I get these scam texts all the time. It’s 100% a scam, and now that you’ve clicked it, you’ll probably get a bunch more scam in the near future, so be extra cautious.

With “drama” I was going for the built-in drive towards negativity and sensationalist stuff.

Oh I got you. Yeah. That sucks. I’m probably going to have to keep myself less informed. I spent the first year of Trump arguing with people that every little thing he did wasn’t the literal worst thing in the world. He fired a bunch of political appointees, just like every President, and it was doomsday for a week. I can’t handle the handwringing every single day.

Even late in his presidency when he actually was doing terrible shit on a constant basis was so stressful. I swear it aged me ten years. I’m not doing that shit again.

We’d need easy payment methods, value the labour of the journalists

Yeah. The incentives are all fucked up in journalism now. No one pays for just solid news, it looks like. They pay for sensational bullshit with their wallets and attention.

I think a lot of the unhealthy dynamics aren’t baked into the internet itself, but due to people making everything about money and advertising

Yeah. Any fix which comes from changing people isn’t a fix at all. We aren’t going to change except through conditioning. Maybe education but that’s such a fucking uphill battle right now itself.

Worst part is, other than some wankery in the internet, most people aren’t interested in reflecting on this or making any attempt to solve it. I’m worried we’re headed into a cycle war and conflict after a hundred years of relative peace. Maybe that will change things, though that means change is in the other side of a lot of pain and suffering (which is a great catalyst for change but I don’t want my kids or grandkids to have to go through that).

Have a good one, mate.

I’m going to go with absolutely fucking not.

2008? The year of the housing crash? Going to go with no, mate. It was not great. A lot of people hurting, myself included.

Biden did have a good economy. By all accounts he handled the inflation masterfully. Better than most other nations. Doesn’t matter because prices skyrocketed and people felt it was handled poorly. All that matters is what they make folks believe.

Republicans just strategically lie and unless the economy is literally crashing around us, “the middle” absorbs that narrative by osmosis.

Exactly this.

I don’t think so. I mean I agree with your point that economy normally means rich people, but I think mega yacht money did well under Biden. It’s the common people who felt the economy was garbage and voted for a changing of the guard.

Well I’ll disagree with one thing: I give zero shits about gossip or internet drama. I’m not oblivious to it but I don’t care about the personal drama. There are trolls and heels of course, and much is made of them, but I don’t care.

Yeah I wish the situation was better, but it’s not going to get better. You said you’re happy to have the internet as options, and that’s what killed traditional journalism. We are probably all less well informed on the big stuff and much better informed on niche things these days. This is the direction of the world. Not global community and rising tides lifting all ships, but fracturing of the zeitgeist and growing division.

Good luck, world. I don’t know how to fix you, but I have faith that coming generations will figure something out after I’m gone, even if the future looks more like the Morlocks and Eloi from The Time Machine than Starfleet from Star Trek.

We all voted for Trump in shocking numbers. Everyone to the online left, including myself, was apparently wrong about everything this election.

Well except one thing: it came down to the economy. I keep forgetting nothing else matters.

In my case it’s Apple Maps, but to the larger question, to me it’s about the web search, which they have a custom algorithm and a monetary stake in gaming the results. You can certainly look at it differently, but “Googling” to answer questions is no longer useful the way it once was.

The filter bubble is absolutely terrible. I miss the days of having basically 3 equivalent TV news channels, plus newspapers. I trusted all of them, more or less, and their audience was everyone so they were fairly balanced and reasonable. These days everyone self-sorts into one media bubble or another because it’s completely fragmented and the people in other bubbles are painful to hear (“let’s just get rid of cars and force everyone to live in big cities!” or “Let’s talk to this former paste-eater about vaccines.”). It’s not that I want to live in a bubble, it’s that people are fucking crazy and I don’t want it around me.

But Google isn’t helping any of that. Google is full of ads and SEO and most of the time I go looking for things like product reviews there’s nothing remotely trustworthy in the results. I trust Wikipedia over a generic google search about most topics.

It’s so bad, I think I could get by with about a dozen bookmarks instead of Google. The signal to noise ratio for the internet as a whole is getting awful, and Google is keeping pace.

It’s federated in name only. It would cost millions in storage and networking to set up another Bluesky node because each node is essentially a full mirror (not that you couldn’t code custom filters or something I’d guess?).

No one is ever going to bother unless conservatives want to set up their own server where they can’t be banned for trolling.

Hours and menus normally come from Maps. News often comes from social media, unfortunately. But Google rarely helps me there either. Concert tickets is probably an app or venue website (but I don’t really go to many concerts because fuck Ticketmaster).

Not that I don’t Google stuff, but it’s way less useful than it used to be.

I’m over fifty (though fuck does it feel unreal to say that).

Why the fuck can’t we make things hot without the internet? FFS

Fire: “I got you, bro.”

Look at how the Russian invasion of Ukraine was sold to Russians. That’s how it will be sold to us. Those cartels are some scary motherfuckers. Legit.

There are a lot of folks who would welcome the idea of if Mexico can’t handle them, we will.

What kind of content are you looking for? Reading every random thought of people you like, or reading every random person on a subject you are interested in?

Frankly, I’d like to be able to follow a combination of people and subjects, but that’s hard because if I’m a techbro promoting my business by showing off some code, is that marketing or technical content?

One way or the other, you have to mentally filter out posts that don’t interest you.

I like subject-based content like Lemmy and Reddit, but it’s also nice to feel like part of a community where people (kinda) care about you as a person. In order to achieve that here, you need to be in a small community or a prolific enough poster that people get to know you. I also don’t like that microblogging tends to push real names and selfies and stuff—I value my anonymity. I don’t have to worry about someone from work feeling a certain way because I play Dungeons and Dragons or have trans friends or have the occasionally cathartic apoplectic political rant.

One nice thing about Mastodon is you can follow a hashtag and sort of get the best and worst of both worlds. I wish Bluesky offered that. Maybe they will in the future. They do offer custom feeds, but it’s not as simple as just pinning a hashtag in Mastodon, but otherwise I think Bluesky is a lot easier to use. Creating lists of people is easy. I haven’t yet looking into how to create a feed like “Star Wars posts”. Other people have but I don’t know exactly how they function.

Laws can only do so much. The founders knew that. They are just words and paper.

We the people chose this. Why and how are moot. We didn’t hold our leaders accountable. Now, we see how far Trump will go, because there are no actual checks on his power. He can literally drag Congress members into the street and shoot them without consequences. And half the country will cheer.

Snek sees what you’ve done there.

I like subject vs identity because I enjoy discussing issues and I enjoy seeing familiar people in the discussions, but I don’t like being followed and following is hard for me. I might love your thoughts on Star Wars but you also post a lot of cat pictures which I’m neutral about and sports which I don’t like.

So if I follow you and see those three subjects, two posts I have to cognitively tune out. If I follow a Star Wars board, I get your thoughts and potentially two other people’s thoughts in those same three posts.

I like that. On Bluesky (or TwX/Mastodon) I have to find people who mostly post about things I want to see. It’s hard and it’s not conducive to massive follow/follower counts which is normally the measure of success.

I also find myself feeling constrained to only post things my followers are interested in, because as an individual I’m just not that fascinating. So I post less and less as my follower count goes up.

Because of all that, subject vs identity is the most natural way to divide up social media to me. I’d be happy to brainstorm other ways, though.

To hear it told on Bluesky, it’s the better blocking tools and the culture of “we don’t have to put up with these assholes.”

shrug

I’ve been off Twitter for years and even before that I probably posted less than a half-dozen times per year. I mostly prefer subject-based social media (here) over identity-based, but I’m looking to surround myself with people who talk about something other than politics because the last Trump presidency I just couldn’t handle the constant tide of horrors.

I just need somewhere to escape all that and if not, I’m going to be in a really mentally unhealthy place for the next four years.

I just bought Govee lights this year and put them up. It was a couple hundred dollars vs $4800 for professional permanent lights. I don’t know how long they’ll last, but I know I’m getting too old to be climbing on my roof.

Overall I like the lights, but I have nothing to compare them with. They’ve been up since just before Halloween.

This is something else made so much worse by wealth inequality. The very wealthy have a vastly outsized influence on every aspect of the world. Being a billionaire, no matter how well-intentioned, is inherently a negative for humanity.