Is this mainly a US-centric take though? In the UK, yes we had AOL here and a fair number of people I knew had it, but it was never dominant as far as I could tell (I’d be happy to be corrected, I only came in around 1997). It was MSN messenger that became established as the dominant instant messenger here by about 2000, I don’t really remember too many people using AIM.
Best controllers ever, in my opinion.
Downvotes are disabled on Beehaw, we don’t see them even on communities on other instances. I find it makes it a much more pleasant experience.
I’m surprised at that, from my experience I think it’s still more normal than not to have analogue clocks at home, and I would always prefer an analogue watch.
I think you’re right then, and honestly I can’t say I’ve noticed.
I’ve never heard of sugarcoating pills, is it a US thing maybe?
I was mildly interested until I saw “designed for creators”. Seems like a meaningless marketing term that gets added to everything these days.
Beehaw is my favourite instance, if it left I would stay with it but and also use a different instance to use Lemmy.
I would worry that Beehaw couldn’t sustain itself outside of federation though, it needs to be either bigger or fill more of a niche and it doesn’t do either. I would give it some time to grow more first if it were up to me.
Because anything truly outside of our senses (or ability to measure) is non-falsifiable, so if it can’t impact us it’s essentially meaningless. If it can impact us then it can be measured and become science.
It’s just occurred to me that that would be difficult to do on Lemmy, since not everyone’s federated to the same instances.
I really think that’s a separate issue, which needs to be discussed as a completely separated issue. I agree ads by their nature are manipulative, they serve the website and the advertiser not the user. I think that once ads are non user-tracking then we can have a discussion about advertising ethics and deceptive advertising (online ads have always been terrible even before they were privacy invading) but you can’t have that discussion when it’s mixed in with privacy issues. Only once you take away the privacy issues then we can have the conversation about ad-pollution versus website revenue.
I really wish people would stop calling them adblockers too, they’re wide-spectrum content blockers, and they’re not blocking ads, they’re blocking malicious ad-networks which is necessary for user security. Given the prevalence of online spyware it should be a basic feature built in to all web browsers.
It just gives spyware-promoting sites the ability to say “but you’re hurting our revenue” which is a completely separate issue.
Funnily enough I’ve also noticed that my comments on Lemmy.ml have only been getting 1 point in the last week. Probably because they’re not interesting enough but since you mentioned it…
I find they’re a pain to use and I only have one out of social pressure, and privacy or not I’m constantly confused on why they’re so popular.
I just use a throwaway account and have the rule of not putting in any data that I don’t want to be read - which is barely anything any way because I do all my computing on my Linux laptop. I figure if they’re collecting location data and recording me then they’re just associating it with “random guy x” because I’ve never given it anything else. I should look in to one of the de-Googled Android distributions but I have so little interest and energy in anything to do with it, if it could be made totally private I would still rarely use it.
Can’t even vote without a Google account.
Posting from a Beehaw account I think does have a psychological effect on me that causes me to naturally tone things down a bit. I think it’s been good for me.
Only issue is I recently opened another account because theyre leaving lemmy eventually and currently my posts dont federate and all my subscriptions are pending.
Nothing’s concrete yet. I have accounts on several instances for their various advantages, but Beehaw is what I’ve settled on as my main “default” for now. The Subscribe Pending is a bug, I don’t think it affects your posts federating so they’re separate issues if that’s the case.
Beehaw is a quieter experience than most because it has narrower federation, but you do tend to get a better signal to noise ratio since you miss the spammier instances - I like it.
Beehaw also doesn’t federate downvotes which I think is an improvement.
I kind of feel the main issue on Reddit is people who just don’t care and would happily post and upvote irrelevant crap anyway. I don’t understand the mentality.
Yes, the differences are fascinating, I know Minitel was big in France. To my mind it was Freeserve that brought the internet to the masses in the UK (and spawned many dozens of similar ISPs in the late-90s), but seems to be a bit of a footnote now. My peers first started messaging through YIM (Yahoo! Instant Messenger) before MSN took over as the default. I remember AOL was perceived as an expensive ISP which limited the popularity of AIM.