God forbid you contextualize this answer in any way, someone here might understand what’s being discussed and form an opinion for themselves.

I recently went back to using Thunderbird after not doing so for, I don’t know, maybe a decade. Having everything in one place is very convenient indeed.

Yeah, and I’m sure you’ll agree there’s a gap between “my car is a machine that occasionally requires service by someone who knows how” and “my car is a metal horse that should go as long as I put gas in it”. I don’t expect people to be the mechanic, but the second group of people is very much real.

People feel the same way about cars, electricity, food preservation. People’s lives are interdependent on massively specialized technical disciplines and most of them couldn’t care less. I understand that the amount of specialization that goes into some topics means you can’t be an expert on all of these subjects, but some people just could not give a single shit how any of it works, and do not have any understanding of the ways in which it might stop working.

I’ve come to greatly resent any sort of technology or design being dismissed as “magic”, because I’ve met too many people who mean it literally.

It is not even semi-private. It is a completely public medium and absolutely nothing posted on it, including direct messages, can be seen as even remotely secure. Worse, anything you post on Mastodon is, once sent, for all intents and purposes completely irrevocable.

This guy is either actively trying to spread fear and doubt about decentralized services, or is somehow only now understanding what the internet is and how it works. Did I step into some kind of time vortex a while back and end up in a world where people ever believed that anything on the internet was private or revocable?

Meta’s interests as a corporate entity are inherently incompatible with the goals behind the creation of a decentralized and federated service. I do not believe they are able or willing to act in good faith, and I don’t think their presence should be tolerated. Personally, I did not jump ship from Reddit to be reconnected with the likes of Facebook or Instagram. The entire effort feels to me like a panic response to the notion that there are people like myself not being shown what Meta wants seen, and they can stay mad about it.

Addendum:

On the other hand, I think people should be the arbiters of the content they view. I don’t get the notion of browsing /all and then being upset at what you find there, it’s just a raw firehose of what people are up to on the internet. There is a value in letting people consume the content they want, where and how they want it. I’m sure someone would be happy to be linked in to this larger ecosystem. There’s a lemmy instance dedicated to mirroring reddit content and I don’t see the appeal of that, but more power to the people who get use from it.

The nature of the fediverse and activitypub is that we can’t stop Meta from making use of this platform. We’re going to have to handle this situation by proving that we have something different and perhaps better than anything Meta can offer. But I won’t stay in a space where their size and influence is permitted to dominate all conversation, it’s already slightly jarring to hear people talk as if lemmy.world were the de-facto center of the lemmyverse.

Beehaw does not take the standard approach to moderation. The biggest problem is that their team is literally like four people and the tools don’t exist yet for them to handle the amount of users and content that come from federating with larger instances. I understand they’re also trying to create a community where moderation is more of a collaborative process than a set of blindly applied rules, and that requires like-minded people. What some people don’t particularly understand is, that set of like minded people are typical targets for bad actors on the rest of the internet, and they’re interested in a place where that’s not a constant concern.

I’m not the target audience for that community, but they’ve said defederation is a temporary measure, and people need to just let them cook.

People want different things out of the fediverse, and I’ve noticed some people aren’t terribly interested in recognizing that. Lemmygrad and Beehaw are very interesting case studies in people using this technology to create a space that serves their needs and wants rather than the lowest common denominator.

sh.itjust.works has defederated from lemmygrad.ml. The hard fact is that you cannot view or participate in their communities from this instance.

I’ve been getting the best results by toggling the page between posts and comments. This forces the UI elements to reload and subscribe becomes a real button. It won’t update, though: I’ll have to click it and then reload the page, and generally it appears either as joined or subscribe pending. I intend to go through and fiddle with the latter at a later time, as you can force the matter by repeatedly leaving and re-subscribing, but I’ve been made to understand this is a server load issue.

Thanks to both of you, good to know the problem is being worked on.

I’ll give that a try. Communities with “Subscription Pending” still seem to show up in my subscribed feed, which is good enough for me, for the time being.

Edit: This works! A curious bug, but one I can work around easily enough. I’m sure this will cause some confusion, so hopefully it’s ironed out soon.

Thank you, I absolutely hate it. I’m going to go vomit into my own eyes now.

For me it’s a combination of being very careful with what I subscribe to, and a lot of the news subreddits putting the text of the article in the post. Makes it near impossible to justify not reading the text rather than jumping to the comments, and it’s guaranteed to be in a decently readable format (unlike most news websites, for some reason)

NCD already being here is how I knew I chose the right instance

This is sh.itjust.works, which makes me a sh.ithead

E: I stole this from somewhere in the wild and wish I had taken note of who came up with it

PatientGamers, one of the communities that got me to make the jump off of reddit. It’s a games discussion subreddit community with a focus on games that aren’t new or currently super popular. Not as far back as the retrogaming enthusiasts, though.

NCD is unique to me because it seems to hold shitposters of every stripe and from every walk. Being truly non-credible requires a working knowledge of credibility, so it all balances out.

Rambly posts aren’t the end of the world, but titles that don’t clearly explain what you’re asking about will tend to be overlooked or outright scorned. As someone with a bad habit of structuring sentences in reverse order, I understand your desire to communicate in a way that feels natural.

Glad to have you in the community.

I used to use reddit almost exclusively on mobile. So far I use lemmy exclusively on my browser and I’m going to try to avoid installing a mobile app entirely, for personal productivity reasons.