2023 Reddit Refugee
On Decentralization:
“We no longer have choice. We no longer have voice. And what is left when you have no choice and no voice? Exit.” - Andreas Antonopoulos
The Stupendous Spider-Man #131:
“How Nefarious! It’s the National!”
Cover Art Description:
Man leaning out of a car window while pointing a gun at Spider-Man in the distance. The man’s license plate says “PRIVATE”, and there are multiple bumper stickers with the words “TRAVELLER” and “NON-COMMERCIAL VEHICLE”.
The National yells fiercely at Spider-Man, “I never entered into a contract with you, Web Head!”
Price sticker had me amused - I never thought of that!
Another suggestion is to buy a card in a different language. Or if it says Mother’s Day where you don’t even bother replacing “Mother” with “Father”, but that might be a bit too intentionally mean so I would only send this depending on what kind of relationship and trauma that OP has.
Happy cake day @ruud@lemmy.world ! Appreciate you hosting all us Reddit Refugees when the Reddit Third-Party API Exodus happened one year ago! And big shout out to you and the other volunteer mods and admins, across multiple instances, that put in their free time to stabilize Lemmy World during the massive uptick in user registration, handling the codebase, the upgrade challenges, the creepy CSAM bad actors last year, and saw us through all the intermittent downtimes we had periodically. Lemmy World has been super stable and reliable since then.
Reminder to all reading this: if you can, chip in and help with server costs for this valuable service. Decentralization FTW
In true 90s fashion, “Talk to the hand!”
Adding some inspiration from well-developed 90s sites via the Wayback Machine.
These will take a while to load and will appear broken. The Wayback Machine is a free service hosted on the Internet Archive and bandwidth isn’t cheap!
This list of sites is, of course, from the frame of view of a kid growing up in the United States in the 1990s. I visited a lot of other sites but I can’t remember them - I only remember the ones I visited in the early 2000s that didn’t exist in the 90s.
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I forgot to add - I believe Kirby was popular as ASCII art in the 90s.
Get this Kirby dance on that web site somewhere ASAP:
<(^_^<)
<(^_^)>
(>^_^)>
Nice start, this is very nostalgic! If you ever had an old Geocities, Tripod, or even MySpace back in the day, check out the Way Back Machine and look for that old URL for some inspiration.
I recommend the following suggestions to build upon this better:
General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]
Table './that90ssite/phpbb_sessions' is marked as crashed and should be repaired [145]
An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.
Ubisoft and EA: Mmmm fresh meat.
I haven’t read the first run of the Amazing Spider Man comics (1960s) in over a decade, but I remember that Peter gained the knowledge to create webbing from the spider bite, and then applied science to create web shooters and cartridges. There’s so many comics out there I haven’t read any other Spidey comic, and probably got halfway through Amazing Spider-Man v1.
The first 3-D gaming consoles. What an era. I had the N64 in the late 90s and was lucky enough to get a used PS1 in the early 2000s.
Mario 64 was the best for me. That opening title screen where you could stretch Mario’s face was hysterical. And then the opening cinematic was so breathtaking, just having that 3-D camera navigate around, with a musical crescendo ending with Mario Yahooing out of the warp pipe. I’ve never been so blown away seeing 3-D gaming. Then came Star Fox, and Ocarina of Time - Magical experiences that I’m getting goosebumps just reminiscing about them.
And of course PS1 when I got to play FF7. Wow. While I hated the graphics (apart from cinematic) since I got this console late into the end of the N64 generation, this was a formative game.
Getting all nostalgic here for simpler times. Having the magic of extremely senior and experienced devs bumping out amazing 2D masterpiece games on SNES, only to immediately shift into 3-D was great. Great time for gaming… before the dark times… before Horse Armor, live service, pay to play, “cut-and-paste-apology-letter-we-promise-to-do-better” broken games, and FOMO battle passes.
What a fantastic console. I played the hell out of GCN. My favorite games on there: Tales of Symphonia, The Wind Waker, and Smash Bros.
Shout out to the 3DS. What an amazing portable! I have so many memories with it, and it was the only gaming device I carried with me EVERYWHERE because of street pass and spot pass. I bought all the bundle games for StreetPass because it was so much fun having iterative improvement with visitors to your 3DS. Integration into other mainline games was pretty great too.
Not everything took advantage of the 3D aspect, but the games I played creatively innovated with it and provided new perspectives to solving puzzles.
I freaking love my 3DS. Right now Steam Deck has surpassed it, but man what an era of gaming.
Note: If you’re nostalgic for StreetPass, look up “Street Pass 2”. Despite Nintendo shuttering all the services, you can still work your way around and get StreetPasses to your console, but you’ll have to homebrew it.
Other runner ups: SNES (I was a kid that wasted away on that console), Wii, Wii U. I used to throw Wii Guitar Hero parties with friends. Great times.
Congrats my friend! Happy for your success!
If I can pass along some advice, be careful with your newfound money. Try to live at or below your current means, and get more into saving and investing your extra income. Your future self will be extremely grateful.
Good luck bud!
I don’t think it’s worth spending the cycles trying to talk about or convince others to join the Fediverse - no one likes an evangelist.
Instead, state the problem and what the Fediverse aims to solve. If one is interested in the problem and is hooked by the solution, that person will seek it out.
Since you’re struggling to provide your own analogy, break things down to basics. Do you know what the problem of social media is? Do you know what the problem of centralization is? Do you know the problem of centralization under corporate or government control? Do you know how decentralization provides a solution to that problem?
If you can break those down and understand it yourself, you can use that as part of the solution. Try facing a mirror and answering the above questions aloud to yourself so you can hear yourself talk. If you can’t explain it, then you’re not ready to explain it to others, and certainly not ready to answer questions when people ask you about it. Analogies aid to the explanation, not substitute it.
State the problem to the person succinctly. Then the solution. It’s important to state those without bias or feelings. You can give anime examples later.
Example posed in a friendly, conversational, and nontechnical manner:
You’ve heard of some of the controversy around Twitter right? The problem with Twitter is that a controversial figure has purchased control over the product, made sweeping changes that are the opposite of Twitter’s mission and values, and has introduced disruptive functionalities that have significantly hurt the user’s experience. In other words, he’s made it much harder for someone to enjoy Twitter, and has made it easier for someone to get scammed or spread misinformation. Twitter users are kind of stuck unless they move to a different platform. But that’s tough because so many people use it.
The Fediverse is a new social media concept that’s come out, and it’s different from things like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. Fediverse is not controlled by any corporation, but by individuals all across the planet that run their own server. An example of a Twitter competitor in the Fediverse is called Mastodon. Mastodon let’s you Tweet, connect, like, share, etc. George Takei from Star Trek is on Mastodon! Since no one controls the Fediverse, the risk of some controversial figure moving in and buying it is extremely small because of how it’s designed. No corporate control, no rich people owning it, no ads, and it is solely focused on the users rather than profits. It’s basically run by volunteers. It’s new and growing, and probably something you should consider checking out if you’re interested. Lots of people started moving over to Mastodon after the recent Twitter controversies.
Have you been contributing and participating in some of the content discussions in the Fediverse? I found that I was a consumer and just came to Reddit to read stuff. But with Lemmy I’m far more interactive.
Cool idea on having a public board, similar to the modlog. Perhaps that idea should be suggested to the Lemmy devs if it is important to you: LemmyNet Issues board: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/
While I’m not sure about the information for your instance, lemmy.ca, I’m with lemmy.world for now. Lemmy.world is hosted by the same people who run mastodon.world.
Lemmy.world posts a blog update that outlines their hardware and financial costs.
“The current VPS couldn’t be resized that much anymore, and load was going up with all the new users. So I bought the same server at Hetzner: a 32-core/64 thread 128GB RAM dedicated server.”
“May / Expenses / Mail: EUR 32,52 / Hetzner (server etc): EUR 424,34 / Storage: EUR 75,69”
The dev, Ruud (User Profile), who runs Lemmy.world also runs another Fediverse instance, Mastodon.world. If you go to Mastodon.World you can see their blog posts which talks about their infrastructure and Expenses.
https://blog.mastodon.world/welcome-lemmy-world
https://blog.mastodon.world/april-and-may-2023-financial-update
The VPS package they’re hosted on runs for almost $600 a month with a massive CPU, memory, and storage. I suspect now the expenses are increasing due to the massive influx of users. Now imagine Reddit’s costs serving over a billion people across the planet - Multi-million dollar contracts between Reddits and other corporations, tens of thousands of full-time salary jobs of engineers and devs, etc.
Running a Lemmy instance on an old laptop is extremely trivial. But serving Lemmy to tens of thousands of users is expensive and difficult. Lemmy will improve over time and hopefully we’ll see load balancing and horizontal scaling in the future. I’d love to see additional containers get spun up during large spikes of capacity.
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