I do wonder what differences in philosophy and development led to something like Blender to be pretty accepted even in pro circles?
For me, personally, the moment I found out you can easily install a version of gimp that doesn't distribute it's tools and canvas across a dozen windows was when it began to feel "right" for me. Granted, I am only using it as an amateur for meme and touching up on graphics for game dev, but it feels right to me at least.
I think it will hinge on one thing: Will AI provide an experience that is maybe worse, but still sufficient to keep the market share, at lower cost than putting in the proper effort? If so, it might still become a tragic "success"-story.
I feel that. Personally, I loved reddit back then and Lemmy now, because it's content-focused instead of user-focused. But it still has enough user accountability for it to work out, unlike e.g. something like the *chans, where it devolves into a cesspool of edgy nonsense quickly.
On Lemmy/old Reddit, there are visible powerusers and drama, sure, but on average the experience one will have when posting something is engagement with their content, instead of engagement with their person.
I never was able to get into any other social media, never really saw the appeal of it either. I feel like I want to not be seen, at least not intensely, and instead my content and my thoughts and opinions to be engaged with, reflected, developed. Most social media has only gotten worse in drifting into the other direction, with people becoming brands advertising themselves as a marketable package, chasing that dream of living on fame.
So, here's a weird anecdote: Me and my ex were watching The Lighthouse together online (long distance relationship). Neither of us had watched it before. Turns out for some reason, VLC was not able to decode the audio codec properly on my end - I only had some athmospheric parts of ambience and music, but most interestingly no voice at all. Up until the very end, I thought they just went extra-avant-guarde and emulated a silent film in addition to the monochrome aesthetics. Only after we talked about it and she told me something about some dialogue scenes I realised that there was actually supposed to be audible dialogue.
Funnily enough, turns out it was still super enjoyable for me because I love artsy movies and surreal experiences, and I was able to piece together the plot and character interactions pretty accurately.
I genuinely think the main ideological function isn't even as much to promote that, as it is to focus personal dreams and fantasies towards wanting to become a part of the "winners". Not that it isn't part of it, just by normalising it as status quo even within fantasies, but I think even more powerful is to have people fantasise about being one of the chosen ones eventually.
Quick reminder that stuff like this is not planned like in some conspiracy, but just a result of dynamics happening (almost exclusively, rare exceptions) unconsciously the way ideology springs from the material base.
Very similar story here, when I finally had glasses it was so weird to realise that stars aren't blurry, and it's in fact normal to be able to see individual leaves on trees, but I never noticed I needed them for many years, because everyday life wasn't affected for me.
How about this story about a young English boy that gets bullied by the poo people, until he finds out he is actually super special. And then he fights the super specials that want society to be structured around birthright, because he has a special born fate to stop them. All while the super specials have used their amazing magical powers, able to literally mold reality to their whims, to create their own version of liberal capitalism.
The short answer: It made me interested in non-commercial alternatives. The fact that the main devs are communists in their own right (even though not necessarily of the same school of thought as myself, but close enough), certainly helped, too.
BTW, just in case you are concerned about that - they are commited to free software principles and the software they develop here is certainly politically agnostic, and they can't and won't keep anyone from hosting their own instances with their own focus or forking the software in the worst case.
Nowadays, definitely. 4 years ago, when this was originally posted? Back when I first engaged a little bit here before hibernating until the big exodus, my most engaged post had like 30-something upvotes.
Well, I am not on Mastodon myself, because twitter-like social media isn't my cup of tea, but from what I heard, engagement there seems to happen much more on a following-hashtags level than following-users level, so maybe (ab)using hashtags more might do the trick.
As 10 Lemmy upvotes are equal or greater than 100 Million YT views according to this metric, I am already deep into the billions of views, the whole population of the world has already viewed this several times
It might just also be talked about as "that event everyone got angry about because of false reporting", or "that event where I argued with some people online, and I realised they made better points than I thought", or "that event that made me think about what actions would have been better". There is more than the main narrative, and more than just a single engagement with it if there's discussion happening.
So, yeah, it will create a lot of hostility, but maybe even a possibility to recontextualise that hostility for some people.
But not to say you don't have any point at all - it's true that it can make some things harder to properly talk about, makes it all the more important to oppose the main narrative whenever possible and not feed into it.
Yupp, blame my FOSS-fundamentalism and communism for being here early - but I still took a looooong break after first trying it out for a bit. Am elated it managed to grow a community since then.
Oh, wow, another book for the reading list :O
Am surprised that I genuinely hadn't heard of him, just highlights the point the article is making.