rwhitisissle @ rwhitisissle @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

The internet became mass adopted via phones. Or rather, the internet as we understand it warped itself around mobile devices. Phones and communication have always been cool. If you were "cool" in the 1990s, you had a beeper. People wanted to engage with you. Talk to you. Fuck you. Do drugs with you. Whatever. But computers were always nerd shit. And when the internet was dominated by computers, it was a nerd space. Phones allow you to have constant, but physically limited access to the internet. There's no full keyboard for typing out long replies. Not a physical one, at least. It's all algorithmically generated text responses. Engagement on the modern internet is clicking a "next" button on a social media website.

I say this as someone who loves computers and hate phones, and it feels like the internet is less and less of a place for me as time goes on. I like talking to people and having discussions, but that's more and more ghettoized as time goes on. And that's sadly what the Fediverse sort of is. It's a ghetto for us oldheads who loved how things used to be and thought what we had is what we'd always have. We didn't realize the high water mark when we were floating in it. And now that the tide has receded, we're left stranded on an island in the middle of a very shallow ocean.

I think part of the reason the word has caught on so much recently, especially in 2023, is that we are fully in a new era that I like to call the "solid internet." The internet as a predominately web and mobile accessible media and social media landscape emerged after 2010, and for about 10 years continued to grow and evolve. I remember fleeing to reddit after Digg died (see the original famous case of enshittification). At the time, the internet was far more fluid. Facebook was popular, certainly, and Twitter was gaining in steam. YouTube was the de facto video hosting platform, but it still had some degree of nominal competition. Same with reddit as a content aggregator. The monoliths of the modern internet were growing, but still rising in popularity. And they were good. Better than anything we'd had before. Easier to access than usenet, but still strange and spontaneous and ever evolving. A brave new world, filled with brave new people (as well as a shitload of racism, homophobia, porn, and gore). This is a period I call the "fluid internet." As of 2023, the internet has solidified and congealed around the current monolithic services as we know them. And now that competition is dead, they get to squeeze - they get to set prices, block VPN connections and unpaid API access, ban problematic or dissenting content, and create a truly corporatized, milquetoast experience - something that caters to everyone, but truly appeals to no one. Like the world's dullest theme park.

The one thing that Cory Doctorow was wrong about in his definition of enshittification is that the final step is that a platform dies. Platforms used to die when they enshittified in the fluid internet, because competition existed and people would throw venture capital at plucky startups. But the reality is that we live in a post-competition world, and people are less adventurous and more "on rails" in how they expect to engage with the internet than they used to be. Google will continue to get worse, but it's still going to be the de facto search mechanism here on out. Same for videos and YouTube. Because that's what people use now and there are no other options. There's not going to be some "hot new platform" that pulls the rug out from under YouTube as a video hosting solution. And if you think the Fediverse and its various alternatives is going to ever be anything other than a niche microcosm of the internet, you're dreaming.

This is it. This is the internet we wanted, I guess, because this is what we made for ourselves, with the only thing to look forward to is it getting worse with time. Eventually Valve will go public at some point in the future and its marketplace will become horrible. Eventually Firefox will shutter its doors and if you want to access a web page, you're going to have to sign a blood contract with Google for use of a chromium browser. I imagine there will come a day when I don't even really use the internet anymore because it'll be so terrible and unrecognizable to me.

The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies. Almost every "alternative" browser is chromium under the hood. Google's next big plan is basically constructing a walled garden around the internet (at least the HTTP part) via complex DRM. Eventually, if you want to access an actual web page, it'll have to be via a Chromium browser. Hell, even today a shitload of websites I visit on FF just don't fucking render correctly and I'll have to fire up a chromium instance just to access them. That's only going to get worse with time.

Yeah, I remembered that, as well. I have an HD album that I bought a while ago and downloaded as a zip file. I looked again just now and it only gives you the ability to download file by file unless you use their client. That's remarkably shitty.

I don't know why you would think they're paid media or propaganda. It's not like they've been paid over half a million dollars in 2015 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Or like they received almost 3 million euros in 2022 by a "philanthropic" organization called Open Philanthropy that operates on the philosophical basis of "effective altruism," an ideology which functionally equates to "let's try to convince billionaires to throw some money at the poors instead of addressing systemic inequality," and which totally cool people like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk have latched onto as belief systems. It's also not like they've been given money by the conservative religious John Templeton Foundation, which was one of the largest financial contributors to the early climate change denial movement from 2003 to 2010.

Nope. Nothing to see here. Not in bed with big money or ideologically dubious organizations at all. /s

The insane thing is that it was working a few weeks ago but then it randomly went away. Like the computer would go to sleep like normal (S3) and then I'd wake up to at least 80 percent battery. Now? All I have is hibernate. Man, as bad as Windows is and always has been, I can't believe it's somehow getting worse with time.

So if I have my laptop in bed at night and then close the laptop lid to go to sleep and wake up, the reason the battery is fucking dead is because the laptop never actually "sleeps" - it just enters a lower power state while still draining battery relatively aggressively?

The thing is that you probably won't find anything that looks too closely at the efficacy of the claims, because the claims are all that anything is reporting on, since the product is so new. Here is a similar article published on asme.org (American Society of Mechanical Engineers), that discusses the buoys and the company's claims surrounding them: https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/tapping-the-ocean

That's probably what the VM is doing: it's self-hosting a server running timemachined. timemachined itself is actually running out of a docker container that's running on the VM, but that's because by 2033 every single update, which occur daily, breaks the existing docker installation on a Mac. Which is honestly very similar to what happens in 2023, except it's every other day currently.

Apple enthusiasts claim it's literally double the amount of RAM they need for their workload. They proceed to watch Netflix in a google chrome window where it's the only tab open on their 2500 dollar computer.

No one is asking you to leave.

At this point, I am wondering if maybe someone should be asking them to leave. I've interacted with this poster in other threads. I think they might be psychologically unwell and I also think that their primary purpose for interacting with Beehaw and, honestly, any other Lemmy instance is based around finding ways to antagonize site administration/moderation and complain about their (routinely off topic and incredibly opinionated) content being removed.

Actually, now that I think about it, a ban is probably exactly what they're fishing for.

Everything you say is what past me would have answered ten years ago, thinking current me is an idiot. Yet here we are. ;)

Wow. Talk about coincidences...

you are not 99% of computer users. Just considering installing a linux distro puts you in the top 1% most competent.

I'm a dumbass and if I can do it anyone can. But, yes, technology is a daunting thing to most people. Intuition and experience go far. That said, it's literally easier today than it ever has been. You put in the installation usb, click next a whole bunch, reboot, and you have a working machine. Is it sometimes more complicated than that and you have to do BIOS/UEFI bullshit? Sure, but past that hurdle it's smooth sailing.

(Speaking of which, I still have a laptop running EndeavourOS + i3. Three months in my system is half broken because of infrequent updates. I could fix it, I just don’t have the motivation to do so. Or the time. I’ll probably just reinstall Mint.)

Ah, the joys of rolling release distros. Endeavor has been stable for me so far. I'm running it on an X1 Thinkpad. Generally works more reliably than my own vanilla arch installs and more low profile tiling window managers. I've found myself sticking to KDE Plasma for a DE because it's so consistent and has enough features to keep me happy without having to spend all my time fine tuning my own UX, which I just don't care about. My realization has been that arch distros are best suited for machines running integrated graphics and popular DEs, rather than ones with separate cards and more niche or highly customizable DEs. Prevents you from having to futs about with things like Optimus, with graphics drivers being the primary cause of headaches for that distro, per my experience. That said, I used to run an old Acer laptop with arch and a tiling window manager called qtile. Qtile was great, but every other update completely altered the logic and structure of how it read the config file for it, so the damn thing broke constantly. I'm like...just decide how you want the config to look and keep that. Or at least allow for backwards compatibility. But they didn't.

Somebody needs to help all those poor people find the rest of their shirts. The top half is missing!

So, it's like the badge from Star Trek you can tap to activate in order to talk to your shipmates or the computer. Except without the...y'know...ability to access a teleporter or do anything remotely interesting or meaningful.

K.

I'm gonna have to argue against a few of these points:

When you enter the Apple ecosystem you basically sign a contract with them : they sell you overpriced goods, but in exchange you get a consistent, coherent and well thought-out experience across the board.

Consistent: yes. Every Apple device leverages a functionally very similar UI. That said, the experience is, in my opinion, not very coherent or well thought out. Especially if you are attempting to leverage their technology from the standpoint of someone like a Linux power user. The default user experience is frustratingly warped around the idea that the end user is an idiot who has no idea how to use a terminal and who only wants access to the default applications provided with the OS.

Things work well

Things work...okay. But try installing, uninstalling, and then reinstalling a MySQL DB on a macbook and then spend an hour figuring out why your installation is broken. Admittedly, that's because you're probably installing it with Homebrew, but that's the other point: if you want to do anything of value on it, you have to use a third party application like Homebrew to do it. The fact that you have to install and leverage a third party package manager is unhinged for an ecosystem where everything is so "bundled" together by default.

Of course you there’s a price to pay. Overpriced products, limited UI/UX options, no interoperability, little control over your data. And when there’s that one thing that doesn’t work, no luck. But your day to day life within the Apple ecosystem IS enjoyable. It’s a nice golden cage with soft pillows.

I guess the ultimate perspective is one in which you have to be happy surrendering control over so much to Apple. But then again, you could also just install EndeavorOS with KDE Plasma or any given flavor of Debian distribution with any DE of your choice, install KDE Connect on your PC and phone, and get 95 percent of the experience Apple offers right out of the box, with about 100x the control over your system.

I used to be a hardcore PC/Linux/Android user. Over the last few years I gradually switched to a full Apple environment : MacBook, iPhone, iPad… I just don’t have time to “manage” my hardware anymore.

I don't know of anyone who would describe themselves as a hardcore "PC/Linux user," or what this means to you. I'm assuming by PC you mean Windows. But people who are really into Linux generally don't like MacOS or Windows, and typically for all the same reasons. I tolerate a Windows machine for video game purposes, but if I had to use it for work I'd immediately install Virtualbox and work out of a Linux VM. For the people who are really into Linux, the management of the different parts of it is, while sometimes a pain in the ass, also part of the fun. It's the innate challenge of something that can only be mastered by technical proficiency. If that's not for you, totally fine.

The whole “special club” argument is bullshit, and I hope we grow out of it.

It's less argument and more of a general negative sentiment people hold towards Apple product advocates. You can look up the phenomenon of "green bubble discrimination." It's a vicious cycle in which the ecosystem works seamlessly for people who are a part of it, but Apple intentionally makes leaving that ecosystem difficult and intentionally draws attention to those who interact with the people inside of it who are not part of it. Apple products also often are associated with a higher price tag: they're status symbols as much as they are functional tools. People recognize a 2000 dollar Macbook instantly. Only a few people might recognize a comparably priced Thinkpad. In a lot of cases, they'll just assume the Macbook was expensive and the non-Macbook was cheap. And you might say, "yeah, but that's because of people, not because of Mac." But it would be a lie to say that Apple isn't a company intensely invested in brand recognition and that it doesn't know it actively profits from these perceptions.

It's one of those things where a lot of these tech startups make enormous promises but the technical challenges are just so far beyond what we're capable of. Like I remember for years r/space on reddit functioned as, functionally, a duplicate of r/spacex. Every other article was about Elon Musk's "totally real" Mission to Mars or about how "full self driving was right around the corner." It's all corporate pandering and wish fulfillment. We want to pretend like we live in a world of unrestrained scientific advancement and fantastic technology. We don't. Science is hard and our understanding of how brains and sleep works is facile.

This feels like one of those situations where something is designed purely to absorb as much venture capital on the tiny, infinitesimally small chance it produces a viable product.

"If people don't do what I say and defederate from this instance because I got banned from a community by a power tripping mod, then these hundreds of websites will inevitably die for it because it means they're all fascist for some reason...and I will dance in their ashes!"

I want you to understand this is what you sound like when you talk. Get help.

I tell you what, bud: if I find me a magic lamp, wish 3 is gonna be for America to be the country we all dream about in our sleep. Right after I get my first wish of a blowjob machine that cures cancer and my second wish of Ronald Regan getting sent to an even lower circle of hell than whichever one he's currently in. Wish 3, though? All yours.

The charter does matter. Because it’s a community driven document.

Yeah, that means functionally nothing.

And, no, my argument is really that you have no power here and the rules are, beyond the functional purpose of insulating the people who run the instances from any kind of legal accountability, largely meaningless in a physical sense. A document like the constitution means something because there are institutions that exist to enforce it. Lemmy doesn't have that. Community rules and policy are more like weather vanes, pointing towards general guidelines of behavior. They're not laws. There are no legal proceedings around them. And they apply differently from average commenter, to community moderator, to administrator. Also, you didn't really say WHICH part of the charter you feel was violated. Just that the charter was violated. It's like if I said my constitutional rights were violated by the police and someone asked me which ones and I said, "oh, you know, just generally speaking."

When majorities in the community realize they’re being punked by the likes of you, the response will be to shun you and your instance with mass defederation.

I don't know what punked means to you, but it means one of two things to me. Neither of which applies in this context. Regardless, yes, instances can defederate from one another. This was always allowed.

Lemmy has these problems partly because the interface design copied from Reddit incentivizes incivility and bad behavior.

There's some foundational premises here that I don't think would hold up under scrutiny. Yes, the interface is similar to reddit's. I don't know if you think that the structure of the interface hypnotizes people into being dicks, or you think that the interface attracts ne'er-do-wells because it reminds them of reddit and they're drawn to it like flies are drawn to shit. In either case, I'm not sure if there's enough argument there to really engage with.

Under circumstances like this, I believe mass defederation is exactly the right outcome. Lemmy is rushing head first to irrelevancy. Then ya’ll can go off and do your own hate thing, like UnTruth Anti-Social or Gab or whatever. Good luck with that.

I'm sorry you had a negative experience. Maybe you should start your own Lemmy instance in which you are better able to enforce your own ideals for the community. Y'know, really swing that ban hammer liberally. After all, banning people who dare question your very narrow, but functionally limitless authority is one of the few joys in life of your average internet forum moderator. Might as well live a little.