Back then the internet was a bunch of coffee shops. Not literally, of course - but for me it was about 30 people on messenger, my favorite chatroom, a random message board, a small but far flung group of people on LiveJournal, and sometimes even my Neopets guild.
Each was my own retreat. The weird and funny stuff we shared there was created and shared because people had a passion for whatever. It also was great in that you could learn about something, and share it with another group that had not seen it yet.
Today the internet is the infinite cul-de-sacs of meme pages, political messaging groups, and disinformation rings on Facebook, along with approximately 6 people that keep showing up from your friends list of hundreds. Or it’s the screaming gladiatorial stadium of Reddit, where the sheer volume of noise smothers any particular voice. Maybe it’s the infinite lawless Walmart of X or even the carefully manicured Target that is BlueSky.
From mining your attention, to hawking trinkets amidst the spectacle, or attempting to sell a little bit of everything to anyone, the new internet lacks third places. It’s all business, all the time, and you can feel it. Every meme is created to engage with that platform’s broadest audience. Everything is homogenized and lacks uniqueness. All the content has been aggregated and reshared, and in the endless and futile search for validation from the algorithm it’s lost something that makes it meaningful.
And that’s why I like Lemmy. It’s a digital third place.
It’s not a gremlin, it’s a goblin, and they might also be the same entity as the ethereal being that lives outside of space and time. The goblin is also a deft thief who is capable of stealing physical things, spans of time, and memories.
Also, the vengeful children make fun of me whenever I experience the slightest bit of rejection.
I reduced max power, but keep my AP’s set to auto manage up to that max level.
There’s basically a plane of signal that bisects the house where the RSSI of each AP is the same. It intersects with areas where people commonly are on their phones. Depending on humidity, location of people and pets, or even just dumb luck, devices were just bouncing between the AP’s, fishing for whichever had the stronger signal. Dropping the power levels made it so the overlap between the AP’s was less, and adjusting the RSSI at which the AP would hand off clients upward made it so handoffs were less frequent. Small throughput sacrifice in the transition zone, but without the constant bouncing between AP’s (which has no throughput).
My comment is not targeted at you, but that sentiment.
That’s such an asinine take. They’re clearly just providing cover for nonsense from Trump.
Definitely one of those “if you believe it hard enough, it’ll be true” things for them.
On the one hand, it might do them good to have their bubbles burst as Trump continues to degrade. It could get them to the place where they realize they were lied to by a fraudster. On the other, it’s bad for all of us that he’s so out of it and suggestible while being surrounded by factions representing corporate takeover of the U.S., Christian Fascism, and those who are merely seeking uni-party control under Republicans.
They were power napping between play fighting sessions.
I hate voicing my dark thoughts sometimes because it feels like breathing life into them, but the nationwide protests are set to occur again on April 19th. On April 20th, there’s all that hoopla about hitting the 90 day point for the Trump admin releasing a determination if they can use the enemies and insurrection act.
Ostensibly the original executive order was about the southern border, but really, all that needs to happen is violence at 1 or two rallies, for the police to either over-react, or for them to pull back and let die-hard Trump supporters who already think we’re in a civil war to commit a terror attack against the protestors, and enough random footage that the news channels can skew the interpretation and put it on a loop.
And it’s sort of self-perpetuating from there. If he invokes the insurrection act, then arrests someone beloved (or at least widely liked), I can’t imagine it wouldn’t trigger more protests, which get targeted more, and in much the same way the anti-genocide protests were. Except instead of playing the protests as a way to portray national support for Trump as divided (as republicans did under Biden), they’ll portray protestors as anti-American revolutionaries plotting to take away guns and replace them with strap ones and forced gender transitions or some nonsense.