How do I make friends as an adult? I'm new to my area and don't have any local friends or community. Have been struggling with loneliness a lot lately.
@solarisfire@magicalgrrrl@actuallyautistic honestly I'd love almost the opposite of that. I'm not very comfortable just going to do an activity with strangers. I'd much rather meet people with a common interest in an activity in a social context for such people, befriend them if that goes well, then do the activity with my new friends.
Ofc I'm open to making friends of any kind, but if we lack things in common, we won't have much to talk about 😅
Oh great someone posted a thing about how “ADHD and autism are only disorders in a capitalist society” again.
Speaking as a person with #ADHD I say unto you all that this take needs to die. I can’t speak for #actuallyautistic people but ADHD is difficult in a lot of ways that would still be difficult in, like, a post-scarcity space socialist paradise or whatever!
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
@ttmrichter
Well it's not an actual issue; it's just my ideas of what would be better. If only I think it, why should they do anything? What I'm really trying to do is to see what people think and spark some thoughts.
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
The term Threadiverse has nothing to do with Meta’s Threads platform, I think the term is actually older than Meta’s announcement. The Threadiverse refers to the platforms that organize things into threads similar to Reddit or forums, right now this mainly means Lemmy and Kbin
I find mastodon boring and I just think people who wanna use defederated twitter are different and more common than people who wanna use defederated reddit. Peertube though, now that is a compelling argument.
Dr Craig Lamont looks at how Robert Louis Stevenson & his literary creations have been – & continue to be – remembered & memorialised, in Scotland & around the world
@EU_Commission This is guarded good news, but it is about disability paperwork, which all disabled people have to deal with quite a bit.
What announcements are there about how accessibility will be extended and improved throughout the EU? How are disabled people being included in leadership in the EU?
Starting my thread with this essay about my books & my cats. I created it a few years ago & keep it updated. It's whimsical, it makes me happy, and it's a good intro to my writing. I hope you enjoy it.
Note: All images in the blog post had alt-text last I checked. Book pages on my site should all have alt descriptions as well. Should. It's a work in progress.
Today in things I'm proud of making: this brand-new blurb graphic for my ongoing series, the Rollover Files.
TL;DR pitch: midlife crisis superpowers. Contains swearwords, moms & teens saving the world, idealism, and good people dealing with bad situations as best they can. https://books2read.com/kmherkes
Part of what I’ve been struggling with lately, feelings of disorientation and guilt about being inattentive to the phenomena of my life, presumes that I, as the individual subject, remain central and yet discrete from the world around me.
@nathanlovestrees@writingcommunity for what it’s worth, guilt about this is not helpful. Which also isn’t helpful to say, because emotions just happen, unbidden. But it might be worth exploring why guilt is the emotion that comes up. For me because, I’m where I am, it’s mostly regret that dominates my life, which is likewise not helpful. But I’m trying to sit with it and interrogate it and shift it.
"Endorsing countries include the United States, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Ghana, Hungary, Japan, Republic of Korea, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom. "