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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • A dizzying number of notable people and people in my personal life have hopped onto Threads, day 1. The “fuck Elon / Twitter” sentiment and generally good vibes to this point mirror the experience I had here when I hopped onto Beehaw and we also had similar optimism and a “fuck u/spez” sentiment. But the major difference I see is this — for the sake of sticking it to Elon these folks are getting themselves even further entangled in Zuck’s world, and we’ve already seen the monsters that emerge from that muck.

    Any social network that builds up a massive, general userbase inevitably enshittifies as the marketers / advertisers / influencers and otherwise self-promoters get their content boosted. With its extremely close ties to Instagram, those sorts of users will be ramped up on Threads in no time, and this period of positivity with fade in turn as that content starts getting vomited out and funneled to everyone.

    The independent Fediverse is not without its faults, but I’m much more comfortable building community within this coalition of a space than in any of Meta’s creations.



  • It’s hardly been 24 hours, but this is the most engaged I’ve felt in an online space in years. I’ve gone on a k.bin/Lemmy/Mastodon tear over the past day, exploring instances and looking for the one that I vibe with the most. So far I’ve been very happy with Beehaw as my home base, and love that I still have access to the communities on the other instances as well. Sure, it takes a slight bit of effort to find communities and make sure that I’m subscribed to them on this account, but I’ve actually found some satisfaction in the process.

    Sure, there’s a low volume of content compared to the old place. But if I wanted a constant barrage of content, I could just go back to RSS readers and have my fill. It’s the discussion and sense of connection that has made it worth investing my time here.



  • I agree. This feels more like the AACS encryption key fiasco to me than it does Digg v4. Brief context for the unaware, in 2007 Digg started taking down posts and accounts that referenced a hex code that could be used to decrypt HD-DVDs and Blu-rays. The userbase was very unhappy about it and spammed the front page with the code, rendering Digg basically useless. Digg relented pretty quickly, and while the site continued to chug along for another couple of years or so, the bad taste left in users’ mouths surely triggered a lot of them to start jumping over to Reddit.

    I was active on both sites for a good while. I loved TechTV when it was a thing, and had followed many of those personalities to their respective podcast networks and to Digg when that channel imploded; over time I definitely started leaning more towards Reddit though, as one could definitely see the corporate pressure that Digg was starting to cave to. The “darkening” of Reddit today feels a lot closer to that moment than to the big Digg v4 switchover – the beginning of the end rather than the final nail. Feels very surreal looking back and having been there for all of it.