danhakimi

@[email protected]

Hi all. I'm Dan. You can message me on Matrix @danhakimi:matrix.org, or follow me on Mastodon at @danhakimi.

You might want to check out my men's style blog, The Second Button, and the associated instagram account

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danhakimi OP ,

done.

Can we please remember to talk about things on the fediverse besides the fediverse itself? ( kbin.social )

Having spent a lot of time on Mastodon... There are tons of people there talking about federated and self-hosted services, software freedom, censorship, encryption, tech regulation... A very narrow range of topics directly surrounding the fediverse get a lot of attention....

danhakimi OP ,

I don’t think most of us actually want that. Then, it’ll become just like FB or Insta… the crowd I mean. The point is to attract the right audience, not just any audience.

Right now, it's attracting a circlejerk of people who only want to talk about how good the fediverse can be. I don't know what you mean by "the right audience," but this is not an audience I or anybody else wants to spend time around, and it's not an audience that can build real collective knowledge or anything like that.

My menswear friends aren't coming anywhere near the fediverse. Not because they're "the wrong audience" and the fediverse only appeals to cool people, but because there's nobody talking about menswear and the fediverse doesn't appeal to people.

See, that is exactly what I want to get away from… you have that on TikTok and FB/Insta. That is exactly what I don’t want to see here.

Why do you follow it if you don't want to see it?

I don't see anything on FB or IG that I don't avail myself of. I follow users I want to follow. I go on reddit, I join subreddits I want to join. I don't have to run away from the content I pick.

Tiktok is dumb though, IDK why you'd want to see algorithm-selected content like that.

Of course, anyone can open a comm like that, I probably wouldn’t block it, but short clips of someone roasting hotdogs with cheese and calling that a super easy and healthy meal… nah, that is not for me.

I mean, you're free to downvote that nonsense. It's certainly not a problem on Reddit, it only exists in the subreddits that are specifically about cringey recipes.

Once again, the kind of people we’re not trying to attract anyway.

You mean people with hobbies? You exclusively want people here without hobbies?

danhakimi OP ,

Have you ever been on a social network under construction? The first people joining are the geeks who talk about geek stuff and the geek stuff now is the fediverse and microservers. It has always been like this.

The fediverse has been like this for years. For... What, a decade? It did not take that long for Reddit users to start talking about their hobbies. I remember a lively community for my undergrad school where people discussed events, classes, student government, the schools' governance structure, all sorts of shit, that was in... 2012? Very active for a very small niche. Much more active then than /m/nyc is now. Much, much, much more active.

I'm not in a hurry. My mastodon account is six years old, and there's still nobody there talking about anything, I have found about 12 accounts I wanted to follow — half of them are software projects or software freedom organizations, and half of them are inactive. I go there, put up a post, none of my ~300 followers see it, because none of them check Mastodon, because it's a complete ghost town.

I've been extremely patient. It's about damn time the fediverse started to happen.

danhakimi OP ,

Wait, what's the trick here? your !cat link worked, but /m/ clearly isn't doing anything, and [email protected] didn't do anything... how do you get it to auto-link?

danhakimi OP ,

A ton of the artists I follow on IG

You missed my point. They're not on IG to bitch about IG, they're on IG to talk about art and they're bitching about IG on the side. They're ostensibly there to share their art, and that's why you follow them, right?

And yeah, some people go there to teach you how to be an influencer, but we're all aware that they irredeemably suck.

danhakimi OP ,

Most of my posts are not about the fediverse. This one got attention, because /m/fediverse is one of the only active magazines here.

danhakimi OP ,

You want people to go somewhere? Make it worth their time. This is like burning man. Show up to a blank slate and make it fun/interesting/sustainable.

I'm trying to do that, but it'll take more than one of us. I'm trying to encourage others to join me. Is that a problem?

All of your gripes sound like a lack of patience,

Six years is not enough time to wait for one other person who thinks suits are cool?

or a need for the corporate instances of social media to be replicated in the fediverse.

See, you're saying "corporate instances of social media," but what you mean is "any other social media that could possibly be perceived as a success." The fediverse is uniquely lacking in content. It doesn't need to be corporate for people to come here and make it something.

danhakimi OP ,

Alright, putting aside your elitist bullshit and your complaints about content you're not seeing because you chose not to see it...

I actually deleted everything on mainstream social media, except for Reddit and Lemmy. Everything else was just noise to me.

Do you see the difference between Reddit and Lemmy? Reddit has tens of millions of users having intellectual conversations about fashion, clothing, style, etc. across dozens of different subreddits. Some of those conversations are quite pleasant. I'm not going to suggest that you follow them, you're not into fashion, that's okay. I'm suggesting that the people who like those things go and talk about those things instead of dwelling on the metaconversations about the fediverse itself.

danhakimi OP ,

But my post was primarily contrasting Reddit from Lemmy, and Reddit doesn't have an influencer problem. I didn't say "we need more influencers," I said we need people to talk about their hobbies.

danhakimi OP ,

The fediverse has gone from 0 to 0.4 in the last ~6 months. Again, the fashion communities still don't exist. The cooking communities are still pretty fucking small. There are not enough animal gifs. People who come here see it as empty, see people all discussing the same narrow range of topics, and leave. There's nobody to follow on Mastodon. I've been on Mastodon, specifically, for over six years. I got really excited when people started talking about it on Twitter, but I still haven't found more than a dozen accounts, and I still have zero engagement, because the fediverse still barely exists.

danhakimi OP ,

that's... confusing... why would you need the [@]instance for the present instance? couldn't it just be [!]magazine with an optional [@]instance afterwards? wouldn't that be easier to remember, easier to type out most of the time, and easier to distinguish from tagging users with @?

danhakimi OP ,

I don't WANT to make posts about fashion, cooking, politics, or non-techie things, but if you do, then by all means, please do that?

I didn't ask you to do those things, specifically. What kinds of hobbies do you have? Talk about those. If your topics are all tech-focused, that's fine, keep talking about those, but I'm really hoping I see people here talk more about pomeranians and nail polish, even though I'm not into either, because those topics will engage people who are into those things.

And now we both are breaking your rule: discussing things about the fediverse.

I think you misread my post. I did not say people should not talk about the fediverse, I just think we should post about other things, too. Especially if we want to see the fediverse succeed, we need more than just the meta-conversation.

danhakimi OP ,

ah, I guess it would be annoying to translate the links like that... but still, why would it go from being a ! to an @?

danhakimi OP ,

I don't think most people who are new to the fediverse really want to see three dozen threads about the fediverse as they scroll. I couldn't possibly convince somebody to join the fediverse to talk about fashion, because there's nobody here talking about fashion, it's like going to a baseball stadium to talk about library science.

People are going to Threads instead. When I point out how shitty Threads is and how people should use Mastodon instead, they say, "you're right! Threads is shitty! I'm gonna go use threads." Because threads is a social network and mastodon is a theory.

danhakimi OP ,

Once you realize that over 80% of the wolrd’s population are complete idiots, you’ll start seing things differently as well.

Well, I know you're an idiot, since you seem to struggle with math. If your definition of "complete idiot" includes people in the 75th percentile of overall knowledge, and you don't see how that makes your definition meaningless and makes you a piece of shit, I can't imagine why you think anybody would want to chat with you.

OK, then try and convince them to come over here

I'm here for conversations. There's no way for me to convince people to come to a social network to not have conversations. Nobody wants that. A very small number of people want to try to build this social network. Those people need to build it, topic by topic, rather than circle-jerking about nothing.

danhakimi OP ,

Reddit became huge off the back of imgur, only developing its own (asstacular) image upload service in recent years. I haven't had to upload many photos to kbin yet (it seems to work fine), but I can't imagine imgur being a problem if I had to use it.

I highly doubt this is part of the problem.

danhakimi OP ,

Of the top 10 posts currently on my front page, 2 are about the Fediverse, 1 is about Kbin specifically, and the other 7 are completely different topics including politics, space, video games and art.

Is this on /all? I did see some non-fediverse posts there, but like... a few of them were specifically from @196, which... the name of that magazine is an obscure reference to an inside joke from reddit, and the content is basically just, what if there was a second @memes. It's not pulling people in.

I did see one cool post about Persian Rugs, though, I liked that.

Maybe you should look for magazines/communities other than /m/fediverse if you want to talk about things other than the fediverse.

I've spent a lot of time there, scrolling through them and searching for the ones I want. And it's not that the ones I want don't exist, but nobody posts or comments there. I posted to some of them, but there's no conversation to be had. I commented where I could, but I'm afraid half of those people signed in for a day and then left when nothing was happening.

danhakimi OP ,

You’re young. I used to think exactly like you. You’ll start seing things more from my point of view as you get older.

Exactly how young am I, o great omniscient lord on high?

You want things to happen instantly, they don’t happen like that.

SIX YEARS.

danhakimi OP ,

I did and I have, here and on mastodon, but I can't affect this change alone.

danhakimi OP ,

I'm posting on the existing fashion communities I've found. I've posted plenty about fashion on mastodon as well. It takes more than one person actually doing these things. So here I am, constructively encouraging people who care about the fediverse to use it. I'm sorry you don't appreciate that.

danhakimi OP ,

They will never get the defederated aspect of the fediverse. It’s like speaking some alien language to them, it simply does not compute.

It's really not that hard to explain. Just tell them it's like email, they'll get it.

I swear, most techies think that non-techies are another species. It's not that hard to explain things, and not everybody is as incompetent as our mothers. Young people understand technology better than old people, not worse, not sure how that part has you confused.

But yeah, being able to post photos directly without going to imgur is easier and more intuitive, I'm glad it seems to be built into kbin without any issue.

danhakimi OP ,

You’re talking about people that open up FB accounts with a phone number… they don’t understand the concept of email.

No, I'm not. My mom is afraid of computers, but she understands email just fine. I've been able to explain federation to a lot of my non-techie friends. You're giving me some hypothetical caricature of a technophobe, but I'm telling you, I've done it, I've explained it to people, it's not that hard, you just hate people too much to give them a chance.

You sure about that? Cuz I’ve had talks with young people that are considered techies amongst their friends, they know a lot less than what techies used to know at that age, which was dissapointing for me. For example, they know that Thor hides their real IP, they don’t know how though. They think it’s somehow magical and that it doesn’t need an IP.

I assume you're talking about TOR, and not Thor. I consider myself a techie, I'm a patent attorney with a degree in computer science. I've read about how TOR works a few times, and probably once new whatever it is you're getting at, but I couldn't tell you how the fuck TOR works now. And I couldn't care less. And I don't need to understand it to sign up for the fediverse or upload a photo to kbin or upload a photo to imgur.

You don't need to be a software engineer with experience in every field of technology to click a link, sign up for an account, and leave a comment. My mom could do it (if she wanted to, although she's probably get angry at me if I suggested it and talked to her about it for more than 20 seconds).

You're just being an elitist misanthrope here. This has nothing to do with the issues facing the fediverse.

danhakimi OP ,

This post is not a complaint. It's a reminder.

danhakimi OP ,

She doesn’t understand why calling her brother abroad without the country’s calling code doesn’t work, I had to type the number in her phone with the country’s code because she didn’t think that was important and just left the code out… cell operators were also a PITA to explain to her, and I don’t think she got that either, cuz she still asks me what the first 3 numbers in front of the cell are and sometimes I give her bogus codes just to see if she’ll go “don’t screw with me”, but she writes them down and never asks me why is this code different from all of the rest that are in use here… not ever.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Why wouldn't you just give her a number and tell her that's the number? Fuck that, why don't you just send her a contact and tell her "click on Bob and it'll call bob! Or tell it to call Bob and it'll call Bob!" Why the fuck would you ever bother to explain country codes to her? Nobody needs to know about country codes, you're inventing this problem.

I'm getting the impression that when you say you don't understand email, you're talking about how people don't know how email routing works, don't understand pop vs imap, don't understand why the sender field is sometimes not accurate. That's not what I'm talking about, because it doesn't fucking matter. Everybody knows everything they actually have any reason to know about email. If I asked a hundred people on the street how to send an email, or check their email, one hundred of them would be able to describe the process successfully. You're just looking for excuses to call them stupid to make yourself feel smarter.

Please tell me the world statistic (percentage) of people that actually went and graduated. I haven’t seen the statistic either, but I bet it’s no more than 15% on a global scale, which about sums my estimate of over 80% of the population not being able to understand simple things (yes, they are simple IMO) like email or federation.

Well, obviously college isn't the only sign of intelligence, obviously you don't need a college degree to operate imgur, or upload a photo to kbin, obviously children don't have college degrees, and obviously different nations and cultures have different systems and norms around education, but:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cac/intl-ed-attainment

So 40%, as of 2021, in OECD countries. Is that good enough for you, asshole?

Also, fun fact, 4.37 billion people use email: https://techjury.net/blog/how-many-email-accounts-are-there/. (yeah, that article is written weirdly).

They use whatever their friends, coworkers, family use. Why?

How fucking stupid are you? It's literally called social media. You're confused about why people would rather see what their nieces and nephews are up to than listen to some stranger rant about how stupid everybody, everywhere is?

reset you password (cuz none of them actually remember it, they’re not used to remembering stuff)

you should not be remembering your passwords. You know you're not supposed to remember your passwords, right? I have hundreds of unique, complex, randomized passwords, I don't remember them. I know a lot of normies who are smart enough to not remember their passwords, Apple and Google are both making it easy. Why are you remembering your passwords? Are you part of that 80%?

People usually don’t care about techie stuff.

They shouldn't need to. Most people don't know how IG works and enjoy it just fine. The reason people don't enjoy the fediverse is not that it's too complicated, it's that it's not enjoyable enough. If people ask me what the deal is, I explain it, but if they ask me why they should join, I can only talk about theory and potential, because there's nothing worth doing here, it's all potential. It needs to be an enjoyable place with people who don't call them idiots and with people who are talking about things they want to talk about.

You don't need to roll your own server on the fediverse. You don't need to compile your own app from source. You don't need to set up your own image server to share images from. You just need to come here and lurk, or vote, or comment, or post, or whatever, and have some fun.

danhakimi OP ,

except this one is a hell of a lot more complicated for signing up. “Now I gotta chech my email for a confirmation link, great 😒… shit, can’t remember my password 🤦… aaah, fuck this shit.” See how easy it is for normies to give up. Make the sign up process with a phone number and sign ups will skyrocket, I guarantee you that. But… wait, that’s info that I would rather not share with a social network. Yes, for people like you and me, yes, for normies, it’s just easier 🤷.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Plenty of services offer both options because they might as well. Yeah, SMS is less secure. Who cares? This is not a bank account, nobody's account is gonna get hacked. And email really isn't secure in the first place. But also, there are plenty of services that only offer email signup, and plenty of people use them, and I've never really heard of anybody having an issue signing up with email, my mom manages, my sisters manage, my technophobic cousins manage.

But they would never come to the fediverse in the first place, because the fediverse never really had a selling point that mattered to any of them. They want to see their friends, and their friends don't use it, or see their hobbies, and nobody talks about their hobbies, or see anything that they could possibly care about, and there's none of that here. If I paid people to check it out, they wouldn't stay. I know plenty of people who signed up for accounts and never posted because there's nothing to talk about, nobody to engage with.

danhakimi OP ,

You’re in your 20’s, I can tell that much. Get to your late 30’s, then we’ll talk.

Guess again, dumbass.

Maybe stop pretending you know everything about everybody. You took a stab in the dark and pretended it was knowledge. You don't need to make assumptions about how old people are because you want to use those assumptions to judge them. You told me I'm too young to know anything, and that you knew better because you were older. You just don't realize how stupid you are.

You started using Mastodon when nobody was actually using it. Things will happen in year or two from now. People are finally getting fed up with the nonsence and ads on mainstream social media. That coupled with bad decisions management wise will reduce the actual users on those platforms (bots don’t count). The time of growth is now, not 6 years ago.

Nothing has changed in the past six years. We've had multiple moments that have felt like... oh wow, people are going to start caring about the fediverse! People are going to come join and it's going to be a place where people do things! But none of those moments materialized into anything, because a million signups mean nothing if you can't find anybody to follow, can't find any followers, can't find anybody talking about anything but the fediverse, and feel, when you post, that you're shouting into the wind. You're not going to post. You're not going to come back tomorrow. You're not going to come back in a year. You tried the fediverse, there was nothing there, you went back to the social networks where society resides.

For something to change, we're going to need to have a conversation people want to join. We're going to need to build communities that people want to post in, or vote in, or lurk in, or comment in, or share posts from, or talk about, or care about. We can't just say "there's no Zuckerberg!" That's not enough.

danhakimi OP ,

You can pretend all you want, I know I’m right.

You never asked how I know that. The fact that you got fired up and started using curse words says a lot.

My identity is not a secret dumbass, you can look me up. You can tell me how you "know" that I'm in my twenties, but you don't, because I'm not. You "know" that in my twenties because you think my worldview is somehow less mature than yours, and that somehow explains my age. No, I'm just less of a dick than you are.

Please quote where I wrote that. I wrote older people are wiser. Not smarted, wiser. Why? Because they have more life experience. Not every older person is wiser, but those that have more than 2 synapses firing up there, usually are.

Oh, I see, so you're wiser than me because you've spent more time in your mom's basement than you think I've spent alive, huh?

Plase take a look at what has happened this year alone regarding social network platforms and you’ll see I’m right. Reddit’s API changes, Twitter limiting tweet views, Meta launching Threads and deciding to federate that platform with the fediverse. Please point at another year in which so many changes have been made on all social networks worldwide. Trust me, the time is now. If it doesn’t happen now, it’ll most probably never happen.

You're explaining why there's an opportunity now. There's still nothing happening on the fediverse. People are flocking to threads and ignoring the fediverse. I'm trying to argue that we should do something about that, make the fediverse a social network and not just a place to discuss the fediverse. You're arguing that it's probably already happened and I just haven't noticed yet. I've been here for six years. A million signups sounds like a lot, but I'm telling you, nothing has changed.

A million sign ups means a lot. If it means nothing to you

It means potential. It means opportunity. It does not mean that we've arrived, or hit an inflection point, or taken advantage of the opportunity.

Even for Reddit and Digg that took years and years.

Not nearly as long as it's taking for the fediverse. I don't want to spend six more years crossing my fingers while Threads grows and the fediverse continues to stagnate, and then wonder why people didn't bother.

Those are usually not things that people who have a higher consciousness and decided to drop the mainstream social media will be interested in.

I really... I don't understand why you're confused when I insult you. It's hard to imagine that this isn't an intentional, active attempt to be seen as a piece of shit. Do you not see how hard you have to suck to say something so stupid, so elitist, so wrong-headed as this? You do not have a higher consciousness than other people, you have one interest most people don't have. Cooking and fashion and cat gifs are not lowly interests, they're interests you don't have. Your personal preferences don't make you some kind of ubermensch, dumbass, they're just preferences.

Yes, I'm aware that the fediverse is mostly techies and nerds. That does not make it better. Reddit has plenty of room for people with different interests. Twitter has plenty of room for people with different interests. Lemmy and Kbin are designed to support different interests. But you continue to express some kind of fear that, if people who like clothes come to the Fediverse, they're somehow going to make your experience more like tiktok. Fuck off with that noise. Don't subscribe to fashion magazines, problem solved.

Be that change. Start posting on a more a link like aggregator place, like KBin or Lemmy. Mastodon is more of a microblogging thing.

I'm doing both. @malefashionadvice and similar communities are absolutely dead. I have found twelve accounts I want to follow on mastodon, half of them have never posted, and the other half are software projects. And I'm really pushing it, I'm really looking, there's just nobody talking about anything interesting.

I really feel that's the experience almost everybody on the planet would have if they tried signing up for and using mastodon. That's why those six people don't post—they came, they gave it a chance, they found a barren wasteland of nothing, and they left.

danhakimi OP ,

The fediverse will never offer phone numbers as a regustartion option. Why? One, it’s invasion of privacy (something the fediverse is strictly against), and two, it’s a service that costs money, while email is free.

Do you know what an option is? Are you confused about how options work? How is it an invasion of privacy to let me choose between the thing we're already able to do and a new thing that some other people might choose if they want to?

Yes, if the services offer “sign in with Google/FB/Twitter”, yes, most people will use that. Ask them if they usually use the last “sign in with email” option and you have your answer… because the other methods I mentioned requires just one click/tap, but not the email option.

No, I'm talking about services that only offer email signup. Actually, there is also eBay, which I guess offers a facebook sign in option, but my mom and sister both signed up by email, they found it easier, because they both occasionally use one of the same computers, and they didn't want to log in and out of facebook to switch ebay accounts.

It’s best that they don’t in that case.

It's best that you stop sucking your own dick about how fucking high your consciousness is and how much better you are than everybody else.

I beg to differ. There are plenty of subjects that appeal to my interests.

Okay, are you going to disagree with my point?

I still know plenty of people who signed up for accounts and never posted because there’s nothing to talk about, nobody to engage with.

You found people here talking about what you like talking about. Why shouldn't anybody else have that?

danhakimi OP ,

I'm getting fired up over you insulting all of humanity. If you can't stand to be called an idiot, maybe stop calling billions of people idiots in every comment, idiot.

Fuck off.

danhakimi OP ,

I wasn't raised to think I'm better than everybody else, I was raised properly. I wasn't educated in the art of contempt, I was educated well. Your parents should be (and I assume are) ashamed.

danhakimi OP ,

@foodporn isn't bad. Not really a cooking community, but active.

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