Dave

You know, I’ve been using Mastodon for 10 months and I’d never noticed the Explore link! My interface even has the fresh, dismissable help text at the top of that column! :D

It’s weird, but the answer I came up with for ALL those categories… was Dark Souls. Even Sports.

I did this in 1997 on the day that Final Fantasy VII came out. Just straight up walked out and didn’t come back for a few days. If I’m perfectly honest, nobody noticed. I’m not sure whether this means it was acceptable or not.

I don’t think many people, even the doomiest doomsayers, reckon it’ll lead to human extinction. But “food and water shortages, mass migration and small conflicts” is not nothing, and could lead to a situation where we think extinction might have been a preferable option.

There’s a sweet spot, right? Popular enough to be viable; not so popular that the quality decreases.

I’ve been coding for 40 years, it’s both my job and my hobby, and I still feel old and out of touch when reading or taking part in coding conversations outside of my sphere :)

This is not meant to be discouraging - even the smallest amount of coding you could learn will be immensely rewarding - more to say that coding is vast arena with a breadth of complexity that can often feel overwhelming. So don’t be put off when you teach yourself some JavaScript and then still feel adrift in a conversation about C#.

I don’t have any specifics to recommend, but I would say that you should start small. Don’t aim to write the next Flappy Bird as your first project, or the next Mastodon. Just concentrate on making a web page say “Hello world!” or changing the colour of some text. Back in the 80s, most kids got their first taste of programming by having a computer shop C64 print “Dave is rad!” on an infinite loop! :)

Good luck!

More broadly: an inability to discern good sources of information from bad sources of information.

Same solution though: education.

I’'m one of the people who sheepishly really liked “new” reddit’s interface, so Alexandrite is like catnip to me!

Infinite scroll! No more losing place in feeds!

Leaving Twitter for Mastodon barely had an impact. I was just about done with that whole place, with or without Musk in charge.

Reddit is different… I still loved using it. I had my subscriptions honed, all my interests represented. I suffered none of the toxicity that others saw. Not sure if that was just because I mostly used smaller, niche-interest subs or because I mostly lurked and seldom posted? It was all friendly, knowledgeable and entertaining, a stream of consciousness that I could dip in to whenever I wanted to.

So I’m not leaving Reddit because of the experience, but more on principal (both the API kerfuffle and a general aversion to ad-revenue models, which are clearly harmful to society). Principals sadly don’t give me something to read over breakfast…

I hope Lemmy can become that stream of consciousness in time. I’m trying to do my bit by being an active contributor rather than a lurking grazer.