Captain Aggravated

Ah the “We didn’t build a better world for our children for the benefit of the goddamn kids” attitude. My country is currently dying of that.

I think her end goal is to get a divorce. A prerequisite of this goal is to get married, and to get married she has to bamboozle some schmuck into proposing.

1. Do not think you can delta his mind. If he says he’s not ready: believe him & move on immediately.

See, it turns out that men actually do communicate pretty well, but we do it by saying aloud words that have widely agreed upon definitions that most closely resemble the ideas in our head, instead of whatever the hell it is women do. I bet the self-ignorant little bitch even accused him of “wasting her time.”

“I TOLD YOU I wasn’t looking for anything long-term.”

2. Careful what you say / how you speak to your partner.

Someone took mask off, didn’t she? Let him know she actually holds a very low opinion of him, that what she wants has nothing to do with you as a living being, probably spoken in a way that indicates she doesn’t even conceptualize you as one? Yeah. Keep the mask on at all times, ladies.

3. Try to compromise on certain timelines. You can’t have everything you want right now.

The euphemisticalness of this one is just delicious. Which specific timelines are these? Could you write down a comprehensive list of “everything you want”? I’m willing to wager the presence and company of the man you’re dating isn’t on that list, is it Miss Widow To Be?

4. Ego stroke. It works!

Until it came apart in whatever incident lead to point 2, we were seeing some success with fake compliments. Experiments shall continue.

5. No “cookie” w/o commitment. (share it with a guy you don’t really like the guy)

We’re grown up enough to have sex but we’re not grown up enough to talk directly about it even to ourselves. Intimacy with a man is not the goal, it is the means by which she intends to achieve her goal.

6. Don’t overshare or give too much too soon. Maintain the mystery

Men drop your ass when they find out what you’re really about, huh princess? Better keep them in the dark for longer.

7. No sleepovers before 90 days. Period!

Gotta find that dude who can’t find any better prospects than you within three months.

No, it drives duplicated effort on the basics, asterisks in compatibility and confusion among new adopters. We’re not innovating here; we’re talking about three parallel Reddit clones.

There’s a #10 for you: A lot of the commercial sites were new and exciting because they let you interact in ways you couldn’t before. Facebook facilitated interactions with people you knew in person, Twitter let you briefly shout at everyone in the world, Youtube became your own personal television show, Tiktok destroyed attention spans…every single Fediverse platform is a clone of one of those (plus Pixelfed is Instagram, whatever Instagram is for). To my knowledge there is no ActivityPub-based project that has a unique or innovative concept behind it, just store brand copies of pre-existing ones.

I find the best thing to do is smear my cat’s mealtimes back and forth. Feed her normally at 6, well feed her at 6:10. then 6:20. Minimizes the feline escalation; not as many things get thrown or shredded, there’s just some impatient meowing for a week or two.

Or I would have had hoops to jump through to get the lemmy.world link where that comment is (nominally) hosted. There’s a chainlink icon and a technicolor pentagram icon, neither of those do it. I either have to manually go to lemmy.world’s website, find the comment there, copy the link from there, come back to my account at sh.itjust.works and post it, or I post a sh.itjust.works link and send everyone on an indirect path. It’s…not good.

I keep saying that the choice should be meaningful; like I had no trouble picking the Peertube instance I should join because my content would fit their theme.

I’ve picked on Pixelfed’s join page in detail before at length. I think you’d be on board with my suggestions.

both SEA and Astrum for space stuff. If you like one you’ll like the other.

“To use your new iPhone, create an iCloud account.”

Gmail advertised superior features before also becoming required for using an Android device.

sure, any service gets you sneding and receiving email, but most people these days end up with an email address as a consequence of some other decision they’ve made.

Sure, a resonance cascade. That might as well happen.

There are going to be layers to this.

1. There are lots of people who are just downright too stupid. They wouldn’t be on the internet at all if Tim Apple didn’t put it in a baby baba for them to suck it out of. They use Facebook because their iPhone came with the Facebook app pre-installed.

2. There are lots of people for whom popularity is the only thing that exists. Their brain cannot function beyond “Everyone uses Twitter.” They’ll adopt this platform only after everyone else in the world does.

3. There are lots of people who have bought the propaganda. The dark web is for drug traffickers and hitmen, torrenting is for pirates, end-to-end encryption is for traitors, and Mastodon is for Linux neckbeards. You shouldn’t associate with those people.

4. There’s this weird trend where the commercial platforms are becoming hives for conservatives, so they’re probably going to stay put in their echo chambers. I have observed little to no presence of actual conservatives on this platform; beyond the horseshoe effect with the tankie crowd.

5. The culture of content consumption is not supported by the Fediverse. We don’t do algorithmic slop troughs here, and the amount of content on Peertube and Loops rounds down to zero, so it doesn’t fulfill the role of mesmerizing colors and sounds for staring at and drooling like Tiktok does or linear television did.

6. Open source software is usually a bit shit. Be it lack of budget, opinionated developers, redundant projects…we can never have one of something. Why does Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed exist simultaneously? We always end up with software that mostly works, has a lot less graphical polish, a shitty project name, a few missing key features and a couple workarounds you just have to know about. Or an intentionally godawful UI. That’ll put people off.

7. A few people who show up are going to be put off by the weirdest decision they’ll be asked to make this month: “Choose an instance, your choice doesn’t matter, just pick one.” If it doesn’t matter, why make me pick? I bet if you watched 100 people try to sign up for a Fediverse platform, at least 30 of them will balk at that stage. I’ve sat and stared at that for awhile myself and I’m one of the ones who made it through.

8. They just haven’t heard of us. Ask ten people you know in real life if they’ve heard of Lemmy, or Mastodon, or Pixelfed. I bet they haven’t, or if they have they let it pass in one ear and out the other out of apathy.

9. A few people have looked at the Fediverse, didn’t see what they wanted here, and left. If you play Satisfactory, for example, you’ll find an active subreddit where the majority of the player base and the developers of the game interact, on Lemmy you’ll find one community where exactly one person posts “daily screenshots until I get bored.” It’s easy to wander off, especially if you don’t like left wing politics, Linux and the Fediverse itself.

So are fatbergs.

I could actually see 3D TVs taking off, even with the requirement for glasses. At the time, there was a fad for 3D movies in theaters. But, they needed to have gotten with content creators so that there was a reason to own one. There was no content, so no one invested, so probably in a year or two there’s going to be some Youtubers making videos of “I finally found Sony’s forgotten 3D TV.”

There was that one time when an AI gave a pizza recipe including gluing the cheese down with Elmer’s glue, because that was suggested as a joke on Reddit once.

There will never be such a thing as a useful LLM.

…to the loud apathy of us GM owners.

Yes, along with Ram pickup trucks and IIRC Fiat, somehow.

“PLEASE use our hilariously power inefficient wrongness machine.”

Has Mexico paid for the wall yet?

<Tantacrul>

Okay, are you ready for the pain?

First, we go to pixelfed.org, and click on “Servers.” We are treated to a page that says “Find the perfect community server. Signing up on an existing server is the easiest way to get started, let us help you find the ideal server to join!” This alludes to creating your own pixelfed server, which the vast majority of users are not going to want to do. We’re talking about a public who has been accustomed to downloading an app, opening an account on the app, and having access to all the content in that app. The idea of hosting their own server at this point shouldn’t really be an idea we’re bringing up here.

We tehn get filters for “sign-up process”, because you have to apply for and be approved to some servers, filter by country, and filter by language. I mean, okay. Then we get Server Catagories: All (87) Art (1) General (8) Regional (13) Adult (4) and Uncategorized, (61). I suppose this is more honest than defaulting everyone to “General” but it’s also lazier than a dead house cat. When the vast majority of them are categorized as “Uncategorized” it gives me the feeling that the people running this shitmound don’t care about it, so I absolutely shouldn’t.

Then we get a section called Network Health, which has data that is not pertinent to choosing a server, including total photos shared, total users, active servers, and average users per server. Neat stats I guess, not relevant to choosing a server to sign up on.

The choices of server are a grid of choices that look like this:

The name/URL of the instance is at the top, with an $8 checkmark next to it which is a different glyph from the check marks in the left column talking about all the evil stuff they don’t do, so I think we’re just used to seeing check marks after names on social media, so we put them there. I can’t find one that doesn’t have that check mark so it’s completely meaningless.

Then we get a cover photo, which 9 times out of 10 is a variant on the Pixelfed logo so here’s yet another opportunity to distinguish severs squandered.

Just below that is the name/URL of the server again in a different color, just in case you didn’t read it the first time. This is just 100% wasted space.

Below this is the first 80 characters of a description that was almost certainly written to go somewhere else and has been echoed here. Several of them read “Pixelfed is an image sharing platform, an ethical alternative to centr…” Which must be some kind of default text. Many also use an identical cover image to Pixelfed.social, the instance run by the creators, so I’m assuming this is also a placeholder default. The dead cat is at it again. Those that don’t use the default boilerplate often have a description that starts with their instance name, for example “Pixelfed.art is a community driven platfrorm designed to showcase and c…” So including the cover image, pixelfed.art’s entry contains the string “pixelfed.art” a total of four times, and nearly no other information is conveyed.

Below this is a button that either says “Create Account” in white on bright lilac, or “Apply to Join” in subdued purple on dark purple, which makes the option look greyed out. People will already be unlikely to click there, and the change in shade further discourages people from trying to sign up. I suppose telling you this here in the main directory will prevent “Oh dammit you have to apply to join” but there’s just something wrong with making it look greyed out or unselectable.

There’s another button that says “More Details,” which leads to another very sparse page which shows a large version of the useless and uninformative cover image, information you probably don’t care about like the server location and establishment date, and a link that frustratingly says “More Details.” We just clicked on that, why do you want me to click it again? When you click it, you don’t get more details about the server, it scrolls down to a list of general features of the Pixelfed platform. Marketing cockshit that people’s eyes just glance off of because this is where marketing departments put all the lies.

Oh, did I mention when you click on the uppermost of the many copies of the server name, the top one in white, it takes you to the same place that the More Details button does?

This page promises to help you find the perfect server, and then offers virtually no information that would help a newcomer choose gram.social over pixey.org.

</Tantacrul>

I would suggest removing a lot of the redundant details such as the More Details button and the second copy of the instance’s name below the cover image. That would free up room for a couple more lines of description for each here on the index page.

Eliminate the Uncategorized category, maybe add a few more like “Arts, Crafts and Photography” “Lifestyles and Activities” “Fashion and beauty” “Casual, Food and Pets”. “I want to upload pictures of my cat, which category do I choose?” “I want to promote my paintings. Which category?” “I want to show off my travel pictures.”

Add a text search bar so that people could search by keyword.

As this is a list that instance admins have to apply to be on, I would suggest some requirements and/or heavy suggestions for that process:

• Do not allow default boilerplate cover images or descriptions. Make them post something. You’re an image hosting platform, you should be able to find an image the defines your community. !woodworking@lemmy.ca runs contests with their members to pick theirs, I won it once. Do that.

• Strongly suggest against using a variant of the Pixelfed logo unless that variant describes what your instance is about. Like if you have a sports-oriented instance, the Pixelfed speech bubble P logo appearing inside a sports ball is more acceptable than a P with “pixelfed.sports” next to it. Better yet, an action shot of a sportsball player making an exciting sportsball play with maybe a logo in the corner.

• Require admins to choose a category, to eliminate “Uncategorized.”

• For descriptions, provide a style guide that warns against things like mentioning the name of the instance again in the description, and steer away from all the bleeding heart hyphenated marketing wank.

BAD: Example.lol is a community-driven, open-source, cage-free, low-gluten, carbon-offset, high-estrogen, no-pressure, fuel-injected, tax-free, non-mandatory place to share photos.

GOOD: Share photos of your arts and crafts projects with our avid community of painters, woodworkers, blacksmiths, seamstresses and more!

The aim here is to present INFORMATION that can help someone new understand why they should - or should not - sign up for your instance. We’re almost perfectly failing to achieve that.