… when the need exists.

Like you already said, it’s much easier to separate needs from wants when you just don’t go to Amazon. It was a real eye opener for me, how I could just add a tiny bit of friction to my “customer journey” (just don’t automatically start my search on Amazon), and my desire for the object would usually just … evaporate.

Like a fey mood had overtaken me, but I managed to shake it.

I guess that’s consumerism.

That’s vertical integration, and the end result for a virus like Amazon is that, left unchecked, they own everything.

I mean they can make it… don’t think anyone would federate with them, though.

Look how they deep fried my boy.

That’s people just sharing their opinion freely. Word of mouth chatter is definitely not the same as advertising or even influencing, though of course they try to be.

It’s not just ad-free, it’s actively anti-corporate, anti-advertising, even anti-monetization. I would go so far as to say even anti-content in some ways. That’s a cultural disconnect that goes beyond tooling.

Rofl, Romeo and Juliet is like the definition of a tragedy.

God yeah, I’ll be like half way through an article before realising it’s just padding out some very surface level details about what I’m looking up. Like the top 3 interesting things about the topic, but never an actual novel, like, human take.

I get what you’re saying. This stuff hinges on essentially finding small businesses to run, for example, a commercial PeerTube instance. And then leave it up to the rest of the fediverse if they want to federate with them.

I don’t think any of us, or the current devs, would be the ones to add this commercial functionality just because we’re not the sort to chase those types of incentives. But who knows, maybe some business will develop a plugin or peertube wrapper, or hell just a whole new thing, and see if anyone federates. 🤷

The journalist does the leg work to produce novel news.

Just to add that in addition to novelty, journalists provide valuable services, like

• holding up a mirror to the present culture
• documenting and disseminating happenings
• packaging up events into narratives

Not to say that you weren’t including these in “novel news,” but just to make it explicit.

Agreed. The only thing I actually miss is geographically local contacts. But as far as just culture and discourse goes - I’m good.

I feel like this is comparing the mall to the park.

They both attract people, but not always the same people, or for the same reasons. And that’s OK.

I get what you’re saying though, because I’ve felt this way when trying to come up with reasons for people (sole proprietors) to get with the fedi, but maybe this place is just not for influencers - not like the corp platforms, anyway. I think the fediverse will attract more and more people with its network effects, but probably never all of the people all of the time.

My modest hope is that the fedi bleeds the big platforms just enough to put them in their place and keep from enshittifying to infinity.

God I feel so bad for people even just trying to learn stuff online now.

10 to 20 years ago we had a lot less content, but when you did find a hit on your search, you could be much more confident it contained meaningful information. Rather than just the official documentation repackaged across 10 different “articles.”

I like that, or something like that. “Server” and “instance” definitely sounds too prickly and technical to a lot of people.

Depending on the instance, you might have to put a little more work into it. Not that I’m saying that’s a problem - in my eyes that’s a feature.

I’m actually a fan, but I get what you mean. I feel like she just writes what’s on her mind, when she’s writing for her named website. Her writing for The Index is a bit more by the books internet journalism.

And yeah I agree sharing this on here is a bit of a circle jerk, but articles like this get shared around in the mainstream and show people still captured by the big platforms another way. I’ve definitely emailed a couple of her articles around to friends, and I can’t be the only one.

You navigate from your local instance. So like you just use hyperlinks (like here on lemmy, I’m clicking around, but my URL still shows slrpnk.net/... - yours probably shows sh.itjust.works/...), or if you try to do something like follow/reply/boost/etc on another instance, it’ll prompt you to connect from your own.

So like here I’m looking at a post on mastodon.social, which I don’t have an account on. If I just type in my home instance in the pop-up modal there, then it’ll complete the action from my home instance. If you’re already signed in on home instance with a cookie then it’ll to it automatically.

It’s so much free speech that it loops around and becomes censorship. 🤷

Any networked device can be used to gain access to the rest of the network (kind of).

… so many games have broken graphics that only look good when taking promotional screenshots.

This is a huge pet peeve of mine, especially when looking at the screenshots or even videos of a game.

You’ll be looking at the store page for like a top-down strategy game, and all they show are a bunch of cinematic closeups of character’s faces with FXAA 99999 and 0 screenshots showing the UI. Bro, that is NOT what playing the game looks like.

I want to see the UI. I Like The UI. I like the strategic camera angle. I am an ACTUAL FAN of this genre and have willingly put myself in your sales funnel - show me the features of the actual game that I want to purchase and play, please.