I mean… it’s a lot of money. Every day I had to put up with some bullshit—that’s most days—I’d be grumbling to myself about that fortune I’d have if only…

Man, I am a childish adult. My wife will tell you I’m a twelve year old boy in a fifty year old body. This is something else.

16 -> 29 is a huge red flag. They are in completely different places in their lives, or at least ought to be. There is an inherent power imbalance due to maturity and finance differences.

Could it be a happy, healthy relationship? Odds are extremely thin, but probably non-zero.

A lot of things that don’t make sense 99.9% of the time make sense at the scale of Google and Facebook. Whether this is one, I can’t say.

I get these scam texts all the time. It’s 100% a scam, and now that you’ve clicked it, you’ll probably get a bunch more scam in the near future, so be extra cautious.

With “drama” I was going for the built-in drive towards negativity and sensationalist stuff.

Oh I got you. Yeah. That sucks. I’m probably going to have to keep myself less informed. I spent the first year of Trump arguing with people that every little thing he did wasn’t the literal worst thing in the world. He fired a bunch of political appointees, just like every President, and it was doomsday for a week. I can’t handle the handwringing every single day.

Even late in his presidency when he actually was doing terrible shit on a constant basis was so stressful. I swear it aged me ten years. I’m not doing that shit again.

We’d need easy payment methods, value the labour of the journalists

Yeah. The incentives are all fucked up in journalism now. No one pays for just solid news, it looks like. They pay for sensational bullshit with their wallets and attention.

I think a lot of the unhealthy dynamics aren’t baked into the internet itself, but due to people making everything about money and advertising

Yeah. Any fix which comes from changing people isn’t a fix at all. We aren’t going to change except through conditioning. Maybe education but that’s such a fucking uphill battle right now itself.

Worst part is, other than some wankery in the internet, most people aren’t interested in reflecting on this or making any attempt to solve it. I’m worried we’re headed into a cycle war and conflict after a hundred years of relative peace. Maybe that will change things, though that means change is in the other side of a lot of pain and suffering (which is a great catalyst for change but I don’t want my kids or grandkids to have to go through that).

Have a good one, mate.

Well I’ll disagree with one thing: I give zero shits about gossip or internet drama. I’m not oblivious to it but I don’t care about the personal drama. There are trolls and heels of course, and much is made of them, but I don’t care.

Yeah I wish the situation was better, but it’s not going to get better. You said you’re happy to have the internet as options, and that’s what killed traditional journalism. We are probably all less well informed on the big stuff and much better informed on niche things these days. This is the direction of the world. Not global community and rising tides lifting all ships, but fracturing of the zeitgeist and growing division.

Good luck, world. I don’t know how to fix you, but I have faith that coming generations will figure something out after I’m gone, even if the future looks more like the Morlocks and Eloi from The Time Machine than Starfleet from Star Trek.

In my case it’s Apple Maps, but to the larger question, to me it’s about the web search, which they have a custom algorithm and a monetary stake in gaming the results. You can certainly look at it differently, but “Googling” to answer questions is no longer useful the way it once was.

The filter bubble is absolutely terrible. I miss the days of having basically 3 equivalent TV news channels, plus newspapers. I trusted all of them, more or less, and their audience was everyone so they were fairly balanced and reasonable. These days everyone self-sorts into one media bubble or another because it’s completely fragmented and the people in other bubbles are painful to hear (“let’s just get rid of cars and force everyone to live in big cities!” or “Let’s talk to this former paste-eater about vaccines.”). It’s not that I want to live in a bubble, it’s that people are fucking crazy and I don’t want it around me.

But Google isn’t helping any of that. Google is full of ads and SEO and most of the time I go looking for things like product reviews there’s nothing remotely trustworthy in the results. I trust Wikipedia over a generic google search about most topics.

It’s so bad, I think I could get by with about a dozen bookmarks instead of Google. The signal to noise ratio for the internet as a whole is getting awful, and Google is keeping pace.

It’s federated in name only. It would cost millions in storage and networking to set up another Bluesky node because each node is essentially a full mirror (not that you couldn’t code custom filters or something I’d guess?).

No one is ever going to bother unless conservatives want to set up their own server where they can’t be banned for trolling.

Hours and menus normally come from Maps. News often comes from social media, unfortunately. But Google rarely helps me there either. Concert tickets is probably an app or venue website (but I don’t really go to many concerts because fuck Ticketmaster).

Not that I don’t Google stuff, but it’s way less useful than it used to be.

I’m over fifty (though fuck does it feel unreal to say that).

What kind of content are you looking for? Reading every random thought of people you like, or reading every random person on a subject you are interested in?

Frankly, I’d like to be able to follow a combination of people and subjects, but that’s hard because if I’m a techbro promoting my business by showing off some code, is that marketing or technical content?

One way or the other, you have to mentally filter out posts that don’t interest you.

I like subject-based content like Lemmy and Reddit, but it’s also nice to feel like part of a community where people (kinda) care about you as a person. In order to achieve that here, you need to be in a small community or a prolific enough poster that people get to know you. I also don’t like that microblogging tends to push real names and selfies and stuff—I value my anonymity. I don’t have to worry about someone from work feeling a certain way because I play Dungeons and Dragons or have trans friends or have the occasionally cathartic apoplectic political rant.

One nice thing about Mastodon is you can follow a hashtag and sort of get the best and worst of both worlds. I wish Bluesky offered that. Maybe they will in the future. They do offer custom feeds, but it’s not as simple as just pinning a hashtag in Mastodon, but otherwise I think Bluesky is a lot easier to use. Creating lists of people is easy. I haven’t yet looking into how to create a feed like “Star Wars posts”. Other people have but I don’t know exactly how they function.