A dizzying number of notable people and people in my personal life have hopped onto Threads, day 1. The “fuck Elon / Twitter” sentiment and generally good vibes to this point mirror the experience I had here when I hopped onto Beehaw and we also had similar optimism and a “fuck u/spez” sentiment. But the major difference I see is this — for the sake of sticking it to Elon these folks are getting themselves even further entangled in Zuck’s world, and we’ve already seen the monsters that emerge from that muck.

Any social network that builds up a massive, general userbase inevitably enshittifies as the marketers / advertisers / influencers and otherwise self-promoters get their content boosted. With its extremely close ties to Instagram, those sorts of users will be ramped up on Threads in no time, and this period of positivity with fade in turn as that content starts getting vomited out and funneled to everyone.

The independent Fediverse is not without its faults, but I’m much more comfortable building community within this coalition of a space than in any of Meta’s creations.

I’m very much a rocky road / cookie dough / moose tracks kinda fella!

Reddit ramble: I nuked my reddit history of 16 years (as of this upcoming July 10) without thinking to download it first. I was a bit saddened at first, because I realized that my reddit history was about as close to a diary as I had kept from the time I was a high school senior. Given digital footprint and whatnot, I’m sure it’s mostly for the best that it’s all in the ether now. The now bare profile is a decent if bittersweet deterrent keeping me from hopping right back onto that site. But! I did remember that I had another handle that I used as my primary for a handful of years (got locked out of it, so I went back to my original one), so I have those vignettes of myself to look back on.

I’ve had good experiences with Castbox.

Oh man, ain’t that the truth. I really gotta make a point to get a backup of all my photos from Google Photos onto a hard drive one of these days. Problem is, Google Takeout batches only last about a week or so and I have a very hefty amount of data to get out. The alternative is to download it month by month, year by year, which I’m not looking forward to doing at all.

Yes and no. Yes, there is no Fediverse-wide admin to moderate content since everything is decentralized, but instances and their subcommunities do, and each one is free implement their own rules. We’re on Beehaw, which is pretty strongly committed to fostering a community with a positive culture and tone, and while there is a good amount of leeway for free discussion (from what I’ve seen in just 2 weeks here), I imagine getting too vocal about wishing that kind of thing might get attention from the Beehaw mods at some point.

Not that I don’t fully understand your emotions.

I saw somewhere recently (don’t remember if it was on Lemmy, reddit, or elsewhere), where a couple of folks were getting into it because a FOSS contributor didn’t recognize the importance of accounting for accessibility in design. They thought that projects as whole did not have a responsibility to account for those design considerations, and that anyone who wants to see those implemented have to do it themselves. While technically the truth in that this is all effectively volunteer work and developers work on what they want to work on, it’s something that could be alleviated by making it a core value of FOSS development. Asking questions like:

• This is a point-click-drag interaction, but how would a person do this with a keyboard only?
• These two components are identified using color, but what if a user is colorblind?
• There are buttons labeled with iconography only, but what if a user cannot see it and uses a screen reader to interact with everything?

It’s tough because the disability community in aggregate face steeper financial hurdles for a number of reasons, and could perhaps benefit the most from freely available, accessible tech.

I know it’s the name of the little alien, and it’s cute and all, but I’ll never be able to read that name and not think of bone-crushing Amazonian snoo-snoo from Futurama.

It’s hardly been 24 hours, but this is the most engaged I’ve felt in an online space in years. I’ve gone on a k.bin/Lemmy/Mastodon tear over the past day, exploring instances and looking for the one that I vibe with the most. So far I’ve been very happy with Beehaw as my home base, and love that I still have access to the communities on the other instances as well. It takes a slight bit of effort to find communities and make sure that I’m subscribed to them on this account, but I’ve actually found some satisfaction in the process.

Sure, there’s a low volume of content compared to the old place, but if I wanted a constant barrage of content I could just go back to RSS readers and have my fill. It’s the discussion and sense of connection that has made it worth investing my time here.

Same but with American Truck Simulator!