What a beautiful whippet!

Yeah, I’m unclear on whether this is for or against

If you need me I’ll be sipping tea in the middle of a wide open field wearing my ceremonial red coat.

I mean, this right here is a perfect answer

Who could have possibly foreseen

Why Canada? The artice says Netflix also used Canada to test its password sharing changes as well so it seems Canadians are a testing ground for Netflix for some reason

Well, Canadians have many biological similarities to humans, so they’re good candidates for a variety of experiments

Welp that's a real evening-ruiner. Poor kid.

The possibility that was haunting me was that the Titan might have surfaced but couldn’t communicate its location, so the passengers were just bobbing along, trapped and running out of oxygen, while searchers simply didn’t find them in time.

I guess the other nightmare would’ve been if the Titan got caught on something deep underwater and couldn’t surface or communicate even though the submersible was intact.

As it was, I assume/hope they didn’t know what was about to happen and didn’t suffer.

He went on to gain notoriety online, with Twitter banning him for saying women should "bear some responsibility" for being sexually assaulted. He has since been reinstated.

Super cool, good job Twitter.

Fuck this guy. Hope he’s convicted.

One of my parents’ two cats can occasionally be wrangled into a harness for outdoor exploration, but Mom and Dad have to be careful. She’s a criminal mastermind and exploits any opportunity to do crime, and she really wants to do outdoor crime.

It really was so valuable in its heyday.

When the Russia thing happened circa 2016, I copied mine to Dreamwidth and while it’s been great it’s also pretty lonely. Basically no one in my circle updates anymore; maybe two or three friends read my stuff.

But I’m never going to stop. My whole adult life is recorded on Dreamwidth; I started my LJ the month I graduated from high school, and 22 years later I’m still blathering, just on DW now with no one to interact with. (The loneliness is mostly a result of me making a decision ~15 years ago to limit my LJ friends list to people I actually knew offline, so at this point the number of people-I-know-offline who have any interest in regularly updating DW can be rounded down to zero.) (But it still bums me out and I dream of a Dreamwidth Renaissance.)

The only reason I keep FB around at this point is that's honestly the only way I have to contact a certain sub-section of people

Exactly. I should use this moment to reflect on how many Facebook “friends” are “must have” folks I should put effort into keeping in touch with outside of FB, and then I should…do that.

But one thing I admit would be tough would be giving up on the possibility (more of a fantasy at this point) of popping into FB for a feeling…for of a general sense of what folks I know are up to. Where they are, what they’re enjoying, what they’re struggling with, etc. Do I need to know how my middle school acquaintance’s cancer treatment is going? Do I need to see pictures of a former coworkers’ dogs frolicking at doggie daycare? Well, no; I maintain my circle of close friends and family without Facebook and can continue to do so. But there was a time FB seemed to provide a sense of being at least casually plugged into a wider community of acquaintances and more distant relatives that I liked and enjoyed. I don’t think we’re ever really going to get that back.

Maybe losing that peculiar late-00s-early-teens sense of a network of real people you kinda care about even if you’re not close is a good thing. Maybe Facebook only ever provided a false sense of community that made us over-invested in near-strangers’ dramas; maybe it pulled us away from face-to-face community building with our actual neighbors. I dunno! Regardless, I’m reluctant to discard it entirely if only because I’m pretty sure we’ll never again see a mass “(almost) everyone is going to gather on this one platform, under their real names, and be at least somewhat reachable through it.”

Great read, thank you for sharing. I know it’s about Reddit, but I’m going to indulge a digression inspired by the article. One of the questions that’s been rattling around in my head ever since I wandered back onto Facebook in December after a 2.5-year hiatus: when is a social media platform “dead”?

My Facebook feed feels like it’s in its death throes, with a handful of hearty souls occasionally posting their own thoughts or pictures or jokes, and like two fun communities that are reasonably active, while the overwhelming majority of content in my feed (other than ads and promoted reels and whatever) is friends of mine simply sharing screenshots from Tumblr/Twitter/Reddit without commentary.

I understand that my feed, full of people and organizations I voluntarily friended over the last…oh god…19 years (?!) isn’t necessarily representative of Facebook as a whole. But it seems like the enshittification, the erosion of Facebook’s most basic utilities—it’s not even good at event planning or photo sharing anymore; it was way better at both of those things in 2012—disincentives using the platform for anything beyond the most anodyne resharing of other peoples’ hot takes culled from other platforms.

Is Facebook dead? It seems like it sucks for promoting/advertising small local businesses, which was one thing it seemed pretty good at ~10 years ago. It sure isn’t good for keeping tabs on your actual friends, and hasn’t worked well at that in a long time. So what does it do? What’s Facebook for in 2023?

(Bigger question for me personally is when to leave it for real, and if I’ll ever have the courage to actually deactivate when, for better or for worse, Facebook efficiently captured a huge majority of my contacts between 2010 and 2015, and I feel a certain amount of anxiety about walking away from that entirely.)