I’m of multiple minds on it, but the short of it is, I don’t feel out of the pop culture loop, I know I’m out of it being around here.

On one hand I don’t mind that, as I’m frustrated by pop culture essentially being mass market culture. It’s not typically something that arises from people interacting and creating together from shared passions, it’s produced and pushed by big businesses. Nothing novel about this observation or frustration, but it’s a vibe I resonate with.

On the other I know if ever you want people to shift into a popular culture produced in the alternative manner mentioned, you gotta accept the transitional situation of entertaining the mass market culture alongside what you’re trying to cultivate. It’s too jarring for many to switch over entirely, and frankly there’s not enough contemporary non-commercial culture to keep people’s interest to justify any attempts at a complete switch.

So in a way, yeah, but also I’m more bummed that it’s so difficult to create an alternative non-commercial pop culture.

DAE is short for Does anyone else.

So people don’t care as much when you leave your small indie label and join a major. In fact quite the opposite. Good on you for winning against the system.

That’s integrating with the system, not winning against it. Which may be taken how one will.

Great photo for sure!

Appreciate this post OP, as I’ve wondered similar at times when not wanting to fuss with another machine for self-hosting (as often it’s not the case that I could run the server software on my main system).

Regarding the first question, for me PeerTube has a similar problem as with other fediverse stuff, which besides a lack of greater adoption is a scarcity of sites with a positive, distinct identity/community (last I checked at least) to encourage more people to use it.

Off the top of my head in terms of PeerTube, only TILvids.com comes to mind, which is cool, but remains primarily tech and specifically Linux-related educational videos. I don’t mind that, but it’d be cool to see a broader range of educational content on there.

If there were more people across these sites, I’d definitely appreciate the Ask communities being moderated more toward their intentions, like strictly open-ended questions, and treat all questions as not being stupid for those respective communities.

However with only so many people, too heavy moderation can deter any activity, so it’s kinda tricky. 🤔

I’d say post this sort of thing to any of the chat/discussion communities across instances.

!general@lemmy.world is open for it.

!casualconversation@lemm.ee is open for it too.

!chat@beehaw.org is likely open for it.

There’s plenty more but those are a few to start with. You may not get many responses due to fewer people and fewer among those in the same age range, but you may also be pleasantly surprised. Regardless, that’s an easier route than trying to start up a community from scratch.

Btw instead of inviting people over, you may also try sharing stuff from around here with links you think your friends might enjoy. Once they see there’s stuff of interest, that may be more of a draw than an invite to Yet Another App alone.

I honestly can’t say I know who social media is even for at this point. There is so much content promoting unhealthy ways of thinking just haphazardly strewn about everywhere. I don’t know how anyone can avoid it all. I don’t know if the benefits can outweigh the costs. Even the most harmless content is forgettable and eats up valuable time that could be used for something more meaningful.

Sometimes I think about how we never see any posts from the happiest people alive. They don’t need social media validation, their positivity wouldn’t generate clicks, and the negativity of social media platforms probably scared them off long ago. As a result of their absence, negativity and unhealthy thought patterns have proliferated unchallenged.

I think you’ve found the larger part of the Internet you don’t relate to anymore with this. Not necessarily the Internet as a whole, but the subset of social media, and the subset within that of the many expressing how bummed they are with things (to put it lightly).

When you shift or fine-tune your focus to use the Internet as it was originally built for (sharing info, collaborative research/creative work), you’ll find it more useful and maybe more pleasant. This is more or less what I’ve tried to do more and more after fumbling about with social media stuff for awhile and experiencing my own growing disinterest in the bummer parts of it.

Speaking of books btw, if you’re into public domain work and ebooks, give Standard Ebooks a look! Similar to Project Gutenberg (also great) with more attention to nicer formatting.

Streaming isn’t the middle ground in my opinion, rather it’s unrestricted downloadable files that you can then handle however. Streaming provides some convenience but no consistent access (see various shows being delisted or shuffled between services).

Companies would love if everyone forgot having home video, in the sense of owning copies of movies and shows they always have access to and ability to watch whenever.

The real reminder…Now to find desktop software that gives the option to save a copy when bookmarking stuff.

Btw, if you’re still into animated shows, there’s a few communities around for them.

General animation:

!animation@lemm.ee

!adult_animation@lemmy.world

!animationafter30@lemmy.world

Japanese animation:

!anime@ani.social

Give’em some activity if you’re wanting to share and talk about some animated stuff you’ve been checking out!

For a light, simplistic open source editor that’s easy to get into, Goxel has been my go-to. I’d liken it to a voxel sketchpad with how easy it is to load up and simply mess about with.

For a more robust open source editor that’s kinda rough around the edges, there’s VengiVoxEdit, which I’ve honestly only scratched the surface of personally.

For a similarly robust editor that’s less rough around the edges, the standard recommendation is MagicaVoxel. It’s a solid choice, but I’m not sure if the developer is continuing work on it or not, which makes a difference here as it’s not open source. It still works fine right now though, so if you’re on Windows/Mac, it’s a good option for a smooth, feature rich editor.

I should finally get into that. I keep putting it off for silly reasons that will never be addressed by putting it off. Can’t get better at making models if I never make any, much less texturing a model if I never texture anything.

Also one of my favorite finds in a related area were voxel editors. Highly encourage anyone into voxel art from games like VoxeLibre or Minecraft to look into them. All the fun of building with blocks with a lot more flexibility.

Yeah, it’s not without faults, so ProtonMail and similar may be a good compromise, or encrypting and sending longer documents. Ideally one day email will be rebuilt from the ground up with encryption.

Also to address your later comments, E2EE messengers are great, but short form writing is simply a different use case from long form.

Exactly. The need/desire to write longer form like this may not come up as often with other more immediate means to communicate, but when it does, email’s there to serve its purpose.

Alongside others mentioned (tags/flairs, multi-communities, keyword filtering, etc.) another feature I’d like to see added/improved is notification settings.

Something like…

In account settings:

• Enable/disable all notifications.
• Enable/disable post reply notifications.
• Enable/disable comment reply notifications.

For others’ posts/comments and per posts/comments:

• Enable/disable post reply notifications.
• Enable/disable comment reply notifications.

With those settings you could more easily tune out all notifications or only opt into those you’d like to see, and opt out of those you’re done with (say your post/comment got popular and you’ve had your fill from the replies).

Unrelated to notification settings, it would also be nice to be able to block communities from the front page via the … More menu in the default web UI.

Ah, the vim part was me trying a little too much to express a short e sound lazily.

It will still raise eyebrows because that’s not how it’s said.

At least not yet, or by enough to recognize that it is (by some, somewhere!). There’s bound to be an accent somewhere that pronounces it like this to where the “normal” way sounds strange 😂

Without writing it out like this: (nō-vĕm′bər) or this (nəʊˈvɛmbə) I wasn’t sure how to write it and express the varying sounds of the e’s in it. Maybe “no-vim-ber” would have been better?