My mazda mx-5 or miata depending from where you are from. Discovered lots of cool places fairly close to where i live. Sunny weekends are always a joy.
It lacks the critical mass of users needed to make even moderately niche communities feasible; basic examples are: City communities, State communities, communities based on car make/model - these are types of communities that Reddits excels at having and it’s because of the size of the user base. The only point I’m making with this is that Lemmy is a very long way off from being a viable replacement for Reddit.
Next big problem is: Lemmy has a HORRIBLE new user experience…which I’m sure is significantly responsible for slowing Lemmy adoption. Single biggest issue is content discovery (which is just-ok if you got lucky and joined a super-massive Lemmy instance when you first joined, all the way to an atrocity if you got unlucky and joined a small instance when you first joined.
There’s also a lot of complicated activities needed just to be a functional Lemmy user: like regularly backing up your user/instance preferences (including subscriptions) and replicating those preferences into another account/instance in case something happens to your current account/instance or your instance becomes temporarily or permanently inaccessible. This is asking too much of your common non-technical user, but it’s still currently necessary just because of how often instances have problems. Think about all the user accounts on all the .ml instances that had to be re-created from scratch because there’s no built-in way for users to do it. Users should be able to sync their user accounts similarly to how instances sync their content with each other.
For the record, the first instance I created an account on (when I was a brand new Lemmy user months ago) was a very small instance (but recommended on the very first page of the official join-lemmy.org site), and there just wasn’t functional content discovery at all on that instance. It was a barren wasteland. The fact that servers aren’t even aware of what content is out there on federated systems until some user on that system already happens to know about the content/community and subscribe to it is setting a lot of new users up for failure. Once I realized that it sucks being on a small instances, the second account I created was on Lemmy.world, but that instance suffers from it’s popularity and is the frequent target of DDOS and was going down for me several hours a day. So, there’s also a penalty for joining a big instance. I ultimately had to create numerous accounts on numerous instances and then try to keep the user preferences in sync across multiple accounts on multiple instances so that I can easily swap to a different account when an instance had problems.
Elitist user base: I swear, some lemmy users are worse than the old BSD forums and worse than stack exchange when it comes to taking criticism about the platform. Guaranteed, this comment will get downvoted, and I’ll be mansplained about how content discovery is facilitated through having to have foreknowledge about some 3rd party websites that keep track of communities (which don’t always work because not all instances can be indexed yet do to a laundry list of other problems), and what an idiot I am for not knowing this, etc, etc.
Having to go to this length just to use a reddit alternative - that’s unacceptable to most non-technical users. Lemmy doesn’t stand a chance of gaining momentum until these issues are solved.
I completely agree, especially on the account backup and migration. I know there is some Github program to help and while I would be able to use it as long as I finger out how to open/download it. It needs to be done on a computer and I never use Lemmy on my computer. So it suddenly becomes a much bigger step just because you need a 3th party program, especially as I just don’t hang around on my computer, when I’m on it I have something in mind.
I created my Mastodon in late 2022 but didn't use it until August 2023 when I made the jump from X. Very happy with that decision although I do still miss some of the accounts I used to follow on there. At some point I want to find a proper instance that I switch to, but it will take a while for me to make that decision.
I currently only really use Mastodon on my phone, but I'm in the process of figuring out Pixelfed and will probably mess with the official app and then Pixeldroid for a bit. Haven't made an account yet either though.
Accessed from: Desktop (Web), Mobile
Platform name: Mastodon Accounts: 3 (Private: mastodon.social, Personal Project: tombraidersocial.com, Charity Project: kind.social) Apps: Elk (Web), Megalodon (Mobile) Uses: Private microblogging, and posting for the projects I run.
Platform name: BookWyrm Accounts: bookwyrm.social Apps: - Uses: Goodreads alternative, but the libraries aren't complete. I mess with it and transfer my Goodreads data every now and then. I won't switch to it fully until it has a working mobile client.
Platform name: kbin Accounts: kbin.cafe Apps: - Uses: Reddit alternative that I hope will have enough people populating it in the future.
Platform name: Matrix Accounts: matrix.org Apps: Cinny Uses: To keep track of some projects. Haven't used it too much yet because the spaces I've joined don't seem too active (yet).
Platform name: PeerTube Accounts: spectra.video Apps: - Uses: Space I might use for my content in the future. Basically a way to try out if I like PeerTube or not.
I also used to have a Lemmy account that I chose to delete because I just couldn't get into it. I already feel better on kbin.
The Firefish account I had for testing used to exist, but the recent trouble with firefish.social has the website stuck in a loop so I can't access it. I had nothing on there, but I'm glad I didn't make the decision to join the Fediverse that way and on that instance. I would've been really unimpressed if all the data had just gone and I couldn't access it anymore.
I am most active on Mastodon, I quite enjoy it there! I access it via Desktop (firefox) and currently the official Android app. I've tried Tusky as well. I also use KBin, where I'm currently writing this. Accessed via desktop and then just the web app on mobile for now. I have two accounts, one on kbin.social that's basically a backup, and then this one. When I need to share a video I use PeerTube.
No. Seeing how “Rock music is evil.” thing started with Elvis Presley. Then in the 70’s you had people going for rock bands like the Rolling Stones for singing about sex and drugs. They moved to metal bands in the 80’s. Marilyn Manson was the big name target in the mid-late 90’s.
So I’m walking around a bazaar in Nepal. I got kids following me everywhere begging for money. Out of nowhere a Nepalese guy wearing a ripped up shirt comes running up and starts slapping kids and yelling at them. The kids run off and the man starts cozying up to me.
He starts asking where I’m from and follows me around for a while. Finally he cuts the foreplay and asks if I “smoke hashish”. I say yeah and we talk about that a while. He asked where I was staying and I told him Hotel Yak and Yetti. He says he’ll come by and smoke with me.
So, at the time he was supposed to show up I’m in the lobby when a hotel worker comes over and says that someone is looking for me. I walk outside and the dude is now wearing a tailored suit and is motioning for me to get in a cab.
Alarm bells go off, but fuck it you only live once. I get in the back of the cab with the guy. He has a pack of cigarettes where he emptied out the tobacco and filled them with weed. He says his cousin is the driver. We ride and smoke. I got so fucken high.
Then he’s like hey buy the rest of this pack from me. I was like dude I don’t have much money. He’s asks if I have some clothes that don’t fit. I’m 6’2” this guy was like 5’. But I’m like yeah and gave him 2 pairs of jeans.
Then I had to flush the weed because I was getting on a plane to Tibet the next morning. Staying in a Chinese prison wasn’t on my itinerary. So I had to leave the weed behind.
[some are] convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home.
I think that it’s pretty safe to say that at least some people around you are stone-cold fundamentalists. This sort of discourse doesn’t come from non-fundamentalists.
That said as stupid as “rock is [from the d]evil” claim is, I don’t think that it’s rooted in racism. Instead I think that it’s because some values often followed by rock bands, singers and fans clash directly with some values of Christianity.
Note that some sort of percussion pops up in almost every musical style, across the eras.
Slaves. They created the guitar
This was already addressed, but… come on, acoustic guitars are from Middle Ages Iberia, and they backtrack all the way into the lutes of the Ancient Egypt and Anatolia. (Probably. It’s so old that the origins are hard to determine.)
My grandfather (born round the start of the first world war) was hideously racist, not overtly religious, but neither of those seemed to figure into his horrified disgust and moral panic at “rock and roll”. Seriously, he’d be less shocked at someone wiping their ass with a slice of bread and eating it, than he would be at them playing rock music in the house. If it featured on a TV ad, or came in the window from someone driving past, it was like he was under siege.
Part of it was the sex-and-drugs angle, I’m sure, but I think even that was a small part of the whole.
I think the biggest part was that it was a symbol of counterculture, of men growing their hair long and rejecting the order and authority of the world he was born into. He experienced a fuckton of social change in his lifetime, he couldn’t navigate the culture any more, and this left him lost, angry and afraid. There were these people pissing on all the symbols he understood, and waving around a bunch he didn’t, while rejecting all the values he’d been taught - and dancing about it, like (from his perspective) a horde of crackheads ransacking a library and smearing shit on everything for lulz.
I mean, I wince and block channels with any kind of ‘reaction videos’, and I’m only genX. I get it, to a degree - though I’m trying at least to ensure that when I get irretrievably stuck in the past, it’s at least from this century. But the change I’ve been through only stretches from Kojak to Skibidi Toilet whatever the fuck that is. His stretched from before cars or refrigeration to the internet itself. I don’t think I’ll see as big a transformation as he did in his time; I hope I cope a shitload better than he did with what I do see, but who knows?
Along a different track of thinking, from where did rock music originate? Slaves. They created the guitar because slave-owners didn’t allow them to make music with drums.
What the flying fuck? The guitar is one of the oldest mediterranean instruments. Naturally it evolved from antiquity, but just how did you think that?
That attitude stems, naturally, from association with sex, drugs and pacifist rebellion with rock music. Organized religion often supports sexual morality, is suspicious of drugs (when it doesn’t incorporate their usage), and considers the social hierarchies to be of divine root, thus going to war would be the right thing to do and pacifism would be the opposite.
Nah, the buttons were fine. I think more people were annoyed about when the TV’s would perpetually be set at 12:00 and you could do nothing about it unless you had a roll of black electrical tape.
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