledgeable answer based on the week or so I've been here.

Lemmy works as a series of self hosted "instances", basically servers people run kinda like a games server or bitcoin miner.

When you join Lemmy, you picked an instance, that is the server you connect to and get all your data from, the "local" in your list.

This server then talks to and share posts with all the other servers it knows about and is connected to. That way when you query your local instance, it knows all about the other content on the other servers.

The over all cluster of various servers is the "Fediverse", various stand alone instances which share data to create the larger community.

So when the talk about defederating a site, like Threads, they mean cutting that server off from the rest of the community.

I get why people do it, I don't get why people would do it to take over existing large subs in that mess.

Wanting some control over a community you care about makes total sense. You put in the time, and you foster the kind of people and content you are interested in.

Playing whack a mole in the current environment on reddit seems like a nightmare to me.

I used to think the next generation was going to out code, design, and trouble shoot me in five years, and that the one after that would make me feel like a dinosaur in my 30s.

Now I'm almost 50, and the army of tech savvy teens coming for my job simple hasn't materialized. With the ease of use of so many devices, a world where "plug and play" actually exists, the effort and skill requirement for most things has gone way down. On top of that, the battle for attention is so great that there is always something easier to go play with, and if it requires a bit of noodling to make it work, screw it.

For a bit I thought "Great, job security!", but now I'm at the point where I need to think about finding interns and replacements, and unless they come from one of the historic tech pipelines like PC gaming or the makers community, not a lot of kids have that kind of background.

There are great programs now in the schools for making app, 3D printing, graphics, music, etc, that draw kids into technology. However, like everything else it's all slick and user friendly. You don't have to spend hour after hour figuring out how to make the thing work.

I watched my two year old nephew trying to swipe on the pictures in a magazine and was confused why they didn't move. He was basically born with an ipad in his hands.

I agree completely that a basic computer class covering those things and more should be standard in schools. Now we have niche tech courses akin to the woodshop and autos class of my high school, but they are electives, and don't cover the fundamentals.

Because stating a wrong fact is the fastest way to get the right answer?

So, if I have an account on one instance, and I want to login / reply to another, how do i do that. I'm using the liftoff app.

I take it I shouldn't have more than one instance login? Don't worry, at this point I've only got two, it really didn't seem right when I was making the second one.

It was my primary social media site for over 10 years, and only one in probably the past five after ditching Facebook.

All I ever used to access it was baconreader. When the first talk of killing off the API started with the rate hike, I had a sinking feeling this was the end.

Rode it out till the last day, and reflexively kept opening baconreader just to realise again it was offline.

Decided to give Lemmy a try, and while it took a couple days to get it sorted, I have to say, for my daily browsing fix, it's more than enough.

Yes, reddit is a giant database, and when google searches take me there I'll view the info, but for everyday use, lurking, posting, and commenting, never again.

Not sure of its bias, user saturation, bot, shills, demographic, or what, but while smaller, the quality and content of the comments here just seems better. It reminds me of the early days on fark or even back on IRC.

It really does piss me off that greed over an IPO ruined something that had been a part of my life for so long.

I am enough of a grumpy old bastard that unless they fix the API and baconreader starts up again, I'm done. The internet is a big weird place, and I'm happy to go see other parts of it.

Same, it took me a minute to understand what I was looking at. If that is what the official r3dd!t app looks like, I'm glad I jumped ship the day baconreader went offline.

I've been to both of those clubs and man was I disappointed.

Seriously though, I've tried to go pure linux many times since the 90s, with mixed success.

There is a lot of software in my field that I just can't get on linux, and now I have a company issued laptop. I can't even write to the USB port, let alone install an OS.

I agree with everything except not burning a book to keep warm when freezing. Unless the book was "How to start a fire with other books when you are freezing".

"Hannah Montana is considered fast, stable, and powerful by most users".

Ok, Lemmy has officially gotten my first "ok now people are looking at me" laugh.

I know I'm an old school techie, but was there really a high entry bar for lemmy compared to say twitter or Instagram? I honestly don't know, other than r3dd!t the last social media I signed up for was what? Facebook well over a decade ago?

If the few steps it took to make a user name, pick an instance, and then get my head around the fact that I had to also join any instance I wanted to respond to, is enough to keep the unwashed internet masses out, well, they are just even dumber than I already thought.

That's a fair point, I noticed if I open baconreader, I can still see my subscribed sub list. I need to learn how to make subs on here, and as you suggest, either find them, or get off my ass and make them myself.

On a nice side note, being an early adopter, I was able to get my username back without some damned number stapled on the end.

I can for sure see both sides of this one. I had ditched all other social media years ago, and baconreader was my one guilty pleasure.

If I had my phone in my hand, I was catching up with other old skaters like myself, reading about the latest trends in tech, or browsing the daily news.

The tag line of "Front page of the internet" was quite literally true for me. That was the portal through which I found content.

In the weeks leading up to the June 30th, I felt a strong sadness, what was I going to do with my screen time? I had created a very custom space using baconreader that neither the reddit app, or to be fair, Lemmy, could provide.

While I am really enjoying learning about Lemmy, and I feel the quality of the post and comments here are far better, it's going to take time to find and/or develop those niche communities again.

I do however agree, and the ex analogy is spot on, that the last thing I want is for this community to just be a bitch fest about what once was.

Give people a bit of time to vent, it hasn't even been a week since a decades long experience came crashing to a halt through no fault of ours.