xapr [he/him]

Awesome, thanks!

That sounds awesome! Is it a Unicomp EnduraPro or is there some other option?

I think it works fantastically well. I personally like it much better than a touchpad. It lets me move the pointer without taking my hands away from typing home position.

You mean TikTok wasn’t a campaign issue? I agree. I think I understand your argument now.

But from what I recall, that’s exactly what happened with the Iran hostage crisis too: they were freed on the day of Reagan’s inauguration after he took over from Carter.

I thought you were referring to a TV series. That’s probably why I couldn’t find it. Thanks!

Do you have a link? I don’t think I’m finding the right Infinite Jest.

I’m not sure I would go as far as saying that the trends are tipping toward smaller communities again, but we can hope.

I don’t think either of those are major issues. I happen to think that Mastodon is OK, almost catchy. Their mascot is very cute too. They officially did away with the Toot terminology quite a while ago, like a year or two, but some instances modified the code to keep that, and the old hands keep calling it that too. Also, keep in mind that I said that I fully expect Mastodon to stay a minor but viable player. It’s never going to overtake a corporate behemoth like Meta, and most likely not even Twitter.

I hear what you’re saying and think you have a good point. It’s very likely that Mastodon will stay a minor player, but I also think it will live on as a viable alternative to the major social networks. There are a lot of people dedicated to developing, running, posting, etc. to keep it lively. There is also the factor that Mastodon will always be there if (when) X or BlueSky stumble and make a mistake that will send another chunk of users over.

Good to know, thanks!

Thanks for providing more details. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mastodon was quite a bit quieter before the Twitter exodus. I moved over during the exodus and found it to be pretty active. I understand that they have kept developing features trying to address the feeling of “what now?” when you first sign up.

Right, Lemmy is very different from Mastodon, even though both use ActivityPub and can thus communicate with each other. Unfortunately, I don’t know that much about those platforms two platforms, other than that they do exist. You can find a ton of active open-source ActivityPub projects to explore on this list: https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub

Cool, thanks.

That sounds pretty neat. Are all the algos developed by Bluesky (i.e., corporate/billionaire/VC-driven) though?

Following hashtags is also a great way to find content you’re interested in.

Sure, this is legitimate as well, and I believe I’ve heard that they’re working on this feature.

There are different Mastodon instances with different post character limits. You could also use an ActivityPub based macroblog (like write.as / WriteFreely(?)).

It’s absolutely insane to hear that a streamer, of all types of people, said there’s a learning curve to it. Twitch is/was bewildering to me, just as a user, much less a streamer who would need to learn to configure and use OBS, etc. SMH.

Nightmare is massively overstating it. Mastodon’s UI/UX is neither a nightmare nor difficult to use. People who say this stuff leave me scratching my head.

In my view, the only legitimate criticism of Mastodon is about the lack of an algorithm that’s constantly bubbling content to the top, but that’s a valid design choice that many people prefer over the toxic algos over at X/Twitter.