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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Mastodon seems like it could work relatively well.

    The other side of the issue though is for social media to feel “social” now, people, consciously or not, want to feel connected to brands and advertising and popular culture. Social media, now more than television or magazines used to, generates our water-cooler moments. It generates the content we sit right here and discuss - it generates memes. These fringe alternatives aren’t popular because the they lack gravity. Gravity comes from investment. Investment comes from potential; typically, potential to make money.

    But yeah, group ware, et al, could work for smaller groups. The friction there is getting people to install, and give a crap about, another app on their phone.


  • What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now algorithmic nightmares that constantly interrupt you with suggested content and advertisements that consistently outweigh the content of people that you choose to follow.

    In the case of Facebook, the decline is either reflected in — or directly facilitated by — two specific features: People You May Know and the News Feed.

    Yep. I was screaming to bring back the chronological timeline when they pushed out the “beta testing”. I actually stopped using social media regularly because I was missing events that were happening in my neighborhood. There was no point once they chose what to show me. But, I’m not the target demographic for their platform.

    Someone who wants to interact with their community and keep in touch with their friends and family is not what social media is for. It’s for selling ads. It’s for maintaining your attention. It’s for engagement and making you feel a way they’ve determined will keep you scrolling.

    And honestly, it’s tough to complain. The more successful a platform becomes, the more content is uploaded and viewed. This doesn’t cost them nothing. Without charging to use or upload to the platform, they have to sell ads. The more engaging the ads are, the more successful business are with posting those ads. So they double down and post more ads - they engage more with the audience the platform has directed towards them. It just keeps snowballing from there until the platform no longer represents what it did initially.

    The actual problem is that no one is willing to pay for “social media”. They’ll pay out the butt for streaming services and two-day delivery but connecting with real people and getting unbiased investigative news, not so much.


  • oxjox@lemmy.mltoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldSelf-hosting Photo Alternatives
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    1 month ago

    Fair enough. Plex may not have the bells and whistles but it’s simple and intuitive to use. I’ve also tried the QuMagie app on my QNAP which does have all those features but found it to be a bit more cumbersome than it was worth.

    I tried Google Photos briefly as well and was very shocked at how bad it is, compared to Apple Photos. It took me several days just to figure out how to delete more than one picture at a time. I have to assume it’s much more robust on an Android than on an iPhone but even their web interface was horrible.










  • I use Bing and Edge daily for work because they integrate nicely with M365 and SharePoint. This Copilot crap does nothing but get in my way.

    In fact, Microsoft pushing Copilot in our faces only results in a disruption of productivity. It took months (which is break-neck speed for MSFT) for them to add the option to disable Copilot in PowerPlatform. Why it was forced upon users in the first place is beyond comprehension.

    Improvements in technology are great. Options are great. Getting out of my way and getting shit done is even greater.

    I don’t know about everyone else but, whether it’s a major corporation or an indie app developer or an automotive manufacturer, the way they all keep changing things so quickly (mostly for the worse) is pushing me away from using tech on a whole.

    Without getting too off topic (too late?), there’s just so much consumer frustration from streaming services, cars, phones, wearables, vr, delivery services, etc., that I have to imagine / hope that in the next few years we’re going to start seeing an anti-tech movement pick up more traction. I mean, how many people really want a voice driven AI assistant?

    Do I want AI to give me better search results? Sure - if it can do so intelligently. It still gets things wrong sending me down a rabbit hole losing hours of productivity. I don’t have time to train your AI for you so just get out of my way and let me know once you’re smarter than me.