People want to see more happening here. The fediverse is not quite the ghost town it was a year ago, but it's still pretty quiet, especially once you start digging into hobbies.

Of course, the good solution is not bot-driven, but human-driven. But people are lazy and think that they'd rather repost thousands of posts with a bot than figure out what links they think are good and post those.

He is an insurrectionist. See his political positions on wikipedia here. It's a well-sourced article. He also opposes

• The ACA
• Research on disinformation
• The Environment, in general
• Abortion, to the point where he said that the 10-year-old girl who got raped and needed to travel to Indiana to get an abortion was lying about it until the police arrested the guy and he confessed.
• Regulating big tech
• Taxes, Spending, pretty broadly
• Same-sex marriage

He's an extremist. They do not have the political power to elect an extremist from their ranks. They need a moderate.

Buying an electric vehicle does not make the world a better place, but buying and using a gas vehicle makes the world worse by a bigger margin, so if you're buying a vehicle, an electric vehicle is probably better.

A TV journalist I know helped shed some light on this.

He used to write about one article a week. Usually a review, sometimes an article article.

Nowadays, they have him write about seven "articles" a week, but six of them are SEO-optimized factoids. You know, those articles where you're looking for the premiere date of a show, but they're six sections long, the premiere date is the last section, and the first five sections look kind of like they were written by a human who hates his job? Yeah. They make actual journalists write those, and they want them written well, because Google's idea of fixing the SEO race was to prioritize long articles and articles that look like they were written by humans.

So these articles are created by humans, they're churned out fast, and they have a few sections represented by headers that directly answer common search terms / questions. The more common the question, the further the answer is buried down in the article.

These articles aren't serious, so they expect you to get six of them done per week on top of your actual job, but they still want you to put effort in and write them well so they don't look like chatgpt garbage, and so that, when people click on them, a fraction of a percent of those people actually stick around on the website and look at more ads.

It's weird how much better Chromecast was when it came out than it is now. Stronger hardware, sure, but no real antifeatures, you could set it up without installing the app, you could use the app without giving it location data, casting was way more straightforward...

I feel like the main reason it's a big deal is the fact that the front-facing fingerprint scanner sucks ass.

Telegram gives me:

• Roll-their-own encryption off-by-default without cross-device support or group chat available.
• The ability to talk to strangers I don't want to talk to
• An open source client, but a proprietary, non-federated server
• An unmoderated social network that's a free-for-all for crypto scammers, extremists, and other nuts

WhatsApp gives me:

• Signal's encryption algorithm on all chats
• Whatsapp web (still with encryption)
• Encrypted group chats
• The ability to talk to human beings I actually know and want to talk to

Neither respects my privacy.

Not sure why I would bother attempting to use Telegram again.

Don't focus on looking for ways to find new members. Focus on ways to make people who find the fediverse want to stay. Accomplish that by putting something here that they like to see and want to see again.

When they join the Fediverse, or when they come to visit and consider joining, they're going to search for the stuff they want to see. They might look for memes, but more likely, they're going to look for their hobbies. If the only hobbies reflected here are gaming and programming and the fediverse itself, most people are not going to want to stay, the userbase is going to develop an even heavier bias towards certain types of people, it will become more alienating to other types of people, and it will stagnate.

Make an effort to post about and comment about other things. Cooking, movies, TV, sports, fashion, hair, plants, decor, architecture, history, religion, travel, a nearby city or town. Join those communities. Remember, when you see a cool article about nutrition, or a cool video guide to Copenhagen that you think people will enjoy, share it here. Post it, even if the community is small and you don't think people will care, because we need to seed communities with something. This is what I've been doing in a few communities, but mostly in !malefashionadvice. It's been frustrating, I haven't really been able to build the community up yet, but it's okay.

While we're at it, don't alienate people by posting, commenting about, or upvoting things that... suck. Keep all forms of bigotry at the door. If you're a hardcore libertarian or tankie or militant atheist... I'm not going to tell you to stop believing what you believe, but try to cool it, like 10%? Please? Nobody wants you breathing down their throats with extremism.

And... I've done this too, but let's make sure that we're not focusing too much on meta posts. They can be worthwhile, but they also are not what new people want to see.

Note, this doesn't work with any other (hypothetical) RCS clients, this is not a part of the RCS standard, it's a feature entirely proprietary to Google Messages.

I don't think any secret agent could rival any of those fictional characters. They have incredible plot armor, depending on the scenario. James Bond is an idiot who fucks every woman who moves, even when he knows they're there to trap him, but has a magic dick that hypnotizes them onto his side.

Batman with prep time is an unstoppable force who could take down every army in the world at once if he really needed to.

No, no human can compare to these characters.

Lol, yeah, this sociopath is going to develop a full suite of banking services and software in a year while laying off employees, sure.

Apple's biggest crimes here are creating a proprietary platform with an exclusive protocol and making it the default messaging protocol on their devices. None of this is really new, though. All that shit is common. We need Signal or Matrix to improve in user-friendliness and even do some marketing to the point where they become viable solutions.

I don't think the fediverse needs more platform alternatives.

What I really think we need is a way for people to use one fediverse account to log into different interfaces, so people can try out a new app / interface without starting a new account. Many apps can do this, but web apps generally cannot, they're generally tied to an instance.

I don't understand people who give a thread this kind of title. "Hey, help me with this thing—" generally, if you want help, you should say, right in the title, what you're asking for help with. Your title was almost as long as your post itself and said nothing.

I think it's mostly to not have Jordan as speaker, since he's a pretty hardcore extremist, and then to make the Republicans look incompetent, at least until they can find another moderate, fail to elect them, find another moderate, fail to elect them, and then make small concessions to elect the first moderate with the help of a few moderate democrats who just want x y z.

See, the impracticality here is not that I'd be jonesing for sugar, it's that almost all processed food and most natural food has a little sugar in it, and also that our bodies literally require some simple carbohydrates to operate. Best case, you go on a hard keto overnight, and yes, the first week is terrible, because keto is a stupid fucking diet that doctors don't recommend because it sucks.

Yes, if I eat nothing but beef and saltines for a week, I'm going to feel like shit. That's not an addiction issue.

What do you mean "still true?" The stereotype was never true.

There were Italian mobsters. There were also Irish mobsters, Jewish mobsters... There were mobsters of just about every major immigrant group in the US, especially if they were marginalized. Organized crime allowed these communities to not only build an economy of their own, but police themselves when they didn't trust the police.

The stereotype doesn't come from the fact that Italian mobsters existed, it comes from their portrayal in the media. The Godfather was popular, Al Capone was famous, so people got into it and made a ton of movies about Italian mobsters. That's all.

But not having books on your shelves is not a green flag, it just might not be a red flag.

Oh, nice! I really appreciate those rare occasions where Google makes my experience better.

I’m not here for mass-produced content, if I wanted that, I’d be in other platforms. The beauty of these communities is they are not filled with posts that are all the same, algorithms and bots. It’s just a community of real people having conversations.

The problem with the fediverse is that it's not really filled with posts at all. Maybe the Tech or Random magazines, if that's what you're looking for, but if you want to talk about cars or suits or model trains or whatever, you'll be lucky if you see one post across the fediverse in a month. Niches are empty, because most people here mostly have one interest in common, which is the fediverse itself.

Conversely, the value of large-scale social media, and the theoretical ideal of the fediverse, lies in positive network effects. You're into some obscure Japanese manga only four people who speak English have ever read? odds are, three of those people are on reddit, and you might find them. Looking for a review on a bootmaker you saw at the thrift store? Go to /r/goodyearwelt, there will be twelve threads about it, none of them sponsored or anything, diving way too deep into details you never could have imagined wanting to know.

But right now, look through lemmy.world or whatever, and tell me:

• What are some good anime? Some good Shonen anime? Some good non-Shonen anime? An anime that represents trans issues well?
• Where is a good place to get a suit under $400? In the US? In Europe? What's the difference between Huntsman and Edward Sexton's cuts?
• What's a good recipe for a cake? What about a salad? How do you deflame a red onion?
• Who is the vice president of the United States? Who is the secretary of state? Who is the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office?

Trivial questions, right? Most of them haven't come up here at all. Reddit is a massive corpus of knowledge, answering questions way more obscure than these, with enough people around to answer whatever question you might have in a variety of niche communities. People want that on a service they can trust.

I don't think many people want more tools to talk to strangers about nothing. Scale gives rise to better conversations and interactions in niche areas.

"I've barely tried these AI assistants everybody seems so hyped about, but you can up flight and hotel info, and Google has vaguely implied that it'll be able to do more in the future so I'm super excited!"

I mean, couldn't Google Assistant already look up flight and hotel info before? Doesn't the introduction of generative AI just transform that look up from simply scanning email and regurgitating info into a weird black box AI task that's right about 30% of the time but confident all the time?

He pretty much admits he has no idea what generative AI chatbots are, and it really shows from the article.

I'm not sure how Hamas makes and fires its current rockets, but I imagine there are at least lightbulbs involved in their process.

My electric toothbrush works in four 30-second increments. Each 30 seconds is plenty of time for me to cover a quadrant. I slowly go over the outside, inside, top/bottom, gums in each quadrant. Maybe if I was meticulously brushing each tooth one by one, I could see the issue, but that's not necessary, is it?

It's gotten worse than debate in quite a few places. People protest memorial services saying that the murder of civilians was justified. This is some real WBC-level shit.

but the truth is that they don’t actually care about Palestinians either.

They sure do. They care about keeping them in refugee camps, using Israel as a scapegoat for their own war crimes and other bullshit, refusing to let them work, often revoking their citizenship in the rare cases it's been granted! Heaven forbid a third-generation descendant of a Palestinian immigrant be allowed to work in Jordan, or own a permanent home.

health insurance isn't really insurance either.

it's like a health services subscription plan with a million convoluted rules.

You do realize that you've skipped about 70 steps, right? OP needs to figure out what currency the recipient wants, pick a wallet app (most of the ones people recommend are god-awful), install it, create a wallet, figure out how to store keys for the wallet safely (which is really not possible), figure out how to add funds to the wallet in the right currency, pay attention to the transaction to make sure the right amount of funds are being transacted... and each of those steps has a dozen substeps, and requires research in an industry that is constantly lying to people.

... plus, OP did not say that there was a QR code involved at all, that's a very odd assumption on your part.

Hamas does not exist to regain land. Hamas is not trying to help anybody. Hamas is using the conflict to maintain its socio-political and military control over Palestine.

American cheese is not a flavor. American cheese is a blend of cheese, fat, and emulsifying agents. if there's cheddar in the blend, it'll taste mostly like cheddar, but less of it because it's only, like, half cheddar.

The important part of the American cheese, in figuring out how to use it, is the emulsifiers.

My preferred use case is using a slice of American cheese in mac and cheese, alongside some other cheese (I love Gouda) for flavor. Or like four other cheeses, whatever. Sometimes I mix in a tiny bit of cream cheese or mascarpone or a little milk, which gets emulsified into a sauce thanks to the American cheese, and makes the whole situation creamier. And then I season the whole situation well, especially if I added that last ingredient, to bring out the flavor of the cheeses.

Now, that's not a real, advanced mac and cheese. I could be making a mornay or something. But I'm lazy and I don't really keep butter in the house. So I cheat. Pro chefs might also use other emulsifying agents to control the flavor and chemistry better, rather than just chucking in a slice of some american blend.

but it's a handy shortcut.

So, as others mentioned, they're tankies. They circle jerk about how "the west" is entirely responsible for every bad thing that ever happened. They blame the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the West, they deny the oppression of the Uyghur people as pure western propaganda...

Any time you cite something horrible Russia or Iran or China or North Korea does, they say "the west is just as bad," draw some false equivalencies, and then proceed to explain why that means that the West is the only bad thing and there's nothing at all wrong with Russia or China.

And... they're so aggressive about it. It's not just that their opinions are so detestable, but that they brigade other threads and insist that everybody who isn't actively bombing US government buildings is evil.

They're annoying. On the fediverse, that might be the highest sin.

To the extent that you're not a dick about it.

Don't be too confident in something you didn't research enough. Don't be too loud about shit you don't understand.

Don't be haphazard with the truth about things that can put peoples' lives at risk. Don't make shit up about vaccines.

Don't lie on purpose. Don't lie or bullshit for attention. Bullshitting with friends for fun is obviously fine if they know you're not serious.

If somebody points out your mistake, understand what they're saying, learn from it, and be gracious about it. Don't double down just to save face, that'll only ever make things worse.

I disabled the Google App back when "Google Now" was still a thing. Remember when it would give you directions to get where you were going after you were already on your way? I'd be on the train, it'd tell me "oh, you wanna go somewhere? Get off the train, take a cab to the nearest train station, get on the train..."

They removed everything but sports score tracking, I kept using it for a while, and then I realized that I could just fucking use my browser for search, since that's where I wanted to read search results anyway. And that's what I did.

They're going to keep doing this again and again, making their app worse and worse.

No idea why I would ever want the Google app back.

cocaine sales would go up. People would try microdosing. Some of those people would end up regular dosing.

There would be a black market, not only for coffee and tea, but also for caffeine powder, which people would sprinkle into anything.

Peoples' overall caffeine consumption would go down. That girl from my high school who got the shakes every afternoon would probably have been better off.

I disabled the google app years ago. I use my browser for search, and then when I get the results, the results actually show in my browser, and I don't have to switch apps or anything to get to my browser.

Plus, I don't have to look at the vestiges of all the features the app used to have, which now just feel like they've left the UI cluttered and pointless.

Plus, every time I open the app, I feel like I'm being spied on, because I am.

Plus, Google Assistant sucks ass. The voice commands are super unreliable, and as for search, I don't want AI to guess what I'm trying to search for, deterministic imperative searches are actually better.

I mean, Telegram is the worst of the bunch, but putting that aside, the point is that people aren't comparing telegram and whatsapp, they're comparing telegram, whatsapp, signal, matrix, sms, imessage, facebook messenger, instagram messenger, session, wire, wechat, the crypto ones, kik, and a dozen other chat clients you've never heard of. And most people are not actually making those comparisons, most people just use the one their friends use, or the one that their phone came with. Nobody, anywhere, is pretending there are only two options and picking one of them.

People frustrated by this will just pick weaker passwords. Of course, the main solution is to allow password managers to insert passwords directly, but I've noticed a few sites don't seem to work with those, either...

Tankies are generally not just anybody with communist perspectives, but a. certain extreme. A tankie is the type of person who will essentially argue that capitalism and western society are the roots of all evil, and deflect from any criticism of Russia, China, Iran, etc. by attacking the US instead of actually addressing the criticism.

A lot of people already use Discord. If you try to get people to move to Lemmy, the vast majority of them won't bother, and then you just have a version of reddit with about twelve people on it. Reddit thrives on scale and collective knowledge. If you're going to have a small community with three digits' worth of people, a chat service is the place to do it.

I'm part of a couple of private men's style discords... one of them is a great, small-but-not-too-small community, and the conversation is much better than anything that went on on /r/malefashionadvice.

For what it's worth, I'd still be happy to see @malefashionadvice or @malefashionadvice take off, but they're both dead, as is.

China having more global influence than USA would help

... would it? I'm not sure I see how.

Unless it's facetime.