Yep. Much as I hate to say it, GBoard just feels good in a way that none of the other major swipe keyboards have for me.

A dizzying number of notable people and people in my personal life have hopped onto Threads, day 1. The “fuck Elon / Twitter” sentiment and generally good vibes to this point mirror the experience I had here when I hopped onto Beehaw and we also had similar optimism and a “fuck u/spez” sentiment. But the major difference I see is this — for the sake of sticking it to Elon these folks are getting themselves even further entangled in Zuck’s world, and we’ve already seen the monsters that emerge from that muck.

Any social network that builds up a massive, general userbase inevitably enshittifies as the marketers / advertisers / influencers and otherwise self-promoters get their content boosted. With its extremely close ties to Instagram, those sorts of users will be ramped up on Threads in no time, and this period of positivity with fade in turn as that content starts getting vomited out and funneled to everyone.

The independent Fediverse is not without its faults, but I’m much more comfortable building community within this coalition of a space than in any of Meta’s creations.

I’ve had good experiences with Castbox.

Oh man, ain’t that the truth. I really gotta make a point to get a backup of all my photos from Google Photos onto a hard drive one of these days. Problem is, Google Takeout batches only last about a week or so and I have a very hefty amount of data to get out. The alternative is to download it month by month, year by year, which I’m not looking forward to doing at all.

Yes and no. Yes, there is no Fediverse-wide admin to moderate content since everything is decentralized, but instances and their subcommunities do, and each one is free to implement their own rules. We’re on Beehaw, which is pretty strongly committed to fostering a community with a positive culture and tone, and while there is a good amount of leeway for free discussion (from what I’ve seen in just 2 weeks here), I imagine getting too vocal about wishing that kind of thing might get attention from the Beehaw mods at some point.

Not that I don’t fully understand your emotions.

Well, fancy meeting you out here too!

I’ll be interested to see what my decidedly vegetarian SO thinks about this (I’m mainly vegetarian but am more omnivorous). We opt for Impossible where available, and it’ll be interesting to see if either of us gravitate to it.

I know it’s the name of the little alien, and it’s cute and all, but I’ll never be able to read that name and not think of bone-crushing Amazonian snoo-snoo from Futurama.

It’s hardly been 24 hours, but this is the most engaged I’ve felt in an online space in years. I’ve gone on a k.bin/Lemmy/Mastodon tear over the past day, exploring instances and looking for the one that I vibe with the most. So far I’ve been very happy with Beehaw as my home base, and love that I still have access to the communities on the other instances as well. Sure, it takes a slight bit of effort to find communities and make sure that I’m subscribed to them on this account, but I’ve actually found some satisfaction in the process.

Sure, there’s a low volume of content compared to the old place. But if I wanted a constant barrage of content, I could just go back to RSS readers and have my fill. It’s the discussion and sense of connection that has made it worth investing my time here.

Same but with American Truck Simulator!