connect

I hate typing on my phone so much.

I very much didn’t expect tight character limits to be accepted and take over as opposed to just when you’re on your feature phone but you have something to say.

And to think in the 90s, there was the belief that the internet was going to free us from corporations (because the corporations were going to be too stupid for cyberspace or the information superhighway, etc.). I’m not sure whether that was young-person naivete or whether it ultimately came from dot-com marketers, but it was around.

Start a blog is a little like “If you don’t like the huge corporation, you have to start your own huge corporation to crush them”. Make a blog, never be seen again.

As for people giving their thoughts, it seems held back until you free it with a link or a question.

I think I’m going to take some days to find out what my brain’s impulses are to want to do over time. Does it have any intention of having interesting thoughts semi-regularly? I don’t know that I could promise that :)

Lemmy’s format just kind of sucks for discussions and visibility. If you comment on a post from a year ago, you can expect that to not been seen by anyone ever.

Yes, that is very irritating.

The more classic forum format is better for discussions because replies bump the thread up to bring new attention to it.

Too bad they’re not very active, to the best of my knowledge.

Also a lot of people just don’t give a shit about random people’s random thoughts

Yeah, it’s true. I remember the stereotype of Livejournal, which might be before your time, of being teenage girls telling you what they had for lunch. They could be accused of tending toward narcissism. Me, when I want to communicate, sometimes it’s that I want to point something out, but sometimes it’s driven by a wish to socialize.

Thank you, I didn’t know about goodoffmychest or general.

I find that following hashtags on Mastodon is a good habit for sidestepping this.

Thanks, I’ll explore this. Overall I’ve so completely avoided Twitter and Mastodon over the years other than following the occasional link when I really did want to see something specific. Someone did point me to their fosstodon thing not too long ago, and all of the huge pictures and infinite scroll I found so off-putting. There’s probably some setting to improve it, though.

I did see tildes when exploring around, and it did seem intriguing, although I didn’t really look down into what was getting posted. I never get invites to anything because I don’t know people. It’s like at times I’ll feel a little interested in lobste.rs but don’t know any of them.

Thanks. I’ve proceeded to have some positive conversations, which I must have been really thirsting for.

I wouldn’t expect to find much traction. And now I’ve spent so much of today writing about this that I’ve mentally lost track of the shape of whatever I felt unable to do yesterday. I’m sure it would have been more about wanting to talk and wanting to express myself than expecting to be interesting or appealing.

One large reason I haven’t rushed to start communities is that there are some personality types that live to be a moderator, and some that totally don’t. But I guess you do it and if it reaches the point where you have to moderate and you hate it, someone else must be around who can take it on.