Rottcodd

Just Right

Lemmy isn't a platform at all. It's a piece of forum software.

The platforms are the individual instances - lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or lemm.ee or whatever. There's well over 1,000 of them total. And they range all the way from extreme left to extreme right, and from rigidly constrained to entirely open.

And since it is the case that there are well over 1,000 instances, each of them privately owned and managed by whatever standards the owners prefer, there is no mechanism by which any particular bias can be maintained at anything above the instance level. That necessarily means that any lemmy-wide bias you might see can only be organic.

You might honestly think about that, and what it says about the ideology you're trying to pretend you're not defending.

I can sort of understand people who can't bring themselves to avoid Amazon - again, for me it's really just a gut-level aversion that happens to coincide with an ethical stance. If I didn't have that gut-level aversion, there's a good chance I wouldn't be able to resist either.

But yeah - the chain restaurant/coffee shop thing just makes no sense to me at all, no matter how I look at it. There are regional and local versions of pretty much anything one might want, and they're pretty much universally both better and cheaper.

I don't really go out of my way. It's more like an ingrained habit.

Most notably, I've never bought a single thing from Amazon. I don't even have an account with them. That's not an ethical decision though - it sort of works out that way, but really it's just a gut-level reaction. The whole idea just repulses me - just looking at a page from their site is somehow gross and creepy.

By the same token, there's a long list of businesses I've either never gone to or at least haven't in the last twenty or so years - Walmart, McDonalds, Starbucks, Taco Bell, Olive Garden, Kroger, Subway, Jack in the Box, etc., etc. Basically, if they're big enough to run national level advertising, they are eliminated from my consideration. And again, it's not really a conscious choice - they just gross me out. It's like the instant I set foot in a place like that, I can feel it corroding my soul.

So when I'm looking for somewhere to shop or eat or whatever, just like anyone else does, there are specific places I don't consider at all. And all major corporations are on that list.

So what's left over - what I choose from - is local or regional, not because I go out of my way to choose them, but just because they're the only ones I'm willing to choose in the first place

And the sort of surprising thing, even to me sometimes, is that I'm by no means starved for choices. There's a world of alternatives out there.

Or maybe... just maybe... this is backwards and the notable thing is that statistics have been cited in support of a claim that the economy is improving, despite the fact that at least half of Americans believe that it isn't.

I don't even understand this headlong rush for an app. And especially being so desperate for an app that you'd use one that embeds ads unless you pay to remove them.

It just seems completely backwards to me.

With Reddit, it made sense - it was awful in a mobile browser, the official app was complete garbage, and either way it was buried in ads So you could (and I did) use a third party app and get a cleaner and more useful interface and no ads.

But Lemmy's already fine in a browser and it's ad-free. So what's the point?

I could maybe see, somewhere down the road when the apps are complete and established, it might be interesting to experiment with some and maybe find one that's got just the features I like most. But that's not what I'm seeing. What I'm seeing are people desperately clamoring for an app - any app - it doesn't matter how primitive and janky it is - they just desperately need to have an app right now, today, this instant. As if lemmy is completely unusable without one.

And it's just... not that way at all. Sure, it could be better, but it's fine.

So I just don't get it.

I couldn't even watch the whole thing - my cringe meter topped off with Canti in a suit, sounding like a TV weatherman.

I use both, but overall I prefer kbin.

I like the UI much better (on mobile - I couldn't even tell you what either one looks like on desktop). The lemmy mobile UI is too disjointed for my tastes - it's essentially just a seemingly random assortment of buttons for a seemingly random assortment of functions. I've tried a few lemmy apps, but haven't been impressed, and I can't be arsed to wade through dozens of betas in the hope that one of them might actually appeal to me. Kbin's UI is fine the way it is, so that's that to me.

And I like kbin.social's "All" better than any of the lemmys I use (.world, .ninja and .one). Kbin.social has a pretty broad range of content, but generally without the botfarm instances, which is just what I want. Lemmy world (when it's working) has too much botspam for my tastes, and while I love lemmy.ninja just on principle, it has a relatively sparse and limited "All." Lemmy.one's "All" is pretty good, but the overall feel of the instance is a bit too weedy for my tastes.

And Ernest is awesome.

Here's a thing I don't think I've ever admitted online since the world is divided into the majority that neither know nor care and the minority that would vehemently disagree:

My favorite Shriekback song isn't Underwaterboys or Gunning for the Buddha or Nemesis or Fish Below the Ice or Faded Flowers or Malaria or My Spine is the Bassline or any of those.

It's Go Bang.

So yeah.

So I'm just scrolling though All New when I see the entirely unexpected phrase "Shriekback spam."

Really, I don't expect to see the name Shriekback at all, other than when I post it, but I definitely don't expect to see a reference to spam. So that was just sort of surprising.

Truth be told, I've been mostly unimpressed with their newer stuff, though it's also true that I haven't really given it enough of a chance.

In any event, this is pretty good. So thanks, spam or not.

Right after spez's petulant AMA, I thought I should take a look around at alternative forums, since that AMA wasn't a good sign of things to come. I didn't have an explicit goal of moving - I just wanted to see what options were out there.

I fairly quickly ran across mentions of and links to kbin and lemmy. I was already familiar with Mastodon, but it hadn't much impressed me (though Twitter never much impressed me either, so that was no surprise). Kbin and lemmy sounded more up my alley though - more traditional forum structure rather than the sort of microblogging thing of Mastodon/Twitter.

So I checked it out

Then I just... never left.

I think it was a two-stage thing: first, he got off the leash, then second, he spiraled off into a fantasy world.

There's evidence that Musk has always been volatile and capricious and short-sighted, and that he's had handlers at his companies who specifically acted to limit the things he was told to try to keep him somewhat rational and to filter and recast the drivel that spilled out of his mouth anyway into policies that were at least not obviously harmful.

When he took over Twitter though, there were no handlers already in place, he didn't take any with him, snd they didn't have the opportunity to appoint any. So he was off the leash, and we got the first clear look at unfiltered Elon.

And it's just been in a self-reinforcing loop since then. He undoubtedly always believed that he was making nothing but sound decisions, but that was an easier belief to maintain when he was surrounded by handlers that filtered out his dumbassery. Now that he's off the leash, his dumbassery is front and center, but he still believes that he's making sound decisions. The disconnect between his fantasy and the reality is thus growing all the time, so he has a progressively poorer chance of making sound decisions, but grows ever more convinced that he is, and 'round and 'round it goes.

I expect that it's going to end in the complete collapse of his sanity.

Really.