I’m just hoping there’s eventually some form of private server similar to FiveM so I can have my Dune roleplay.

My Japanese saw and shinto rasp just sighed in annoyance.

Personally? The vast bulk of my interactions with people online. Voice chat, DMs, servers for pretty much everything. Being involved in roleplaying communities in DayZ and Conan, the vast majority of the behind-the-scenes stuff is taking place on discord. Servers for particular game servers as well as groups make up a pretty big portion of my list, along with smaller private discord servers of networks of players from various other servers. It’s how I stay connected with dozens of people I’ve known for years.

I’m also in quite a few discords related to modding and game development. Nearly every modder has their own discord, which is extremely useful if you’re running your own game servers and need to be in contact with them or if you make mods yourself and want to seek advice or information for compatibility. The same is true of a lot of other non-gaming software, with many developers having their own servers where they post updates and where you can find advice or post suggestions.

I’ve got a few queer community servers on my list, which were particularly helpful when I was early in my transition before I really had gotten around to rebuilding my social network and finding accepting people. There’s even a discord for a group of animators I used to spend a lot of time with back in the mid 00s; back then we were using forums and IRC mostly, and a little bit of Skype, but these days it’s been a good way to keep in touch.

If I’m home and on my computer, I’m almost always in a discord voice chat. It’s basically the modern equivalent of AIM or ICQ or Facebook, but with loads of added features and without Meta being involved. I even use it for note taking and storing images and screencaps.

Even something like Matrix, at the moment, doesn’t really cover all the voice and video chat features that Discord does. It’s close, but it’s missing essential components like push-to-talk, and it requires workarounds to enable things like screen sharing.

Discord turning to shit would be a real pain in the ass.

No paint? Sure. No touchscreen? Good.

…No radio? That’s going to absolutely murder their sales.

I mean, it’s also why some people like me. And why some people like me at first but eventually wander off when they run into people that don’t like that I’m not willing to pretend to be someone else.

But it also means I speak my mind and am seldom surprised when someone who says heinously authoritarian shit turns out to be a jerk. And it means that sometimes I see manipulation that some people seem to go out of their way not to see, which makes me gravitate away from people that other people seem to get sucked in by.

Personally, I’d rather be willing to say what I see than to tiptoe around polite fictions that ultimately cause us more trouble than they’re worth. Even if it means some people who would rather bite their tongues forever don’t really like me.

Do those have push to talk?

Honestly, a good portion of them probably are the alt right. For some reason leftists on Lemmy have been taken in by this idea that everyone they talk to who purports to be a leftist must be taken at their word in good faith, even if everything they say literally sounds like a right-wing parody of leftism.

The fact that this vulnerability exists necessitates that we assume it’s being used.

Why did the economist walk straight past a $1000 bill sitting in the middle of the sidewalk? Because if it had been there someone would have already picked it up.

It would be absolutely absurd to assume that no conservatives are cosplaying as leftists spouting exactly the stuff they accuse leftists of spouting and doing everything they can to disrupt any form of leftist solidarity. It’s a $1000 bill sitting in the middle of the sidewalk that we can literally watch them picking up if we’re not too willfully naive to acknowledge that it’s happening.

Would you leave a secure server open with the password to the root account literally on the front page? No? Then why is anyone leaving this vulnerability wide open and pretending it isn’t?

ITT: Apple customers think everyone is as bad at purchasing decisions as they are.

Letting the Republicans win went so fucking well this year.

What’s that about not learning anything?

It’s one thing when everybody quits Starbucks. It’s another when everybody who might do the right thing resigns from all the positions of power.

I literally could not care less if you disapprove of my response to literally anything.

Okay, but the difference here is pretty stark. YTMND pages were made from people’s individual creativity with no monetary incentive. Nobody was profiting from them, they weren’t being shown via some mysterious algorithm that creators spent all their time trying to appease. They weren’t presented in a format that encouraged constant joyless consumption. They weren’t advertisements or corporate messaging or coopted by fascists. There were no YTMND trad wives or manosphere influencers.

It was literally just people making silly, often irreverent pages to make people laugh. It wasn’t something with the end goal of addicting people to scrolling their way to oblivion for countless hours as the world fell apart around them, and it didn’t literally diminish their cognitive capabilities.

I’m not saying everything on TikTok or other short-form video platforms is bad, but they’re fundamentally different platforms. It isn’t a generational thing. Amazingly, I was alive for YTMND and am also alive for short form videos. It’s not something any generation has an exclusive claim to.

I too find myself at times scrolling through YouTube shorts finding little of value. I too notice that I’m staring at an AI voice telling an engagement-bait story that probably didn’t happen while watching unrelated satisfaction-bait arts and crafts videos with no purpose because that’s what people have figured out will keep us staring long enough to get through their video.

I try to ask myself if I’m actually enjoying this and disengage the moment I realize I’m not, but I also close the damn thing just to realize I have it back open again a couple hours later.

That’s the difference. That’s why it’s sinister. It’s why social media in general is sinister, even Lemmy. Because even after you close the window half the time you just open it right back up again. That’s the loop.

I don’t remember that being the case back in the days of YTMND and Newgrounds and all those old sites. I’d look at some stuff and then move on and look at some other stuff. Not close the window and then go right back to looking. And nobody was fighting to keep my eyes locked into their shit as long as possible. If anything, there was a ton of weird countercultural stuff that didn’t care at all if I looked at it, or even actively worked to make itself unpalatable.

Not as engagement bait, but as anti-art. As crazy surrealist or dadaist nonsense. As experiment and unfettered expression.

These two things are not the same.

It’s strange the way resigning seems to be treated as some sort of protest in and of itself. It’s not. It’s giving up. Protest would be refusing to resign, refusing to obey orders, and delegitimizating the people giving those orders.

Resigning just makes it easier for someone less principled to come along and do the job.

This post makes me realize that masking is the thing I’ve spent the bulk of my life defiantly refusing.

Just make vi.

God knows what disease contracted from a couch Vance is walking around with.

I think it’s just jabbing at our early assumptions about dinosaurs seemingly lacking much in the way of bulk. We used to interpret them as these ultra-skinny weirdly mummified looking things rather than the plumper creatures many of them probably were.

The idea is that aliens find skeletons of animals we’re more familiar with and come to the same kind of wildly mistaken conclusions about them that we might have if we’d found rabbit skeletons without having first hand experience of modern rabbits.

What is this shady, unsubstantiated, posted yesterday ass random github repo trying to encourage people to compromise their email security and why is it worth posting?

Element really needs to get push to talk. It’s an incredibly basic feature to be missing, and for me personally and I’m sure others the lack of it is a deal breaker.

How can someone be guilty of acting as an agent of China but not guilty of conspiring to act as a foreign agent? 🤔