Online Homes

[JohnTitor]

I love forums. Some of the most fun I've ever had online has been on forums. But I can never see a forum as my "home." Really, the name itself says it all: a forum was a PUBLIC place of meeting and action, and I see private sites as what should be our real "homes" and where we put projects that are meant to be accessed easily and consistently updated. Forums are great but I still don't think they're the ideal place to host some things like image galleries, lists, wikis, long-form writing, and so on.

This forum is my home and all of you are my housemates.

So, does that mean that May is the landlord of the owner of the house?

Don't get it twisted, a landlord is a rentseeker.

[capstasher]

This forum is my home and all of you are my housemates.

So, does that mean that May is the landlord of the owner of the house?

Don't get it twisted, a landlord is a rentseeker.

Our rent is making quality contributions to the forum. Sounds fair enough to me!

[rancher]

Some of my "online homes" :

• Fediverse -- aka "twitter meets email." Linux sysadmin geeks run their own servers and all the servers talk to each other. There are no ads or algorithmic "suggested posts" , no influencers , and basically no normies. I feel like this is where a lot of the kinds of people who made imageboards and IRC really sparkle moved to (at least the people who didn't migrate exclusively to discord/reddit). Bonus: people often write *paragraphs* to each other -- you won't really find that on twitter, discord, et al!
• IRC -- it's older than me and probably older than you. Internet chat standard dating back to 1988. I have been a resident of some rooms here for over half of my life. Probably not a good option for people who are not already in it for life
• Gikopoi -- more fun and dynamic than IRC. There's two servers and one is better than the other. Chats are ephemeral, chatters are anonymous by default, and there is streaming.
• RSS feeds -- a number of people I know like to write blogs and this is how I follow them. I consume various forums and other online communities via syndication as well.
• Small webforums -- ah, I went through a phase of preferring anonboards, but in practice they are inferior to webforums. When I want to participate in longer-form discourse, this satisfies a different, more organized itch than what fediverse does. Great places to learn and share knowledge, as well.

I am providing no links because these are tools for people who like to build their own homes on the internet.

[Blond]

So, does that mean that May is the landlord of the owner of the house?

Don't get it twisted, a landlord is a rentseeker.

Our rent is making quality contributions to the forum. Sounds fair enough to me!

We only upload high quality posts.

[capstasher]

Don't get it twisted, a landlord is a rentseeker.

Our rent is making quality contributions to the forum. Sounds fair enough to me!

We only upload high quality posts.

My grand dad loooved to make high quality posts on some forum or other. I forget exactly what it was about but it had like, some art of the Flintstones as a banner? Strange, but nevertheless.

[cidoku]

Fediverse

I never understood this. I guess I appreciate the Fediverse in theory, but in practice it's treated like a bunch of twitter clones, except they're monothematic echo chambers. Maybe it's just that don't care about the stuff they post there, usually just tech and politics, and I'm quite exhausted of all of that. That's been my experience with Fedi, at least.

[dokyun]

I guess I appreciate the Fediverse in theory, but in practice it's treated like a bunch of twitter clones, except they're monothematic echo chambers.

Thing about fedi (both me and @rancher have run instances before) is your view of the network depends heavily on the kind of people you talk to, who you follow etc. If you follow people on Mastodon who only talk about shit like EU politics and global warming then that's what'll fill your timeline, same if you follow wignats who just post lame /pol/ shit. The unfortunate consequence of existing as an alt-twitter means that there are several large droves of people who basically treat fedi as though it were twitter, but the plus side of your view of the network being informed by who you follow means you can mostly stay inside the margins where those people aren't. You're also given the tools to filter out instances you don't like at the user level, etc.

Maybe it's just that don't care about the stuff they post there, usually just tech and politics, and I'm quite exhausted of all of that. That's been my experience with Fedi, at least.

Yeah, I get that. A big part of the reason why I like Fedi is just the nature of how it works. I like network effects and watching people hack on stuff and seeing what it does on the network, and I like being dragged into infinitely long hellthreads where we post memes and talk about radios and shit. At least that part of the network, the one filled with hackers and shitposters feels open and free in a way that simply doesn't exist in the same caliber somewhere else anymore, and it's the kind of thing that TPTB are actively trying to kill, so it's worthwhile for that alone.

[Amlux]

I think the Fediverse would instantly be obsolete if every site just had the decency to have an RSS feed. I love firing up my RSS reader and instantly seeing if all the sites I care about have updated or not and then realizing when I'm "done" (with no endless scroll and attention-baiting algorithm) so I can focus on creating MOAR OC, which is what any online home desperately needs!

I respect the federating of any major service, including Twitter, but a "better" Twitter is still Twitter and is still shittier than any article being hosted on a site or discussion being hosted on a forum or imageboard... in my humble opinion. Just my two cents.

[dokyun]

I think the Fediverse would instantly be obsolete if every site just had the decency to have an RSS feed. I love firing up my RSS reader and instantly seeing if all the sites I care about have updated or not and then realizing when I'm "done" (with no endless scroll and attention-baiting algorithm) so I can focus on creating MOAR OC, which is what any online home desperately needs!

I like RSS feeds too, and pretty much every blogsite has them cause the engine underneath already supports it. The only blogs I've encountered in the wild which don't have them are the ones on neocities and whatnot. They most likely have never heard of them, and if they had then they might have more important things to say. I've never read one of those blogs that was actually interesting.

There's no active component to RSS though. It's entirely one-way, which is good for a lot of stuff, but it's just another way to fetch an index.

I respect the federating of any major service, including Twitter, but a "better" Twitter is still Twitter and is still shittier than any article being hosted on a site or discussion being hosted on a forum or imageboard... in my humble opinion. Just my two cents.

Here's something anecdotal, but maybe important to what I'm saying: I've never used twitter. And I don't like the format of twitter either, never got the appeal of it. Granted the time when it was actually a happening thing is a bit before my time, you know, it used to have a chronological feed and APIs and whatnot, and when they got rid of that the smarter few tried to move on to something else (Fedi has all that). But like, calling fedi a "better twitter" is like calling email "better Gmail", is that actually what it is or just mindless branding? Here's something: I don't think normies actually care about the former. All the libtard normies left twitter for bisky because it was branded as the "better Twitter" for those who didn't like the new guy in charge. And like, it's the same fucking thing, there's nothing different about it. They only care about the interface.

So yeah, twitter-styled stuff is garbage. The culture is garbage, and so are the people dragging that garbage back into Fedi in order to make more of the network's total volume garbage. But I don't have to see that stuff because the network is the computer, and if I really wanted to I could write a script to throw posts that my server recives with gamer words or #openai #israel #mutualaid #nigger #rape #finance right into the garbage, or respond with a picture of goatse. And I don't think twitter-brained people can really comprehend that. You can't let these guys win.

And here's another thing: Articles are garbage too! Forums suck! Imageboards haven't been marginally cool for at least a decade! I'm not trying to be dismissive here, it's just Sturgeon's Law in action. You aren't gonna tell me that a good twitter post and a bad 4chan post side by side are somehow a contradiction. And you know, I'm not gonna pretend to be a prude or some moral bastion, I like low-culture schlock.

Anyway, rant over. I have no monetary incentive shill fedi (if that changes, I wll edit this paragraph. Right now I do it for free and the server costs for FBE have to come out of someone's pocket.), but you might actually like it if you give it a chance. If you get rid of your preconcieved notions and just look out for other weird hackers and nerds to shoot the shit with it's a fun time. Same reason why I stick around here.

[cidoku]

Issue with all your fedi-posting is that you can't improve social media; social media is fundamentally rotten. The fediverse in its most common form is fundamentally rotten, shackled to a timeline-and-replies format. What frontend do you use? I see it's Pleroma, literally inspired by Twitter! I believe timelines are decadent, presentist slop. Slow-paced communication like in forums or personal sites is the TRUE way forward!

Even if I complained about it before, I feel deeper connections from randoms posting on my guestbook than I ever did shitposting on twitter (2014-2020) and my friend's fedi instance, because I know that people who read my site do it on purpose, not because it popped into their feeds. Effort more meaningful and thoughtful than just pressing follow on a bloated site that barely loads.

Sorry to be a hater. My soul burns with hatred towards anything resembling social media.