Or I would have had hoops to jump through to get the lemmy.world link where that comment is (nominally) hosted. There’s a chainlink icon and a technicolor pentagram icon, neither of those do it. I either have to manually go to lemmy.world’s website, find the comment there, copy the link from there, come back to my account at sh.itjust.works and post it, or I post a sh.itjust.works link and send everyone on an indirect path. It’s…not good.

I keep saying that the choice should be meaningful; like I had no trouble picking the Peertube instance I should join because my content would fit their theme.

I’ve picked on Pixelfed’s join page in detail before at length. I think you’d be on board with my suggestions.

both SEA and Astrum for space stuff. If you like one you’ll like the other.

“To use your new iPhone, create an iCloud account.”

Gmail advertised superior features before also becoming required for using an Android device.

sure, any service gets you sneding and receiving email, but most people these days end up with an email address as a consequence of some other decision they’ve made.

Sure, a resonance cascade. That might as well happen.

There are going to be layers to this.

1. There are lots of people who are just downright too stupid. They wouldn’t be on the internet at all if Tim Apple didn’t put it in a baby baba for them to suck it out of. They use Facebook because their iPhone came with the Facebook app pre-installed.

2. There are lots of people for whom popularity is the only thing that exists. Their brain cannot function beyond “Everyone uses Twitter.” They’ll adopt this platform only after everyone else in the world does.

3. There are lots of people who have bought the propaganda. The dark web is for drug traffickers and hitmen, torrenting is for pirates, end-to-end encryption is for traitors, and Mastodon is for Linux neckbeards. You shouldn’t associate with those people.

4. There’s this weird trend where the commercial platforms are becoming hives for conservatives, so they’re probably going to stay put in their echo chambers. I have observed little to no presence of actual conservatives on this platform; beyond the horseshoe effect with the tankie crowd.

5. The culture of content consumption is not supported by the Fediverse. We don’t do algorithmic slop troughs here, and the amount of content on Peertube and Loops rounds down to zero, so it doesn’t fulfill the role of mesmerizing colors and sounds for staring at and drooling like Tiktok does or linear television did.

6. Open source software is usually a bit shit. Be it lack of budget, opinionated developers, redundant projects…we can never have one of something. Why does Lemmy, Mbin and Piefed exist simultaneously? We always end up with software that mostly works, has a lot less graphical polish, a shitty project name, a few missing key features and a couple workarounds you just have to know about. Or an intentionally godawful UI. That’ll put people off.

7. A few people who show up are going to be put off by the weirdest decision they’ll be asked to make this month: “Choose an instance, your choice doesn’t matter, just pick one.” If it doesn’t matter, why make me pick? I bet if you watched 100 people try to sign up for a Fediverse platform, at least 30 of them will balk at that stage. I’ve sat and stared at that for awhile myself and I’m one of the ones who made it through.

8. They just haven’t heard of us. Ask ten people you know in real life if they’ve heard of Lemmy, or Mastodon, or Pixelfed. I bet they haven’t, or if they have they let it pass in one ear and out the other out of apathy.

9. A few people have looked at the Fediverse, didn’t see what they wanted here, and left. If you play Satisfactory, for example, you’ll find an active subreddit where the majority of the player base and the developers of the game interact, on Lemmy you’ll find one community where exactly one person posts “daily screenshots until I get bored.” It’s easy to wander off, especially if you don’t like left wing politics, Linux and the Fediverse itself.

So are fatbergs.

Naw, not the tar, the tahre, the black rubber thang 'roun uh wheeyul, s’fulla ahr? It jus plum blew ayout. Ah tell ya i’us sygogglin downna road 'are for a minnit, but ah gotter stopped. y’all gonna seyun sumbuddy ta fix’t?"

A major component of a tarheel accent is the “eye” sound comes out as “ah.” Ah’m goin tuthuh stower to bah sum ahce creem. “Tire” beceomes “Tahre”, which is not identical to how we pronounce “tar.”

I’m from a particular area where it is sometimes useful to speak like a native, and sometimes it’s useful to speak like not a native. Naturally my accent isn’t very thick but I can put more on or take it off, even mid-sentence. Which is useful mostly for mocking people.

When the UK voted to leave the EU, how many members were they allowed to send to the EU council and the Parliament of Europe?

When the thirteen colonies declared independence from the British Empire, how many members were they allowed to send to the British House of Commons and House of Lords?

The UK was not in the position where they were outright denied representation in a government that exerted power over them; that…what would the appropriate British word be? Burk? Pillock? …on Facebook I was talking to was bitching about not getting to vote against that guy from Greece or Germany in the same way I don’t get to vote against that guy from Kentucky or Texas.

My home state and about a dozen others DID secede from the union while having fair and legal representation in Washington once…look how that turned out.

I could actually see 3D TVs taking off, even with the requirement for glasses. At the time, there was a fad for 3D movies in theaters. But, they needed to have gotten with content creators so that there was a reason to own one. There was no content, so no one invested, so probably in a year or two there’s going to be some Youtubers making videos of “I finally found Sony’s forgotten 3D TV.”

There was that one time when an AI gave a pizza recipe including gluing the cheese down with Elmer’s glue, because that was suggested as a joke on Reddit once.

There will never be such a thing as a useful LLM.

Find me any definition that is or is not Europe. If you can draw a line between the Mediterranean, Baltic and Atlantic, sure. Britain, Ireland and associated islands? Iceland? Greenland? Scandinavia? What about to the East over land? Is Russia European? How much of it?

The definition of “Europe” is useless because the definition of “continent” is useless. Australia: does the continent of Australia include Tasmania and/or New Zealand? Some folks claim both Americas are one continent because they were connected at the Isthmus until we sawed Panama in half. If we classify them separately, where does North America end and South America begin? My middle school taught that North America only had three nations on it, Canada, USA and Mexico. Mexico is on North America but Belize isn’t? What about Greenland? Africa: Madagascar? The Arabian peninsula? Asia: Japan? What about India? Is the “subcontinent” part of Asia?

Europe is the least convincing of them all. Pretty much nowhere else do you have to start mentioning “culture” when drawing a border between continents.

…to the loud apathy of us GM owners.

I SAID RAM THE FUCKER. I DON’T CARE IF THE ENGINES ARE GONE, GET OUT AND PUSH IF YOU HAVE TO.

The United States has been called “the great experiment in democracy.” Well I think the experiment has yielded data. I recommend carefully analyzing it.

Yes, along with Ram pickup trucks and IIRC Fiat, somehow.

It’s almost English jibberish. They link to the script in the description.

“So I ran to york round the wash today.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. That doll’s areen blunderface.”

You can almost latch onto it.

Reminds me of Skwerl

I’m going to go down with my ship, bellowing orders to my crew until the last.