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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Mastodon seems like it could work relatively well.

    The other side of the issue though is for social media to feel “social” now, people, consciously or not, want to feel connected to brands and advertising and popular culture. Social media, now more than television or magazines used to, generates our water-cooler moments. It generates the content we sit right here and discuss - it generates memes. These fringe alternatives aren’t popular because the they lack gravity. Gravity comes from investment. Investment comes from potential; typically, potential to make money.

    But yeah, group ware, et al, could work for smaller groups. The friction there is getting people to install, and give a crap about, another app on their phone.


  • What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now algorithmic nightmares that constantly interrupt you with suggested content and advertisements that consistently outweigh the content of people that you choose to follow.

    In the case of Facebook, the decline is either reflected in — or directly facilitated by — two specific features: People You May Know and the News Feed.

    Yep. I was screaming to bring back the chronological timeline when they pushed out the “beta testing”. I actually stopped using social media regularly because I was missing events that were happening in my neighborhood. There was no point once they chose what to show me. But, I’m not the target demographic for their platform.

    Someone who wants to interact with their community and keep in touch with their friends and family is not what social media is for. It’s for selling ads. It’s for maintaining your attention. It’s for engagement and making you feel a way they’ve determined will keep you scrolling.

    And honestly, it’s tough to complain. The more successful a platform becomes, the more content is uploaded and viewed. This doesn’t cost them nothing. Without charging to use or upload to the platform, they have to sell ads. The more engaging the ads are, the more successful business are with posting those ads. So they double down and post more ads - they engage more with the audience the platform has directed towards them. It just keeps snowballing from there until the platform no longer represents what it did initially.

    The actual problem is that no one is willing to pay for “social media”. They’ll pay out the butt for streaming services and two-day delivery but connecting with real people and getting unbiased investigative news, not so much.


  • oxjox@lemmy.mltoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldSelf-hosting Photo Alternatives
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    1 month ago

    Fair enough. Plex may not have the bells and whistles but it’s simple and intuitive to use. I’ve also tried the QuMagie app on my QNAP which does have all those features but found it to be a bit more cumbersome than it was worth.

    I tried Google Photos briefly as well and was very shocked at how bad it is, compared to Apple Photos. It took me several days just to figure out how to delete more than one picture at a time. I have to assume it’s much more robust on an Android than on an iPhone but even their web interface was horrible.





  • oxjox@lemmy.mltoFediverse@lemmy.world...
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    2 months ago

    Twitter.

    I know this is the “wrong answer” but I had always used Twitter to keep tabs on local government agencies, newspapers, reporters, restaurants, bars, events, concerts, sports teams, etc. Not to mention all the accounts that pertain to my hobby’s and interests.

    I’ve used bird.makeup but it’s not reliable if it works at all. Some agencies, like our transit system and streets department, will post on one thing on their website and something else on instagram or twitter (many have stopped using twitter after the api change). RSS is fine for some things but not everything. I haven’t been using instagram for years because of advertising and the algorithmic timeline. I at least need lists.

    Really, the right answer here for my needs is that all these groups need to join the fediverse. I just don’t see that happening.

    Or maybe I should say I wish the “existing platform” of my city government would start their own instance.






  • I’ve just installed this. If there wasn’t an official news release (thanks for the link) I would have thought this was fake.

    There’s no NFL. Under My Teams, you can’t select one of your teams to get information about them. There’s no games scheduled for today, and nothing shown for yesterday. No spring training MLB. And, most importantly, there’s no Widget.

    Thanks, this is super interesting, but I’ll stick with TheScore for now.



  • As cool AF as this is for being “the future”, the video just had me worried about the future of idiots standing around town in people’s way (like Casey standing in the middle of the stairs while texting).

    I mean, yeah, it would be super cool to walk into a grocery store with these on and get recipes and caloric info and suggested alternatives or on-the-spot deals from brands, etc. The potential for this as a user is incredible. But at the same time you’ve got everyone else in the store trying to walk around you flailing your arms around like while you watch a TikTok video about making chili. Which is not something I would have thought would be a concern twenty years go but we know now that most people are inconsiderate.

    The one positive shown here in the video is that you can’t really doing anything while you’re moving (yet). So the fear of people actually walking and texting / computing or DRIVING with these on is quelled.


  • I use Bing and Edge daily for work because they integrate nicely with M365 and SharePoint. This Copilot crap does nothing but get in my way.

    In fact, Microsoft pushing Copilot in our faces only results in a disruption of productivity. It took months (which is break-neck speed for MSFT) for them to add the option to disable Copilot in PowerPlatform. Why it was forced upon users in the first place is beyond comprehension.

    Improvements in technology are great. Options are great. Getting out of my way and getting shit done is even greater.

    I don’t know about everyone else but, whether it’s a major corporation or an indie app developer or an automotive manufacturer, the way they all keep changing things so quickly (mostly for the worse) is pushing me away from using tech on a whole.

    Without getting too off topic (too late?), there’s just so much consumer frustration from streaming services, cars, phones, wearables, vr, delivery services, etc., that I have to imagine / hope that in the next few years we’re going to start seeing an anti-tech movement pick up more traction. I mean, how many people really want a voice driven AI assistant?

    Do I want AI to give me better search results? Sure - if it can do so intelligently. It still gets things wrong sending me down a rabbit hole losing hours of productivity. I don’t have time to train your AI for you so just get out of my way and let me know once you’re smarter than me.




  • I’m not getting into how long a copyright should last. I don’t have a meaningful opinion on it.

    What it seems people are overlooking (or forgiving?) is that the guy published a book about characters (IP) he doesn’t own. Taking something that doesn’t belong to you is theft.

    Whether or not Amazon should option his material is irrelevant if he didn’t get permission to use it in the first place. I mean, fan fiction is one thing. Creative license and educational purposes could be argued. But he published a freaking book!

    Do you think Zack Snyder should get to put out a Rebel Moon and call it “Rebel Moon: A Star Wars Story” without getting permission or paying for licensing? Is this the reality this sub believes we live in? If you write a novel and I read it and soon start writing better more successful stories based explicitly on your characters without crediting you or sharing in my profit, how would you feel? Should your work be public domain? Is that what you (collective) feel is best for “the public”?

    I don’t really have an opinion on what should happen with the work either. I could see some cases where it would be a major loss for the public to have the work erased. This could be catastrophic for classic literature. For something so new and not having any established cultural significance (as much as you wish it did), I’d go with whatever a judge believes is best under the law. You’re welcome to argue the validity of the law, and I may agree with you, but that’s a different conversation.