Yes.

I think I have a mental disorder where if people online are angry at me I actually start introspecting a lot rather than blowing it off. Sometimes I have something I want to say anyway and emotionally prepare to eat it.

Here’s Roto-Borola, who has somehow fallen asleep while sitting up like a person.

My favorite band is Elend, they’re essentially unknown outside of the metal community in spite of not being metal in any way. (They are one of the only non-metal bands given an exception to be listed on the metal archives.) It’s neoclassical, but at times absurdly violent and their first three albums have harsh vocals. (Note that “Weeping Nights” is more or less an alternate version of “Les Ténèbres du Dehors” where the male vocals have been removed.)

violent, harsh vocals

violent, no harsh vocals

beautiful sad music

absolutely gorgeous shit with screams

(just giving youtube links so you can redirect to your frontend of choice)

I saw a snake-oil kickstarter for one of these about ten years ago.

I used to use the Trisquel forums, Trisquel being a fully-free operating system and at the time the only one that could be installed by a total novice. There was a guy there, Chris, who was heavily involved with the company ThinkPenguin. Chris seemed genuinely passionate about free software and actually seemed pretty genuine when plugging his products, he’d point out the specific points where his products failed to be fully free and sometimes give examples of competitors who could do better and some justification for why he didn’t feel it was realistic for ThinkPenguin to match that. I had some respect for him and some of the stuff he wrote on that forum really helped me understand the movement better.

Anyway, like ten years ago someone made a post about a kickstarter for a new company called Purism, which was fundraising to build a fully free high-end laptop I think by the end of that calendar year. A couple hours later the CEO of Purism (his name was Todd) found his way to that thread and explained to us how exciting this was and he intends to use Trisquel as the operating system and we should totally support this financially, blah blah blah. He’s giving lengthy replies to every single comment made in that thread. At some point Chris writes an extremely extensive response about why every detail Todd has promised does not seem realistic, including recognizing from the kickstarter photos exactly which computer Todd intended to use as a base and why he felt that choice made no sense. I didn’t really understand any of the details here to be honest, but yeah. Todd gives a one-sentence reply to Chris’ post where he addresses zero of Chris’ points and instead simply tells us that Chris is slandering his project because Chris is afraid of seeing a competitor succeed and doesn’t actually care about free software.

At that point I didn’t really need to understand the finer points to figure out which one of the two was more reliable. It was so blatantly transparent that Purism became a running joke in the forums.

Todd obviously ended up backtracking on virtually everything, using a brilliant scheme of weakening the promises in the kickstarter description over and over and over and dodging questions about that. He made a bunch of petitions to the FSF to certify his stuff on the grounds that their certification requirements (all those details initially promised for his laptops) were unrealistic to achieve. No shit. He also created an online (change.org? not sure about that) petition to Intel, which was sure-fire going to work, I’m pretty confident Intel did remove their management engine because I definitely would have heard more about that if Intel inexplicably decided to ignore that change.org petition.

Oh yeah, and on top of that, because Trisquel was the only FSF-endorsed distribution that was realistic for general-purpose use, he also ended up blowing a bunch of the funding to make his own distro (called “PureOS”) because if he stuck with using Trisquel his customers could easily end up on a forum where his products weren’t taken seriously.

Anyway, his initial kickstarter got like $600,000. He did release a laptop which was functional but not really different from things other companies like Los Alamos and ThinkPenguin had been doing for a while. A few years later he promised a fully libre phone and I think got even more for that than the laptop kickstarter. Last I heard only a very tiny fraction of the orders had actually been filled, and people were upset about that because it was already a few years late and also the company was desperately trying to remove all evidence that full refunds on request had been promised for the first couple years of preorders. Also the phones remained like six times as expensive as the (at the time) new pinephones and only functional for people who were extremely generous with how they define the word “functional”.

I’ll admit I did find some entertainment in this, but overall this shit was really depressing because not only could the funding Purism got have gone to other projects, but, more significantly, everyone who got scammed will be much more hesitant about supporting libre projects in general.

edit: Just checked /r/purism, the sidebar reads “PLEASE! Read at least 10 posts here before considering whether to place a Librem order! :) System76 is also a great alternative for Linux laptops.” Sounds like a community of happy customers.

Good comment. I’m pretty sure “public money, public code” used to be a slogan a while back. It didn’t get a lot of traction but it resonated with me.

The moment an adblocking add-in was made for Phoenix (later Firefox), I installed it and never looked back.

Oh wow, I had totally forgotten that it started as phoenix. I only remember that name because the first time I downloaded the browser, the homepage read “Phoenix is now Firebird”.

Honestly, I think it’s even overblown as a thing on reddit, I feel like virtually no one who is over fifteen and using reddit recreationally cares about karma. I’ve heard it presented like people are out there karma-farming because they feel a sense of pride in having a high number and I kind of think that’s an invented caricature to get mad at. I’m skeptical that anyone actually cares.

Obviously there are people and businesses/institutions who use reddit for promotion and narrative shifting and there are bot accounts to be sold to those institutions, and all of them definitely care about karma, but I think that’s something different (and more harmful).

In the present discussion, the people posting want to share that they’re trying something new. I don’t open these posts myself but I think that’s fine. It’s very unlikely there’s some hidden motive here. As someone who cares about free software and the linux ecosystem, I would hope that the community is receptive and encourages newcomers to participate.

I do understand how OP could be annoyed at seeing a lot of these in his feed, but I think the solution is to get them off his feed, just block the community. Letting newbies have their moment is more likely to grow the community.

I don’t anymore, but it definitely still doesn’t feel anywhere near as bad as reddit is.

In the past, the security fortress Lemmy has had that reddit doesn’t is the userbase being too small for organizations to feel astroturfing is worth their time.

Yeah, probably a little, but this same change was 1000x more noticeable like half a year ago when reddit banned third-party apps. I think it’s reasonable to lament the change, and I kind of miss the tight-knit community from the first three years I was here, but it’s still worth celebrating the platform taking off. Ultimately all you can do is be the change you wish to see in the world.

That said, if we start getting heavily astroturfed with bots and spam I’m going to be a little less zen about it.

I saw the picture before reading the edit and was trying to imagine what OP was doing that made the end key significantly more useful than the home key, like not going backwards on principle or something.

Around this time of year one of my best conversation starters is “What’s your least favorite Christmas song?”. Everyone (at least here in the US) has at least one Christmas song that annoys the shit out of them, but you’ll get tons of different answers.

I switched like ten years ago because I wanted to learn the details, but in all honesty I still feel like I barely understand anything. Not sure how normal this is, maybe I’m unusually dumb, but I feel like what I’ve really learned is how to troubleshoot and solve issues by reading documentation and tinkering, rather than understanding what I’m actually doing. I’ve had a stable system for years but I kind of feel like if a typical arch forum poster looked my system configuration for five minutes they’d be like wtf are you doing.

I’ve been paying one euro per month for posteo for almost a decade now.

I think we had the basics covered early. Too early maybe.

I basically had my sex ed delayed a year or two from the other students because as a fourth grader I would mostly just tune out when the teacher started talking.

The devs’ politics led to them valuing building a welcoming community over the principle of free speech. There was a strictly enforced moderation policy from the start, which may seem crazy now but it’s a lot easier to do when your community is small. Toxic people definitely came in and got banned. On their way out you’d often see them complaining about how ridiculous it is to filter out slurs. The community that stuck around was really great. I’m not someone who posts a lot on any platform, but I was viewing lemmy every day for a couple years because the discussions were good, and there was very little hostility.

Today the community is more like reddit than it is like old lemmy, lemmy actually feels a lot less friendly today than it did like six months ago.

I do think the devs were wholly unprepared for reddit to shoot itself in the foot as badly as it did. Their project went from a passion project to serious business almost overnight. With time I’m sure they’re capable of working through the issues we’re facing today, but I don’t think they were ready for the big migration when it happened.

Not my analogy, but observing people living under capitalism and then concluding that humans are naturally selfish is like looking at workers in a factory where pollution is poisoning their lungs and then concluding that humans naturally cough a lot.

I guess that makes sense. I wasn’t really thinking to filter out terrible opinions, just filter out things that aren’t actual opinions.

What’s your reasoning?

I saw one of these in action! I never actually knew her, but she was cc’ed in a lot of the emails I was getting. Our emails were first initial, middle initial, first three letters of last name, then extra digits if needed. J. E. Lloyd had “jello@…”

Some stuff that’s colloquially seen as capitalism is okay. Me paying someone to clean my house because I hate that chore is fine with me.

Sometimes I do wonder how many “pro-capitalist” individuals actually think we’re railing against exchanging money for goods and services.