MudMan

Your user name is “dyikeyboards”, I feel like we’re gonna agree to disagree on this no matter what I say, and I’m fine with that.

I feel like that caveat holds up until you buy a laptop.

Well, somehow keyboards are now a niche boutique industry where people spend hundreds of dollars putting together custom-made minimalist builds like they’re honing a weapon in an action movie. I find that’s probably dumber than a corporate logo becominmg a default key (which to be fair has been a thing since the 80s, the C64 had a Commodore key), but it does mean that if don’t want it, you can get a keycap with anything you want on it instead.

Fair enough. Alt used to be that before we decided to have a button to annoyingly pop up the menu strip. And there’s still Alt Gr for that in full sized keyboards if we want to go back that way.

I don’t remember the last time I pressed the “right click” contextual menu key, so honestly it’s not like it’ll be too annoying. Unless they do replace an actually useful key, at which point I guess the people making “make Windows actually work good” apps will get to live another year.

Wait, how did it go UP in 2020? Do you guys remember 2020? How could you possibly get run over by a car in 2020? Did the twelve people who still got to drive to places try extra hard? What the hell?

Oh, it’s me. I’m that guy. I mean, look at my post history here. I invented being that guy, except Maher is older than me, but I’ll still argue about it because I’m that guy.

It comes from being somewhat above average in school, and getting a bit of a reputation for being precocious and smart and not really having anything else going on so you may as well double down on it and have a thing. Plus if you ride that wave confidently enough it’ll get you a full on career. And once you get validated by sucess, or whatever you personally consider success-adjacent enough, there’s no way them kids are gonna show you up. Ever. No matter what. Every hill is worth dying on. Because that self-image. Is. All. You. Have. All you’ve had for decades now.

Man, I should go hug my dad. I can point at the two or three conversations we had that made me at least try not to be that asshole.

A dick? No idea. Don’t know the man.

A dickish vibe, public persona and general cultural presence? I mean, enough that I made that joke, I suppose.

Bunch of people, mostly old dudes, have a fundamental aversion to not being the smartest person in the room. They latch on to whatever gives them the opportunity to be contrarian and in an environment of social media and disinformation they don’t fully understand they spiral out into neofash, deluded stances becoming their entire persona.

Rant about something you’re wrong about, get the whole internet telling you how dumb that is, get defensive because you can’t be the one who’s wrong, get radicalized. Welcome to the 21st century.

Source: I can’t believe I didn’t spiral down that toilet myself. Seriously, I should be one of those assholes. I can’t believe I noticed just in time before the Internet weaponized that personality type into the death of democracy.

Imagine going on Seth McFarlane’s pocast and having people come out of it going “whoa, that guest was a dick”.

That’s dedication to your being a dick craft.

I use ones that are explicitly labelled with a black strip. My tactic for opening them is to put them between my lips and blow, which works pretty well but got really weird during the mandatory masking periods.

Oh, no they don’t “randomly” dislike Meta. They have very good reasons to dislike Meta. I dislike Meta. I abandoned all my Meta accounts ages ago, never looked back. Like I said, all social media was a mistake.

What I’m saying is that the general tenor of the conversation is to actively dislike Meta, then look for ways to justify Meta federating being bad for everybody else. It’s not to think about the consequences of Meta federating and then deciding if it’s convenient or not.

I mean, my personal take is that Meta social media sucks, so I’d much rather access the people I know in Threads safely from Mastodon than from a Threads account, if we’re gonna put the cards on the table. I don’t need to like Meta for that. In fact, that’s a stance entirely built on not wanting to have to engage with Meta’s platform to reach the people in Meta’s platform.

And hey, it’d been a while since people accused me of being a paid shill for anybody. That’s some holiday nostalgia for you.

The problems have to do with people not liking Meta. I’m getting an increasingly strong feeling that the goalposts shall be placed wherever they are needed.

Which I suppose explains the tonal whiplash of going from people raging that not enough people were defederating from Meta to raging that Meta is defederating from the usual suspects in less time than it took to get through the Christmas leftovers.

Not that I particularly like Meta. All social media was a mistake, if you ask me. But still.

This is the one of very few remotely empathetic takes here and it still feels a need to preface with “some people do fake it”.

I am hoping I stumbled upon a meme, because if not, holy crap.

I want the record to show I didn’t even go with the top 5 most absurd Met gala outfits that came up when I googled, I was trying to keep it fair here.

Admittedly, if you were on some isolated area and this came off a boat you’d think you’re being invaded by aliens, too.

I’ve been saying this from the go: users don’t need to know decentralization even exists until AFTER they are signed up.

What Mastodon needs is a proper migration flow that moves old posts and remote follows so users can decide if they want a new instance after they spend some time in the system and start to understand how it works. Any mention of decentralization on signup is a churn point, because decentralization doesn’t add any features to posting and reading posts. From a UX perspective, decentralization isn’t a feature.

Things are about to get messier once the big decision coming in becomes “do you want to see Threads or nah?”, which then actively requires thinking about a competing social media platform on the way into this one.

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They didn’t “chicken out”, necessarily. It turns out that making huge social networks, and particularly for-profit ones, is not trivial. They connected a few accounts this week… but they also launched in the European Union this week, they weren’t even out worldwide until now.

But hey, don’t you worry, everybody is freaking out again. And if BlueSky ever finishes their own proprietary interoperability protocol and that is made AP-compatible on this end I’m sure we’ll have another hipster breakdown.

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