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As a leftist, I find them annoying because they make me look like an idiot by association.

50/50 leftists and Russian troll farms or worse, by any charitable outside evaluation.

Full beards are great. I can go a week without any maintenance and still look presentable. Any other style of facial hair is just too much effort.

I think zoomers are young enough not to have the generational memory of how creepy mustaches are, so suddenly they’re cool again. I’m afraid it’ll last until the zoomers are old enough to be the creepy ones.

Let’s see if Loops can fill the gap. Not sure if an open source alternative could generate enough hype to be viable - maybe if TikTok is banned in the US or something.

It’s just an app, yeah.

OpenStreetMaps is amazing, but it is a map, not a whole ecosystem like Google Maps is. As a map I find it’s often better than Google Maps, but what is still lacking are good front-ends implementing a wide range of functionality in a user friendly way.

On desktop I often use GNOME Maps, but it leaves a lot to be desired still and is obviously intended for Linux users running GNOME.

Not happy with OrganicMaps? It’s my personal favourite at least, and completely open source. Probably depends what your needs are. :)

Unless, of course, one blocks them. It’s not perfect of course, but I think federation brings about an unique opportunity to decide how many fools one is willing to suffer. And the tools will only get better with time. :)

They’re also not holding anyone hostage. I can see how people are tired of the whole “if you don’t like it, fork it” argument, but Kbin, mbin, and Piefed are all perfectly viable and interoperable alternatives that are available already.

Super Mario. It’s been milked for what it’s worth and more, but whenever there’s a new Mario game you just know it’s going to be good.

Looks promising.

I’m setting it up now, was close to give up when it continuously refused to work after setting up an account. Turns out the passwords randomly generated by Firefox is a bit too hardcore for it, I changed to something with fewer special characters and now all is good. :)

Edit: It worked for setting up the interface and my profile, but I still cannot sign in from within it. Seems like a promising project though.

Edit edit: Moved it from a subdomain to a normal folder, now I can sign in, but it still acts a little broken, and doesn’t federate. Oh well, I’ll see if I’ll tinker more later.

It did create a bit of a splash back when Mastodon got together and played a huge part in saving the Texas Observer.

As for being used of a source of what random people are talking about, I think that’s further off for three reasons:

1. The biggest platform is a better source
2. It doesn’t go well with decentralisation - you want to report what’s going on inside one big, centralised service
3. It tends to be pretty worthless lazy journalism. The journalists who have been converted to Mastodon tend to avoid writing sloppy pieces about what people are talking about online - they rejected Twitter for a reason.

I landed on it being a red flag, but nothing so bad that I’ll stop supporting them for now. But given that it’s a paid service, part of what I am paying for is for them to provide a better and more ethical alternative to known free engines. In turn, this means that I hold them to very high standards.

I’m guessing after the backlash over this they will be even more careful going forwards. It’s impossible not to make mistakes now and then, and though I agree with @poVoq that Kagi’s response here reflected that they had not thought certain issues through enough, I choose to be patient with them for now. At least they are making an effort to communicate rather than just giving empty corporate responses that mean nothing.

Yeah, I think it became a bit of an impossible solution the second Ernest’s proof of concept suddenly attracted a whole bunch of users and attention after the Reddit exodus. Kbin was clearly not ready, and I admire him for staying on course with the development after that despite pressures.

That said, users are not wrong to want easy to implement features asap. So I personally think the fork makes a lot of sense, though everyone could do without the occasional bad faith from some of the people involved.

My understanding of the situation is that Ernest, the main developer behind Kbin, thinks of the current Kbin as a proof of concept, and he is doing profound rewriting of the codebase to better fit his vision of how it should be working.

Meanwhile, other people wanted to contribute to Kevin directly, developing a better product on top of what Ernest considers to be too shaky foundations. So he’s not all that interested in pursuing that part of the development before he is happy with the core.

This also leads to a dynamic where he still has his own vision for the project and it goes through him, whereas other contributors want to make it their own more and develop something different.

It’s hard to see how to make everyone happy here without forking. Hopefully both projects can still gain from each other in the future: Mbin can benefit from the rewritten codebase of Kbin, and Kbin can implement features from Mbin after seeing that they are good and work well. In either case, the continued development as separate projects is probably not all that bad.

Does someone know if anyone maintains a list of companies or organizations where this kind of bullshit has gone down, with link to sources? Could be useful to keep track.

I can’t believe how quickly we went from pretending we thought murdering civilians was a bad thing to concluding it’s merely a matter of killing the right civilians.

This is already supported in kbin! Press your icon in the top right corner and enter the settings, and select the languages you’re interested in under the “Filter languages of threads and posts” setting (somewhat counter-intuitively under the “Appearance” heading). Seems to be working great for me at least :)

At least where I’m from, the teenagers are beginning to shy away from emojis as well, with the exception of one or two that are considered culturally acceptable. Which ones they are seems to fluctuate, so if you’re out of the loop you’re better off not trying.

My advice is to join a cental hub in the network if you’re interested in a very broad range of content, and a specialized hub if you have more particular interests. The relationship between for example lemmy.world and startrek.website is a great example.

I think a lot of the perceived complexity of the fediverse is that it’s not just a social network, but a network of social networks. You’d want to start out on a node that reflects your interests; if that interest is merely “more content”, make it a central one.

If you want to be on a tiny or self hosted Mastodon instance it might even make sense to build the base of your network on a central network hub first, and then migrate when you already have rooted yourself in the network.

Good to know, thanks! I tried it out back when it was known as Wimp, but jumped off the wagon during all the controversies. I’d really rather not use anything owned by Jack Dorsey, but I might be a bit too principled for my own good haha