Christian

Over ten years ago I was looking for a foss email client and I was really hesitant on claws because the interface looked ridiculously dated, but settled on it anyway because it seemed the most appropriate for me out of what was available.

The interface has received zero facelifts since then, but it’s grown to become endearing because the software has been fantastic and reliable for years. I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles in an email client, so maybe it’s missing features others might want, but it does everything I care about and needs minimal setup.

Yes, I actually do interpret it that way even though I’m pretty sure I’ve never received it with that intent. Then I think “why am I like this?” and wonder if this is part of getting old. This is actually much less of a joke than it probably sounds like.

“The problem”, I explain, “is that the mods have no lives”, to conclude my essay on how using a forum introduces a risk that could potentially shave precious seconds off someone’s speedrun.

I actually have quite a high ratio on both the private trackers I use just from seeding stuff for a long time and trading points in so I can download stuff, it just doesn’t help my ratio.

I think this is a good way to use private trackers. Most will have occasional events from time-to-time as well. If you keep seeding everything you get from freeleech, eventually you’ll hit a point where your seeding benefits outpace the amount you care to download and you can just download whatever and not care anymore forever. One of mine I hit that point about six years ago and I just totally take it for granted that I can snatch anything I’m curious about. I do not understand the need to care about your ratio beyond being enough to download things you want without losing your userclass perks.

I actually like private tracker forums a lot, they are communities that no organization will ever care to astroturf and that are free of bot posts. You’re just talking with people, and as you grow to recognize some of the regulars it feels like a community. Anyway, it’s weird how normal most people on those forums are about this stuff considering how if you look at r/trackers you might get the impression that the purpose of these websites is for the users to move up a ladder like it’s a game. (Also the consensus on that subreddit is never use a tracker’s forums under any circumstances ever because you will 100% be banned for no reason because the mods don’t have lives and…what?)

I actually don’t really care about “content manipulation” per se, I’m just trying to avoid astroturfing. Every online community has moderators. I’d prefer that the moderators are people, and people have beliefs and viewpoints that they might want to push.

If Jerry the mod from Minnesota is removing posts that don’t align with his beliefs I don’t give that the same weight as when it’s done by a multibillion dollar corporation whose belief is more profit. If fifty mods are influencing my beliefs in the exact same direction without coordinating with each other, maybe I was actually inclined to believe that in the first place. It’s coordination that makes it dangerous, and there really isn’t a return-on-investment for astroturfing a community of a few thousand users.

You could make an argument that this is a reason to be wary of admins of big instances like .world, but I’m skeptical even that has enough users yet for astroturfing to be worth investing in.

I actually think lemmy took off because the “content manipulation” the devs/admins were engaging in through the early years prevented it from becoming a toxic environment. Almost all the other alternative platforms were focused on minimal moderation and they became awful places as a result.

I found an article here for anyone else looking for a source that’s not just a clickbait image.

This kind of thing has been a long time coming, it’s why I started looking into decentralized social media in the first place. It actually feels less dangerous today than it did before the plague of GPT bots that make everyone wary of whether they’re reading something written by a human or not.

I left facebook for diaspora in the early 2010s because I felt like an algorithm could influence my opinions too easily. If I see a bunch of my friends voicing one opinion, but all of my friends who voice the opposite opinion don’t make it onto my feed, that will influence my own opinions regardless of how mindful I try to be about that. I was kind of addicted and it took strength to delete my account.

I started looking for reddit alternatives a couple years later for similar reasons. I’m really glad lemmy has finally taken off but things had to get a lot worse for that to happen.

he has a list of things that will prop up his approval rating, because that is the only metric that actually matters to him

This almost feels overly forgiving to Trump, given what the remainder of our political body is. When judging US politicians by which metrics actually matter to them, “approval rating” puts someone way in the upper echelon.

One time I got ready to head for grad school just like any other day and I realized I forgot to close my shirt drawer and was like huh, I’ve never forgotten that before. Nine or ten hours later I get back home and Buddy has not come out to greet me, instead I see our other cat Oceanborn, who is quite antisocial. I walk into the bedroom and Oceanborn paces in front of the dresser meowing and my heart sank into my stomach when I realized what I had done. For just a moment I felt so awful but opening that drawer just to see him do an enormous yawn and then a stretch and then jump out all happy, there’s something to be said for moments of terror for someone’s well-being that instantly turn to pure comedy when you realize they’re fine.

Black cat snuggled up in my black shirts. Later that evening I saw him use his paw to open the dresser drawer and hop in again, so it turns out he had just taught himself a new trick without having the decency to inform me about it.