Then who will you look down on? When you life is nothing but frenemies you're in competition, when you have some reminder of the things you did to the world over money that means less than video game points, when you realize the people who cheer you actually are just cheering for the company you bought and the people you squeeze dry and discard. When you accidentally see a post from a hater and realize not only do they have a point, they also know you better than your fans.

In the quiet moments, when feelings of emptiness and anger at the world you played an active role ruining, you get to look down on them.

You must be living a great life, because just watch how they put on a smile and dance not because you'll pay well (you won't), but out of fear that your mild annoyance could wreck their life. That the kids you forced them to have could be taken because they're already on the brink of homelessness, and they need this job. The fear that just for funsies, you might make a few calls and have their life methodically torn apart.

And that's why they won't try to kill us. We keep their little dominance games less adversarial. We're not the game pieces, we're the board - and if the board shrinks there's a chance of actually losing the game.

We make them feel powerful and superior, because here's the thing - no one who has a billion dollars and keeps actively working to make more is doing it because they're happy - at that level they're not even doing it because they like the game - millionaires might enjoy it, but it's like playing poker with a 5¢ buy in - they'd be building something for free if it was about building things or making deals - they've already maxed out how lavish a life can be

No, they're doing it for respect from their peers. Because they think it'll make them respected by the people they respect, but it won't. But they were raised to believe money was worth, because what's the alternative - to recognize you deserve none of it?

No, the truth is, this world sucks for everyone. Some people find joy anyways, but most of us just have varying degrees of mental illness

I mean, keeping them local is easy - if anything much easier. I like the idea of summoning them, maybe a mod summoning and banishing them to have them watch a community

And bots shouldn't be acting like humans, they should be doing things only they could or should do. Like haiku bot, n-word bot, things like tallying votes for AITA, or even tracking nominations and building best of communities

They were misused on Reddit, but we can do more with them here. Probably starting a goodbot that messages admins so they can stay ahead of the inevitable bot explosion

Hey, so it's not jerboa based and I ended up pushing it back a few weeks, but I'm now looking for beta testers on Android if you're interested

As for the name, I think I'm going with Luna for several reasons, a big one being that someone suggested it and Flemmy was the only name I could think of beforehand

I'm posting updates to !flemmy@lemmy.world for now, if you're interested I'll be posting instructions for the beta soon.

Whether you're interested or not I'd love to get feedback. I'm good with data and UX flow, but I mostly just comment - I need to learn how other people want to use Lemmy

If you're on Android and want filters, I'm looking for beta testers for my app. I've got keyword filters that can hide or collapse posts that contain a word or phrase.. well really I have a system that is very easy to add filters to and I'm looking for feedback

If you have an idea that would work better for you, let me know

I'm finishing up testing today and spending tomorrow hopefully getting a build uploaded, let me know or check out !flemmy@lemmy.world if you're interested

Iphone build is in the works, keep an eye out for Luna for Lemmy

By convincing people at large that social media run by individuals or groups isn't viable.

Personally, I'd do it by attacking the credibility of the admins. Sow doubt. "they only run servers so they can steal your data", "look at this guy! He pretends he cares about free speech, but he's abusing his power to censor and radicalize people!" "The only reason you'd use these private instances is if you have something to hide. That place is for criminals"

They might even be able to get legislation passed to make it legally risky to run the servers in the US if they control the narrative

Only early adopters, technical people, and the privacy minded care about how this actually works, and we've been telling our friends and family how bad Facebook is for years (for good reason). At first they didn't care, but now I get push back

Next, make it unreliable. If it goes down frequently, gets flooded by bots, or just starts to suck in general, most of the people here now will leave, no matter how important federated social networks are. Maybe they'll go to servers that bend over backwards to become offshoots of threads, maybe they'll look for Reddit clones elsewhere, personally I'd start up a private federation for friends and family if this goes south

Regardless, this place will become an empty mall - if it's not a healthy form of social media I'm not going to spend much time here, and I'm extremely passionate about it

And the last option is just ads and incentives. Make it tempting and play to fomo.

They'll probably do all of this to some degree, especially if we explode in numbers and present actual competition.

We're ready to handle it, but we also need to make sure the battle lines are as far away as possible

Convince the population at large it doesn't work, or even that it's dangerous.

Like community run utilities, universal healthcare, or any number of things that so obviously work better without a profit motive

Make the populace at large see the fediverse as a failed experiment, a hive of criminal activity, or a bunch of tiny toxic echo chambers

Hell, they could even push legislation that makes running social media out in the open impossible for individuals

I'm totally on board with this. Most of this stuff is random culture crap I could take or leave, but common use of /s is practically an excuse not to make an effort to understand the other person's POV.

Being a charitable reader and trying to understand the other person is everything.

Sure, without it there will be misunderstandings... But coming back and clarifying "I thought that was obviously sarcastic" is the kind of little nudge that makes both people reread what they wrote, and introspection keeps a community healthy.

It's embarrassing when you misunderstand someone or if you didn't get your basic position across - and frankly it should be.

And if people get nasty the second they see a bad take, that's a symptom of being in an echo chamber (or at least a very polarized community)

Running a server isn't that expensive. Someone did a breakdown, and found the cost is around $0.20/user/year. Their math might have been a little off, but it's in the ballpark based on the back of the envelope math I use to see if something scales

That's well within casual donation amounts.

But, that assumes admins and mods are volunteers- maybe they get a few bucks now and again, but their time is a far bigger factor than server costs

It's weird to think about, but data has a shelf life. Software needs to grow and be pruned regularly, or it dies.

Social media is both - the data dump is useless without an ecosystem of tools around it, and if the data itself stops interacting with the zeitgeist of the parent society, it basically becomes an old journal. It's interesting to a very specific group of people, and literally no one else wants to see it (aside from a few gems picked out and cleaned up for public consumption)

At any point we could go back to Reddits explosion after the digg migration. We could pull up posts that mirror exactly what's happening now. It'd be interesting for sure, and there's days of then-now posts that people could be making...but instead we just have people telling us about their memories of that process.

Why? Because that data is old and stale. You'd have to hunt it down with tools not intended for it, filter out the best of it, fix broken links, and probably put it through a slur filter

I really like how willing people are to read and write essays. I like to lay out my argument, cover likely arguments against it, reread it, maybe edit it down or come back to it later.

It makes me understand my own position better, and sometimes I realize I'm wrong (or they no good would come from convincing someone I'm right) and I delete it

On Reddit, people would just skip over it, hell a few people called me out on my response being too long and let me know they didn't read it... One guy said something like "who even are you, I don't know you and my gf doesn't talk to me that much"...it was deeply confusing

I'm considering a free version on the app stores with limited ads(subtle and no tracking), a paid version without them, and one with optional donations on alternative stores.

I don't like ads and I don't want to shove them down unwilling throats, but most people don't care (and frankly I need the money)

Among the ones that do, there's those that hate seeing them, and ones with privacy concerns. If I make them subtle and offer an upgrade to remove them, I hope that'll satisfy one group, and the other one can get a build where the ad libraries were never installed in the first place

On the plus side, I'm about to open the beta that handles both just fine (plus a lot of features no one else is doing yet). The deadline I for myself is Saturday when the Reddit clients go down.

Unfortunately it was built by someone who lurks and comments, and I realized even though merging feeds from accounts on different servers is going to be awesome, other people like to post and I need to stop getting off track

The stress of the timeline is starting to get to me and I'm terrified no one is going to give it a chance, but I've fixed most of the things that drove me nuts in jerboa... That should count for something, right?