Andrzej3K [none/use name]

I still use Mastodon — as a place to dump intrusive thoughts more than anything — but there is this huge tension between people who want to chat with randoms, people who only want to chat with friends, and people who want to use it purely as a broadcast medium. The protocol/convention doesn’t really allow for managing this issue, which is a shame, but I have come to the conclusion that microblogging is just kind of cursed as a medium. It’s fundamentally all about building a personal brand, and if you have no social capital you are shit out of luck. And if you have too much, well, enter the reply guys.

Lemmy/the Reddit model on the other hand strikes a good balance between anonymity and being able to vet odd characters. Different people want different things ofc, and that’s fine, but I find I have more fruitful conversations here than on Mastodon.

It’s a great format. 45 minutes of procedural intrigue, then a load of guys in balaclavas bust in and fuck everything up for the last quarter hour

Me too! The sad thing is that the whole system is set up to prevent people from being able to really choose what to watch. Even within a liberal framework, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the optimum system would be something like ‘person decides they want to watch a show with x characteristics, they discover options based on user reviews or a Wikipedia deep dive or w/e, then they click play and the appropriate rights holder is compensated’. It’s never just been about compensation though. They can’t have users going straight for the good stuff, otherwise what will they do with all the slop?

It makes me very sad tbh. My Dad watches movies all the time, but it’s always some average-to-poor Netflix original, because that’s what the app surfaces for him.

I still use Gboard but I feel like it’s got a lot worse in recent years

So glad I ignored the hype and stuck with usenet

In anglo-Christian culture ghosts were explained away as souls in purgatory, and this led to a Catholic/Protestant split wrt whether they existed or not, because Prots denied the existence of purgatory. They are still religiously problematic really — think about how often the ‘ghosts’ in American media turn out to be demons in order to keep things in line with scripture.

I personally believe there’s something much more terrifying implied in the English folk-tradition though: a spirit bound to the last physical vestiges of their time on earth, going through the motions as what little is left of their mind after the trauma of death unravels completely. They’re dead — it’s over. They can still do the things they did in life, but it doesn’t mean anything anymore.

Obviously there are very powerful resonances here for anyone who has witnessed a person sicken and die.

Bluesky is more like Twitter, and Twitter users prefer Twitter to Mastodon

What a strange question

Hit yourself in the testicles with a cartoon mallet, then rethink your priorities