Even taking into account that we’re talking about the rural South, a rightfully elected Black man being denied the ability to serve due to the color of his skin, in a town that is overwhelmingly Black (85%) is absolutely mind-boggling.

Yep. Much as I hate to say it, GBoard just feels good in a way that none of the other major swipe keyboards have for me.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach is a favorite shorter read of mine.

A dizzying number of notable people and people in my personal life have hopped onto Threads, day 1. The “fuck Elon / Twitter” sentiment and generally good vibes to this point mirror the experience I had here when I hopped onto Beehaw and we also had similar optimism and a “fuck u/spez” sentiment. But the major difference I see is this — for the sake of sticking it to Elon these folks are getting themselves even further entangled in Zuck’s world, and we’ve already seen the monsters that emerge from that muck.

Any social network that builds up a massive, general userbase inevitably enshittifies as the marketers / advertisers / influencers and otherwise self-promoters get their content boosted. With its extremely close ties to Instagram, those sorts of users will be ramped up on Threads in no time, and this period of positivity with fade in turn as that content starts getting vomited out and funneled to everyone.

The independent Fediverse is not without its faults, but I’m much more comfortable building community within this coalition of a space than in any of Meta’s creations.

Crying because I’m sitting on 30k+ photos and videos on Google Photos and staring down the monumental task of backing them up piecemeal.

I’m very much a rocky road / cookie dough / moose tracks kinda fella!

Reddit ramble: I nuked my reddit history of 16 years (as of this upcoming July 10) without thinking to download it first. I was a bit saddened at first, because I realized that my reddit history was about as close to a diary as I had kept from the time I was a high school senior. Given digital footprint and whatnot, I’m sure it’s mostly for the best that it’s all in the ether now. The now bare profile is a decent if bittersweet deterrent keeping me from hopping right back onto that site. But! I did remember that I had another handle that I used as my primary for a handful of years (got locked out of it, so I went back to my original one), so I have those vignettes of myself to look back on.

That’s pretty wild, because it’s notoriously introverted up here and kind of a difficult city in which to make friends — for that still be better than the burbs is interesting to hear.

That’s pretty wild, because it’s notoriously introverted up here and kind of a difficult city in which to make friends — for that still be better than the burbs is interesting to hear.

I’ve had good experiences with Castbox.

Oh man, ain’t that the truth. I really gotta make a point to get a backup of all my photos from Google Photos onto a hard drive one of these days. Problem is, Google Takeout batches only last about a week or so and I have a very hefty amount of data to get out. The alternative is to download it month by month, year by year, which I’m not looking forward to doing at all.

Sure thing! Hope you find a great read in there!

Yes and no. Yes, there is no Fediverse-wide admin to moderate content since everything is decentralized, but instances and their subcommunities do, and each one is free implement their own rules. We’re on Beehaw, which is pretty strongly committed to fostering a community with a positive culture and tone, and while there is a good amount of leeway for free discussion (from what I’ve seen in just 2 weeks here), I imagine getting too vocal about wishing that kind of thing might get attention from the Beehaw mods at some point.

Not that I don’t fully understand your emotions.

I saw somewhere recently (don’t remember if it was on Lemmy, reddit, or elsewhere), where a couple of folks were getting into it because a FOSS contributor didn’t recognize the importance of accounting for accessibility in design. They thought that projects as whole did not have a responsibility to account for those design considerations, and that anyone who wants to see those implemented have to do it themselves. While technically the truth in that this is all effectively volunteer work and developers work on what they want to work on, it’s something that could be alleviated by making it a core value of FOSS development. Asking questions like:

• This is a point-click-drag interaction, but how would a person do this with a keyboard only?
• These two components are identified using color, but what if a user is colorblind?
• There are buttons labeled with iconography only, but what if a user cannot see it and uses a screen reader to interact with everything?

It’s tough because the disability community in aggregate face steeper financial hurdles for a number of reasons, and could perhaps benefit the most from freely available, accessible tech.

I know it’s the name of the little alien, and it’s cute and all, but I’ll never be able to read that name and not think of bone-crushing Amazonian snoo-snoo from Futurama.

It’s hardly been 24 hours, but this is the most engaged I’ve felt in an online space in years. I’ve gone on a k.bin/Lemmy/Mastodon tear over the past day, exploring instances and looking for the one that I vibe with the most. So far I’ve been very happy with Beehaw as my home base, and love that I still have access to the communities on the other instances as well. It takes a slight bit of effort to find communities and make sure that I’m subscribed to them on this account, but I’ve actually found some satisfaction in the process.

Sure, there’s a low volume of content compared to the old place, but if I wanted a constant barrage of content I could just go back to RSS readers and have my fill. It’s the discussion and sense of connection that has made it worth investing my time here.

I love the quiet tension in this.

I will second Cuphead. Fair warning: it’s really difficult in that old-school sidescroller way in that you will lose many lives and you will have to try the levels again many times. But it is far and away one of my favorite games ever because the developers hand-animated it in 1920s rubber hose style — I’m talking frame by frame, by cell. They have a great art book too if you really take to it like I did. 😅 ! Book.

This is how I feel too! “Old internet energy” is what I’ve called it, and it’s great to feel that again

I agree. This feels more like the AACS encryption key fiasco to me than it does Digg v4. Brief context for the unaware, in 2007 Digg started taking down posts and accounts that referenced a hex code that could be used to decrypt HD-DVDs and Blu-rays. The userbase was very unhappy about it and spammed the front page with the code, rendering Digg basically useless. Digg relented pretty quickly, and while the site continued to chug along for another couple of years or so, the bad taste left in users’ mouths surely triggered a lot of them to start jumping over to Reddit.

I was active on both sites for a good while. I loved TechTV when it was a thing, and had followed many of those personalities to their respective podcast networks and to Digg when that channel imploded; over time I definitely started leaning more towards Reddit though, as one could definitely see the corporate pressure that Digg was starting to cave to. The “darkening” of Reddit today feels a lot closer to that moment than to the big Digg v4 switchover – the beginning of the end rather than the final nail. Feels very surreal looking back and having been there for all of it.

It does, but I see it less as a parallel to the Digg v4 migration and more to the AACS encryption key fiasco. Brief context, Digg was taking down posts and accounts referencing a hex code that could be used to decrypt HD-DVDs and Blu-rays. The userbase was very unhappy about it and spammed the front page with the code, rendering Digg basically useless. Digg relented pretty quickly, and the site chugged along for another couple of years or so. The “darkening” of Reddit today feels a lot closer to that moment than to the big Digg v4 switchover. Feels very surreal looking back and having been there for all of it.