Fediverse presence

[suzyne]

Off-topic:

Oh yeah, tell me about it... I think it would be even worse if we hadn't dropped Windows XP support.

If people love, for example, Windows XP and think that it's the best operating system interface ever, good for them. Or Maybe it's Windows 7 and everything has been downhill from there?

Since I am extremely partial to Windows 10 and will resist 11 for as long as possible, I understand that having a strong preference is valid, but what I push back against here, is uncritical black and white thinking. That peculiar idea that what someone thinks somehow reflects the universal experience and is an objective truth.

Not wanting to pick on Eduardolucas1 and I only refer to it again because their statement is a recent example, but when they said "Social Networks and instant messaging are a failure and a nightmare" there is so little nuance and it is such a broad indiscriminate generalisation that it lacks any real meaning. Me, my family and friends use those daily and when on such platforms we are not living a nightmare or feel they are failing us.

I guess it's the absolutism of some views that appear on these forums that can rub me the wrong way. Usually I ignore such comments, and sometimes I don't, but it would be nice to read opinions, not comments phrased in ways to suggest that the writer thinks they are the keeper of some indisputable truth.

Facebook and Twitter definitely don't need the heavy JS frameworks they use in order to do what they do, and neither do most other modern websites.

But what can we do? We got here not just because of big corporations, but via the legions of web developers looking for easy solutions. Maybe the blame lies mostly at the feet of Wordpress and the way it normalised using systems that you didn't need to understand?

I was asked to make a website for a church community. For their needs, a static site would have been more than sufficient, but they persistently kept saying "But what about Wordpress!". Accusing Meta and Google or some other big company for where we are now has its place, but I suspect the complete answer is more complicated and involves the choices of plenty of little people and small businesses too.

[andyprough]

Me, my family and friends use those daily and when on such platforms we are not living a nightmare or feel they are failing us.

It's a good point.

I haven't used Facebook for various reasons, mostly because my extended family doesn't use it much, but also because the way Facebook scrapes and sells the personal data rubs me wrong. However, I'll be needing to use Facebook in the future. I plan to move out of the city to the countryside over the next few years and do some farming with animals and crops. The farmers in my area are all on Facebook and they use it for everything. They buy and sell seed and feed on it, they buy and sell farming equipment, they make arrangements with neighbors to get help doing repairs or to get someone to watch their farm when they go on vacation. They buy and sell and trade livestock. It's virtually impossible to survive as a small farmer in this area without all the help that neighboring farmers willingly provide on Facebook and without access to the local marketplace created on Facebook. So at some point I'll take the plunge, and I expect that the experience will be largely positive, although I'll probably try to mitigate my loss of privacy somehow or other. But it will be enjoyable to be part of that community.

[athenian200]

Yeah, my perspective on whether social media is a disaster or not, is a little more complicated. I don't have much experience with Twitter because a platform that only allows 140 character Tweets and image posts was never my style, but I can talk about Facebook, since I joined in 2007 and watched all my friends in high school move over there from MySpace. My view is more that Facebook was really good when it first came out, and that's why people embraced it. Even for a few years after it first came out, it just kept getting better. But like everything else, at some point it just started getting worse, removing features and having ever more bloated and Chromium-specific code.

Like for instance, one Facebook feature I really liked that they took away was Notes, that was at first very simple, but almost grew into a way to do blogs on Facebook. They wound up killing it and making it hard for me to share any Notes I had previously published with friends, forcing me to hunt through archived data and use the half-busted backend stuff to do ridiculously specialized searches in order to get read-only access to my old Notes, and then republish them as normal posts with no formatting of any kind, just to try and save the content. That's the thing I don't like about Facebook... they haven't really been making it better, it caters more and more to advertisers and less and less to users, and features I personally use keep getting removed while the overall experience just keeps getting slower.

Facebook Messenger though, is honestly pretty good for what it is. It used to be better too, because it was originally designed so you could access it via XMPP, which meant it was really easy to use it with something like Pidgin and get an AIM-like experience. For context, most of the people I talk to on Facebook Messenger migrated over there from AIM, and for me the transition was pretty seamless at first because I was able to use Pidgin just like I had been doing for AIM. For a while I even had both my Facebook friends and my AIM buddies side-by-side in the same application and could monitor both services at once. Even today, you can still kind of hack around with Facebook's proprietary chat protocol and APIs enough to sort of get it to work with Pidgin inconsistently, but the point is it used to be really easy. Though, if I'm being honest, even AIM itself didn't like people using third-party clients, and I doubt AIM would have been much better than Facebook Messenger today if it had survived.

Facebook Marketplace is also really useful as an eBay alternative. Basically, Facebook makes a lot more sense if you think of it as being more like the old AOL ecosystem that you accessed through the AOL client to go to AOL-branded services rather than real websites... it's basically something people can use to get an Internet-like experience without having to be tech-savvy enough to go on the "real" Internet. Only it has attracted enough people and generated enough value that even people who are tech-savvy have a reason to use it over the kind of platforms they would prefer, and wind up resenting it in the process. Because it wasn't made for them, it was made for the AOL-type users.

Overall, I would say the primary reason I still use Facebook is simply because of the access it gives me to people and existing friend networks. It's not so bad and unusable as to justify me cutting myself off from all the non-technical people I know and isolating myself on platforms used only by nerdier people, but it is definitely a lot less functional than it was in, say, 2014 from my perspective.

[suzyne]

Off-topic:

It's virtually impossible to survive as a small farmer in this area without all the help that neighboring farmers willingly provide on Facebook and without access to the local marketplace created on Facebook.

Overall, I would say the primary reason I still use Facebook is simply because of the access it gives me to people and existing friend networks.

That's largely why I am Facebook too. To be where the people are who I want to keep in touch with. For family members, you can encourage, but it is impossible to get them to shift as an entire group to anything different.

And I have joined private groups that have been on Facebook long before I came along, and as the newish member it is not for me to suggest, "Hey, do you all want to try cohost or MeWe?". So I just use Facebook.

On the issue of it being less functional than before, there is a wide gap between not as good, and being rendered unusable, and I think Facebook is quite a long way from that second point.

So, I have gone through my Privacy settings and configured it to be all as restricted as possible, and sure they are collecting data and serving ads, but that is part of the deal of being where the people and activities that are important to me are.

And FB Messenger is ad free (for which I am thankful) and works really well.

[Eduardolucas1]

If people love, for example, Windows XP and think that it's the best operating system interface ever, good for them. Or Maybe it's Windows 7 and everything has been downhill from there?

Since I am extremely partial to Windows 10 and will resist 11 for as long as possible, I understand that having a strong preference is valid, but what I push back against here, is uncritical black and white thinking. That peculiar idea that what someone thinks somehow reflects the universal experience and is an objective truth.

Not wanting to pick on Eduardolucas1 and I only refer to it again because their statement is a recent example, but when they said "Social Networks and instant messaging are a failure and a nightmare" there is so little nuance and it is such a broad indiscriminate generalisation that it lacks any real meaning. Me, my family and friends use those daily and when on such platforms we are not living a nightmare or feel they are failing us.

I guess it's the absolutism of some views that appear on these forums that can rub me the wrong way. Usually I ignore such comments, and sometimes I don't, but it would be nice to read opinions, not comments phrased in ways to suggest that the writer thinks they are the keeper of some indisputable truth.

You`re blandly and literally assuming meaning and a depth or context i didn`t imply or exposed in my sentence. I`m saying social networks and IM are like that because they are defined by public and popularity, in the sense that those who aren`t used and are good are literally not a good example. I`m speaking about whatsapp, facebook, tiktok, telegram and discord, which are the ones people really use. They are objectively crap.

And honestly, i feel no need to justify myself to you to prove i`m not entitled to an absolutism of my own views. There are even research materials in psychology and public health studies that show how harmful they are. I`m not required to not affirm a short, concise set of opinions without a dissertation, if they have basis, in any public space.

[Moonchild]

Off-topic:

You`re blandly and literally assuming meaning and a depth or context I didn`t imply or exposed in my sentence.

News flash: that is what happens when you make broad-sweeping blanket statements and present them as something objective. Not even with an "I think" in there.

[Eduardolucas1]

Off-topic:

You`re blandly and literally assuming meaning and a depth or context I didn`t imply or exposed in my sentence.

News flash: that is what happens when you make broad-sweeping blanket statements and present them as something objective. Not even with an "I think" in there.

Does that entitle someone to use fallacies to call out an absolutism which does not exist?

[Moonchild]

Off-topic:

Does that entitle someone to use fallacies to call out an absolutism which does not exist?

Yes, it does, with the critical note that they aren't "fallacies" in that case, because they are only wrong from your point of view.

However, we're drifting into a rather academic analysis of conversation which is literally a waste of everyone's time. That is the actual fallacy here, and one we see regularly: the logical fallacy of "winning an argument". This is all off-topic and fully irrelevant, and you should just admit you should have been clearer and move on. That's the last I'll say about this tangent.

[Mozell11]

Btw Pale Moon already has a Discord (but only as a backup or last resort when the forums are down) so I'm not sure if Telegram would add any more value that Discord doesn't provide already.

Discord is limited to the web (and tends to be more resource-intensive on CPU/RAM compared to a traditional forum), whereas Telegram offers native applications.

[Moonchild]

Discord is limited to the web

No it is not. If it was, I wouldn't be using it.
Native client download: https://discord.com/download