this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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They're opening their mouths. That's enough. Be the change doesn't mean anything if shitposting to death about that particular day's meme is the thing everyone else is into.
But everyone isn't into that. I certainly aren't. So I suppose there's hope for me and Enttropy.
Also, I noticed that I spent less time here when the front page was full of beans and then meta discussions about Lemmy/kbin/Reddit with pretty noticeable whiff folks being up their own ass about this place being better than Reddit.
Also, what some people here don't understand (@OpenStars did), is that the Fediverse is not this huge global revolution that they assume it is. At this point, the Fediverse caters to a VERY specific demographic, and trying to make a "Mezcal" or "Trip Hop" community on the Fediverse is just like trying to create a Board Game Design community on Subaru's Post-sales forum.
Case and point: soloRPG on the Fediverse has existed for over a year, and amongst all the Fediverse instances, the interest and demand for this community is so small, that 99% of its contents have been posted by a single dude.
And regarding shitposting and cringe circlejerking, I don't know about other instances, but since the latest update, the default landing page of Kbin is whatever you set as "homepage" in your profile's settings. Also, blocking magazines and users is pretty easy and does wonders to stay away from shit you don't want to see.
Just for the sake of argument: it is different here, than there. Like here if you sub to something, at least on kbin.social I get every single new post as a "notification", rather than simply seeing more of that on the home page like you might expect. I keep forgetting, subscribing, then having to unsubscribe when already the next day there are 30+ notifications from a single account or magazine posting a flood of stuff.
And having to visit the specific magazine - not the user, not the thread, not clicking the link or expanding the picture - to unsubscribe first is somewhat counter-intuitive I suppose. All the more so when you continually have to keep doing it for every non-English magazine from an instance that doesn't mark each magazine since the entire instance is that way (and I've heard people say that about non-NSFW too? although on kbin.social I hardly ever see NSFW content to begin with).
So if someone has a need or desire to simply be taken care of without having to lift a finger to do stuff themselves, atm Reddit legit does that better than here. Fuck spez and all that, I'm just saying that the collective weight of all that effort from all those programmers and such have made it a more "polished" environment than here. You sell your soul to him, and he looks after you, up to a point.
Those of us who come here now don't care - I mean more polish would be nice but we think it's better here even without that - but those who simply want to be taken care of and can't be bothered to e.g. read instructions or search for those, would do better to return there. imho at least, for now, until the software catches up.
The notifications are flooding you because you turned them on or were on by default. If you go to your Kbin’s settings at the bottom of the page there are two checkboxes for subscribed magazines’ notifications. Just turn those off.
Also, make sure you set your homepage to your subscribed magazines and you’ll be good to go.
And about the other stuff, it’s not just about having a desire to be taken care of without having to lift a finger. I don’t care about having to learn how all of this fediverse stuff works because it’s fun for me, but that isn’t the case for the overwhelming majority of internet users that genuinely have zero problems with the platforms they use, and barely use. For example, my 70 year old parents barely know how to use YouTube and that’s the place they use to consume and discuss the topics they care about. I tried to teach them about Reddit and other forums, but it’s simply unnecessary when the reliable and easier thing already exists.
Same thing when you expect someone who uses their computer because of 2 or 3 applications, to ditch MacOS and all their neatly integrated hardware, to then spend hours and months on end to craft themselves an OS with Linux in which none of their specialized hardware works anymore.
Also, a ton of teenager to middle aged people will think the same about the Fediverse, when Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and other websites already provide them the platforms they need to express themselves and are "too casual" on those, to genuinely not have an issue with the platform itself. All of those users have valuable inputs and content to offer to the platform, and we’re not going to have them here, just because of how complex this platform is not only on paper, but in infrastructure ie: search engines are going to have a terrible time indexing the Fediverse, the content is mirrored in some instances but not EVERY piece of content is, and not amongst all instances, etc.
Re: notifications - thank you! I've read several guides including that latest one, but did not go deep enough to find out about subscriptions, and it was definitely my fault for not putting in sufficient attention to make it work how I wanted. You definitely just improved my future experiences on this platform immensely:-).
Re: ease of use - I would also argue that TONS of attention has been put into making YouTube easy to use, down to extreme tinkering of the icons so that you know how to play/pause or fast-forward or whatever, and their intuitive nature makes it so that you don't even have to read a manual or guide or book or even watch a tutorial video in order to start. Instead, they "just work". Admittedly, Lemmy/Kbin aren't quite "there" yet, at that level:-). e.g., often you can click the image icon and things will show up, but not always, and also I see where some people are including pictures directly into their comments, but they seem to only be those that are hosted internally on kbin - so e.g. not working when pasting a URL - and also I noticed that the "From url" image option as you write a comment seems to be buggy, as it seems to do nothing (in Chrome on Mac OSX). Those kinds of things aren't enough to drive me away, but I can see for others how it would be.
Re: entitlement - I've found that older people are among the most entitled on the entire planet. Someone who is 70 or even 60 (or 50?) will attempt to use an argument like "why bother learning something when I'll only live for like 20 more years anyway", as if that somehow entirely negates the second law of themodynamics that things don't just happen without effort. Plus, if you learn one thing, that makes learning subsequent things easier. That said, Linux isn't for everybody, and I get that too:-). I gotta say that's one beautiful thing about Mac OSX (not iOS): it is Unix with a pretty candy shell, and it really has had a ton of effort lovingly poured into it in the past. Anyway, yeah then younger people inherit those attitudes, and tbf YouTube and Reddit and such have encouraged them further along those lines, so without thinking they have been molded into sheep. For those people, I honestly think that Reddit may be a better place for them? Things will "just work", there is more content still there, and like if they don't want to learn how to use this place, then they won't, so I guess then... just don't? There's a famous saying that you cannot fix stupid, but actually, YOU CAN - ignorance is easily curable merely by sharing knowledge, and there are whole entire classes offered by the likes of MIT, Harvard, Yale etc. entirely for free. What you cannot fix, I think, is obstinacy: if someone is flat-out opposed to doing something, then I have yet to find a way to get around that kind of a block, short of little-child antics like distraction or tricking them into it. Anyway, if they don't like this place, or linux or whatever, then nobody's trying to force anything onto them, we're just building up something that WE enjoy, and we're doing it at the pace that we as content creators and contributors and early adopters are comfortable with. If they want more, but are unwilling to build it themselves, that's entirely on them?
Speaking of, I might switch back to more lurking than contributing, if it keeps going this new direction where everyone simply whines that the fediverse is not identical to Reddit in every way. I cannot help them, but I can help myself to maintain my own sanity. Though for a little bit at least I'll try to offer rebuttals (like this one), and I'm so happy that as I do I get to converse with people like you who actually try to help others, have deeper thoughts, and make Lemmy/Kbin actually worthwhile for me to visit. :-)