Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

All the recent stuff over on Bluesky about them refusing to ban Jesse Singal from the platform, in spite of all the protestations from the trans users that made Bluesky what it is, makes me feel that I was right first time back in 2022: that profit-driven social media is always going to turn out this way, and maybe the Fediverse really is the way ahead for us, despite its many flaws

Some real weird following shit going on over at Bluesky. Because of how feeds are integrated centrally into the app, a lot of folks really only scroll through a specific feed rather than their entire following list.

As a result, tons of folks are mass following folks (I'm talking 25k, 60k, 90k people) just to get their own follower numbers up due to some people following back just because.

But in my experience, engagement is much less there than here. I've even seen people with thousands of followers more than me who get little engagement with their posts, have to repost em a few times, etc.

Real weird behavior. Bluesky tires me out sometimes due to this. I've posted before about how it almost feels charged and the energy is so frenetic. Or maybe I just got used to the fediverse and having no company trying to force me to spend as much time as possible on their platform. Idk

you know, for all my flammability, i am not much of an enjoyer of fights. oh no, gee, of course not. it would be so nice if everything was solved over an honest, vulnerable conversation and a cup of green tea. love, peace, candy cones and all that fluff.

but that's for those who actually listen.

you think we hadn't tried?

people did, and then you ignored them, or slandered them, stomped on their throats even harder for even daring to talk.

you know, i find some kind of sinister joy in the way those news anchors are reacting to how we cheer on that leech's death.

"people are really angry and hopeless with the state of things, but violence has never solved anything. nonviolent protest is always better than a violent protest"

ow-ow-ow, не әңгіме? what's the matter, what happened? did our champagne sippers and suit wearers defecate in their silk trousers after realising they're made of meat too? heh. such pity.

You know that thing where you expect that something is true or will happen, and then it doesn't and that really trips you up? Like maybe you were looking forward to getting a treat from your favourite bakery, and when you get there you find that they closed early for some reason, and you're just not sure how to handle that for a moment? Is there a word for that?

@joepie91 oh for real if anything it has united people. I was literally giggling about it with my pain management provider as I left the office yesterday after we discussed the uprising that would happen if Dr. Oz took away everyone’s pain medication. We don’t usually giggle about anything, but we were yesterday.

@joepie91 NPR ran a headline on Luigi Mangione that actually said "Here's what he missed" and I just laughed out loud. Luigi could have wiped out every single attending shareholder and executive with a fuel-air bomb and still wouldn't have equaled 1% of the needless death and misery these "insurance" companies cause every single year. Yet the moral contortionists staffing NPR are here overexerting themselves to pretend out loud that he didn't have an obvious point.

@joepie91 It's very clear to me now that when some outlets say an issue is polarized, what they mean is that the public and a few key talking heads are in disagreement about a topic, and that Sucks™

The AI hype train is reaching predictably ridiculous extremes in a desperate attempt to force acceptance of its “inevitable” narrative, and it’s partly because credulous journalists who should absolutely know better by now happily platform the worst of this nonsense.

https://loudpoet.com/2024/12/13/the-ai-in-publishing-hype-train-needs-to-be-derailed/

Rarely has manipulation of the public opinion by media outlets, been as obvious as with the UHC CEO assassination.

There's no end to articles decrying widespread "polarization" on the matter that simply doesn't exist, opinion pieces full of non-sequiturs and strangely aggressive pearl-clutching that is totally out of character for the outlet that publishes it, or direct copy-pastes of statements from politicians, cops and executives that are superficially laundered as 'news'.

If you've ever been in doubt about whether the media is there to inform and support the public or just to protect the established power structures, well, here's your answer.

The discover feed is a powerful default on #bluesky - but only if you are using the bsky-provided PDS. @gabboman and I compare screen captures of the new user onboarding flow on the default PDS vs. on his PDS and confirm that the discover feed is only visible by default when one makes an account on bsky's PDS. I personally can't make my default feed be anything except discover even when following is the highest priority.

This is more important than a simple default because a) it's conspicuously one of the only closed-source parts of bluesky and b) it is the most obvious revenue stream: you can't sell ads in a choose-your-own-feed system. The dissociation of behavior by PDS - aside from showing that the platform behaves differently depending on your PDS, which is interesting in itself - hints at the leverage that they have over hosted data and app experience at a very granular level.

Fedi-friends, I wanna buy a phone that runs Linux, but I don't want to deal with anything installation related, flashing microSD, flashing bios, whatever.

I would like to receive the phone with a Gnome-based shell already installed and ready. Are there ANY options on the market? If I could, I would absolutely buy a Fairphone 5 with postmarketOS today.

”Do you reckon someone has ever gone to see the band Placebo, thinking it was The Cure?”

(source: abcelya on Instagram)

Aagh 😆

#tööttiläpät

I do think that public broadcast of content makes sense to some degree, but trying to make the "global context collapse firehose" healthy doesn't feel, to me, where efforts should go.

It's fine for people to keep working on it, but I'm more interested in contextual communication, public and private