Don’t let ANYBODY ever call you a pleb, I know and you know that in your heart you are a pedon.

Raises mud clump in solidarity

How dare you call me a pedon, I am a PEON.

People these days have no respect.

Their company motto used to be “Evil is subjective unless it is done to us at which point it is wrong” but that was considered a little tooooo on the nose so they took it down.

A volon is the up-quark subatomic violin particle for anyone who is unfamiliar.

That violin is too damn big

Damn that must be a pain to drag around all that fucking loot

Bluesky has a serious marketing budget and a virtual “get out of having to back up unrealistic promises” pass for tech in interviews (everyone just accepts they are going to decentralize when it makes zero sense from a business perspective).

Well the openstreetmap community aren’t employed by a bunch of hacks perching on a tower of cardboard held together by a failing scheme of duck tape that nobody left after all the layoffs and enshittification knows how to repair, so that makes sense : )

Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn’t?

On this topic I just want to point out the microblog format with twitter even BEFORE musk bought it had gotten very cold, harsh and toxic.

As a result the most positive thing you can say about people’s feelings about microblogging is that they are bored of it (in terms of it having inspiring potential) even if they use it daily themselves and like it.

I don’t think that is fair to mastodon or microblogging, it is just how the ships happened to sink as they crashed into the reef.

I say this all to emphasize that it is ok for mastodon not to get hit by massive hypecycles. Mastodon is useful and awesome, if people see it is as boring I say let that be a compliment because that means people are beginning to slowly trust the medium again.

Twitter/musk made people REALLY sad about microblogging and it is going to take time for people to get excited about it again like they do for the 'grams and the 'toks.

Hi James Joyce here, what did you all say you were up to?

I think tutanota (now tuta) is pretty decent.

https://tuta.com/

Someone feel free to correct if I missed something bad about them.

The gulf of mexico vs gulf of america thread on the Open Street Map forum is interesting and worth a read.

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/gulf-of-america-gulf-of-mexico/124571

I also get the feeling the VR market started out a lot like the mobile gaming market in that mba business majors who have zero ability or to desire to make genuinely artistic and compelling experiences choked out any other kind of person being in leadership positions in the industry.

Similar to mobile gaming the rush of business majors who “think” they know how to transform vr gaming when they don’t know the first thing about game development and have never bothered to pursue a creative venture in their life that wasn’t just a thinly veiled scheme to scam other people out of their money has severly stunted the growth of the vr industry indefinitely as it did the mobile gaming market.

The very structure of the largest companies in VR (besides perhaps valve) precludes the possibility of any actual artists and developers with a vision getting into positions of power in these companies and even if they do, they are never actually listened to or you wouldn’t get embarassingly empty visions of VR like “the metaverse”.

VR, like mobile gaming cannot be understood as an outgrowth of the traditional gaming world, rather VR in particular must be understood as a market constructed by non-experts who didn’t give a shit about learning gaming development or how to create compelling fantasy worlds because the objective was always to be a digital landlord speculating and monetizing on an ownership of large swathes of digital communities that artists showed up and made into actual spaces people desired to be (artists are an unpaid detail though, that kind of fluff is easy, an AI could do it and besides it is fun for them!).

Unfortunately for VR fans I don’t think the industry will take any significant strides until those kinds of people are kicked out of the boadrooms of these companies and I don’t see that happening anytime soon given how long mobile gaming has been a squandered wasteland of casinos that nothing with any vitality or soul can grow in.