hendrik

It’s a very involved discussion to be had. There’s the difference between what should be, and the reality of what people do. And I’ve been trying to convince people for decades now. And it’s hard to impossible across the board. I’ve seen how we slowly moved from blogs, Linux forums, more open messengers to WhatsApp, asking Linux questions on Reddit and just not writing genuine personal blog articles any more. I think it’s been a constant decline for like 15(?) years now? And that’s across generations. Even the boomers enjoy WhatsApp for example. It’s hard for me even to convince anyone to move to Signal, which isn’t that different from user perspective. They’re already all comfy within a silo. Yeah, and now -for some reason- the youngest people don’t even own a laptop anymore. They kinda need the apps. And they’ve been taught to be at the receiving end of consumerism.

Also kinda hard to find allies to start some kind of revolution. I like how PieFed for example expands on the concept we have here. MBin as well. But mainstream opinion here is something alike a Reddit clone. The majority of the audience wants(?), needs(?) that.

And I feel “for free” regularly isn’t a good point to lead with. From the average person’s perspective this isn’t about cost, they’re not even aware internet platforms cost money. As Google, Meta or X or the Chinese don’t take money from the average user either. Nevertheless, they provide them with all kinds of features. So in my opinion we need to advertise with other distinguishing features and sort out cost some time later.

I’m not sure if that’s how internet platforms work as of today. It’d be a nice idea, for sure. And I think we have some all-in-one platforms. Or at least platforms who aspire to do a lot of different things. But other than that, I think it’s kinda the same situation in the commercial internet. X does shorter public messages, Reddit does threaded discussions. YouTube does longer videos. Instagram does enless scrolling through short clips and images… And group chat rooms will be on Discord or WhatsApp. Classified ads and garage sales will be yet another platform… There’s some blurry lines, for example YouTube can do image stories. But it’s designed in a weird way and not really mainstream. They do short clips but you kinda switch modes when doing that and all younger people rarher stay on Instagram and TikTok anyway. People announce their events on Instagram all the time but it doesn’t specifically help with the use-case. One thing they all have in common is some vaguely similar commenting system. It’s social media after all. But I think they all focus on a specific subset of things. I know Elon Musk has some dream of providing an everything-app. But he can’t do it either.

I wonder what average people even like. I kinda liked the early idea behind social media platforms like Facebook. You could send memes there, talk to friends or strangers, sell old stuff, talk about your pets in some group. or whatever. Maybe there’s some space for one of our platforms which isn’t occupied by a lot of competing platforms…

Ridiculous. We need to develop one [new] universal standard.

I’d say yes and no. There’s generally some difference with who’s doing woodturning in the basement or people who go to the old lady’s knitting club. Other than that, I’ve had a lot of hobbies where I didn’t spot any difference between how people approach it due to gender. Like a mixed sports club, or volunteer work for example in a youth organization. You’ll have different kinds of people there. But not due to gender.

Lots if nice users posting original content.