Beefalo

I wonder if it works like IRC. The “plague” this entire time has been servers. As soon as the idea only works because somebody, somewhere, is maintaining a server, cloud or hardware, then you’re kinda sunk. The server is the bottleneck. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a AAA game launch only for the servers to be inadequate. It happens again and again and again, so I assume the business considerations push them toward having just enough server and maybe a little less, never extra, which costs money and cuts margins.

Somewhere there are a bunch of servers howling away in a room that are actually Discord, and Discord spends money to make them howl, so there’s never as much server as you want, which is why things start bogging down with too many people in the chat room at once.

Most importantly to a corporation, if you have to interact with their servers in order to do anything, then they can own the platform by owning the servers. So there’s always going to be a server, even if it’s not strictly needed. The same consideration goes through the head of the streamer who always wants to launch a Discord because it’s “free” but they can sell it to you and then have top level control of an entire community as an asset that can be sold to others. There’s always a server. There will be a server if the actual application doesn’t really need it.

The reason IRC works fine with 1500 people in a chat is because IRC uses the user’s machine for any sort of computation power it needs, and then everything else it is doing is just sending data across wires. There is no central server farm. I haven’t used IRC in a really, really long time, but if it hasn’t changed, then it also doesn’t support lots of picture posting, which helps. Most of the memory usage on my machine at idle is just too many Discord channels all needing to use my local RAM memory to store the umpteen thousand photos everyone has uploaded, all the memes and etc. The IRC I remember was text, and text uses so little data that it can be treated like zero data.

Lots of pictures are probably non-negotiable in the modern era. Heck, they’re pretty important for serious work tasks, like putting up a shot of the broken gadget, so the engineering team can get an eyeball on the failure, that means pictures are in, text-only isn’t viable. I don’t know if modern IRC supports this or not, it probably does if people are still using it at all.

But IRC is a piece of open-source software that you install on your machine, free to the user. It’s not a web app, it doesn’t live in a browser. The data of you interacting with others is being sent out to them and also back to you, where it shows up in your IRC client and the chat room. If 1500 people are using it, then 1500 people have each added some of their machine power to making it all work, so it scales, it always has as much hardware as it needs. Again, there’s no server in the middle to run out of capacity, so that problem is just bypassed.

Everything used to work like this, circa the late 1990s and early 2010s. Everyone was assumed to be on a PC of their own, and the only problem was how to connect them together to do stuff, like have deranged fan wars about shows. BBSs were already kind of old hat, and there’s that damn server again, every BBS has one. All the most clever apps of the 90s, even the web, managed to jump through hoops to avoid the necessity of a central server to get things done because then somebody has to pay for it, run it, maintain it and own it. We just want the wires, the lovely, lovely cables dragged across the sea at somebody else’s unthinkable expense. If you can eliminate the server somehow, then you win. And they did. Things like IRC and ICQ blew the hell up from using that model.

We really need to dig that entire concept back up and brush the dust off of it. I wonder if that’s what Matrix is.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go prune some pointless Discord channels. Oh, by the by, fucking nobody uses Slack, or knows what it is. Dudes on the internet all think it’s normal because tech offices seem to use it a lot, the rest of the world has never used Slack. Up until right now I was assuming that Discord and Slack are the same thing, owned by the same company, and Slack is just the “business casual” version of Discord. This doesn’t seem to be true, but that’s how unfamiliar I am with Slack, while being chronically online. There are probably more people around who still remember ICQ than have ever used Slack in their lives.

I love the Church of the Subgenius reference built into Slack’s name. From what I can tell, nobody who uses that thing actually gets any slack, it actively removes slack from your life and makes boss surveillance really, really easy for the boss, but you must always act as though Big Brother can hear, or you’re fucked. Good work Bob, nice joke. Anyway, I shut up now.

Oh well, guess I’m still happy about this magic bag i got for going places I don’t want Google knowing about.

I’ll never forget the dude who said he put that exact face on his credit card, so he’d have to stare down ol’ Ben every time he wanted to waste money on shit.

That is a face that says, “Every dollar today is worth ten in the future, sir.”

Ooh, yeah, good call, I always forget them when things get dweeby.

I swear, nothing is commie enough for Lemmy. “Linux? Pshhhsshs! Cuck!” Mentions no alternative

Oh, yeah, that’s the new normal, I’m a bit surprised they gave you a whole 100MB to call your own.

The modern Dad pro-move for giving the kids a game console for Christmas is to sneak the box open, set it up, do all the ridiculous downloads and patches then sneak it all back into the box nice and tidy so that the kids can just open it and go on Christmas morning.

Bond fund here we come, that’s as ensured as you get now, moneybags.

They definitely think Bill Gates is Jewish.

He’s not. No Jewish ancestry and his current practice is a sort of casual Catholic thing, but he also thinks Dawkins is cool, so about what you’d expect. That’s from a quick Wiki check, but still.

Because if he’s on their poster…

Yep. Some of us remember when it was Fuck Ellen Pao, they seem to like their sacrificial CEOs over there, though I’m sure they get paid too much to be the scapegoat.

That just makes me stop and think about how bad Musk loves being That Guy. The other ones will take the heat and then float away on their golden parachutes, you never really hear from them again. Not him. He keeps making new companies so he can be That Guy at them.

Yahoo Finance managed to make itself real damn useful, and that’s one of the most lucrative ad markets, if not THE most lucrative.

When I woke my Yahoo Mail account from its ancient slumber, everything was in Spanish for some reason, and I expect that reason is that they expanded outside the US and have a large user base in South America, where Yahoo probably doesn’t look as dead. “Free email” goes even farther when your country doesn’t get to have the world’s reserve currency. So Yahoo just defaulted to Spanish for accounts until I had to tell it I’m a gringo.

Americans really do have a hard time remembering the rest of the globe exists, but our companies don’t, so a lot of companies that seem “dead” are just really active outside the US.

So yeah, somebody is still using Yahoo News. Quite a lot of somebodies, actually. Even Americans. Especially Americans. They hooked us with real nice stock market quotes and such. That’s how you reel a Yankee back in, make it easy to see that revenue trend at a glance.

I haven’t used Facebook for years. It bored me after 20 minutes, I wasn’t sure what else to do there, I closed the tab, I went away. I never made a post about how I’m packing up my little hobo bags and leaving forever, you’ll all be sorry!! I just went, quietly, and never came back.

I lie, every three months I poke my head in there, and then once I actually sold something on Marketplace, for $80, so FB is the only fucking social website that has ever made me money despite being the one I never use. One of these days I’ll get on there and try to find out my brother’s current address, but he doesn’t respond to messages anymore, either.

LIkewise, I quit Twitter, shorty before the Elonpocalypse, because it just sucked. I didn’t like being there, and wasn’t having any fun. So I just stopped going there, quietly, telling nobody, I left. Now you have to login to even see it, and yeah, haven’t logged in there in forever. I hear they changed the name.

That’s how it looks when you actually quit a place. You just quietly disappear one day, like a fish slipping under the waves. Who knows, maybe you’ll find a reason to come back, you know? And it would look stupid as hell if you made some big fucking scene about leaving and then had to crawl back in, WOULDN’T IT?

Maybe you want to sell an old drumset, or ask a question, you never know. So you slip quietly out the side door, you don’t even slam it, and then you forget to show up again for months at a time, or never again. When was the last time you logged into MySpace?

You? You look like you’re going to found a subreddit called r/ExRedditors. Move on, already. The future beckons.

“Gettin shitty”, my buddy’s personal phrase for getting drunk, probably hoisted from his dad.

A man had to go to the trenches for that line, it is no wonder that it lives on so long.

I think the thing that’s really stopping me from using that is that every time I get curious and go poking around to see what the fuss is, I run into some sort of paywall situation, or maybe it’s just a long queue that you need to join to get access, something like that. All I know is that you can’t just casually fire it up and take it for a spin.

Either I’m finding the wrong thing, or the people who already swear by it paid some fee or got an early access code ages ago. It also doesn’t know when it’s lying, and already got a lawyer in trouble for trying to let ChatGPT do his job, apparently it slapped together a brief, an argument before the court, that referenced a bunch of case law that didn’t actually exist.

No matter what, it’s not so casually accessible as people make it out to be, I don’t know what’s up with that.

It was always like that, is the problem.

I never did become an app Redditor, like I never used Apollo or any of that, so I was always using whatever their production interface was on browser. For a brief time they were allowing us to create filter lists for r/All so you could attempt to browse that beast looking for interesting communities without the sea of porn and hate groups, then they took that function away pretty quickly, I guess we were using it too much.

Eventually, the truth dribbled out that investors were breathing down their necks for user growth at any cost, since there was no profit. This is why bullshit like Coontown, fatpeoplehate, and just endless constellations of far-right hate speech communities were allowed to thrive and grow during the entirety of the 2010s. So long as they didn’t do anything that put Reddit in legal jeopardy, Admin refused to chop off large parts of their precious user metrics.

This meant the rest of us dealing with a community where the Nazis were always in the walls, even if you were browsing subs about container gardening. Things like r/JusticeServed allowed populist hate groups to grow large and juuust barely mainstream enough that you could pretend they were something else. You were always tiptoeing around the hate groups, hoping that nobody in your container gardening sub posted something that would bring the Eye of Sauron upon you.

So, to be clear, it didn’t become hateful, it’s been like that for years and years. The rest of the internet was far more aware of it than I think the average habitual Redditor was, as far as they were concerned Reddit was just as toxic as 4Chan, but at least 4Chan is clever and influential, sometimes.

If you avoided r/All like the plague, and made a part-time job out of curating your experience, you could get a half-assed positive result that looked nice enough if you squint. It was true, there were some genuinely nice communities on Reddit - and they tended to be very practical in nature, like r/Excel - which didn’t attract chuds. Any subreddit which gave some fool a chance to bitch about things they didn’t like got big, fast, and ended up pinned to the top of All, where, again, anybody who wasn’t already a logged-in user would see it, festering.

The only reason Reddit has persisted for so long is that it basically stole away the user bases that once filled all the individual forums of the internet, and came to hold them hostage. It was chill circa 2011, before the Digg migration, before they’d even rolled out subreddits, yet. It got nasty fast as the userbase grew and it started to attract average folk.

The only thing that Lemmy has going for it is that lack of commercialization. To be very clear, the Nazis are already here. They move in fast. Stormfront was one of the first big sites on the internet, period. People avoided Mastodon for a long time because the last they heard that’s where the Nazis went when they started getting banned elsewhere. Whether it was true or not, the hate groups are already on the Fediverse.

The difference is that for now, we can block their communities from participating in our communities, which hopefully is enough. We couldn’t do that at all on Reddit, admin just ignored thousands and thousands of reports and always had the final say on everyone’s lives. Just don’t go around thinking that hatefulness is something brand new, you must have been working hard to ignore it for a long time. That shit’s been baked into Reddit for a decade.