Nah, they'll just fix the excess inventory with another contest! It worked really well last time!

It still sucks though. It doesn't play nice with dark mode on Windows at all. I've been trying to get away from Google docs and I was hoping Libre would be a decent alternative, but it just feels bloated and clunky in comparison. I really wish it didn't.

If anyone has alternatives I'm all ears.

We really need to do this. Leave them to their own devices and let them reap the results of their politics instead of shielding them.

Right! Even where you can monetize your hobby, if you're not in it for the sake of your own personal passion, what's the point?

Great art comes from passion and artistic integrity, not from trying to slap together some garbage to make a buck. If you happen to make money in the process, awesome, but if that's your whole motivation it's going to come across in your work and put a bit of a stink on the whole endeavor.

There's a world of difference between art being enabled by commerce and art being created for the money. The second is self-defeating.

I'd say it's more that we've been paying out the nose in the form of offering up our data and digital autonomy, and by allowing not only the Internet but our societies at large to degrade and polarize. We've paid dearly for our 'free' services, in the case of the US with everything from our reproductive rights to our connections with our own families and communities.

I'd much rather pay the price of an extra latte now and then for real internet communities than deal with actual Nazis and orbital Teslas for some shitty undermoderated ad feeds infested with trolls, AI, and literal societal saboteurs on the payrolls of Putin and Winnie the Pooh.

I could see a legitimate service being made out of something like an extra private lemmy, or a lemmy with additional features. Sort of like you'll see these suites of services from Proton or Nord. Yeah, i can set up my own SMTP server, even encrypt my data, but it's a lot easier to pay a few bucks to have a reliable service do it.

With federated services eventually becoming mainstream, i wouldn't be surprised to see some companies offering packages that do things like provide additional privacy or larger amounts of storage.

Or like I'd imagine sustainable video hosts will have to monetize somehow just to pay for the storage space.

This is a big part of the shift in mentality that needs to happen. Something doesn't have to be the biggest to be better. We don't need millions of concurrent users per server to enjoy connecting with other people and sharing ideas and art.

Like, a local cafe doesn't need to beat the profit margins of a Starbucks, it just needs to make ends meet. And it's probably a lot better experience in the process.

It really does sometimes seem like a lot of people just go through life working and killing time. There are definitely people living their lives for themselves, but I think it's a pretty foreign concept for some folks who've bought heavily into a commerce-focused culture.

Or maybe some branch of Operation Mindfuck is converting rich silicon valley cryptobro jackasses into useful idiots to trigger an open source social media revolution.

This right here. Honestly, if we're taking the time to hop platforms and start bolstering the next wave of popular sites and services, why make the same mistake again as the last time around?

No matter how much a company talks about how ethical they want to be or how much they value doing the right thing for their clients, once money enters the picture on a wider scale and people start looking in the direction of an eventual IPO, everything goes to shit.

Meanwhile, IRC is still working just fine. No degradation of services after decades. You can still throw your own ircd up on a $3/mo VPS and be golden.

Moving everything to open source, decentralized platforms can only be a boon for all of us in the long run. Anything less is just kicking the problem down the road a little.

Oh! I feel like I'd cramp up with an index mouse, but that's neat!

I love my Ergo, honestly. The programmable buttons are really nice, and i like the horizonal scroll wheel leaning. Plus the angle is a lot more comfortable than their other ball mice.

What's really made a difference for me though is the precision mode button. It's upped my graphic design game in a major way! It honestly feels kind of like having a half-assed tablet as far as the more precise control goes! It's waaay easier to draw with, though if i were doing more freehand stuff (and could draw for shit) obviously a tablet would be better.

The Ergo has been my daily for few years now, and some iteration of Logitech's style of thumb ball since about 2004, I'll never go back!

I asked though because i was curious to have a point of reference for looking at the differences. What do you like about the Huge?

Thumb ball gang! What mouse is that? Have you tried Logitech's MX Ergo? If so, what do you like about yours?

Seems like the system is working just fine!

Doing that on Jerboa right now. It's great!

Choice is the point of federation.

Being able to create spaces according to your needs without having your hand forced by anyone is kind of the point of the Fediverse. Beehaw can cultivate a community that fits what they want, just like Lemmy.world. That's what it's for.

There's nothing stopping you from registering on Beehaw if you want to post there and contribute to that community. But without being able to detach themselves from instances that have open registration, there's no way to even slow trolls down. Banning would be meaningless, because you can register as many accounts as you could want.

The point of the Fediverse is decentralization and choice where the default options have been a bland toxic mess.

Personally, I enjoy both the more cultivated environment of Beehaw and the bigger community feeling of Lemmy.world, so I registered with both Beehaw and Lemmy.blahaj.zone so that i can post and read whatever.

It's not about what's better, it's about choice.

I completely forgot about web rings, and that's honestly a great example. It really does feel like we're getting a little piece of the old Internet back; spreading out and bringing back that individualized experience. And yet the connectivity of the fediverse has the potential to give us some of the good parts of the modern Internet.

A few years down the road this will probably be looked at as a transformative time for the Internet, for better or for worse. Given the negative impact of so called 'web 2.0' social media, I'd say getting away from it could have as far reaching positive impacts as getting tied into it had toxic results.