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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)SC
Posts
11
Comments
1,666
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • I'd argue perhaps the opposite: if you want full moderation and admin freedom, running it on your own instance is the only way to do it.

    If you run it on someone else's server, you're subject to someone else's rules and whims.

    Granted, I have zero reason to think the admins of any of those listed instances would do anything objectionable, but that's today: who knows what happens six months or a year or two years from now.

    Though, as soon as you start adding stuff to your personal instance, you're biting off more maintenance and babysitting since you assumably want your stuff to be up 100% of the time to serve your communities, so that's certainly something to consider.

  • They're offering to pay you to watch ads, same as what Brave does.

    You're going to get people who fall for the "free money" aspect, same as always.

    (Also replacing a site's ads with their ads is exactly the same shit Honey is doing, so it's nice to see that the founder has a single idea and is going to keep going after it.)

  • The biggest thing I've started not doing (stopped doing? whatever) that's helped me is spending any time using search engines to find things.

    If I'm looking for something I try to find some sort of forum, or irc channel, or discord group, usenet group, or message echo or whatever and just ask what's (probably) still an actual person.

    Maybe google would be faster but holy crap has my quality of shit-i've-found online gone way the hell up once I stopped asking a computer to send me to something obscure or old or odd, because every search engine has basically decided to go all slop, all the time now.

    The only drawback is if I'm asking someone a question about OS/2 on an echo, it might take me a couple of days until some greybeard comes back with an answer, but so far it's been 100% accurate shit, rather than either nothing useful, or incorrect slop.

    It also fixes that weird thing where the internet feels like nothing but bots and AI slop generators, because you're in a situation where you can almost 100% be certain the person you're talking to is still actually a human and it also leads to lovely conversations about other shit, and really brings back the feel of the "old" internet before it got infested with big tech who capitalism-ed it into a pile of garbage.

  • It's almost stopped me buying ANY games, at all.

    At some point within a year or few of a release the odds of anything I find interesting showing up for free on epic is damn near 100%.

    It's the ultimate patient gamers bit: wait 2 or 3 years and that game you want will be $0.

    (It's why my epic library is now bigger than my steam library, despite spending $0.)

  • I'd argue the problem is that Hollywood has lost the ability to make cheap movies, and thus if it doesn't gross a billion dollars, it's a flop.

    A stupid example, I'll admit, but I think most people will agree was good: The Breakfast Club. It had a $1 million budget, which isn't shit even adjusted for inflation (about $3 million).

    Maybe they should find people who can make a movie for less than a hundred million and see if they come up with any winners?

  • That's probably true, though I'm not sure who has ever actually made a legitimate determination since you'd have to remove the non-humans from the numbers first and, well, Reddit isn't going to tank their MAU numbers by ever releasing that kind of stat.

    It's also not helped once you hit a certain size and the nature of scale takes over and the level of toxicity goes up: even in small groups, when a new person shows up and asks the same question for the 20th time, they start taking shit for it. If you're in a BIG group, it turns into a giant dogpile, and people stop asking questions because who the hell likes that kind of response, so you end up with a lot of people who are subscribed to something, but none of whom actually contribute at all.

  • A Lemmy community with 100 active members is more likely to be 100 active humans than a subreddit with 10,000 members is, based on the last time I went to Reddit: it was so, so clear that everything was either ChatGPT, or a repost of shit even I had already seen, or was just otherwise obviously not an authentic human sharing something interesting.

    So yeah, not entirely surprising.

  • It makes a gross kind of sense: the foods with vitamin C are going to be fresh fruits and vegetables. Which are fairly expensive, relative to cheap processed food that doesn't happen to contain vitamin C.

    So, this is about how poor people are getting a disease that's caused by not being able to buy what is somewhat more expensive foods and sounds properly peak capitalism to me.

  • US yes, maps no.

    There are less dumb dumbphones that do a bit more, but I went for quite literally phone-calls-and-sms-only.

    I have navigation in the car that works fine, so I personally don't need that, and am using an iPod, so I don't need any media functionality.

    The camera is shit, but again, if I'm going somewhere specifically to take pictures then I've got a reasonable DSLR.

    Like I said, not for everyone but works great for what I want and makes it where I basically spend zero time on the internet unless I explicitly sit down at my desk.

  • I'm with you on phone reduction, and I'm closing in on like 8 months of using a dumbphone.

    If you're really serious about removing distractions, a Nokia that feels like it fell out of 1996 is a shockingly good way to do it.

    A bit harsh, perhaps, for a lot of people and I won't deny there's a lot of compromises you have to make, but if your goal is to reduce distractions and be in the present, it's pretty much the gold standard.

    No social media, no group messages, no email, no push notifications, no advertisements masquerading as 'important', nothing. If you want me you can call or text, and if you don't want to do either then I guess whatever it was turned out to not actually be that important anyways.

    Also mine lasts like 10 days on a charge, and doesn't cost $1000.

    My compromise to survive in modern society was an iPad mini. It's loaded down with all the crap my phone used to have, but it's also something I do not take to bed or out of the house, so I can still do banking apps and totp 2fa, and take and send pictures via email and all that stuff without it being a device that's attached to my hip most of the time and thus in easy reach of noise and nonsense.