As a whole, the Dems are pretty center of the aisle, because America as a whole is fairly conservative compared to Europe (despite 60% of the population being more liberal than the government at most times). Europeans generally consider the Dems in the US a conservative party, and corporate Dems are definitely closer to the right than to the left. The other issue besides the general conservative leaning in the country though is that there’s about 50 other groups of various left leaning shades that would be their own separate parties in Europe but are bunched in with the corporate Dems and therefore have little say in the party platform.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t about early access games. It looks like it’s about AAA games like Cyberpunk that release in a completely broken state and take multiple rounds of post release patches to make them even close to what was promised.

…I ain’t one to yuck on somebody else’s yum, but that’s definitely a Valentines Day style heart she’s holding…

This is the big one to me. It’s much more difficult to search for specific content if it’s isolated amongst communities on different servers, all trying to fill the same niche and splitting the potential userbase for said niche up between them.

If there was like a tag system in place that communities could use to tag themselves as being for a specific thing, like cooking, for example, and then you could aggregate/search posts from all communities under the cooking tag across all servers federated with yours, it would greatly simplify finding content for less tech literate users while also increasing the resilience of the entire network by allowing more communities for a specific niche to exist, which would prevent content loss if one server goes down without discoverability being an issue.

There’s a flaw in your logic around people’s preferences if Lemmy wants to keep growing - at the end of the day, Lemmy is a service, and people shouldn’t be expected to give up what they want from a service. They’ll just go somewhere else if they aren’t getting the services they want.

It’s like if a restaurant told you what they were going to serve you and you better eat it or go find somewhere else to eat. Nobody’s going to put up with that. They’ll go somewhere else to eat. Just because you think the food is good doesn’t make that a good service model.

Now, I’m not saying that Lemmy should copy Reddit, or Facebook, or whatever else because that would defeat the entire point of Lemmy. But, taking into consideration the friction points people have with using federated platforms and coming up with ways to reduce that friction will only end up helping everybody. For example, finding a way to make a native aggregator for similar communities across multiple instances would not only help with discoverability for smaller communities, but would increase engagement by simplifying the process of users being able to find content they’re looking for while also allowing for more instances of those communities to exist across more servers without splitting or isolating the userbase to those servers, which would increase the resilience of Lemmy’s communities to specific servers going down.

I dunno if I’d call it a massive corporation now. Data grabbing? Most likely, it’s got ads at the very least, so it’s got ad metrics. But it’s owned by the same people who own WordPress now.

Honestly, the best part of modern Tumblr is that the creator sold it to Yahoo for just over $1 billion, and then Verizon sold it for less than $3 million 6 years later. They tried to monetize it, royally screwed themselves in the process, and ended up selling it for less than .3% of what Yahoo bought it for in the first place.

The original owner took his money from the sale, disappeared from public life, and only pops up occasionally when he makes a donation to some charity or another. All while Verizon gave themselves hemorrhoids trying to make it into another data-grabbing social media blackhole like Twitter X or Facebook.

Tumblr, too, once upon a time. Started out as a side project built by a guy and a programmer from his company he paid to help him. He hated social media sites like Facebook and wanted to build a social media site that he would enjoy using. Someplace where he could post his photos and follow people he liked so he could see their content, and that was it.

They even helped develop the COVID vaccines.

Furries need high paying jobs to be able to afford all those commissions and fursuits, after all.

Be the change you want to see in the world!

I decided one day that I was gonna try growing my hair out, as I had it basically buzzed my entire life. I went from that to now having a ponytail so long that it reaches the small of my back (when it’s not in a ponytail I have to be careful that it doesn’t get caught when I put on pants or sit down), and along the way I inspired boys I worked with to try growing their hair out on multiple occasions. One didn’t like how his hair basically turned into an afro and cut it, one has been rocking a shoulder-length viking-esque look for about 8 years now, and the last looks so much like white Jesus that Catholics do a double-take just to make sure the Rapture hasn’t happened.

Being a boomer is a choice, not an age.

I’ve seen it for years and years now, and I can only conclude that it’s down to the kinds of people who are attracted by these kinds of projects.

They’re tech literate at a professional level by necessity in order to engage with these things at an early time in their development, and this seems to drive a mentality that makes UX design kind of an afterthought, since they already know how to do the things they want the software to do, and they’re not focused on how less tech literate users will handle it.

Then you add in the small minority of gatekeepers that wind up in every community, who feel that a larger, more generalized userbase would be invading their niche community, and you end up with stuff like the Linux forums where asking a simple question would get you a series of remarks that essentially boil down to “go fuck yourself, you should know how to do it already.”

I feel like the people concerned with UI/UX come into these kinds of projects later on after they’ve matured a little, rather than right from start, and this causes resistance to their changes because the userbase is already entrenched in the current UX, especially from the gatekeeper folk in the community who see a higher tech literacy threshold as a good thing.

Damn right! I was jealous of these kids who had the courage to express themselves how they wanted and explore their identities outside of what was deemed “socially acceptable” back then, and I will fight tooth and nail for kids to be able to do the same today, even if I don’t exactly understand what’s “it” nowadays.