That’s about how it went for me. This is pretty much my home instance, but I also keep an account on a more local lemmy for chatting with the townies.

Also experimenting with my own instance. Still workin out the kinks.

There’s a donator page? I wonder if I’m on there…

EDIT: Oic, just scroll down here.

Nice of the .world admins to donate a hundred/mo. Didn’t know that.

What a trend setter!

End of an era 🥲

Although usually the tide rolls back down for a while with one of these Septembers, as some newbies just don’t click with their instance for whatever reasons. Still, it seems inevitable that it will tip over that threshold, and stay there, one day.

Definitely. Another similar trick I used to do was to write down the objects in my agenda under “things I wanted to buy.” Sometimes just the act of writing it down gave me the feeling of having fulfilled the desire in some weird way.

I remember duplicate communities seemed like it would be a problem, until you experience it and realise it’s actually a feature of the fediverse.

I was just so used to the centralised mentality. I honestly have a hard time putting myself back in that headspace…

… 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.

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.