OpenStars

Open source software may be a good model to look at. People contribute bc they want to, regardless of any monetary remuneration.

But it's hard, and a for-profit corporation can often move forward more quickly to develop an objectively better project. Except even though they *could", they (usually) don't, and really they have zero reason to, bc their goal is to make a profit, not a product. Reddit vs. Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin/etc. is one such example.

But it gets complicated bc of all the counterexamples, like at one time Google really was awesome, and free, so most of the open source projects did not push hard to replace it, bc it worked so well for so many. Similar to Lemmy I suppose - before the Rexit it had existed for many years, but it wasn't until that shakeup that it was propelled forward extremely quickly by the influx of developers, e.g. who made the front end apps. Before that, the Reddit experience was fairly good even if not great, so not as many people bothered.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

I doubt you can simply listen to someone online - maybe, but there's no accountability here and that seems like a hindrance. So maybe try to find an actual irl counselor? If you are part of any clubs like a religion then that often offers streamlined access.

I will offer one piece of direct advice though, not from myself as a good source but from someone who I have come to trust: maybe pause the dating scene. So many people try to rush into that, but if you haven't gotten yourself put together, then how are you going to offer to share your life with someone else? Depending on the circumstances ofc, like if someone was super awesome then they could help you, but it's a lot to put onto someone else, and isn't that a bit unfair to them? It seems kinder to both yourself to narrow your focus to getting your own life put together, and to others as well. If you are currently dating someone, note that I am not saying that you should immediately break up with them, it's just something to consider and make your own determination about what to do.

I have looked on Android Firefox, Mac OSX Firefox, Android Chrome, Mac OSX Chrome, and flipped from portrait to landscape, I checked multiple instances, and thereby multiple themes (my account normally uses darkly-compact). In several of these scenarios the image is resized to be "tiny" as in <1/20th of the screen width, and from there it ranges up to 1/3rd, or at the absolute widest ~3/4ths of the screen (someone else also replied to the person you replied to showing this screenshot demonstrating that width for them too).

Throughout all of this, the person you replied to has only managed to conjure up 3 facts, one being an extremely generic term "web browser", 1 seemingly objectively false ("giant"), and the other 1 at best seems unreproducible by anyone here ("full screen width").

In short, the person you replied to seems to be acting in a trolling manner, as in like a canonical Karen, which frankly does seem surprising given how clearly articulated the original message of theirs was. We would be happy to help them diagnose further but at this point they just seem to be venting - granted though, not so much in the message you replied to on its own.

A picture is worth a thousand words. The AP article in the OP, right after the title, has a picture of Bernie Sanders, to help jog recognition and enhance immersion and feeling of reality, then has the wall of pure text after that - appropriate use of pictures enhances rather than detracts from the experience.

I too was put off by the constant use of pictures on Reddit, so I researched it a bit and found that millennials and beyond use pictures, especially the same memes over and over, to convey an entirely different experience than mere text. The memes speak to emotion and a shared set of experiences in this topsy turvy world. It being possible means that it works, and the more I thought about it, the more I came to appreciate it.

There is a second meaning to it: on hexbear voting is disabled and so they extremely often use pictures in replies to convey their thoughts instead of voting - but while on the hexbear server they are represented as tiny icons, like emojis basically, everywhere else all across Lemmy they are giant. After blocking the hexbear instance I have not seen much of those though - you might prefer that to having to block each person individually, see your Settings (not Profile), second tab, scroll WAAAAY down, to block an entire instance.

Regular pictures though, on the Lemmy webpages, likewise also do not have a way (that I know of?) to control the size. So they are all-or-nothing, have it or don't (afaik). Having them makes this place more welcoming, especially to a younger crowd, and enhancing participation helps the Fediverse to encourage a more steady stream of content and help ensure that it does not turn into a circle jerk niche set of tiny interconnected communities.

So, while a "giant" image was not intentional, an image was. Also, I only just when getting to this very paragraph in this reply noticed how significantly different the height of the image is when I have my Android keyboard open in my Firefox browser vs. when I close that, as would be done by someone scrolling. As I composed it, and chose preview to make sure that it worked, it was shown at maybe half the width and two thirds the height, but then hiding the keyboard it suddenly jumps up to full width and height. So that fact too likely contributes to people not realizing the full extent of what the picture is going to look like to others later on. It also may look different in the place it came from too, further leading to the discontinuity between what was intended vs. received.

Anyway I do try to use pictures, especially memes that are easily recognizable, whenever possible bc they seem to work better in the communication process (that is a 2-way procedure between both sending and receiving partners) than a mere wall of words. So you may want to block me, although I will preemptively say that I will miss your perspective across the Fediverse in replies such as this one, though ofc I understand that if it is driving you crazy then you may want to take steps to improve your experience.

Hopefully Lemmy or your preferred app (or some other one that you could switch to) will implement a solution that doesn't require massive effort and maintenance on your part to be constantly walling yourself off from what will end up being an increasingly larger share of the Fediverse as it grows and brings in newer and younger people, but for now the code is somewhat primitive in terms of such technical details.

In any case, I hope that this explanation helps.:-). Also, oh wow, could you imagine trying to have a conversation like this on Reddit!? :-P The technology here being far behind there does not begin to make up for the Fediverse being worthwhile, whereas Reddit is useless - as in even if I was not here, I still would not be there:-D.

It is what it is. The original founding developer is a tankie, and offered everything he did entirely for free. Meanwhile after Reddit began to collapse there were several projects - like squabbles and discuit - who offered to let people come onto their instance but refused to offer their code as open source, presumably with the intention of using the standard approach to first disrupt the market and then later make a bunch of money (also used to lure in fish, set out the bait and then reel it in).

The closest one to Lemmy was Kbin, but that has its own whole entire set of drama, being open source but not sharing the development process with anyone else and then the singular founding developer being extremely slow to add new features or take things further or even maintain the existing instance in the meantime (there is the Mbin fork, but if Lemmy is early beta or late alpha stage software, Kbin/Mbin is still early alpha, plus Kbin repeatedly goes down for days to a week at a time).

Meanwhile, most people who just enjoy being "taken care of" by daddy spez remained on Reddit, which from a technical perspective (of like server uptime and whatnot) does objectively offer a better experience. At least until old-reddit is killed off, though in the meantime they seem to allow it due to their increasingly dire need for content creators.

So anyway I am saying that politics is very much entertwined with the entire existence of this place. People chasing profits have other Reddit alternatives that they turned to, so we are the odd ones who enjoy "sharing" (i.e. in the socialist sense) and are willing to put up with the significantly higher technical barrier to entry and greater share of problems, in order to preserve our freedoms and help set something up that has a hope of lasting in the future, as corporations enshittify themselves all around us.

But yeah, I want to ditch the toxicity side of it as well:-). Except I cannot change others, only myself, hence why I just block those and move on with my life, and let them do the same.

I wonder if somebody shot the guy?

'cept it comes instead of a home, ability to afford supporting a family, food (at least the kind with proper nutritional support), medical care, and capability to work at merely one job to make ends meet. So... yeah, easy except for that.

Instead, Huffman will eat it from the inside out like a parasite devouring its prey.

And people will praise him for being such a "success" (at business), and will be outright shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED that the Reddit experience does not improve as he promised it would.

But hopefully some of us at least will choose to learn from the clusterfuck that was Rexit.

Fwiw, my own experience changed dramatically after I blocked lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net. Some people also block lemmy.ml but I like the memes so I do not go that far - yet when people do come back with the most inane shit replies, it is >90% from there.

The Fediverse does require curation to be halfway usable, but the fact that nice places exist here at all makes it very different from Reddit imho. That takes effort to maintain, and while mods may not always be perfect, consider the kind of person that would remain as a mod on Reddit after the protests... overworked, entirely unappreciated, and having to deal with the most childish people. When old-reddit gets further shut down (as it seems to have started to people say, e.g. when accessed via a VPN) it will degrade even further. The scabs will run the show, even more so than now. Just like happened with X.

Ofc, do as you please, but I hope this perspective helps:-).

He is the best!:-)

Big Money is involved - here is an interesting description, enjoy!:-)