Okay, hear me out:

I get the argument that most of these protests are meaningless/if you REALLY want to change you're going to have to do this this this. whatever (I usually stop reading there). I understand, but I don't agree.

Sure, it's nice when a protest can actually enact real changes but lets face it; that's not common and sometimes not going to happen: fine. The decision to make a protest shouldn't be decided on the basis of 'can I win'; a much less restrictive--and very deeply fun--philosophy should be "is this worth taking time out of my day just to annoy/frustrate/irritate those who are doing this?' If yes (it should always be yes), "So lets find out how many ways me and anyone else I can recruit can make this happen'.

In other words: every time a subreddit finds a new and interesting and stupid and ridiculous and just weird way to be irritating and embarrassing af...I am living for this.

Hard agree.

I don't really think federating with them is doomsday, tbh (though I go back and forth on this one), but that doesn't affect my primary reason for my nope. Threads consolidates everything I hate about corporate social media--and for that matter, all social media--without a single part I actually liked and made dealing with the other parts worth it. This is not a twitter clone; it's like someone asked chatGPT to create a social media network based on twitter for other chatGPT bots to talk to each other. For fuck's sake, it doesn't think its users should control what they see on their own feed.

I am perfectly willing--even eager--to perform melodramatically about things that annoy me in public for fun and when I'm bored and applaud others doing the same; it's fun times for all and possibly my favorite thing ever. This is not that.

Threads makes my skin crawl on concept. This is not 'they do not align with our values' because come on, Fediverse contains a multitude of values and invents more and i bet if asked, everyone here would list off a different set of values they believe encompass Fediverse and now I'm tempted to see because it would be hilarious. But we can't even get that far; Threads has no values. This would be a marriage of convenience to a real doll fueled by Facebook's algorithms and sponsored by Wal-Mart; whether or not it's a danger to Fediverse shouldn't even have come up because the first question that should be on anyone's minds is 'wait, this is actually a serious question?' and have been answered 'lol of course it's a joke, I just forgot to add the /s'.

I'm still waiting for that /s.

If the only reason you'll fight is because you think you can win, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Win or lose or both or nothing at all, you do it because it's worth fighting for. Sometimes this ends with Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell v. Hodges, but mostly, it won't, so if the best I can do right now is give some people a very, very bad day, well, I'm in: let's go.

So after twenty-something years on social media, along with mailing lists, messageboards, usenet, this is a topic I think about literally every time I have to add, change, migrate, delete my account as I migrated from platform to platform like some virtual vagabond between text-driven city-states. A virtual vagabond with no worldly goods, no name, no history, and completely invisible to all. To exist, I must apply to the City Leader, and if accepted, I get a name, a nice studio apartment, and visibility as well as contact with other humans after watching a short commercial every five or so humans. If I leave, am thrown out, or the city is burned down, I can't take anything the city gave me with me. By 'gave', I mean 'loaned' btw; none of those things were actually mine.

All the discussion of whether or not to federate with Threads were interesting in that in general, it's kind of pointless. A server instance isn't a democracy; the owner's opinion is the only one that matters. If you don't like it, leave. And I don't argue their right to do so; they're paying the bills, doing the upgrades, eating grapes with robot butlers, I don't know their lives. Federated means anyone can run their own not-twitter or not-reddit; go for it. All you need is money, free time, and the knowledge of how to register a domain name, get, run, secure, and maintain servers, and install and configure the program, lure people in, and avoid breaking any national or international laws. Like I said: I really seriously do not argue the owner's right to decide anything for their server. i know how to do all those things and I ran several websites and archives: I wanted a nap before installation step.

Fediverse is a massive step in loosening the stranglehold megacorporations had on our ability to shitpost in peace and talk about our cats without feeling stalked by people wanting to sell us shit or sell our browsing habits, blood pressure, and underwear size to those who will the try to sell us deeply individualized shit; it's the circle of life, man.

Wow this got long but feelings.

So at this point--two decades and change of social media, the rise and fall of social empires, so much virtual vagabonding across the virtual desert to find a new city-state....I don't think it's too early to consider getting around to a productive discussion of how we go about separating the individual identity from the community and define what is theirs to keep no matter where they are. If there was ever a place and time to start building a model, it's where all the city states are allies and the individuals can interact with each other no matter what city they're in. The account transferability in Mastodon is a really good start, but it's not a solution, much less the solution. It's a beginning.

I don't expect to have a working, finished, flawless product in six to eight weeks or six to eight months; I expect it to slide in three weeks and two days after the announcement that it's ready for alpha testing and immediately break the first time a tester opens it; it'll be another month before it goes into testing again. I expect it will be a weird buggy mess of wtf after months of virtual warfare and everyone will hate it before the rough draft of the design documents are even released. I expect there will be one weird guy who really thinks everything should be written in Rust because he's insane and never sleeps. Five to eight devs will dramatically quit; one will quietly move to Utah and farm emus. None of them will be the Rust guy; you're stuck with him. I expect the working version after testing is done will be hated by everyone and probably kind of crappy. But it will also be amazing, because as of it's release--no matter how shitty, buggy, or how many inexplicable design choices are made--the individual exists outside of being community property and that no matter where we go or how much we pissed off that admin or if our city-state was nuked from orbit, there are things that are ours and we get to keep them.

Both specific and in general 1.) Nectar mattress. The only mattresses i'd ever bought were from amazon and very on sale. Important Life Advice: whatever you have to do to make i happen, get a good mattress. Even my bed approves and it thinks everything is beneath it, including me.

2.) My bed.

Oh boy, here we go. This goddamn bed.

I bought it roughly twenty years ago and it literally took my entire tax return at my first job and then some to get it and the very first piece of furniture I personally picked out and bought for myself which may explain absolutely nothing about how I ended up like this.

It's fairly straightforward, plain four poster queen bed but so incredibly melodramatic no matter the room I put it in, this thing will dramatically not fit and carry on like it's actually in a castle tower in 1700s Frances waiting for a princess to sleep in it (it did not act like this at the store, okay). It has an unnecessary number of parts (some really could have been consolidated and a couple I'm not sure even have a function other than to add time to assembling it) every piece of it is awkward to move, even the parts that have no reason to be and don't look like they are, and every single piece is ten times heavier than than look or is reasonable, sane, or really should even be possible. The wood is dark and does a very cool dark gleaming thing, and it takes hours to clean and oil it to a soft gleam (so. goddamn. many. parts). Twenty-four hours later it's sitting there dull and dramatically telling everyone who sees it I never clean it and also use substandard wood oil

It takes a very base minimum of two people to even attempt to put it together and you better not have plans for the rest of the day because it doesn't matter how many times you have done this, somehow, you will always get six parts wrong because whoever designed this has another job making complicated puzzle locks that you will never solve and will die mad about it (this person is a sadist). Just looking at it in any given bedroom I live in, it makes me feel I should be wearing something long, white, and flowy while waiting for my angsty vampire lover to visit me in the dead of the night and not taking my night's sleep shorts and a tank top.

This bed is a snobby, judgemental asshole who acts like I didn't buy it at the goddamn Roomstore at ten percent off because it was a floor model.

But. it's a goddamn tank that's been in substandard moving vans and the backs of multiple trucks and dropped down stairs and sometimes forgets to at least look scuffed. It will survive all the wars and still give its occupants a great night's sleep. Those deceptively slim posts are strong enough to joust with a burglar, beat him to death, and then put back and rehang my very melodramatic bed curtains on them (though I'll need a little hysterical strength to hold them up for very long; I am not kidding how stupid heavy those thing are and should not be). I love this bed, it is my soulmate, and it is where I will sleep until I move to a convenient grave. I hope all of you are able to have one of these in your life and if you already do, you have my condolences; but it's ride or die now.

3.) The best headphones I can afford and a budget for potential upgrade/replace every two years (you don't have to use that timeline,but it works for me). Related: Sonos speakers. No, they are not the best in any class but they are good to really good in multiple speaker classes and are affordable--if you budget strictly and buy a piece at a time or watch for amazon sales like it's your job--for normal people.

4.) Kindle may actually be the most important single decision I have made in my life. I like books; I didn't want to use a screen. I did it and a decade and change greater with slowly degrading eyesight I bless the day I decided to try it every day. Currently on an Oasis.

5.) Giving up and budgeting specifically to pay a ridiculous amount of money for my jeans. Sure, the receipts legit horrifies me, but they fit perfectly,, are crazy comfortable, can pretty much survive anything I do to them (and I am hard on my clothes) and some have been with me since before the Obama administration and don't even have a loose thread on them. I have literally every single pair i ever bought and they still look great (and I never add up the cost of them all and what thing I could have bought with that much money, God).

Egg boiler. On the surface it's just the most gadgety pointless product invented but I literally wore it out because suddenly I could have hard boiled eggs and no risk of setting my apartment on fire because I forgot about the eggs. After I move, it's the first thing I'm getting for my kitchen because low-risk hard boiled eggs are totally worth it.

There's a lot of seemingly 'useless' kitchen gadgets like this: full size food processor, waffle maker, breadmaker, even my ridic large instapot. I don't use them every day or even every week and no, I don't need them for daily life. Yes I can mince fifty thousand vegetables for this really complicated soup by hand or make bread from scratch or do whatever you do to make a pot roast without them--but I won't do those things. I know me pretty well now; if I want to make that soup, make some fresh bread, or do that thirty-step fancy pot roast, I need those tools or I'll default to frozen pizza and maybe have fresh Italian bread if I went to Central Market recently and remembered to grab it from the bakery.

Logically, I want to say no, not really, but I also would have thought the blackout and ongoing protests wouldn't really affect Reddit and they'd ignore it. Reddit itself, however, seems incredibly determined to pursue a course of action which requires performing This Does Not Affect Us At All as dramatically and publicly as possible given the slightest opportunity whether anyone cares or not. This doesn't even include the admins playing subreddit roulette that encompasses actively rebelling subs, subs deep in malicious compliance, and subs that have no idea wtf is going on they just want to talk about their weird NSFW fetish in peace.

So no, I don't think so, but I'm beginning to wonder if Reddit thinks there is and what they're seeing on their side that I'm not.

I kind of think that's how it's supposed to go in my made-up-right-this-second knowledge of the evolution of open source Federated social media sites. Pick the largest/most active/most variety to get your feet wet and make any weird mistakes you need to make in a crowd where you're one of many and sheer speed of posting means you'll be forgotten in like, hours. Then you get comfortable and see if this is a forever-fit or just a okay-right-now fit.

I mean, I hard-bond to my first and pretty much settle immediately for life unless something is seriously awry, but even I made a backup in another one that I mirrored all my favorite communities in and I am seriously getting one more in a smaller, more specialized server. Yes, I do get the point of Federated, you do not need to explain, but here's the thing: intellectually I know that actually, the population of the Fediverse is orders of magnitude smaller than reddit or pretty much any other social media site, but feelings do not agree: Reddit was like a large, slightly hostile country with a lot of states you avoided always but especially between dusk and dawn; the scope of Fediverse is like being on a very small planet in an expanding universe you can watch growing in real time and it never stops. It's great, but there's something very unsettling realizing you're eight servers from home surrounded by kpop or wake up to find you posted in three communities in servers you don't recognize at two AM and if you can get a reputation for that kind of thing.

My ADHD is living the dream, let's go, but I can see how it would throw people a little.

You. You are my people.

I started vaping seven years ago as a way to quit smoking; I smoked my last cigarette literally outside the vape store before walking in and asking what to I buy to pull this off as nothing worked. The transition was seamless; not only did I never even crave a cigarette again, I very quickly learned to loathe the smell of cigarettes once my full range of smell came back. There's not even a temptation to start up again.

It also helps that I choose vapes that smell amazing.

I am still vaping, yes, but I'm stepping down my nicotine pretty much every two years. I started at 24 and am now at 15 (I was stuck at 18 for a while). Those transitions I can definitely feel, but I can start with adjusting my mod's wattage, air flow, use different coils for a bit, and ease into it so once I step down, there's no chance I step back up, and then reward myself sometimes with a new fancy mod with a touchscreen with more leds or a cooler tank or something. All that and I am spending an order of magnitude less than I ever did on cigarettes and I have the math to prove it.

It's certainly not ideal and yeah, it's slow and basically only progressively reducing harm, but it's a process that for me is guaranteed to work with no backtracking and progress is assured.

Yes very very much; there's so much new stuff and this is a good opportunity to expand my interests and not end up having half my subs be drama subs and read AITA until I lose my soul. But also because I'm trying to make a determined effort to be a responsible community member and post actual sentences and engage with others so it becomes a habit. Will any of those sentences make sense? No, and stop pressuring me. Being coherent is an entirely separate goal and many steps from here so back the hell off, okay?

Hello fellow humans, I am normal, friendly, and sane!

God, I never thought of that or I would have transitioned here months ago to start prepping.

Legit and I agree.

However, nothing in my experience with Reddit Admins has contradicted my impression that when they were five years old, you could give them a full screaming meltdown playing "I'm not touching you" in three minutes or less. Can I prove it if they aren't melting down regularly over some of this where I can see it? No. But I know it's happening, and that's enough.

Uh, I see a problem; where are the LAN cables? Are they...are they just using wifi?

God, I just did the set up new laptop process on Sunday; I completely forgot how insanely long everything takes to set up, update, configure, etc. Linux SBC, maybe an hour end to end; install, update, all my configs neatly in a file, ready to be copied over. Regular Linux: two hours end to end at most. You just do not appreciate the beauty of apt update/apt install quite as much as the moment you are confronted with a new Windows install.

Windows? Pretty much most of Sunday afternoon and evening. First the Dell updates, then the driver updates, then the pre-installed program updates, then the Windows updates (though not in that order and not all at once, because predictability what is that). Then I could actually start adding my programs and configuring it, and oh boy.

Just my base configuration for Office--that being each individual program in the suite, God knows--required a hunting expedition and a lot of googling to track everything down in multiple locations and I still had to do a lot of it manually; putty and kitty required copying bits of the registry; calibre I gave up as it was less work to do it myself from memory; firefox was the only thing I could just copy and paste a folder and be entirely done. That part was nice. Every other program I needed I had to track down and install separately then hunt up configs in multiple locations and Windows kept interrupting the process because oh, we forgot, here's more updates and one to three restarts. Why?

And Windows 11's start menu is just insulting; talk about salt in the wound.

I just went in for the last time and no threads, so uninstalled it.

I honestly did not realize it would bother me this much.

I've been thinking on that and assuming fosstodon and lemmy.world both agree to defederate with Threads, I'm going to go ahead and set up regular donations. I only use DW a few times a year, but I renew my premium membership every six months and it's not cheap. I want to keep supporting it because its model does not include ads at all (premium gives you lots of icons, too, and I used to be a huge icon person, so I can't say that's not a consideration). Unless I lose my job or something, I'll keep paying until death or dw closes whether I ever use it again; it's worth supporting.

I was already considering it--when i joined mastodon I bought their stickers to show my appreciation--but this is been a wake-up call. If lemmy.world decides to federate, I mean, I'm not going to leave, but I am going to email lemmy.ml about why my application is still pending and use that for my primary.

I mean, I try and test drive all new social media platforms that don't actively make my skin crawl, but. I've really bonded with it super fast, and not the way I did with Mastodon where I really sat down to make myself adapt. Don't get me wrong, I love it and pretty much use constantly, but there's always an adjustment period; the very worst was tumblr's hellscapy postingness, but reddit was a very close second. My first social media was livejournal, so for me, everything is compared to that. When I went to dreamwidth, I had enough experience scripting and remembered enough from doing web design to build my own layout and theme straight from the available source, so my friendslist there (dw: circle) is literally customized as close as my skill level then could get to exactly how I want to read, and the right sidebar is customized to only want I personally want there that aren't distracting to me, which is basically a fancier and more idiosyncratic version of my livejournal friendslist. I do me, okay.

Back to Lemmy: from the first, it was super comfortable and familiar. Community posts to the left, right sidebar, almost the exact amount of white space I need, so it was effortless to follow along and add communities and post comments. No weird distractions, nothing unnecessary or fancy to take my attention from content, and I can open up pictures directly in my feed and close them there without having to go to the community or change my scroll rhythm much. Joyous.

I just went back to DW to search for one of my posts and while there, I paused on my circle page and took a moment to realize: oh. They are not the same, no, but Lemmy is basically a less idiosyncratic minimalist version of my specific reading aesthetic; the base elements of both are the same.

(The only thing I might want to change is coloring the post titles since I'm very trained to see plain uncolored black text as text and not links, but three entirely different colors on a general feed page like this one might be a dealbreaker for me; I can adapt to seeing 'post title is link even if black' but tossing in a green or something with blue and orange in close proximity feels like a nope and I do like the blue for user and orange for community very, very much.)

So tentatively: this may be my new community-oriented home.

Sweet Roko's Basilisk, so I wasn't missing some mysterious reddit setting where I 'new' was translated as 'wtf' and 'crap'?

It's a whole new world.

I redownloaded just to check and I was able to login and can see current content. It did give me an error when I logged in and sent me to the reddit website for a second before I backed out and then all my communities showed.

Between reddit and twitter being insane I have no idea wtf is going on.

ETA: Okay I'm not logged in anymore but all my comms are still available. I do not think reddit is sober anymore and should consider a twelve step program.