Just passing through.

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • As much as I think AI will make everything worse, I think it’s just a symptom of the real problem in the industry.

    I think it boils down to two things:

    1. Major studios are pure capitalists with no artistic interest, with newcomers like Apple and Amazon not even having a culture for authenticity in any part of their operation
    2. Marvel made too much money

    So what they’ve learned is that there’s no point in making movies - if they want to make money they need to make a franchise. So they keep investing in anything they can possibly milk into a soulless franchise that sucks in consumers and leaves them hooked.

    There’s no room for artistic authenticity in this process. It will produce worthless garbage by design. It’s consumerism turned into cinematography.

    Thank god some are rebelling against it.



  • I find microblogging is a really hard format to work with. Being short is super important - the default for Mastodon is 500 characters, on Bluesky it’s 300. On Twitter it might be even less, who cares.

    So you need to try to get your message across super efficiently. Even if you can write longer in mbin, people might not have the attention span to read long texts. So watch the character counter.

    Some other things:

    Getting attention

    On Mastodon there are two ways of getting attention to your post. The first is by getting followers; the second is by getting boosts. Until you have your own following, the best you can hope for is that people reading your post thinks it’s worth promoting and then boost it. Hashtags can also be moderately effective - it’s certainly good for discovering content - but you’re probably not going to reach very far by shooting things into the void with an hashtag attached if you have no followers.

    What helps is to interact with other users. Follow them, boost interesting content you see from them, favourite/upvote their content as a “compliments to the chef”, and leave a comment when you have anything to say. Doing this, they might follow you back, which will dramatically increase your reach on the fediverse.

    Hashtags

    There are two general ways of using hashtags. First, you can add it to some word in your post that nicely summarizes what you’re talking about. This is not too distracting, and common practice in most parts of the #fediverse. We don’t expect it in forum-style content of course, so for some users it’ll look a bit out of place.

    The second way of doing it is by listing hashtags at the bottom of your post. Mastodon has a way of hiding these a little, so that they don’t get in the way.

    As for which hashtags to use, you can of course get creative. But some hashtags are more common than others. When drafting in Mastodon the interface tells you how many people visible from your instance are using the hashtag, which is useful. We sadly lack that on Mbin. In general, maybe include some general and some more specific ones, but don’t over-do it.

    Mentions / @s

    Mentions play a very specific role in the Fediverse. Inherently they’re of course simple enough - @user@example.com - but they play a fundamental role in how different Mastodon instances are stitched together.

    Of course, they can be used to notify someone - if I tag you (@unknown1234_5@kbin.earth), you’ll probably be notified that I did so. But more importantly, it serves the same purpose as an address on an envelope. If you respond to someone on a different instance without @ing them, your post might never reach them, as your post wasn’t told it needed to travel to their instance. This is a bit weird and not very intuitive, but that’s the reason why Mastodon users always tag each other like crazy in the comments.

    @s are also useful to point people towards a specific account, or to include someone in a conversation that might not have been aware of it.

    Not sure if that’s helpful, but at least it’s something!

    A couple of fun things as a bonus:

    • If you follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy, your microblog posts will all be sent to Bluesky as well. I have been testing this a little, and it works: if you search for Aasatru on Bluesky, you’ll find my Mbin account. I don’t really microblog much from here though.
    • If you get followers on Mastodon, everything you boost will pop up in their feed. So if you see a comment you find to be particularly fun or insightful, and that ideally also works well as a free-standing text, you can boost it to give it attention on Mastodon and similar sites. Sometimes random comments can “escape” this way and get much more attention than the post they are responding to.


  • As far as I know there’s no option to boost posts from Lemmy, it’s an exclusive little function for Mbin and the microblogs.

    I quite like it, as it makes it easier for good comments to “escape” from here and into the microblogging platforms. Assuming of course you are followed by users over there. But it is not a function on Lemmy.

    So I’m not sure what OP refers to, or how posts appear as boosted in the dadjokes community. But it is indeed possible for Mbin or Mastodon users (among others) to boost any content seen on there.








  • Of all the nerdy things I’m excited about, the prospekt of making bug reports to FOSS git projects through my Mbin or Mastodon accounts is certainly on the list. I have so many accounts I made just for a single bug report. This will be great if/when it takes off.



  • This comment was brought to my attention as it was reported for being too dumb to exist.

    As I’m not a moderator of this community, I’ll leave that judgment to others.

    However, I will point out that the Online Safety Act was passed in 2023, towards the end of well over a decade of British politics being dominated by the Tories. Labour only won the election in 2024.

    So, despite popular belief, the liberals are not the ones taking your rights away. Unless you consider Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, and Sunak to be liberals, of course. Which you might, as nobody using the word “liberal” seems to have even the faintest idea what it means any more.

    The Online Safety Act is not about regulating TikTok, it’s about surveillance underneath a thin veil of protecting children. And it is very much a Tory piece of work.




  • Yeah, the only reason I’m on the fence is honestly the accumulation of highly specific cookware - I move around a bit and get into food, so I am already looking for two different types of waffle irons as well as a crepe pan.

    Then again, whenever I end up leaving Denmark it will be hard to find the frozen ones, and maybe impossible to find a pan. So I guess I should go for it - I can justify it by considering it a souvernur rather than a kitchen utensil. ;)