Yes! This is it right here, this is how you grow the fediverse. Props to UoG for figuring this out early! Here’s to hoping that other universities catch on that providing Mastodon hosting to their employees and students has more value than offloading all of that discussion onto Twitter or Facebook where it can be shaped by a potentially hostile corporate owner.

Lemmy and Mastodon have an equal amount of shitposting and meme content in my experience

Lemmy, I like the simple post structure with all related commentary under the original submission.

Mastodon is fine for people who like it but it’s hard to follow the thread of replies as every reply is its own individual post.

I guess the twatter format makes sense for dashing off quick messages but I find it hard to follow and it’s difficult to find communities and topics of interest without also including a shit-ton of noise along with the signal.

Yeah, our inflation metrics (mostly the CPI) have been juiced and jury rigged to hell and back so that on paper “inflation” remained perpetually low for 30y and capital wasn’t pressed to raise wages. This has been an ongoing issue since the 1980s but really, really, became a core issue in the last 15y as energy prices, healthcare and housing costs ballooned while wages stayed relatively low or fell.

The economic growth of the last 30y has almost entirely funnelled to the top 15% and while there are plenty of jobs available to everyday folks they’re almost exclusively McJobs or gig work that don’t pay enough to support living independently much less actually doing anything other than working and sleeping. So when Democrats talk about “the economy” they might as well just say “rich people’s money” instead because they don’t seem to understand the distinction between those two phrases.

You’d think Bernie’s widespread support from the working class and Trump’s win in 2016 would have clued them in that they’re missing something but they pointed the finger at literally everyone else (“Bernie bros,” “low information voters,” misogyny, every *ism under the sun) instead of asking where they went wrong in their candidate selection and messaging.

I don’t even think they have anyone who represents (or is even willing to act like they care about, even if they’re simply manipulating) a low income working person and it shows.

I’m sure we’ll see plenty of opinion and “think pieces” in the Atlantic and NYT pointing the finger at a convenient scapegoat in the next couple of weeks, surely that’ll solve the problem.

Her performance on The View was absolutely, hilariously, abysmal. They asked her something like “what would you have done differently from Biden to grow the economy?” and she replied with a canned “We’re very proud of Bidenomics” and no further elaboration 🤷‍♂️

Like, yeah, sure, Bidenomics has been great for the top 20%, but what about everyone else who’s had to move back in with their parents? She demonstrated absolutely zero understanding of the economic reality for 4/5 of the population.

He rambled at great length about making America great again and bringing back jobs and Kamala told folks that nothing will change. If you’re struggling to understand why things went this way I’m not sure I can help.

At the very least Democrats probably should have told people they’d do something to help them instead of just assuming that people would intuit that over the long term Democrat economic policy would be more stable and provide better net growth.

People in the US are dumb as shit, you have to explain things to them and make them feel like you’re paying attention. This is something Democrats have utterly failed to do reliably since Clinton 1 or Obama and it’s why they lose elections. They’re quite literally out of touch and don’t realize it’s not the 70s or 90s when blue collar workers would reliably back them because they’d (relatively recently) supported the labor movement and life was, overall, pretty good for everyone. You can’t run on a policy of inclusion and civil rights for marginalized groups when the main voting group is struggling to make their own lives work.

Democrats would have benefited greatly from telling the public that they were going to do anything at all about 30+y of neoliberal policy that benefits Wall St at the expense of the bottom 80%. This election (and every election since Obama left office) was a referendum on business as usual neoliberal policy at the working class’s expense. You could get away with that in the 90s, but when the working class can’t earn enough to rent their own apartment or start a life they’ll vote for literally anything else, including a convicted rapist and con man.

200% markup doesn’t matter when you’re billing it straight to the client anyway 🍻

They’ve done it more than once now

Whatever they can get their hands on, including your unique hardware identifiers

Friends don’t let friends use Manjaro

They’ll find some way to make this change break the AUR again

Emacs users be like

Find widely known orgs that use the platform, the BBC comes to mind here. Search for other well known orgs to point out so you don’t just have one example. Highlight the fact that other platforms are cross linking to the fediverse (Meta’a threads for example) so a fediverse presence will give the city a presence on those platforms with no extra effort needed. Point out that Twitter has become an unreliable platform due to ownership change and that that situation could replay itself at any time on any centralized platform. Help people get Mastodon working on phones if needed - the official app is quite good. Basically just sell the platform as best you can, don’t go heavy on ideology and focus on practical benefits.

In my experience many of the people who haven’t quit are self medicating for attention or depressive reasons. Of the folks I know who vape about half were diagnosed with ADHD later in life (30+) and quit after finding a stimulant medication that worked for them. The rest are unmedicated and self medicating with nicotine and coffee or energy drinks. Self medicating is overlooked in virtually every discussion about nicotine and I’d like to see it considered more often when the topic comes up instead of just leaping straight to “nicotine use bad” or “nicotine users should be punished” like most discussions do.

Edit: there’s also some interesting research re: nicotine’s neuroprotective properties that gets lost in the prohibition fervor

Finally. Are they actually hiring decent UX folks this time or are they using the people who designed 1980s VCR programming UIs again?

Offer to help setup the account and show them how to use Mastodon in general.

Also, not necessarily applicable to you but worth keeping in mind: encourage organizations to run Mastodon instances/provide Mastodon hosting for their employees or members in addition to providing email addresses. If an org is providing email to employees or members for business correspondence they could easily provide Mastodon services as well. This enables public discussion with the org in twitter/social media format without a third party controlling the platform.

Write a couple of your own toy services as practice. Write a one-shot that fires at a particular time during boot, a normal service that would run a daemon and a mount service that fires after its dependencies are loaded (like, say, a bind mount that sets up a directory under /run/foo after the backing filesystem is mounted - I do this to make fast ext4 storage available in some parts of the VFS tree while using a btrfs filesystem for everything else.) You can also write file watcher services that fire after changes to a file or directory, I use one of those to mirror /boot/ to /.boot/ on another filesystem so it’s captured by my system snapshots.

I’d start by reading the docs so you have some ideas about what services can do, then you’ll find uses that you wouldn’t have thought of before.

iPod replacement, dedicated smart home device dashboard, dedicated navigation/entertainment system in the car, dedicated UI for something on your home network or weather info or headlines or whatever website you want to check regularly in one place

Yeah same. When he started topping my feed despite me blocking him I ejected from his platform and washed my hands of the whole thing.