@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

OpenStars

@[email protected]

Compassion ~ Thought

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

Those teens had sex.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

yes

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

inb4 this gets removed by rule #5

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

N-n-no!

...

... ^(yes,^ ^shut^ ^up)^

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

If 30 is old then I am... nevermind! 😬

OpenStars , (edited )
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

Or Linux skinned to look like it? (As if that is somehow much better? 😜)

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

People need to: (1) have capacity, like a single mother with 3 kids and commuting to work 3 jobs isn't going to switch even if it took less than a day, and (2) they need to see the value of doing so first. Lowering the entry barrier will help IMMENSELY, and then after that people are willing to put up with some slight amounts of effort so long as they know in advance it will be worthwhile.

Unfortunately a non-technical mainstream normie isn't going to know how to check their hardware first, and barely knows what software they themselves use (including the variety of plug-ins) on a daily basis, or how to know which ones they will have to give up using, and seek alternatives for.

If such alternatives exist. Like, on a mobile device (including laptops, or an Android phone/tablet), nobody has ever managed to tell me an actually usable web browser that doesn't burn up my battery in the background all day long like Firefox does - Firefox is an absolutely horrid shit app, which just so happens to be better than Chrome... barely.

And what program/app is more crucial in this modern era than a web browser? So when people see the state that the CEO of Firefox has put that FOSS program into, and the lack of anyone else (e.g. LibreWolf) making a better app - which again must be usable by non-technical mainstream normie users - then they nope right out and never bother to reconsider.

Note that the market share of people using desktops vs. a laptop or mobile where battery concerns are absolutely critical is dropping, see e.g. this article.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

WRONG! It is turtles actually. It's elephants alternating with turtles (and then every tenth level is capybaras) all the way down.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

Well, "life as we know it". But for all we know energy rather than matter-based beings could have existed more readily back then, and perhaps struggle to exist now under lower density conditions. Thereby making that earlier era more habitable for their type of life, even as our current era is more habitable for our own type.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

Also telling me this while still in my dreams as I sleep? (How do I know, you may ask? It was the five moons in the sky that gave it away)

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

Hrm... sus - I was talking with someone who by no means could ever possibly be a Velociraptor, but I noticed that the same cannot be said of you? 🦖

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

Perhaps you could be... in your dreams?! 😂😴

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

Okay so this one time, in band camp...

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

img

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

Is that you, little red riding hood? 🐺👵

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

This makes perfect sense.

"The BEST is YET to COME", and all that.

I can't wait to see what... excitement the rest of 2026 will bring.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

img

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

AI is getting better all the time. Eventually it will surpass human intelligence, but that seems decades away. Some challenges that remain are:

  1. Untrustworthy proponents, who even if they were telling the truth NOW, that fact would be inconsistent with their past lies.
  2. Energy utilization costs
  3. Unethical training practices, note how like each of the above this is independent of its actual capabilities
  4. While we are at it, how many "AI" answers in the past have been curated with manual effort, or even are due more (sometimes exclusively?) to human answers placed into the area where the supposedly, and falsely reported, answers from "AI" were supposed to have been. I concede this may be a shrinking pool of answers (yet for all we know it could even be a growing one? as in waves of propagation where answers that were previously impossible via AI, become possible, but then there are even more answers beyond that that remain impossible, until AI again catches up to those, and the wave moves forward).
  5. Reliability - as in how many answers are worth paying attention to vs. must be discarded (remember those people who trusted the AI answer and thereby had to be evacuated via boat due to the rising tides making a crossing impossible?), and more importantly there a lack of distinction between which answers are which. Even Sam Altman says this, so you don't have to take my word for anything here.
  6. The culture of constant blaming of people for believing the false narratives spread by AI proponents - like you should have just used a better prompt, bro! This happened with Windows too, for decades, as in "you should have just spent 50 hours turning off this list of 100 things that are super annoying and replaced core components of the OS, and then do a large subset of that again and again after every update process... bro!" At some point though, when can we say that "Windoze sux"? Or Reddit? Yes Reddit has technical superiority to Lemmy in many ways, plus there is tons of content there that while it may be elsewhere too (Facebook, Instagram, X) is not on the Fediverse, and in some cases is nowhere else. Yet... we all are here? (And some of us also there too.)
  7. The profit incentive makes people distrust anything coming from the source that you linked to. Facebook, Reddit, X, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. all enshittified, and just because chatgpt has not enshittified YET, does not mean that it will not in the future. I would not have said this as strongly here if you had linked to an ethically-sourced, non-profit or even FOSS source (something running DeepSeek?).

It is true that "AI is getting better", and it is also true that "A'I' sucks", both. And many of us do not spend 10 hours a week keeping up with which of the large (but shrinking?) variety of things A"I" cannot be trusted with vs. where it might be halfway useful (if it does not lead to your early untimely demise, e.g. in interpreting medical advice). Like I would use it to retrieve a link for me to read (& VERIFY!!!!!!!) information, but I would NOT trust it to interpret an image for me. It happened to work successfully here, but this is a mere party trick? Beware, any company that is looking to fire all of its staff and rely instead purely on AI - it is not ready for anything close to what the promises claim that it is ready for.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

It might at that. Though there will also be a lag time where even after it comes, people have become so inured by the past lies that they are slow to adapt. And hallucinations still exist, especially in the cheaper models where significantly fewer than 10^8 (or was that 2^8?) compute cycles are expended to answer the equivalent of a random Google search query.

It would also help if humans were precise. General "AI" in the sense of movies (such as the one I showed a picture to, in the first panel) do not exist. But LLMs do.

it's not actually like email

source

Brociopathic Mendencies (@jackdaw_ruiz@normal.style) says "i am no longer saying the fediverse is like email. from now on the fediverse is a lot that turkish neighborhood of uncompleted mini-castles.   it was supposed to be one beautiful-but-unrealistic thing, and instead it's a different broken-and-hilarious thing, and if anyone lives there you have to assume they were driven into the hills for being unable to exist in polite society.". The post is illustrated by a photo of that neighbourhood
ALT
OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

Then don't squint your eyes: problem solved 😂🤪

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

I prefer the analogy of a fleet of ships - free-traders and pirates alike. Some captains refuse to pass along messages to other captains, and that's alright, because consent should matter, after all, and someone's "right to free speech" does (or rather should) not trump my right to not have to listen to their crap, nor my right if I were a captain to not have to platform it.

So you pick a captain that shares your values, or perhaps you become one of your own.

PieFed has made huge strides in cross-community visibility (multi-communities and combining comments across cross-posts), and in explaining what each instance is all about (see https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser), and in migration of whole entire communities between instances.

The Fediverse is not like email. It's like self-hosting your own email server. 🤔😝 But it's getting better. And people will put up with complexity if they see the value behind doing so - it's just that with so little content, and what content there is being so toxic, especially to newcomers, that it's not worth much of a hassle for them to keep trying whenever they hit a hurdle. Lowering the barriers will help enormously with that, as will increasing the level of enrichment to power through.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

Such a hip cat, daddio.

img

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

They are for the next three people in line after William Tell, of course!

They take their job of suiciding participants very seriously.

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

  • Loading...
  • OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    Do people actually take water to bed? Like... wouldn't that make you have to pee?

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    Ah, not having to get all the way up would make a world of difference, yes!

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    For just a moment I thought this was in reference to grandma...

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    🤔😁😉😝

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    Technically it would have been true, it's just that A"I" does not deliver on that promise.

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    ... when you were younger?

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    Sus. You us young'uns would have used
    how_do_you_do_fellow_teenager.avi

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    img

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    Next up: vampires.

    Very long-living beings that regenerate (have access to healthcare?) and don't need to work, but do need to extract your lifeblood to feed their lifestyle choice. Typically has much exaggerated appetites compared to a normal human being.

    Hrm... 🤔🧛‍♂️

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    Not 100%, though not 0% either. On the spectrum, it does appear to have been closer to democracy in the past than the present.

    I note that any action taken via force may not work out well in today's era of surveillance technology, plus also it would still need the unskippable step of achieving consensus among the people, which is nowhere close to happening.

    Watching the fights on the Threadiverse is instructive: we cannot even achieve consensus here, so I think trying to go beyond that to include mainstream normies is hopeless. You can fight against the leaders in a society, but how do you fight both them and the will of the people at the same time? You cannot.

    It's just my opinion, but I think it's much more likely to achieve any kind of change at all to work within the existing systems.

    With great power...ignorance is bliss?

    EDIT: I see some comments saying the Mastodon post didn't add anything to it. I agree! ...

    An image on the left depicts: "A Chinese woman discovers she's been using a hand grenade as a hammer for last 20 years." An image on the right is an awkardly shifty-eyed monkey puppet with the caption "C++ engineers."
    ALT
    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    Good point and agreed! I’m a little new to posting so I thought it was polite to include the source where I found it.

    It absolutely is, and welcome! 😁

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    For good reason. https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core, which https://nlnet.nl/project/Kbin/ points to as official, has not been updated in quite some time, and while https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list used to show one last straggler, it now is entirely empty with zero instances that are advertising themselves as running that software. It is well and truly dead.

    Mbin carries onwards, but with only <1k active users world-wide one wonders for how much longer.

    PieFed's flagship instance alone has >2k active users, and its second-largest instance another thousand. PieFed.social is now the 2nd largest instance reported on that Fediverse Explorer site.

    Of course, nothing else comes anywhere even remotely close to the size of Lemmy.World, which is >5x larger and has 40% of all Lemmy active users (totally independently of the same admins' PieFed version, which is the #3 PieFed instance).

    So when one falls (Kbin), two more rises to take its place (Mbin & PieFed, plus also nodeBB, flarum perhaps one day, and obviously Mastodon, Friendica, and others across the Fediverse as well:-) - this bodes well for the strength of the Threadiverse to carry on!!?:-P

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    We are stuck with "Threadiverse" as the least worst alternative for a word that means the subset of the Fediverse that is not microblogging and instead of that user-centric sharing offers topic-based, threaded, forum-style conversations.

    Thankfully, it predates that horrid experiment in yet another failure, and also most people choose it (over e.g. "Forumverse"), including several high-profile ones such as the creators of Mbin and nodeBB and our beloved Ada that have used it for many years and now do not want to switch.

    But mainly it seems for lack of anything better to call it? "The Verse" has a nice ring to it, but lacks specificity. "Lemmy + PieFed + Mbin + nodeBB + maybe flarum or is Sublinks now dead also like Kbin, but not Mastodon, Pixelfed, Friendica, Loops, etc." is way too long and keeps changing, as too does the method of access, through Voyager, Thunder, Summit, Blorp, Interstellar, etc. as all those work with at least two instance software types.

    The Verse

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    True... but there is also nodeBB, flarum, there used to be Kbin, at one point there was going to be Sublinks (flarum is similar, except it definitely will exist, but maybe not be federated so quickly), and so on. There is likewise Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, and so many other implementations of the ActivityPub Protocol - and while "Fediverse" conjures up connotations of Mastodon as its flagship hence microblogging, that experience does not seem to describe our shit- and meme- posting spaces here.

    And that doesn't begin to get into the variety of methods of access, like will a Voyager user care if they are connecting to an underlying Lemmy or PieFed (or perhaps in the future Mbin or nodeBB or something else)? Or Thunder, Blorp, Interstellar, Summit, etc.?

    So it might be awhile before we can reenter the cycle again, especially if new members keep joining even as we try! :-D

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    Correct: "we" can do whatever "we" like. In the poll I mentioned, many people indicated a reluctance to use "Threadiverse", but people indicated an even much STRONGER preference to use it. I guess I've grown accustomed to it, and never really cared much to begin with, so long as we picked something to call the non-microblogging portion of the Fediverse (though I liked Forumverse, or something without -Verse, or whatever we want).

    Make another poll, or perhaps a meme in this community, or use whatever format you want, and offer up your own suggestions? I look forward to see what you come up with!? :-D

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    img

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    People have offered so many suggestions.

    In the PieFed poll, the breakdown was:

    • 36% Threadiverse
    • 27% (The) Verse
    • 18% Forumverse
    • 9% Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed
    • 9% Lemmyverse

    But there was only 11 votes total (this was prior to the absolute explosion of PieFed users). Rimu also suggested Foriverse or The Federation or The Federated Platforms that actually Federate Properly or FPFP for short. And Snoopy liked Topicverse.

    In the Lemmy version of the poll, in descending order with number of upvotes the suggestions were:

    • Threadiverse (34); including extremely strong support from creators of Mbin, NodeBB, and elsewhere I've seen Ada; does not include additional upvotes to other comments also saying to use Threadiverse, e.g. another one below that with 18, or another with 12
    • Forumverse (29); also other support in comments below that e.g. one with 13
    • the negative answer that anything containing "-verse" is automatically bad (25)
    • "A quorum of forums." (14)
    • "The linked linkers, because we're link aggregators that link together." (8)
    • The Verse (or Le Verse, 8)
    • Lemmyverse (or Threadiverse, 8)
    • Topicverse (7); plus others with smaller vote counts e.g. one with 3
    • (6)
    • cross-faggregatorverse (6)
    • apparently Fediverse in 2008 was simply called , prior to ActivityPub (5); seconding the hatred towards anything with "-verse"
    • aggriverse (though was this supposed to be "aggreverse"? anyway, 5)
    • yes, even back in that poll irelephant suggested "boardnet"! (5 upvotes) also "forumnet"
    • Lembipie (5)
    • Lemmyville (4)
    • gnu-verse (4)
    • bulletinfedi (4)
    • "Fedivotes" or "Votiverse" (4)
    • The Linux hangout (4)
    • open social web (2)
    • Lempiebin (3)
    • Mycelium (2)
    • Censorverse (hehe, 3-6=-3)

    So Threadiverse won by an absolute landslide, with AT LEAST +17% more votes than the next runner-up, Forumverse.

    Personally I like irelephant's suggestion of "forumnet" better than boardnet. But the main obstacle is the hard-liners who do not want to budge from Threadiverse. Perhaps they might if something were clearly better and started to catch on?

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    (checks notes, statistically analyzing frequency patterns, outsourcing to consulting firm) Apparently not!

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    img

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    Move over, I'm coming with and I'm not asking!

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    Sometimes both:-P

    But one is always shit.

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    the Left always eats its own

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    We are King Kong to them - one proper smack sends them flying straight outta whatever room there were in and into the next.

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    img

    OpenStars ,
    @OpenStars@piefed.social avatar

    No way!

    Unless... no, never mind.

    But then again... no, forget it.

    Although... please ignore me.

    Except, it's just that...