I have been using “social software” for decades now. In the early 90s I ran a single line BBS networked across Canada and USA (every modem in the network called the nearest modem and we shared posts this way). I went to friendster (before that “makeoutclub”, if anyone remembers that thing), myspace, then piled onto facebook like everyone else.

The only thing that seems to make a social media tool relevant is when a critical mass of young people, in that 15-30 demo, decides that it’s time to adopt a new social media platform. This has been because they want a place away from their families, but there’s also all kinds of memetic reasons behind it that have nothing to do with function.

Young people need to flood to open source, distributed networks like Lemmy. I don’t mean to be a token old guy and speak poorly of an entire generation, but I’m not impressed with the embracing of Tiktok, Facebook and reddit. I find it hard to take anyone with a cause who inhabits these spaces seriously. I told my niece about why Facebook sucks, and she said “that’s so boomer.” Like, wtf?

So yeah. Young people, stop using twitter and all that junk. I promise if you come here I’ll go somewhere else.

The author has 4 other pieces written, and before that she wrote for Gawker, New York Magazine (like not even the Times) and GQ. I’m going to venture that there’s some nepotism going on somewhere.

Just wait till copper goes up in value a little bit. In the 00’s gangsters were melting pennies down by the ton for the small amount of copper in them. Wouldn’t call them “trash” exactly…

The “left” in the United States is much further right on the global median. The Democrats are barely a center-left party on the global political spectrum.

Traditionally, at least since the Reagan Coalition was formed, the Democrats have functioned as a Republican-regulation party, the safety valve of rightwing ideas. The Republicans have put all of their chips on the Reagan Coalition, which they know is a tent with limited accommodations for the non-white non-rightwing. Both of these strategies have weaknesses that we can see cracking open in real time.

The Democrats, by comparison, are a much bigger tent of a party, and regional pressures and interests make it much harder for them to break the mold. There are still Democrats that identify as “conservative,” if you can believe that, and a substantial amount of them, too. There used to be “liberal Republicans,” but that number has dwindled into near-zero %.

I’m not in any way forgiving these dissenting senators for destroying what little health care Americans have. If there were any time in history where any one senator could choose to go rogue and still get re-elected, it’s now.

I didn’t mean Trump was a black swan in a historical sense, that nobody could have predicted him. And yes, Trumps have nearly taken over before.

I meant it as a black swan in the sense that nobody could actually predict how such a takeover would change “the Overton window” the OP was talking about. Even though we’ve always known Trump-style rhetoric was simmering just below the surface-- as in whenever some conservative would make a half-assed argument about racism from the perspective that they actually cared, not out of any concern for race or the damage of racism, but as a kind of jokey game, self-referencing just how much they didn’t give a shit or think that it was an issue.

For example, when King County, Washington changed the inspiration for the county name to Martin Luther King. Originally it was named for William King, the VP under Franklin Pierce. Popular opinion has it that the latter King was probably in a gay relationship with James Buchanan, and conservatives launched a campaign against the name change, citing it was “homophobic” to do so, as if they actually gave a shit about MLK or homophobia. They no longer have to play these little games, it’s totally fine for a popular conservative to say more or less whatever the hell they feel like saying about race, gender, sexuality, science, religion.

And now, apparently, it’s suddenly okay to use the “socialist” word. It certainly wasn’t before Trump.

Whatever happened to the 12 Jasons? They used to stop things like this. I imagine they were disbanded by the regime.

Overton Window

I like the concept of the Overton Window (thanks for teaching it to me). However, I don’t think anything quite fits in any predictable threshold of acceptable ideas right now. Trump is such a black swan, it’s almost like we’re defining the window in real time… If things weren’t so horrible, it would be an exciting time to be alive.

Cuban-Americans are very split politically. Actually, every Latino nationality has varying political belief patterns when it comes to voting in the USA.

Older Cubans tend to be conservative because they were driven out by Castro and the Republicans were more aggressive toward Castro, also, some were rightwingers in Cuba and many of them rather terrible people and they naturally like to carry their ideology over from their homeland.

Their children do not vote the same way as much, their grandchildren are majority on the other end.

Sparks agrees.

MacOS has more than sandboxed… they are basically removing the ability of a user to do anything to their computers. I can’t fix my dad’s imac (I used to fix my own macs), they are impenetrable… They’ve more than “sandboxed” apps, they’re forcing all but previously established powerusers to take their dying overpriced lumps to the Apple store. This, they say, is “good for you.” I loved Apple for 8 or so years. Hate them to death now.

My 9-year-old quad-core running Mint MATE 22 boots up faster than both my dad’s 2-year old iMac and my 6-core PC running Win11. And I can tell you what every process running is doing… bonus.

again, if you think osx is free you are deeply, cripplingly ignorant of how Apple makes money.

What? No. Your “payment” to Apple continues as you use OSX.

You don’t need to pay “Linux” anything (though you can donate to distros and app devs if you’re a sweetie).

You don’t even need to pay for a computer. You can steal one or find one in the garbage. Apple hates recycling hardware, that’s why they sue 3rd party Apple repair and maintenance shops. I used OSX for a decade. They were cool for a little while, being somewhat novel for adopting a UNIX-like as their backbone, but that goodwill and logic is long dead.

I hate them as much as I hate Microsoft, perhaps even more, because not only have they abandoned the ideals they marketed in the 00’s, they are draconian in their enforcement of their control. Their planned obsolescence is absolutely criminal. They embezzle tens of billions of dollars overseas to avoid taxation. And Tim Cook now blows Donald Trump for breakfast.

To hell with Apple and their whole shitty thing.

One thing you might notice is that flatpak defaults to “system” installs. Is your root system directory filling up? You probably want to start installing onto --user, as this will put things in /home where they belong and, by default, sandbox permissions away from root (that, too, can be easily changed).

Also, don’t fear mixing different ways of installing. I use AppImage, Flatpak, the default app-get install method, and .deb. FlatPak at this point is the best, because it offers the ease of use of AppImage, but the flexibility and auto-maintenance of apt-get/Software Update. The only problems I’ve encountered were due to me not understanding that it was filling up my root partition by default…

I’ve been running Mint MATE for about 9 years. Love it to death.

A sidestory to this is that Flatpak and AppImage have been miraculous boosts to Linux OS machines. After I figured out that ya gotta throw the --user flag into your flatpak installs so they don’t jam up your / tree, and also throwing flatpak override --user xyz.app onto a few apps that benefit from universal access, things have been fine and dandy.

I continue to be happy with how awesome Linux has gotten just over the past 5 years.

That’s terribly disheartening. I’m sorry, Italy.

How about instead of reddit being the example, we use craigslist? A mostly innocuous non-profit with wide usage, founded by a person who could have easily “gone reddit.” It isn’t so hard to imagine the same ethos and technology being applied to fundamental “social protocols” like reddit, facebook and others. My objection is that there seems to be an assumption (in American culture at least) that the way things are are the only way they could have turned out or the end result of making the best thing.

A widely cited example: Microsoft did not make the best operating system. There’s many reasons why they too over the world.

A lot depends on what one considers the best, too. Your points about the examples I gave are valid, we just had very different experiences of those platforms.

Anytime large numbers of people flock to some platform is because they made it easy and attractive to use.

Is this really the case? There are many reasons why people flock to things, but those things being the “best” or “easiest” are not necessarily chief among them. People left friendster because it couldn’t handle the traffic and it was annoying. People left myspace for various reasons, some political (it was acquired by Rupert Murdoch, who owns Sky/FOX), and many simply because college kids were using this newer thing called Facebook.

Why were they using it? It wasn’t because it was the easiest, or best, it was because their parents weren’t using it and they could be themselves without being snooped (a similar force has driven Twitter and Tiktok success). Youth culture tends to attract more users, another reason that doesn’t involve making something the easiest or best; add this good fortune and Zuck’s shameless profiteering by selling user data in order to cover the growing pains of their servers, and Facebook became a thing.

Like, couldn’t I just ask, why didn’t you create this Usenet based reddit killer yourself?

The short answer is that I’m not a developer. Another short answer is that even if I were a developer, convincing habitual users to do other things is a different planet of annoying. I hope that not developing reddit-killing software does not prohibit me from having criticisms of reddit and other corporate social plats?

That doesn’t mean the technology didn’t/doesn’t exist. Create a UI for it. Teams is just a copy of Slack, which is just a pretty face slapped onto IRC (not literally, but the point stands).

“It’s janky. It’s charming. It works. It’s Copyparty.” ®

My VPN for about 7-8 years is run by Italian hacktivists (airvpn, it’s a nonprofit, they’re good people), I haven’t heard about this ban. Perhaps it only applies to Italian citizens using VPNs, not to Italians running VPNs. Wait, that doesn’t make sense… I’ll check out their newsfeed.