I worked for Microsoft for many years and the fact is many companies' marketing and PR departments think their customers are morons. Or perhaps it's that they think their customers don't mind being treated like morons.
The shit they would send flowing down the pipeline that we were supposed to say to our customers just blew me away. "You know our customers aren't STUPID right? I can't talk to them like they're stupid or they'll escort me off premises."
OP is sharing a very useful tip for people new to the Fediverse. Let's not allow our pedantry to get in the way of what is still a helpful tip please.
It boggles my mind that I read this sentence near the end of the article:
"Force everyone to interact on one app, and it’s easier to fill their feeds with whatever advertising you want."
This isn't a quote from an expert, these are the actual words of the author of the article. "fill their needs.... with advertising."
Nobody has "advertising needs." It shows how fucked-up the internet has become when a journalist writes something like this unironically, without even attempting to explain themselves. They just assume everyone believes they have advertising needs. Unreal.
Have you noticed how many of us old shits there are in the fediverse? It's a disproportionate number. I think many of us miss the freedom and chaos that the internet once was and are looking to recapture the excitement that the internet lost at least a decade ago.
Yup, I went through all those same stages and am loving the Fediverse. I had forgotten how it felt to have to EXPLORE. To find good content, to see something that's (only mildly) outside my comfort zone, to use a tool that's still a WIP. I spent 15 years on Alien Site and it was just the same jokes, the same content, all the same topics, the endless commercialization of every word you say.
No it's not as easy to find content here. No the apps aren't as polished. But it really feel like how I felt back in the BBS or Slashdot days. I hadn't realized how miserable I was with the current state of the internet until I abandoned all the mainstream sites.
This is mine as well, but it wasn't on PC that impressed me. It was the first time I called Directory Assistance and at no point in the call a human was involved. Until then every demo of voice recognition had been a goofy parlour trick. Voice recognition software was very niche, and only marketed to secretaries for dictation. To suddenly see it in a practical application to completely replace a human interaction blew my mind.
It the admins on one server are assholes, they don't have the power to ruin it for everyone.
Exactly. One of the big issues with the r-site. There's only one community for any one topic and there are more users (and content) than they could possibly use. Ever tried posting to /r/ShowerThoughts? It's virtually impossible to come up with a topic that makes it through the filter. And it won't change because deleting 90% of submissions still leaves more than enough content to fill the page. It's easier for mods to just delete content en masse and ban a user than even engage in a conversation with them.
(I'm not picking on the mods on /r/ShowerThoughts, I've never interacted with them. I'm just using the sub as an example where the community is so big that an individual user is just an annoying gnat in the grand scheme of things).
I've said it before, I don't think posts (or users) should have a number associated to them. It promotes karma whoring. And I don't say that in an accusatory way -- I watch the upvote counts with excitement when I submit a post too. It's just human nature.
If a post was rated "Very unpopular", "Somewhat unpopular", "Neutral", "Somewhat popular" and "Very popular" then you could still identify the hot posts but without engaging the reward/addictive centre of the brain.
Same with users. Don't give them an endlessly growing "karma" number that encourages spamming low quality populist posts. Once they hit "Very popular" there's no more incentive to make submissions purely for the seratonin fix.
Also, is there a way to only see posts here on this (kbin.social) instance?
I don't believe so, anyone in federated instances can reply to or create a post in a magazine on this instance. But by default when you browse (and subscribe to) magazines you're only doing so to ones on this instance.
If you've subscribed to a community on another instance you're probably already aware of it, and you can both identify which ones are outside, and browse individual subscriptions by going to Settings --> Subscriptions. See below that I'm mostly only subscribed to local magazines on this instance, but I'm also subscribed to a Lemmy community and it's very easy to distringuish.https://i.imgur.com/ot7iHJQ.png
More proof that corporations are nobody's "friends." When they latch onto a community it's purely for profit and marketing motives.
I don't understand. What's the point of posting private photos to a federated service? Just use Imgur.
"When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."
100% agree. But we should never try to force things to "one." There should never be just one community for a topic. That's what Reddit is. "This is the videos subreddit, if you don't like it you don't have a choice."
Good communities will rise. Bad communities will fall. Some communities will attract users because they're big and have lots of members. Some communities will attract users because they're small and friendly. Choice is good. Fixating on there only being "one" of anything is bad.