deleted by creator

sad OSCAR noises

In an effort to fight modern techbros, all modern human writers start churning out Oulipianesque texts, and reading books is cast once again as a passtime for weird (perhaps dangerous) nerds.

…actually, there’s some half-decent stories you can tell and ideas you can bat around with this frame informing both format and content. The title Samizdat jumps to mind when thinking about some of them (I know there’s a contingent on Lemmy who might not be thrilled about the connotations, but it’s a good word). Hmm.

Completely unasked-for protip if you ever find yourself in Zurich - do the Lindt Home of Chocolate tour (building is fucking gorgeous and the tour is pretty cool), but don’t be a sucker and visit the shop in the lobby. There’s a factory outlet at the back of the property.

I know as a random American, chances are you won’t need this information, but I feel I got played when I walked out with my fancy bag of redic-balls expensive chocolate a few months ago (part of that was the CAD > CHF exchange rate, but still)

I don’t even know for sure if the chocolate is less expensive at the back, but noting the number of Swiss coming out of the outlet v. The Home of Chocolate, and difference in bag quality, it probably is.

Also you might see these cars on the way back there, which are adorable af.

Ngl, I’d watch the fuck out of a movie about juggalos toppling a surveillance state. Culminating in the cinematic final showdown I’ve always pictured in my head when listening to I Want My Shit..

I almost feel like someone needs to do a write-up of the [email protected] debacle - while not a 1-for-1 example (it wasn’t a migration attempt that functioned the exact same way as it would with PieFed), it’s a good case study for userbase-community owner-instance dynamics that should be considered, specifically the bit in your last sentence.

Out of curiosity, have you got a link or something for these workshops (and are they done in English or French)? I’m out in Ottawa, seems like a useful thing to have in my pocket to share with folks since there’s a lot of movement between the two cities (and if online geography isn’t a barrier).

If not, no worries and keep up the good fight.

I think part (though not all) of the issue is discoverability. There’s other communities where this isn’t as prevalent, but a) they’re not always easy to find, and b) for this as well as other reasons, they might not be super active (if people don’t know it exists, who’s posting?)

I get around the first bit by trawling All New once and a while. One feature I will say I liked on reddit was the random community function. But while I like that it’s a smaller userbase here for some reasons, it does mean less diversity of interests.

Pretty much repeating what’s been said here, but a) how does she actually use it beyond her own posting behaviour, and b) who is she talking to?

If she literally just posts random crap on her feed and talks only to kin, a concentrated effort to move family to something like Friendica might be a useful project. If she’s interacting with a wider network of friends/acquaintances, community/hobbyist groups, news outlets (you can do that in the States, can’t do it in Canada anymore), Facebook games, and various slop vectors, you have a much more challenging task on your hands.

There’s a lot of shit on Facebook that’s hard to replace in a way people who otherwise don’t care about Meta would use. If you’re looking to start anywhere, I’d say start setting up a Friendica instance, have a plan to onboard key family members with the least amount of friction possible, seed your own feed with grandma bait, and keep bringing it up (“Oh yeah, [x] was great, I took a lot of pictures, here’s the link to my Friendica page. Oh, you need an account? It’s just your e-mail, password’s GrammyGram@420. I’ll show you how to change it*.”)

*Not a Friendica user so I dunno how it works in detail, but you get the idea. Also doesn’t need to be Friendica specifically, but this one’s usually brought up when talking Facebook alternatives specifically.

I think on the whole, we do a little better at this than other platforms. Does depend on the subject, but I see more positive, respectful interactions here than I do elsewhere.

Always a good reminder though!

Maybe something like Patreon

Well we do have Liberapay. It’s not perfect in that it only addresses the payment angle (with the issue around processors noted by the other reply still present), and doesn’t allow for subscriber only content, but it’s something.

I think between something like this and a few other things (dunno much about PeerTube etc. or if ‘private’ posts are a thing where you could maintain a ‘mailing list’ of donor accounts and grant them access to exclusive stuff), it’s possible to cobble something together. Lot of management would be required in the backend compared to more mainstream approaches at this point, though.

Just thinking outloud, there’s probably stuff I’m not considering here. Re: an eStore…idk, only thing I can think of is a DIY webstore relying on emails and money transfer services if trying to avoid mainstream eCommerce stuff like Shopify or whatever (same way people used to sell pot on the clearweb back in the very early days, lol).

Just a general reminder to people that college stations still exist, blow most other stations out of the water if you want a better variety of music, and the one closest to you would love your support. And lots of them would also love volunteers from the community!

That’d be an interesting turn of events - phone bans leading to a zine Renaissance among young people.

Don’t see it happening, but it’d be kinda cool.

IIRC from the Pokemon days, there were a lot of concerns around the ‘prize’ scoring system, with the idea that you’d take the opponent’s prize cards when you knocked out a Pokemon. Misunderstanding/holdover from Pogs, I think (where getting the other player’s pogs was a thing).

Couple that with stories of kids getting knifed over holo Charizards, and I kinda get why schools were concerned (putting aside the ‘that’s not how the game works’ + ‘that was one disturbed kid’ elements).

There’s a few people I know who use it for boilerplate templates for certain documents, who then of course go through it with a fine toothed comb to add relevant context and fix obvious nonsense.

I can only imagine there are others who aren’t as stringent with the output.

Heck, my primary use for a bit was custom text adventure games, but ChatGPT has a few weaknesses in that department (very, very conflict adverse for beating up bad guys, etc.). There’s probably ways to prompt engineer around these limitations, but a) there’s other, better suited AI tools for this use case, b) text adventure was a prolific genre for a bit, and a huge chunk made by actual humans can be found here - ifdb.org, c) real, actual humans still make them (if a little artsier and moody than I’d like most of the time), so eventually I stopped.

Did like the huge flexibility v. the parser available in most made by human text adventures, though.

If you’re not daily driving Arch, btw, did you even join Lemmy?

I know you’re not daily driving Arch because you didn’t mention it.

(Jokes, obvs. Congrats on the self-discovery!)

Give this a shot maybe? I know there’s some other archive collections as well you could try digging into.

https://geocities.restorativland.org/

Does it? If you set up an instance for your local community/city/whatever, and name it something that makes sense for your intended userbase, I think it would be fine.

It goes from “I sold my couch on FlohMarkt” to “I sold my couch on Local Ottawa Marketplace” for the ‘normies’ out there. They’re not going to care about the underlying software so long as their couch gets sold.

Do recommend a DIY local advertising strategy if trying to get something like this running, though - posters at IRL flea markets, adverts in small community papers for antiques and collectibles, crossposts/links to postings on stuff like MaxSold/Kijiji/Craigslist/GumTree/FB Marketplace/[insert online marketplace operating in your area] by first adopters, that kind of thing.

Focus on the current primary use case of centralized marketplace services (buying shit from your neighbours), then introduce the “Oh yeah, we’ve also set it up so you can see postings on Local Toronto Marketplace, Local Kingston Marketplace, Marché Local de Montréal” etc. from there.

I really, really think talking to people in terms of specific instances over the overarching platform/protocol is a way around ‘normie’ confusion about the Fediverse when first trying it, then getting exposure to how it works in practice will help them understand the nitty gritty stuff better. Is this problematic in some cases, like with Lemmy? A little bit, yeah. For something like FlohMarkt? I think less so.

(‘normie’ in quotes 'cause I’m not the biggest fan of the term, but it’s a useful shorthand)

Might be talking about the Bookwyrm client on F-Droid?