Dude, it’s your platform, Meta.

I was gonna say…“just stop selling them the ad space”. Like, wtf?

Nothing, really, though it took a good bit of detox to get to that point. I’m only using a pseudo dumb phone, though (it runs Android 11 in a flip phone form factor).

Last August, I did a 30 day challenge and used it like a true dumb phone. No email, no chat, just the same things a comparable KaiOS true dumb phone would do. That was…limiting but I quickly got used to it. After that, I decided to un-dumb it a bit and am still daily-driving it almost a year later.

The only apps it runs now:

• Thunderbird Mobile for email
• Aegis for TOTP
• Bank app (a necessary evil since I bank remotely and nearest branch is 50 miles away)
• Organic Maps
• SchildiChat (Matrix group chat)
• Meshtastic
• Fennec (though mostly only for looking up business phone numbers/addresses while I’m out)

So it’s not a true dumb phone now, but it’s pretty bare bones. I think even true dumb phones have mobile browsers (KaiOS is basically Firefox OS, afterall) as well as some kind of mapping, email, and even TOTP apps. All the rest of the “smart” stuff it does is just annoying enough that I don’t spend all day on it, but works well when I need it.

I don’t know if I could go to a Light Phone III since I need my bank app, but something like the Minimal Phone with its eink display and QWERTY keyboard is probably my upgrade path.

I get what you’re saying about lemm.ee (and I share that opinion) but it’s definitely a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.

.ee was very averse to defederating opting to leave it up to the users; I have no such qualms and don’t federate with more extreme or problematic instances. That cuts the workload down considerably.

My “theme” here, such as it is, is providing a non-toxic and (relatively) safe environment by default. It’s even an official mission statement now. By “generic” I mean a good mix of content while not pigeon-holing the whole instance into a single set of topics (nothing wrong with that - look at your instance and startrek.website as great examples - but just not what I’m going for myself).

Not sure if you are in your response, but I’m also factoring in federated content as well. I’m certainly not saying that I have to agree with everything that comes in via federation, but I definitely do not feel compelled to platform everything or everyone either. At the end of the day, regardless of where it comes from, all this content is all showing up under a domain registered to me. There’s a sense of implicit responsibility and tacit endorsement for that content which is stressful to even think about. Really, the only solution to that is running an instance that doesn’t federate or federates very narrowly. That introduces FOMO to the point of “why bother?”

I dunno. There’s definitely a balance to be found, and I’ve mostly modeled mine off of Beehaw, but keeping that balance has been challenging.

Probably once the .ee evacuation settles down, and all the new alts of previously banned accounts are taken care of, things will be a bit less stressful.

So for my peace of mind, I stick to strongly moderated instances

That’s what I’m doing with mine, and holy crap is it a chore. Like, my mental health is in the gutter just trying to keep a vibe here that’s “general” while not over-modding the place to a desert. I am looking for secondary/backup admins, so if that’s the kind of environment you want to help foster, hit me up.

I do strongly feel like we need to chase some outside demographics. Things are getting a bit stale here, and we need some new blood and less, uh, passionate viewpoints.

Cases in point that I feel are detrimental to the success of the Fediverse:

• Half or more of the demographic here being armchair activists for every-freaking-thing. It might be less than half (probably so), but they’re so loud and persistent, it drowns out everything else.

• The absolutists who see the world only in black and white and paint things with a brush the size of Australia. The lack of nuance in opinions here is staggering. Everything is “all or nothing, perfect or bust, good is the arch enemy of perfect, etc” here, and that is simply not how the world works.

• The people who’s only response to literally anything in the news being “Guillotines! Luigi! Violence violence violence!”

• The people who are clearly only here because they’ve been banned and/or are otherwise too toxic to be platformed anywhere else. Like you said, I’m here because I want to be here, I want to be part of something better, and not because I was banned or otherwise asked to leave any other platform. Two years in, I cannot say this place is “better” just differently bad.

• The people who think they can say anything they want here because it’s not “corpo social media”, so anything goes.

  • And when they’re appropriately modded, they go straight to YPTB, play the victim, and incessantly whine how they’re so censored and this place is “just like Reddit”. 🙄

• The revolving door of trolls owing to the platform’s distributed nature. It’s a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, and yes, I mix my metaphors.

Given all that ☝️ and more that I didn’t call out specifically, we definitely need to attract some new blood here, at least to thin out the above; we need people engaging on topics other than whatever hot-button issue is flooding the front page.

This article is about Bluesky, and say what you will about Mark Cuban, but he’s not wrong in this and it also applies fully to Lemmy/Piefed/et al. The amount of dog-piling that any comment that even remotely goes against the groupthink here is insane; even the slightest disagreement to an absolutist statement gets brigaded to hell and back with accusations of “bootlicker” thrown around like that’s some kind of universal checkmate move.

That’s not engagement, and it’s certainly not healthy.

My interest in this platform has been steadily declining because it’s the same old rage/soapboxes/knee-jerk reactions. I can’t imagine trying to get new people to come here right now let alone stick around. I try to post non-political, non-hot-button stuff as often as time allows, and I know others do too, but I dunno. Seems there’s too many people here who just want to rage and virtue signal and not enough who actually want to just…be people.

Beehaw recently updated to 0.19.11, which was the change within the last few weeks. Your account is marked as being a bot, and bots accounts aren’t allowed to vote as of sometime between Lemmy 0.19.0 and 0.19.11 (Beehaw upgraded from 0.18.4 to 0.19.11).

So unless there’s a reason your account needs to be marked as a bot account, you should be able to just go into your profile and uncheck that box.

I’d have probably thought the same thing except a group of girls played/sang it during the high school talent show, so I already knew it was a real song.

FWIW, they did a kickass cover of it.

Unrelated to the thread, but love your username (took me a minute to get it)

Also, yeah, love the “good intentions until proven otherwise” attitude. Two years here have nearly beaten that out of me (despite me knowing better).

Hola desde el mismo lugar de siempre. (Lemmy).

I’m the dev of Tesseract.

New accounts have badges that show their age if they’re between 0 and 30 days old (among other tricks up my sleeve)

LOL, please tell me there’s a “let’s play” of that

• One Thousand Miles: Lip Sync Battle
• White Chicks: One Thousand Miles

I…kinda actually do (long story), but I also have a lot of pet peeves lol.

As an old, professional drunk, I can anecdotally confirm this.

(cough) You should post Dune Buggy (cough)

(Me, drunk)

1st thought: I have to pee

2nd thought: I really have to pee.

3rd thought: I love you guys. Also, I have to pee.

10 GOTO 10

I think I also recall some comments from somewhere from UK people saying Fahrenheit makes more sense for weather-related temperature.

But yeah, definitely human inconsistency lol.

Absolutely. I basically flipped a coin on whether to post this or “Peaches”.

Gracias!

I didn’t say I had a problem with any of that. But spinning up a burner, posting, and deleting everything afterward takes other people’s conversations with it (and those don’t currently come up in search results because the post is deleted). Granted that’s a platform limitation, but it is what it is. Posting from various alts but leaving things intact…go for it.

Imagine being a legit new user and being shunned because your account is not 30 days old.

That’s part of my complaint against the ones doing that “hit it and quit it” bullshit; it makes people wary of interacting with new accounts.