CRAB BATTLE!

On the web, click on your username in the upper right and then click on settings. Under Avatar you can browse your local file system for a suitable file.

The nice thing about being blind is that I don’t see any of that and can just pretend it isn’t happening. The smells are unavoidable though.

Wile walking to the bus my dog picked up a dead bird off the ground and was just carrying it like the good little 'triever she was until I noticed and removed it.

No that’s pragnent

pregananant

Unfortunately the ticket inspector thought that I would magically start understanding Spanish if he increased his speaking volume.

Ah so it’s not just an American thing.

hoo boy have I got a story for you!

It’s my first day heading to work after moving to a new apartment. I get on the bus around 7 AM. My guide dog (Guide Dog 1 from a previous post) is under my seat with her head poking out a bit into the aisle.

A few stops down route and this drunk lady gets on and sits right next to me. I’m a little annoyed but it’s public transit and a lack of personal space is par for the course.

“Oh, a doggy,” she slurs in Spanish, attempting to pet my dog’s head. Unfortunately she misses and starts petting my leg instead. I jump up and relocate to another seat, but not before telling the woman “Please don’t touch my dog, and don’t touch me either.” The rest of the ride she’s groping the air in the general direction of my dog.

Some other anecdotes in no particular order:

• Someone in the back of the bus screaming “It’s my birthday WOOOOOOOO!”
• A lady ranting at the driver to stop for a good 20 minutes because she has to pee
• A smelly bum falling asleep on my shoulder

I have to mention a time where I was probably the strange one: after the lockdowns ended but while masking was still common, I would wear a full respirator with face shield, basically a gas mask, while on the bus. My rationale is that a normal paper or cloth mask stops the wearers germs from getting out but doesn’t do so well at stopping them from getting in. I can’t see who is or isn’t wearing a mask, so I’m going to wear something that WILL protect me against the non maskers.

EDIT:

Oh and the time my bus got cut off by another bus and the driver got out and started yelling at the other driver. I was already within walking distance of my destination, so I just noped off the bus before it could escalate.

EDIT 2:

same bus as the drunk dog petter, this guy would get on at the stop after mine. I called him Mr. Bucket because he always carried this large white plastic bucket that smelled absolutely foul.

EDIT 3:

I get on a bus (different city) while wearing a lanyard with a name badge on it. I forget to slip the lanyard under my shirt, and this lady leans in and grabs the lanyard to examine the card.

Her: “You’re from [name of place on the lanyard]?”

Me, unable to lie at this point: “…yes”.

Don’t know why “clanker” didn’t occur to me when writing the OP

Abominable Intelligence

You’re not the first person to point that out. It reminds me of the Burger King logo personally. I did a little bit of research into color theory when designing it. I wanted blue and gold to be part of the color scheme and the red in the arch came up as a complementary color vs the other two.

I don’t know anything about it other than the memeable illustrations, and even that only incidentally.

You’re right I hadn’t thought of that.

Like I say in the OP, Lemmy and other Redditlikes have a default post sorting algorithm that prioritizes new posts over old but still active posts. This has a huge impact on the culture of the site. Topics are more ephemeral. Once they drop off the first page nobody will ever see them again.

On a forum, if a person wants to make frequent updates over a long period of time on a single topic, they can make a single megathread that stays visible as long as new replies keep coming. On Lemmy et al. the topic quickly drops off the radar no matter how many people reply, meaning if the OP wants to make frequent updates on a similar topic they have to keep making new posts if they expect people to reply.

Let’s say I’m on a car enthusiast forum, for example (IDK anything about cars). And let’s say I’m restoring an old car and want to share my progress over the course of months. I can make a single topic about my project and post replies to it with pics and updates about what’s going on. As long as I keep updating or as long as people keep commenting on what’s already there the topic remains relevant and more importantly visible, and could remain so for years or even decades.

Now let’s imagine the same project on a Redditlike site like Lemmy. Yes I can do the same thing as above, make a single post and keep replying to it, and people can chime in with comments. But because the default sorting algorithm causes older posts, no matter how active, to drop off over time, I’ll be replying to the void since nobody will see the post. In order to maintain the same level of visibility and interaction, I have to make new posts for each update. It’s less likely that my project will become an enduring part of the community’s history because it will either get swept away by new content if I use a single topic, or be scattered across several disparate posts.

Other differentiating factors that people have brought up are signatures and avatars. Avatars are really small on these sites and there are no sigs at all. These were modes of self-differentiation on forums, allowing individual users to be more recognizable and allowing connections between users to develop. On Redditlike sites you’re just a username and maybe a little icon, making it harder to see anything but disembodied ideas floating in the ether.

Yes I can make Lemmy behave like a forum by sorting posts by latest comment and using the “chat” display option for comments, but nobody else does that so posts will get swept away by new ones for them even if they aren’t for me, meaning the culture never grows around this system.

When I hear “HTPC” I kinda assume you don’t want a full fat desktop, at least you don’t want it right at boot, but a TV-specific interface, something that’s easy to use at 60 inches and 10 feet away.

I really want the full story

hmmm I hadn’t thought of avatars and sigs being part of it but you have a point. Did Reddit even have Avatars before they started pushing their profile pic customizer thing? Even then they’re pretty small, likewise on Lemmy, so there’s not much room for personality, and as can be seen here a lot of people just don’t bother.

The problem though is if others are using a different UI the conversation may flow differently

Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. You CAN recreate the message board experience on Lemmy pretty faithfully by sorting posts by latest comment (like the bumping system of forums) and setting comments to “chat” which flattens the comment tree, and sorting oldest to newest, but nobody does that so the community doesn’t develop around it.

I hadn’t thought of SEO as a contributing factor to the decline of the search experience, but it absolutely makes sense. To some degree I think SEO is actually GEO (Google’s Engine Optimization) but if some other platform, even a paid one that isn’t incentivized to weigh sponsored content higher, became dominant SEO would just pivot to minmaxing for that platform instead.

Incidentally, there’s a search engine called wiby.org that only indexes sites that don’t use Javascript, which in practice makes it a great web 1.0 search engine.

Yes that was my understanding of its original purpose, as a real-time communication service for gaming. It has since been put to broader use but isn’t suited to this broader purpose.