Nepenthe

It’s really a mix of both. More heavily the way the site has been for years because people love drama more than anything else. If you want the sweet serotonin of karma, you’ve gotta be simultaneously the funniest, meanest, and most jaded person in the room, and everyone is jockeying for that position.

It just breeds assholes by design. I’ve noticed my own behavior has changed, too, since leaving that place, although partially that’s because I just didn’t want to be like that anymore.

But it really has been noticeably affected since the protests. I was originally trying to stay for one single sub I was in, because they were the kindest, calmest community I’d met since back when forums were a thing.

Just the best group, for reasons none of us really understood and some of us kept trying to find psychological commonalities to explain. Truly 98% of them were people I’d chill with irl and I still know a few on discord. And also here. If you’re reading this, hello!

But the migration away was enough to completely alter the atmosphere imo. A lot of the more conscientious users left for other pastures, leaving behind those that were more neutral or even openly hostile about the protests.

There began to be fights and insults thrown where before this, any aggression had been unusual. The posts took a turn that reflected that feeling and I really stopped bothering with the place after a few months. I’m still a bit sad about it and there are things that I miss, but there just wasn’t enough to hold me anymore. It seemed to increasingly echo every other part of the site.

For the moment, this place is quieter but better. We still get dumb shit every now and then, but it’s not to the same degree and hopefully never will be. As above, I blame the demographic. We’ve grouped all the people with stubborn morals into a little room and it turns out they have things in common. I do miss a couple people I used to see everywhere all the time when kbin first ramped up, but we run in different circles and they’ve gotten lost in the crowd.

And yes, btw, I am also going to name you one of my favorite users to see around. You seem as kind as you are prolific.

One of his three legs appears to be wearing some sort of sandal, and that is clearly a sock underneath. Killing was justified.

Age of Attraction

Uuuunfortunately, that turned out to be an easily-accessible post that was barely chopped up probably for brevity more than anything else. Wasn’t one of their students, it was some 8yr old at their apartment complex.

Dunno if you’re from there or defensively made assumptions, but the MAP community was gonna come out fairly quick regardless and go over just as well.

War with Canada, though? Canada. I’ve genuinely never heard me or any other American on any political side have one negative thing to say about Canada, and we generally view them as our little brother no matter how frustrated and superior actual Canadians get about it.

The brits would be invading America’s hat, it would be a war over the rule of the monarchy, and both sides being NATO members means NATO is not really a concern.

I don’t think that would ever be a thing, but if it were a thing, I really wouldn’t choose to be at war with anyone on US borders. Not even saber rattling. We’re very paranoid, if that’s changed at all it’s gotten worse, and physically touching our borders will almost certainly draw aggro.

Plus, let’s be honest, Canadians aren’t brown enough to be ignored. We’d sell out Mexico faster than Canada simply because the cartels are too much trouble.

The go-to counterpoint being that people come to social media to socialize with other humans. The moment another “human” hits me with “As an AI…” or are otherwise unmasked for any reason is the exact moment I lose a little bit of faith in the platform.

It’s not enough faith to make me stop using it the first time or even the fifth, so long as the promise of almost always interacting with another person is dangled in front of me. But that little bit can’t be regained and eventually it’s going to hit zero and I will leave.

I already have chatbots if I want to talk to myself. Talking to the cat makes me feel less lonely than chatbots do, and given the choice between the fedi forever remaining niche or retaining the bot “activity” of reddit…I’d just move to tildes.

The only halfway good argument is the use of a breaking news bot, but I’ve found I tend to get tired of those very fast for the same reason. They just make me sad and irritated, and I end up blocking them. If the news is interesting enough, I expect humans will spam it.

If they could be programmed to only post when user interaction falls…maybe, in theory, but that feels more insidious to me than anything else. The idea of a company pumping their numbers will never make me like them, and if bots are already posting stuff, why do I have to interact in order to get content? They’re already doing it. 🤷‍♂️

If I’m lurking enough to trigger the theoretical user activity bot, I’d also be fine lurking while “other users” (the bots) give me things to look at, and they’ll never go dormant.

Moving one over here was fairly hard for this reason. I admittedly should be keeping it up still, but where realizing I had nine whole subscribers made me really happy (there are tens of us!), realizing nobody was ever going to make a move of any sort even to comment and that I was going to continue carrying this entire community by myself has made me very discouraged.

I know most people are content to lurk while they look for something that’s interesting enough to post/interact with. I do that too. But come on, guys. Don’t do me like this. Nobody goes online to sit and talk to themselves.

Doesn’t make them good or necessary just because they’re common. When I see bots, I tend to block them pretty fast regardless of contribution, and my experience has been pretty damn nice here in very large part because the bot users are (to my knowledge) mostly or entirely dormant.

Nobody wants to interact with a known bot, or post where that’s the main contributor. The bot is never going to engage with them, and it somehow feels worse than posting into the void.

It makes sense, but it’s more than a little depressing and I would have thought the features wouldn’t really be much of an issue for someone who chose that platform. Someone on Twitter might be aware that Reddit exists and how it works, but they’re still not very likely to uproot themselves from a platform they know and use just for that (current events notwithstanding).

Can I ask what kind of service Hubzilla is, that puts it above the other options? Especially for nerds? I’ve heard the name maybe three times now, but I know nothing else. Is it just the fact that they’re not tied down?

For me, I had my own reasons that were similar to Nougat’s. Sensible, non-eye-burning interface. A frankly surprising admiration for what I’d seen of what would become my dev’s personality and approach, where I hadn’t felt anything but veiled contempt for an admin in decades. I didn’t know about the other perks (individually muting instances, neat community tagging system, 70% compatibility with mastodon) until later, but those make me even more satisfied with my choice and I’m content to wait out the small stuff.

For inquisitive people, I’m not overly certain beyond what I’ve said. It could have been a fluke. It could be that, since lemmy was the first choice anyone ever mentioned, shitposters are just looking for the easiest way to have a good time. So lemmy got all the shitposters. And if you weren’t interested in what lemmy had to offer, there was a very good chance you weren’t interested in where the fediverse currently was in general, in order to bother reading through all the other options. A lot of people decided they didn’t like how janky and different it felt and they just went elsewhere.

I could be overly-projecting, but people who kept looking long enough to stumble across kbin instead of choosing lemmy or giving up I think would tend to be the more anxious, detail-oriented types that are liable to do their homework before making anything approaching a decision. Which would…inherently make them more likely to be hungrier for that kind of thing in general? Which naturally meshes pretty well with the aforementioned nerdiness of those who were already here when we arrived.

I really don’t want to make assumptions, though, or end up implying things like “Lol, lemmy got all the lazy chodes and we got the smart people.” Especially between such closely-linked communities that started out as quite literally the same group. Expecting such a clear delineation would be a bit laughable, and we’ll blend with each other like we always have. I have no interest in tribalism, I’m just enjoying the time period this platform is troll-less.

Kbin, here. Lemmy images come through fine 80-90% of the time, with a rare case that the post will federate but utterly forget the image. I don’t believe it’s ever missed a video, but I don’t often stop for those in order to weigh in.

@macrophotography started out repeatedly losing the image when they first started federating with kbin.social, but it resolved in a day and after checking, it still works fine.

who the kbin software attracts

Currently, it’s an uneven split between fledditors and tech nerds, which I would chalk up to mastodon/fedi in general brimming with mostly nerds, and kbin specifically being a platform in its infancy that would naturally attract more curious devs than shitposters.

I think it’ll balance out more over time, as people who have made their home here make it the home they’re looking for. I’m hoping kbin will always keep the air of kind hyper-inquisitiveness that it currently carries.

I would consider it a very fine line because suicide, by nature, is always a consenting choice. This does not mean anyone wants to die, most don’t. If you ask them whether they would feel the same if all their problems were magicked away, you wouldn’t really even need time to think. It’s just that, for them, there is no other solution. Or at least, not one that seems like it could ever possibly be attainable. You’re forced into it because there’s no other way to make it fucking stop.

Your condition that patients be mentally sound, I question. Either understanding the consequence of their actions (the concept of death) would be enough and nearly everyone would be greenlit with an appropriate time span for consideration, or nobody would be because in order to make that choice you’re almost certainly mentally ill.

If all it takes is understanding my own actions, I’d be approved tomorrow. Doesn’t mean it’s the first or even third option I’d choose. Just means I’m chronically broke, often homeless, and have been used and abused often enough that I don’t even bother with the idea of a support system anymore. The most impactful of my illnesses is so rare it’s hard to even find a therapist who mentions it at all, let alone one I’d click with. Of the medication legal in the states, one is not something I want to do because it has a risk of heavily worsening the dissociation that already leaves me non-functional, and the other causes brain damage.

It would be my choice, but it would not be a voluntary choice. It’s just…the option that I have that isn’t this. Which is by far the biggest risk here, of simply shrugging and egging those suffering to take the painless way instead of funding and supplying adequate treatment.

(this is, for somewhat obvious reasons, not to say I’m against MAID. I think since people are going to do this, they should have a way to do so that isn’t horrifically painful, with a lower likelihood of just making someone’s hilariously shit life somehow even shittier. But this is not a game, and the inexpensiveness of handwaving the people problems is a genuine danger.)

From what little I’ve seen of threads after its rollout, no, I really can’t say I’d be looking forward to it. Almost every comment I read here is interesting and civil, and meta’s clientele don’t tend to have a lot of overlap with “people I want near me.” Threads is only a few days old, but initially looks no different and I just don’t want that kind of bullshit back in my life. I forgot what it was like without it.

If it were up to me, honestly? What I would like when meta intentionally or not eventually begins acting unstable around non-meta instances, is for that to be their problem. I would like the fediverse as it is to focus on itself and its own business and bugs instead of acting as Meta’s nanny the way XMPP did, and if they have problems seeing the rest of our content and federating their subscription-only metaflorps, they are able to join us where they’ll be more free anyway.

Oh, I never realized the storylines in Detroit were that short. I’m exactly like you, and I’ve also found that the more games I play at once, the less I enjoy any of them. So my hands are a bit tied in terms of backlog and that one’s been on the backburner for…years, now that I think of it. But That bumps it up my list considerably if I can 100% it in like 3 days.

I was very close to giving the fuck up initially, though. You know what the biggest encouragement was when I was signing up? When I was looking through the comments on kbin, someone said all the hoops would keep the idiots out, and I will put in a _lot _ more energy if it means both showing off and being where the idiots aren’t. I’d say having a barrier there really has done some good for the overall quality (for now), but the people claiming it’s good to make sign-ups as hard as possible are sometimes the same people claiming there isn’t a barrier at all, and it comes off as very strange elitism.

Reading the explanations and advice people were giving to each other made a whole lot more sense than anything the internet was handing me, but even some of that could be head-scratching, and hands-on is probably the best way to go. Not without its dangers. I still think I got incredibly lucky to end up on an instance I like this much. Imagine having admiration for the dev for once.

Honestly, you’re right, and I think the analysis paralysis that the fediverse immediately presents isn’t really helped by the fact I’m just generally a neurotic person. Wanting/NEEDING to understand how every aspect of something works and why lends itself really well to things like linguistics and biology, but I feel bothered when I skip the tutorial in a game I already know. What if I missed something and I’ll never be able to figure out how buttons work.

I don’t really think it’s fair to pretend that, before two weeks ago, anyone under god had any idea what an instance was unless they were already heavily tech-oriented.

It took me hours of trying to read through not-my-kind-of-jargon to understand what the hell I was looking at and what kind of consequences that unexplained choice would have, and it really seems like a good number of users that initially struggled forget the learning curve extremely quickly the moment they’re over it.