Kind of a combination maybe? Since Mastodon lets you find new people with similar interests by browsing what’s on your local timeline or hashtags of interest, and you can still follow people of interest without any chatting. I don’t know much about chat apps but don’t you have to already know the people beforehand, or come across them via a mutual acquaintance or invite to a chat room?

Of course, Mastodon can be and is used for broadcast/consume interactions, but not as much, since most broadcasters want a huge audience with little interaction, which means a big platform, while the ones on Mastodon are probably looking for a bit more interactive experience with a smaller audience.

Reading comments, it’s really something that people think >=1800 sq. ft is small! Probably because they haven’t really built houses smaller than that for at least the last 30 years, with very few exceptions. I currently live in a post-WWII 2BR, 840 sq ft house, which to me feels plenty big enough for a single or couple, but back when it was built, <1000 sq ft. was the size most people raised their families in . When I was a kid more like 3BR 1200 sq. ft. houses were the typical size.

I wish they’d build more smaller houses like this instead of only large >2500 sq.ft. or McMansions. More houses would fit in the same area and they’d be more affordable, to buy, take care of, and pay property tax on. Even before housing soared to total unaffordabilty, all newer houses were huge and out of reach for normal people. It feels like every aspect of our society from housing, transportation, clothing, any kind of shopping, everything! just gets more and more impractical and ridiculous. Who is making these crazy decisions? Not regular people. I know it’s stereotypical that when you get older you think things are getting worse, but they are getting worse, dammit!

Mastodon is more for people who like to have interactions or conversations back and forth with other people, while the big platforms are for influencers/broadcasters and consumers/viewers-- any back and forth interactions there are more between commenters than with the influencer/broadcaster. Of course there is some overlap and exceptions to that characterization, but that’s how it generally seems to me.

So IMO it’s not a competition, there’s plenty of room for both types of SM. Depending on a person’s preference they may use just Masto, just big SM, or use both, each for different reasons. The problem is when people expect Mastodon to be just like xitter/bsky/threads and get upset that it isn’t. Relax and use whichever platform(s) you like.

Nice summary! I’ve been here through that whole time period. If it had stopped at the stage around 1995-2000 (before FB & web 2.0 took over the internet, before every business model became about bombarding us with ads and spying on us), our lives would be much better today.

Yes you are correct, it’s worse now. At first it was creative, innovative products that made things more convenient or fun, or at least didn’t harm its users. Now all the new things are made by immature egotistical billionaire techbros: generative AI which has ruined the internet by polluting it with so much shit you can’t get real information any more, not to mention using up all our power and water resources, the enshittification of Web 2.0, Web 3.0 that was pure shit from the get-go, IOT “smart” appliances like TVs, doorbells, thermostats, refrigerators that spy on you and your neighbors, shit “self-driving” killer cars that shouldn’t be allowed on the roads, whatever the hell that new VR Metaverse shit is, ads, ads, ads, ads, and on and on. It’s a tech dystopia.

I can only hope that nothing ever happens to where I’d have to use Windows again. (been using only linux for over 10 years and the latest Windows I ever used was win 7 at work).

If that happened, the shock of all the last 10-15 years’ accumulation of enshittification hitting me at once might give me a stroke. The boiling frogs of today have gotten used to their OS serving them ads and spying on them by now, but I wouldn’t be able to deal with it.

I’ve always said governments and public institutions funded by taxpayers should use FLOSS and not be beholden to private companies. Any shortcomings or unfulfilled needs in Linux and FLOSS software would quickly be dealt with once large organizations like these started using it as the default, since they could easily fund whatever features or fixes are needed for significantly less money than they pay for proprietary software (especially now that these days they’re forking over annual subscriptions), and thus they’d also have much more control over the making sure the software meets their needs.

It seems like a no-brainer to me. Maybe it wasn’t in the earlier days of Linux but not for the last decade or so.

Oh I see, that makes sense! Thanks

We’ve got four more years of …

I see this all over Lemmy. Do people still not realize what has happened? The next 4 years is just the beginning of what has been unleashed for the US for at least a generation or more.

Not 10 million. As of today (all votes still not counted) trump leads the popular vote by 2,557,324. That’s 49.9% to 48.3%. Current vote count: https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-ELECTION/RESULTS/zjpqnemxwvx/president/

Not that the popular vote matters in who wins, but it’s nice to know he didn’t get a true majority of all votes cast. 1.8% of votes were 3rd party, more than the difference between trump and Harris. If the amount of those votes that were “to teach the Dems a lesson” were added to the ones where POTUS was left blank to “teach the Dems a lesson”, well … anyway.

Who said they had a “burning hatred” of women? Most of the men in the focus groups who said that they wouldn’t vote for a woman wasn’t because they hate women but said things like, women were “too emotional”, would not be able to handle dealing with adversarial foreign leaders, or that it’s “just not appropriate” for a woman to hold the office of POTUS. Oh, and even some women also said that.

Yes indeed. https://abcnews.go.com/US/trumps-deportation-plan-private-prison-industry-sees-lucrative/story?id=115775702

Just because burning fossil fuels is bad doesn’t magically make nuclear good, or somehow no big deal. The chance for a catastrophic accident mentioned in the meme is only one drawback (which is bad enough–get real, denial is not a strategy here). Just a few other issues:

• the problem of what to do with the waste: no permanent solutions have yet been implemented and we’ve been using costly-to-maintain “temporary” methods for decades. Not to mention the thermal water pollution to aquatic ecosystems

• the enormously out of proportion up front costs to construct the plants, and higher ongoing operation and maintenance costs due to safety risks in proportion to amount of power generated

• the fact that uranium is also a limited resource that has to be mined like other ores, with all the environmental negatives of that, which then has to go through a lot of processing involving various mechanics and chemicals just to make it usable as fuel.

Anyway I’m not going to try and go into more detail on a forum post, but all this advocacy for a very problematic method of producing power as if it’s a simple solution to our problems is kind of irritating. At least I hope the above shows we should stop pretending it’s “clean energy”. We should be focusing on developing renewable and sustainable energy systems.

“A lot of Latinos, those who can vote, did so because they think he [Trump] can improve the economy. That would be very good for us too,” said Carlos, an undocumented Mexican who lives in New York City.

Oh Carlos, mi dulce niño del verano …

“The Onion is proud to acquire Infowars, and we look forward to continuing its storied tradition of scaring the site’s users with lies until they fork over their cold, hard cash,” said The Onion CEO Ben Collins. “Or Bitcoin. We will also accept Bitcoin.”

This is great!

When I was 11, that was 5th grade and we would rotate being on “safety patrol” which is where you would stand, by yourself, at certain intersections and make sure the younger kids waited for cars to pass and it was safe before crossing the street. Of course we walked to those spots by ourselves. And by age 12 I was babysitting other people’s kids.

So those people and their rules are crazy. If we really aren’t letting kids walk somewhere by themselves by age 10-11, no wonder our society is so dysfunctional. This has got to be very detrimental to the personal and social development of the children.

I would have thought a red state like Georgia would not have what they call “Nanny state” laws? I’d like to see the actual wording of the “reckless conduct” law they would be charging her under. Does it actually specify how, when and where your children can go unsupervised and what ages of children it applies to, or do the cops just get to “use their own judgement”?

edit to add: I feel sorry for kids growing up today and apparently in the last 20 years or so. When I was a kid our mothers just said “Be back by supper” and we went out and played wherever. they didn’t know where we were. No cell phones to track us.

I have a pre-touchscreen era (for its model anyway) 2012 car. I’m hoping by the time I have to get a new car this touchscreen fad will have come and gone. How are you supposed to use those things in the winter when you have gloves on?

Your console, my price?

I never use Google, so this is from a blank slate search. The top result for “can i c” is “can I change my vote?” Also the top 2 results for “what is” by itself are: “what is the 4b movement” and “what is a tariff”. Here come the leopards.