Mastodon is obviously an already established and semi-well known social network–A user-owned network of communities. But one of the biggest issues I always see the corporate social media denizens talk about, is that the loss of content when moving instances (sometimes, you have to do this) is one of the biggest turn-offs. And that’s definitely something I can attest to. If I were still on mastodon.social, from my humble posting-beginnings in 2017, I’d have a post history longer than five football fields and probably plenty to cringe at.

The question remains: Why haven’t we been able to take this history with us … if every instance you’ve ever been federated with is keeping that data.

What do I mean by this?

Every single time you post on Mastodon, your words get pushed out to other instances (servers), and in order for people to be able to read what you said, a copy of it is downloaded onto that server. It does this very quickly, so quick that it seems as though it happens in real-time. And, for all intents and purposes, I’m not inclined to believe that it doesn’t.

If you’ve ever had an account on an instance that isn’t mastodon.social, and you have a posting history, and you remember your username: Go over to mastodon.social, create a burner account, and then search up that username.

Yeah, you see that? Your entire body of posting-work is still there, even if you deleted your account, even if the instance you were on is long dead.

This is obviously not true for every server. Some choose to delete old content to make space for the new, but there are many Mastodon servers out there retaining everything ever posted, like mastodon.social.

But what point am I trying to get at here? As far as you’re probably concerned, even if that data still exists, and your account, and instance does not, you can’t access it, right? You can’t reclaim everything you’ve said and done, and put it back where it belongs: Under your ownership.

Or, what if you could?

If you’ve been following my posting history on here in the past week, I’ve been screwing around with Nostr, and musing about Bluesky. Two networks using a similar protocol, that I feel are getting the idea of what I’m thinking of here, only about 75% correct.

Bluesky’s problem, is that the protocol is owned by … the owners. The corporation. Your keys report to their server, and in return, so does your content. A central server that has a lot of different keyholes.

Not really the optimal experience, because you can’t create your own server, and build your own community, and survive if the main Bluesky datacenter goes out, right? The only thing you can do is host your own software that essentially just holds keys and content, and, as far as I know, all of that will be worthless if the devs ever go offline with the main server.

So then there’s Nostr, where all of your data lives everywhere on the network, and as long as you have your keys, you can use any app that utilizes the protocol, and continually access everything you post, forever. You can’t be banned, but you also can’t block anyone. And any random stranger can take your public key from your profile, and view your entire everything (as I’ve said before).

I would say this is also not really that optimal. The idea is great, but the execution trades privacy for extreme versatility.

This brings us back to Mastodon, which is still in active development, still receiving new features, and … well, kind of also only has the whole thing about 75% correct.

There’s that last little bit we’re missing here.

The user should have the option of a community, a personal community away from what’s viewed to be the central Mastodon server and have their privacy, but, they should also be able to retain their posts, and their bookmarks, and their likes, and their lists, and everything else.

How do we accomplish this?

Keys.

The entire fediverse (for the most part) already has all of your content. So, if every user had a key tying them to that content, no matter where you’re located, be it mastodon.social, or mkultra.monster, then you could just go wherever you want? That’s the idea, at least.

Your content becomes immortal, immutable, and that’s the one missing puzzle piece to ActivityPub. I am 100% sure of this, and I don’t know what the developer stance is on the topic of keys and immutable data, but I fully believe this is something that should be on their roadmap. Yes, storage space is a concern … but holding onto the text content of a post is much easier, and smaller in size, than holding onto larger pieces of data (like photos, and videos). If you scrolled back to five years ago and found something you posted, but the only thing you could see was the text, would you be all that disappointed?

I guess that part is subjective.

Mastodon is already setup nearly identical to Nostr, except users live on the relays. So just … add user generated keys to the mix, and I am 100% double-dippin’ certain that most of the naysayers being spammed by engagement farming on Threads and Twitter will jump ship.

Mark my worms.

If it isn’t. Well. They’re making a huge mistake.

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/07/21/mastodon-become-immortal-the-logical-next-step-in-federated-social-media/

#bluesky #mastodon #nostr #socialMedia #tech

Wuthering Waves is another mobile game that crosses the boundaries between your phone, your console, and your PC. Much like the games that came before it via MiHoYo, it proves that a gacha can be so much more than a slot machine rewarding you with anime girls. For years and years, I would’ve never considered a phone a thing with actual good games, and I’m slowly but surely being proven wrong.

Recently, I wrote about MiHoYo’s latest game, Zenless Zone Zero, a cyberpunk slice and shoot ’em up that absolutely rips ass. But now, I want to talk about the apocalyptic world of Wuthering Waves, where while wandering some desolate canyon, I came face-to-face with this dude on a huge motorcycle from hell that sliced me in half and killed me (okay, not really, but the dude on the bike was definitely there).

First of all, the soundtrack:

https://youtu.be/mglYS2zftVM?si=2qJICXm-JK0fDJIH

This is the music you hear as you’re logging on, introduced to the game with something that sounds like it should’ve been in Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots. I’m not even sharting you. I think Kuro knew they had fierce competition that’s already years down the development line, and they knew they had to immediately capture you with something.

So, they chose violins and a piano.

And then there’s the setting …

The story is about this apocalyptic event called the Lament that wiped out most of humanity, which also caused a whole bunch of monsters to plague the world. You’re a person woken from your dreams in search of your lost memories, and ultimately, the goal of beating the “Lament.” I think that’s about as simple as it can get–A plot you’d expect from maybe Ghost in the Shell, but with swords.

I’m sure there’s an anime more suited to compare that to, but my mind is full of fog and hangover pain.

It is, at face value, quite a bit darker, and a little more adult than the bright and cheery high-fantasy world of Genshin Impact.

I’ve also done a little bit of reading, and some say the story in its current state is very short, but I think that’s the way these things go as live service, gacha games that never truly end (plus, Waves just launched). And, as another Breath of the Wild clone, there is surely much more to do than story content.

For example, Somnoire, these supernatural realms of lost dreams that you traverse in a challenge to collect “cards” that power you up in order to ultimately win a reward. In a way, this sort of reminds me of the elemental challenges in Genshin Impact. And, of course, there are tons and tons of world quests that I’ve yet to explore.

Mostly, though, this write-up is about my initial and beginning impressions in the game.

Speaking of just having started, my main player character is level 40.

Either I’m totally kicking tons of ass, or this game is more forgiving than Genshin, where I’ve been meddling in the quests since it launched, and I think my current cast of characters are level 30?

Despite how much I like Genshin, my main issue with it, is that traveling on-foot is slow. And your stamina … is low.

In Waves, not so much. You can grapple onto hooking points and swing across short distances, and then float around on a glider sorta deal. But, wait, there’s more! You can surely climb up the edge of a cliff, but if you hold down the run key, you can also RUN UP THE SIDE OF A CLIFF.

https://youtu.be/BOacUoKZuLc?si=FisIAD3CxaHopyr0

It seems like this game was specifically engineered with exasperated Genshin players in mind. I’m sure a lot of people who play it know, MiHoYo is … let’s just say, not so forgiving. From running around, to pulling for new characters, it takes time. A lot of time. Unless you’re extremely lucky, or, spending tons of money (which I refuse to do, I will never spend hundreds in one sitting on a gacha game).

In fact, I jumped back into Genshin after playing Waves for a little bit, and I was taken aback a bit by the fact that your sprint only lasts a very short time, compared to Waves where, in many areas, it’s infinite. Imagine that, an open world Breath of the Wild clone that says, “Hey, this is a game where you potentially pay us money for fictional characters, but also, we’ll try not to waste your time.”

But don’t take any of that to sound like I hate Genshin. No, I really enjoy it. It’s just that, through spending time with Waves, I’ve found there are definitely things that could be improved upon. Things that would really only just be a quality of life sort of fix for Genshin. Not that I’m … that invested in these games. I haven’t been really invested in a game since Mass Effect 3 ended.

Everything since then has just been a search for the next greatest thing. Baldur’s Gate 3 had that feeling for a while, and then the developers dropped it, decided there would be no DLC or expanded content, and peaced out. And here we have the reason why I’m more tending to play endless open world gacha games than 70 dollar Steam games that end and cease updates and expanded content. The sort of thing that leaves you feeling like the time your girlfriend ghosted you after months of being together with no hint that anything was ever wrong.

Okay, maybe it’s not that serious.

All that aside, I haven’t really touched on the opening experience in Wuthering Waves.

When you first log in, much like Genshin, you’re dropped into this world that, from just camming around, you can see is very large. You’re set off on a starting quest, and before you know it, you’ve seen two cities, a few towns, and fought off the engineer of these weird puppet people. A story quest that feels literally like something out of a show on Crunchyroll (not a sponsored comment).

And, did I mention the combat has almost the exact same dodge mechanics employed in Zenless Zone Zero? I’m not entirely sure how both games managed to have this real clinched, click, dodge, attack sorta mechanic (since they both came out at almost the exact same time), but I enjoy it! Another thing that felt weird going back into Genshin where the dodge amounts to … just dashing out-of-the-way real fast and sometimes failing to do so.

The only thing that leaves a little to be desired, is the English voice acting. But … that’s kind of an issue in a lot of these games, and I wouldn’t say it really takes away from the experience.

Having rambled on enough about this, for now, I think I’d give this game a 7 out of 10 anime girls for the price of 19.99 and a little bit of luck. And I’m cautiously, but optimistically, anticipating new content.

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/07/19/wuthering-waves-genshin-impact-but-for-adults/

#anime #breathOfTheWild #gacha #Gaming #genshinImpact #kuroGames #mobileGames #openWorld #wutheringWaves

Over the past week, I’ve spent a little time here and there checking out the latest game out of grindy, microtransaction game maker, Nexon. This is what I think about it.

Hold up, haven’t I seen this before?

Back in the olden days of gaming o’ yore, there was a time when Shephards saved the galaxy, and the Inquisition had only just begun, guards of the veil be damned. Before developer studios killed their community forums and moved communication to Twitter, and while we were all playing Mafia Wars and The Sims Social on Facebook, awkwardly flirting with sims created by our close friends. An age where the latest Sims game didn’t have swimming pools, and most of us were still venturing out Into the Future.

That time was 2014. A time before gaming was corrupted by an onslaught of nonstop subscription models and battle passes. When 30 hours to beat a game was perfectly acceptable. When loading into something brand new, felt … exciting.

But war, war has changed.

Warframe was released in 2013, and then later, for the Playstation 4, in 2014. This was mostly only an alpha, and all you could really do was jump down to a handful of extermination missions from a static solar system map.

Around the same timeframe, the first Destiny was released on consoles, and, at the time, didn’t even remotely touch a PC.

Both games shared (and still share) similarities. As Warframe evolved, it became a mission-hub, shooter-looter game where you built your character, played with friends, and spent the rest of your time sifting through playing-card-eque warframe modifications. Destiny, and then its sequel, years later, are really not all that different.

It’s a theme I don’t feel has really caught on all that much outside of … well, Warframe and Destiny. Sure, we have Helldivers 2, but, that’s kinda sorta similar, but also not really.

Warframe and Destiny 2 exist as “live service” games. Games that exist without a subscription, but do have expansions and microtransactions, and are persistent, never-ending. I think back in the golden age of gaming, we would call this a hybrid MMO.

They don’t really exist in a niche, but this genre has largely been overshadowed by MOBAs, and then survival games, and then battle royales. I think the battle royale genre still reigns supreme as one of the most popular format of games to play. Although, personally, it’s starting to feel pretty stale for me. Even if Apex Legends is really cool.

But, now we’re in 2024. Warframe has been out for about 11 years, and Destiny has been chugging along for around the same amount of time. And I guess Nexon decided to throw their own hat into the ring. For … reasons?

Enter: The First Descendant. Like if Mass Effect Andromeda had a child with Destiny, and then got cybernetically modified with implants from Warframe. It’s a game occupying a concept that already exists, so much so, they purposely or accidentally copied UI design directly from Destiny 2. And, as damning as this may look, I decided to give the game a shot, regardless.

Hello, I am now a bunny.

The game starts out kind of unremarkable, dropping you into a sci-fi universe where an evil big guy wants an artifact for his own evil doing and bidding, and you’ve got to stop him.

The First Descendant is a third-person looter shooter powered by Unreal Engine 5. Become a Descendant. Fight for the survival of humanity. Descendants have unique abilities to tackle both solo and co-op missions. Up to 4 players use varied mechanics to defeat giant bosses. BE THE FIRST DESCENDANT!

It … kind of reminds me of the beginning of Destiny 2, paraphrased and rewritten.

You’re a descendant, and you can do really cool stuff with your hands, like shoot out ice, or electricity, and also fire guns at monsters.

My first impression, is that the gun play kind of sucks. It feels like holding a stick and going “pew pew pew” with imaginary bullets. Sure, they’re actually coming out of the gun, but there’s next to no feedback when you’re firing a gun, and when your shots are hitting your target. It just doesn’t feel like I’m shooting a weapon that kills things.

Now, the graphics are pretty slick, and, well, I don’t know if this is an issue with Linux, or what, but I’m running pretty good hardware, okay? And having the settings on high, I get great FPS … until I venture into an area where there’s a lot going on, or onto a battlefield where missions are happening. Everything slows down to a 15 FPS slug-fest. And, apparently, this is something that’s happening to a lot of people, and it may not actually be a hardware issue.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve felt the struggle of a poorly optimized game.

Within the first ten levels, I wasn’t really feeling like I was having all that much fun. I was feeling like I was just shooting a gun at some aliens until loot popped out, and repeating the process over and over until I was really powerful, and also had access to the Bunny descendant.

This is about where things start to get better. I like the bunny lady.

With my descendant now fully maxed out with all the gear you can wear, and equipped with modifications (that has an interface eerily similar to Warframe), I’m starting to feel like progress is happening.

I notice something though … this game takes place, entirely, on just one planet? Did I miss something? What happens when you’ve completed all the missions across the map? Is it endgame time? Do I get to go to space and see other planets?

I mean, this is what I’m expecting, since this is a direct copy and paste of Destiny and Warframe. But I’ve done almost no reading on the extended story of this game, and am speaking about it now from only first-hand experience.

But what about the voice acting?

The voice-overs in TFD sound like a typical dub in an anime. Some of them are alright, some of them sound like the person speaking has no emotional capacity whatsoever. It’s a very, Nexon-ish, Eastern grinder game. Which is fine! Grinding mobs for loot is something I’ve done since 2001, when I joined Anarchy Online.

More issues, and stuff, and things.

From the jump, to level 14, I’m only really now starting to feel like I could enjoy TFD, and that’s if they continue to fix it, and put out new content, and aren’t sued by two different developer studios.

One of the issues I encountered while randomly playing the game, thus far, is that pretty much all the content is designed with having other people around you, in mind. Except, even though there are a lot of people playing this game, sometimes there is nobody doing the mission you need help with. So, you kind of just fail, and then fail again, and then either stand there and wait for someone to waltz in, or go do another mission and return later.

I’ve said it before years and years ago, and over and over again since then: A persistent online game where there is only group content, is a game I’m not that interested in.

Eve Online is great, until you find out you can’t do anything actually fun or remarkable unless you become a social butterfly and join massive corporations, and constantly collaborate with other people. I’m a recluse! I don’t want to do that all the time!

Albion Online is awesome … until you hit a wall and find out you’re gonna die, son. You’re gonna die and enjoy it, unless you join a guild with active players, and collab–You already know what the heck’s going on.

Black Desert Online is exactly the same, but it has more solo content than the previously mentioned games.

What I’m trying to get at here is, even if your game is online only, built around co-op and being massively multiplayer, you still need to have content people can do by themselves, or you’re going to annoy me. You’re going to bring a screeching halt to your entire game if for some reason a ton of people just stop playing.

I will give TFD a little merit, though. One of the reasons I don’t really play Warframe, is that their story and quests are ridiculously convoluted, and not very friendly to people who have day jobs. You’re telling me I have to grind for a week if I want a cool gun? Are you fuggin’ serious, dude?

The same kind of goes for Destiny. I like the theme, but I don’t like how a lot of the game kind of feels like a slog, until you get to the content you want to be in.

TFD, so far, you pretty much just blast through everything like a stream of water through toilet paper.

This could be good, or bad, depending on what exactly the endgame is.

At the end of it all.

With my initial impressions down, and my extensive history of having seen this all before, and knowing exactly who Nexon is, as a company, and what they’re probably going to do (Hello, exorbitant cash shop prices), would I continue playing?

Probably. I kind of do want to see what the endgame is like, and just how deep customization and stat-building goes.

Would I recommend it to other people?

Uh … maybe? If you feel the same way I do about Warframe and Destiny? Give it a shot, maybe we’ll talk, and I’ll help you shoot some mindless aliens.

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/07/16/the-first-descendant/

#destiny #games #Gaming #nexon #theFirstDescendant #warframe

This is going to be a sort of long one (or maybe it won’t?), because I have a lot of thoughts as a tech and social media enthusiast, and some of those thoughts have to do with how I feel about the direction that social media is moving in. How I feel about Mastodon, and Nostr, side-by-side, and what the biggest problems with Bluesky are.

So, let’s jump right the heck in …

Nostr, the misconceptions, and the truth

I recently wrote about Nostr, and its relayed protocol of user-owned identity that you can take … wherever. I outlined a lot of thoughts and impressions I initially had, and then what I wrote went to Reddit, and then it found itself on Nostr. It got there entirely outside my own involvement. I posted to Mastodon, and almost nowhere else.

This inspired me to log back in, and set some things up (such as domain verification from one of a few domains I own), and then I explored a bit. I interacted with people, participated in some community events that came up spontaneously, and really dug into the extreme multitude of features that run across the Nostr network.

Let’s just say, I was pretty floored, and some of the impressions I had were wrong. Such as thinking that a place that is more centered around the idea of lacking censorship, or robust moderation, must be filled with toxic, horrible trolls. In the couple of days I’ve been messing with the network, I think I’ve muted like one person who said some off-the-wall shit in my notifications.

But … I think Nostr has nasty people just in the same way Twitter, Threads, and Mastodon do. They exist, and they always will, no matter where you go.

Suffice to say, I learned a lot about what decentralization was, and now is. I was given an article by user @7fqx@ditto.pub that gave some really in-depth information about the emergence of decentralization–Scuttlebutt, ActivityPub, and then ATProtocol, and Nostr.

I’m not going to lie, I originally started writing this as a hit piece against Bluesky, thinking their ATProtocol was just a riff of what Nostr was doing. But, apparently, both ATP and Nostr were developed independent of each other, and mostly without any knowledge of one or the other. I think that’s … actually pretty wild, and strange.

On the topic of decentralization, which is something I feel is integral to the future of the internet, I now understand Mastodon to be a place of islands, and decentralization that occurs in a way that’s more like isolated communities talking to other isolated communities. Like the latter half of The Walking Dead.

In a way, it’s decentralization, the half-measure. The full-measure, that comes with some iffy trade-offs some may not like, is Nostr, and ATProtocol.

You take your identity, your thoughts, your posts, and you move freely between pieces of software, and networks, and you lose nothing (this is nearly the direct opposite of Mastodon, where moving to a new server means burning everything you’ve ever posted, to the ground). And, honestly, I’m kind of starting to feel like that’s how it should be. The downside, is that, on Nostr, you have a public key, and a secret key. Your secret key is something you use to log in and sign events coming from your account, and your public key is basically your identity. That’s not the iffy part, though. The iffy part, is that people can use your public key to see all of your data except direct messages (which are encrypted).

Not entirely too scary, unless you’re doing a lot of weird things on your account. But definitely something you should know if you decide that this is a journey you want to take, and you’re not jaded from hearing about how much Jack Dorsey loved Nostr and it’s Bitcoin affiliation (a lot of people across different platforms hold a lot of dislike for the man).

At this point, I’m less worried about the power consumption of BTC transactions, and have more shifted that focus to content farms from the likes of Microsoft and Nvidia buying up all the AI tech they can get their grubby little hands on.

That aside, I’m not writing this to blow smoke up the Bluesky developer’s butts. I, in fact, am not favorable of Bluesky and there are some specific reasons for that. Maybe this spells their downfall, or maybe they’ll be a tight-knit community that doesn’t really expand all that much, forever.

Bluesky, the Apple of social media

Bluesky is a place that a couple million people call home (I think, last I saw, it was around 6 million or so). There’s no algorithm, and much like Nostr, you own your identity. Except, for now, that’s mostly tied to the website’s central server.

Now, obviously, there are far less people populating Nostr, but Nostr and its relays are able, and are connected to both ActivityPub and Bluesky (just, not through ATProtocol).

Most of what you’ll see on bsky.app are quite a few furries, an actually impressive population of Second Life users, and quite a lot of LGBTQ+ people. None of these things or communities are inherently bad. In fact, I think they’re probably the only reason Bluesky is really alive at all, today.

My angst and negative feelings about the direction of Bluesky have nothing to do with the LGBTQ+ community, or any other community residing on the platform.

The issues I mainly hold have to do with how far up their own asses the board and developers are, in regard to the platform, and its development over the past year or so. This is why I kind of think of them as the Apple of social media. And you might think, “Hey, don’t you own like a billion pieces of Apple tech?”

Yeah, I do.

But this is more like if Apple skipped over having Steve Jobs and just went straight to some random guy who didn’t know what he was doing. You know, like putting up a wall and locking out all potential users for a year, and keeping all new sign-ups under lock and key via exclusive codes. As you might imagine, having that walled-garden erected through six or seven different events where people were leaving Twitter in droves, very likely probably worked against the social network’s best interest.

Mainly, because Threads came out of absolutely nowhere, and sucked up most of those users.

That’s only half of the issue, though. The other part to all of this, is that the developers I see directly on Bluesky do not recognize or acknowledge this at all. Paul Frazee, whose influence goes back quite a bit further than Bluesky, posts as though it’s the greatest platform ever made (maybe just because he’s a developer for Bluesky). But the website, despite its six million some-odd users, feels almost completely dead.

Which is ridiculous, because, as I’ve said, Nostr has far less users than that, and it most definitely doesn’t feel dead when you post.

Not to mention, we’re over a year into Bluesky, and it still, more or less, is propped up to look, feel, and act just like Twitter did in 2014. ATProtocol, in this respect, still feels mostly like an afterthought that’s inaccessible to most users.

Meanwhile, if you really like Nostr, you can get going with your own chunk of the network immediately, with about a page of install commands.

It’s this mixture of grandiosity that emanates from Bluesky, and the blunder of keeping their doors closed through one exodus after another, that I think they’ve shot themselves in the feet so much that they now don’t have feet. They have stumps.

But, if you’ve followed me all the way through this article, I think there’s a way they can blow the doors open. But, then they’d have to sort of abandon their idea of the ATProtocol, and stop trying to be the center of social media they most definitely are not, and probably never will be. And, really, that’s the final issue I have with Bluesky and the ATProtocol.

It feels like they’re trying to do Nostr, but be corporate-owned. Bluesky doesn’t feel like it’s owned by the people, developed by the people, and run by the people. It feels like it’s run by some suits, who give the impression that the people will have their freedom, as long as they say it’s okay.

And that, my buddy ol’ pal, just ain’t okay.

The elephant and the ostrich

Which brings us squarely back to Mastodon, and Nostr. Both platforms have their own merits. Nostr is about controlling your own content, and what you see, and largely eschews censorship to a high degree. But everyone can see almost everything you do and are talking about, whenever they want. Mastodon, on the other hand, puts the tools into a user’s hands to create a network, and build their own communities, while picking and choosing who those communities interact with. A network that … encourages users to police everyone around them … which is how we end up with tyrannical admins acting like they work in a prison, and they’ve just been promoted to Warden.

If only there were some way to take the best parts of both of these animals, and make them one.

An elephrich.

For now, though, I am at least pretty content to screw around with both while I feel around and see what sticks. In the age of corporate control and censorship so heavy that people can’t even say “kill” or “suicide” any more (these are only two of the most egregious examples I can think of), I think it’s healthy to explore your options, and cement your identity, and who you are online, before everything else we’ve come to know is lost completely.

If that’s something you care about, at least.

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/07/16/why-bluesky-will-probably-never-be-it/

#activitypub #atprotocol #bluesky #corporations #mastodon #nostr #socialMedia

Nostr, the name of a social network that I really can’t pinpoint the theme of. Like something a disgruntled Twitter developer came up with after trying Mastodon, and thought, “Hey, there aren’t enough opportunities to pay for this?” And then there’s the name, like it was definitely something thought up by a hipster sitting in a corporate lounge.

But, you might be surprised (or perplexed?) to find out that it stands for, Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays. Mastodon also uses relays, but more as a way to connect people, and to ease the struggle of the slow slog of natural federation.

If this is exactly what Nostr relays do, then … Okay!

Nostr, at least via Damus, has a Twitter-like environment, but also you can use it to blog, but also you can build a website and a merch store with it. All you have to do is have a … bitcoin wallet, and some money.

Months back when I originally made an account on the iOS Nostr app, Damus, I logged on and said, “Saw this app being talked about, decided to jump in and see what’s up. Hello! #introductions” and I got, honestly, a pretty warm welcome? I at least wasn’t pelted with swastikas or anything that you might assume would happen on an unfettered and seemingly unmoderated social network.

Although, there was just one strange user who advised me that I should be anonymous, and that the goal isn’t to be famous, which kind of felt threatening, in a way? Not that I haven’t encountered some degree of angst on every social network ever created while being a “content creator.” A creator who is definitely not famous, and more just doing these things for fun, as hobbies, until one day it maybe pays bills. But that’s beside the point.

I’m not sure if said person meant any of that to be threatening, but asking immediate personal questions about what I do, what my skills are, and why I should stay anonymous was … just weird.

And then there’s this feature called “Zap” where other users can toss Satoshi coins at you for posting. That’s also a bit strange, but I guess I won’t really complain that I was given the equivalent of about 10 cents worth of Bitcoin for posting a few “hello” notes on Damus.

The potential to make real money by just posting online is, at least, intriguing. But, I’m not sure if this is really all that different from just having a Patreon in your profile links on Mastodon.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Okay, but where’s the part where you gotta have some money?” I mean, first of all, giving people money for posting (completely optional), requires that you fund a BTC wallet. Which, I don’t know how people really feel about cryptocurrency anymore in our current climate of things going on. What with AI driving the mass extinction of the human race, but I am still under the impression that operating on a crypto network is using up some kind of power fulfilled by Nvidia farms.

It is sort of a noble thought, though, from a social network: That people should and can be paid for posting, or for doing what they do, directly on the app, and quite effortlessly …

But then I returned to Nostr today to see how things are going. Partially, because I saw some random person on my Mastodon timeline somehow commenting on a fediverse post, from Nostr, and I thought, “Alright, let’s give this another look for a few minutes.”

(If anyone can explain to me how someone from Nostr managed to federate into Mastodon, that’d be great.)

I decided I didn’t want to just view this via the Damus app on my phone, and then went off to explore web apps. And, oh boy.

Alright, so you need your public or private key from your original account. In my case, this is from Damus, and easy to find. So then you plug that into one of many apps available, all, I assume, developed by random independent developers. I searched around a bit and settled on this one called Snort. I just kind of liked how that sounded.

All’s fine and dandy, until I start reading about how your profile and/or username should be verified on-chain so that it’s less likely that someone impersonates you. So, like a blue check? In the profile settings, I have an address that was assigned to me via Damus (I think? I’m pretty sure I didn’t make it up myself), and via Snort, that address is invalid.

So, I find the page via Snort that lets you “get” or register a new one.

Once you’ve navigated there, through their not-so-obvious link, you have the option to get one for free as a subdomain, but no matter what you do, even if it says the username is fine, you get an error. Error. Error. Error.

Then, the only other option is to buy one from Snort, or Iris (some kind of connected app, or network?) for the minimum price of around 30-35 dollars USD, but in BTC.

This is the part where I mentioned you’d have to have some cash. Albeit, I don’t know if this is really required. It seems to be pretty much just the Nostr equivalent of paying for a blue check on Twitter, except I can’t see why you’d want to do this on Nostr, because I, and I don’t mean any offense to people who use this network, who are genuine people just trying to connect and have fun–But I don’t know why anyone would do that on such an unknown, and niche network.

Sure, you can opt to support the developers, and that’s fine. But, I also see a heavy degree of AI generated content on different feeds, including from the developers at Snort.

(Snort also appears to default every avatar for unknown or new accounts to some variation of an AI generated person)

I have very strong opinions against AI generated content, and if you know me, you know I refuse to support anyone who uses this tech, at least, if I can help it.

Aside from the fact that this bubble is about to pop and everyone is due for a massive wake-up call, one that I’ll be bringing the popcorn for: If you can’t even make your own avatar on a social network (or, jesus christ, screenshot something from a movie or a game if you’re not feeling inspired) … I don’t think I can trust that you’re actually able to develop anything, at least ethically, you know, without contributing to the 115 degrees Fahrenheit heat and 80% humidity we’re experiencing in certain parts of the US.

But, I have these exact issues with the developer of the Ice Cubes Mastodon app, where guy has payment options for his work, and loads up the app icons with a bunch of generated slop that is most certainly ripping people off.

If you’re going to ask to be paid, even passively without requiring it, you need to get rid of the AI generated theft you’re participating in. Use some of that money to hire an artist to spend maybe a day making you a few icons.

Now, the AI issue is one that is wide-spread, across every network, and I’m not sure if this is a bigger problem on Nostr, or if it’s just people peoplin’. But it is worth pointing this out, especially if we’re talking about developers developing things for monetary gain, and using theft-tech to visually represent themselves, or their products.

With all of that aside, how does the software perform? What does it feel like?

If you’re using the Damus app, it feels about as stable as Bluesky. Definitely in need of polish, but responsive enough that it doesn’t feel like it’s going to explode my phone. The web apps, on the other hand, are a scatter-shot. Snort works about as well as the Bluesky web app, but it glitches out, it resets your avatar to some AI garbage, and then refreshes back to what you actually have … the feed goes blank, and there are, of course, errors.

This was the better experience.

In the few other apps I tried, there was little to no functionality, or there was total functionality, with no features whatsoever.

Do Nostr developers want me to be on my phone 24/7?

And, how can we talk about how it feels to use Nostr, or Damus, or any of the web apps, without talking about the userbase.

Here’s a drive-by scroll via Damus for you:

https://youtube.com/shorts/u-H_FYbxtEw?feature=share

Maybe I’m viewing the wrong feeds, or I’ve messed something up, but most of what I see on Nostr are people who seem to worship BTC as if it was their personal god. Like, a space where the only thing anyone’s interested in is cryptocurrency, and sometimes right-wing politics.

I don’t know, that’s not really the kind of thing I tend to interact with, so it’s a bit alienating. Where are the people talking about gaming, or technology, or Linux, or even just anime or something?

“Bro, I LOVE bitcoin, my ENTIRE LIFE is centered around it! What? No, I definitely have other interests. Have you heard of Ethereum? You can verify smart contracts with it.”

This is kind of the same problem Mastodon had in 2016. Very tech-worker centered, not a lot of room for normal people, with normal interests, except in this case it’s people with a crypto gambling addiction. I expressed before how much I loathed this when I was still actively participating in the NFT space.

If your community looks as though I’m being inducted into a cult centered around crypto upon entering, I’m not sure I, or anyone else, is going to feel inclined to stick around and chill. You know what I mean? Maybe the people behind Nostr can take this as some constructive criticism, or, ignore me completely.

Anyway, let’s sum up what we’ve learned from this treck into the BTC social network space …

There are far too many ways to access Nostr, and usually that wouldn’t be a problem, but most of those access points are broken, or extremely lacking. Some apps attempt to nudge you into paying them for an address (or, better known as, blue check verification), and it’s entirely unclear if this is required if you intend to stick around, AND, you might end up paying people who use theft algorithms. You can get paid for posting, if you actively know how to use a Bitcoin wallet, and if you actually feel like interacting with people who talk about nothing but bitcoin. And, some way, somehow, you’re able to get Nostr to federate to the fediverse, and Mastodon, but the method of how this is accomplished is beyond me. But … at that point, maybe you should just use Mastodon?

My overall impression of Nostr, the network Jack Dorsey ran to after being evicted from Twitter, and chased off of Bluesky, is that it needs … uh, work.

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/07/11/nostr-the-strangest-and-clunkiest-twitter-replacement/

#art #artstr #bitcoin #btc #coffeechain #cryptocurrency #foodstr #grownostr #introductions #nostr #plebchain #socialMedia #socialNetworks #technology #tunestr #twitter

I was twenty-eight years old when Dragon Age Inquisition came out. It was right after the triumph (or catastrophe?) of the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy. I still remember that day … the Normandy crash landing on some jungle planet, and then cut to black. And we’re still waiting on a sequel to that, twelve years later.

https://youtu.be/CTNwHShylIg?si=NDMu1Tu6R-Yk-VxY

Speaking of sequels that have taken far longer than they should, I’ve finally sat down to take in the opening minutes and official trailer of the game formerly known as Dragon Age Dreadwolf. Look, I … I have some thoughts. And I’m aware that not all of them are the popular opinion in regard to Dragon Age games.

But I was there when Origins came out, and it was one of the greatest experiences I’d ever had in gaming. The concept of affecting the opinions of my companions, and even romancing them, was a foreign thing to me. So, imagine my surprise, for the very first time, when I found out you could sleep with Morrigan. As long as you were enough of an asshole to please her sensibilities … and then bear a child with her.

I think I spent hundreds of hours in that game, and I didn’t even play any of the DLC at the time. I didn’t do that until years later, when I finally beat Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition.

Funny story: Dragon Age 2 didn’t feature the Gray Warden, it was some new character named Hawke. I hated this, and intentionally avoided ever playing it until about five or six years ago from today. The same goes for Inquisition.

I specifically avoided two entire sequels to Dragon Age Origins, because they took the world, story, and character that were established, and that I was attached to, and put them in the trash can. And then they did that again, once you finally relented and played DA2, and maybe became attached to Hawke as a main character. They took them and also put them in the trash can.

It was my state of mind, the whole entire time, because I was also a major fan of the Mass Effect trilogy, where you were allowed to become attached to the world and characters, because they actually continued, through each game. And no, I don’t expect Shepard to return in Mass Effect 4. I’m talking about here what makes logical sense to a story, if a character isn’t presumed dead, and also has an active goal as the credits roll.

Enter: The Inquisitor, and the Inquisition.

I cannot stress enough, I was very reluctant to play this game. In fact, I only finally picked it up, once I found out that you could get a glimpse of your Hawke in the game, and a slight mention of your Gray Warden through the return of Morrigan, who, for all intents and purposes, should have brought the Warden along for the journey, depending on the ending you had in Origins, plus the Witch Hunt DLC. But, it seems BioWare is entirely allergic to my wishlist as a gamer in regard to their Dragon Age titles.

I’m not even saying they would have had to continue with the Gray Warden completely through each game. It’s understandable, that after some time, maybe someone else would take over. But what I wanted most through each game, was a real, direct continuation of the world and story, instead of this constant indirect, ham-fisted, years later state of the world that they keep latching onto. The plot point that continues, today, in … uhm, The Veilguard.

And, of course, you guessed it … yet another brand new main character, that, if the trailer and opening gameplay are anything to go by, completely ignore the Inquisitor. I’m just not okay with that, dude. The literal end of Dragon Age Inquisition (if you play through all of the DLC) has your Inquisitor and pals heading off to seek out Solas, and stop him from tearing down the veil.

Which makes the opening gameplay recording all the more frustrating. At this point, I’m convinced that Varric is meant to be the main character who actually appears in all four games, and that sucks. It sucks, because he’s not your character, or, at this point, characters. And then, this guy who BioWare has been dragging through each title as some kind of storyteller who chronicles what’s happened, has the audacity to say, “This crew needs a leader, someone we can count on.”

https://youtu.be/4F3N4Lxw4_Y?si=6nY637LTbCh5x-dE

Bro, you had that leader … THREE TIMES. And one of them had already set out to accomplish what you’re attempting in this “years later” continuation of the story.

I think the biggest slap in the face in both the official trailer and the opening minutes of gameplay is that there is absolutely no mention of the Inquisitor WHATSOEVER. There’s a side character from Inquisition who joins your squad, and later, a random Gray Warden, but your characters, who are heroes, and already established? They’re just gone, who knows where they are? Maybe they’re having some lemonade on a beach while the world falls apart.

Sure.

In Dragon Age 2, the transition to Hawke at least made a little sense, and in Inquisition, maybe that made some sense too. It was at least made less bad by the inclusion of some mention of your previous characters. But, if what they’ve shown us so far for Veilguard is anything to go by, you may as well just assume the first party that set out to stop Solas are all dead.

It’s just the biggest question, especially watching this reveal trailer: Why the hell is Varric forming a NEW party?! I’ll say for the third time, there was ALREADY a party formed and pursuing Solas!

I won’t show exact details and recordings of this ending in Inquisition, because I’m sure there are people who haven’t yet played it, who want to see it for themselves. But, I think maybe at this point I’m just getting a little bit fatigued with BioWare.

I’m 39 now, and I’m sure I’ll probably be 45 by the time we get the gameplay trailer for Mass Effect 4, which I’m sure will probably feature some characters besides Liara, who knew of Shepard. And then some new character who has no idea what’s going on. Just like in the abandoned Andromeda sequel, that was at least kinda cool, as a restart to the series.

To the people who are fine with this, I just wanna know how you can excuse this patchwork story-telling that has abandoned your characters three times now, especially considering what you may already know if you’ve fully completed Inquisition.

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/07/10/dragon-age-dreadwolf-i-mean-the-veilguard-a-new-party-to-pursue-solas-because-the-first-one-is-gone/

#bioware #dragonAge #dragonAgeOrigins #games #Gaming #inquisition #rpg #veilguard

I woke up on my day off like I usually do, basically just procrastinating for hours and hours. And then I logged onto Mastodon, and then Threads. I like to start off my day by doing some posting, like you do. And then I saw that, uh, well, the official Threads account is attempting to commit career unaliving.

Post by @threads View on Threads

If you’ve followed along on the platform at all, you’d know that Threads has been very careful about controversy, politics, and news. So, it was kind of a big surprise to see them using the main official Threads account to promote works by one of the most transphobic authors in the world, who is constantly embroiled in hate campaigns on the platform formerly known as Twitter. So much so that even Elon Musk himself has asked that she … post something else she’s interested in.

While I heartily agree with your points regarding sex/gender, may I suggest also posting interesting and positive content on other matters?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 4, 2024

Essentially saying that while he agrees with violent transphobia, he wonders if the head of the TERF movement has any … interests. You know, aside from what a stranger’s genitals look like (I don’t know why she doesn’t just get a Pornhub account and put her addiction into a more private setting).

That the official Threads account would appear to endorse all of this, completely out-of-the-blue, and unprompted, is … well, troubling. Especially since nearly every single reply to the thread is people trouncing Threads for being so tone-deaf as to make a post like that. Specifically, since we are in 2024, where the thought of Harry Potter and sorting houses should have been something that people stopped caring about over a decade ago, years after the series was concluded.

Post by @willforrestthewriter View on Threads

Post by @bealeiderman View on Threads

On that topic, I urge you to read a different book, such as Children of Time.

But, that was only the first, “What in the actual Hell?” coming from Threads, so far today. The second instance of oh-my-god-ery coming out of the platform, this time, isn’t by the official account itself. Instead, it comes from a random with an average looking username, turning out to be an LLM, on a platform that is only a year old.

Post by @frank_william3191 View on Threads

Post by @frank_william3191 View on Threads

Nothing like the equivalent of botting your Twitch chatters on a social media platform to really put things into perspective here. Did a random user set this up as an experiment, free from the knowledge of the team behind Threads, or is this sanctioned by Threads themselves? Not entirely sure, either way. But that an account like this exists, and isn’t or hasn’t been flagged, well …

This is something I’d expect to see on Twitter, a platform that died six months ago and is struggling to retain optics that make it look like an active platform, versus something completely new, that apparently has 100 million+ users. And now, you really gotta wonder, how many of them are bots without thought or feeling?

And this sucks, because I just recently wrote up a post on here recommending Threads over Twitter, to social media users who wanted something new, but don’t like the concept of Mastodon.

It’s got me thinking I should move all of my activity, at least in text form, back to Mastodon, or, my personal Mastodon instance, exclusively. And just forget about this corporate mess of AI-bubble-obsessed tech leadership who can’t see the forest from the trees.

Because, this is, of course, an issue that also resides in the user arena on mastodon.social. Wherein, a few weeks ago, I suspended a user from federating with my server, due to him being an account (from mastodon.social) that was completely maintained by … you guessed it, a language learning model.

But this is a problem that reaches all the way back to 2016. The moderation team behind the flagship instance of Mastodon, does next to no moderation, essentially forcing any instance smaller than it to perform either constant suspensions, or they simply hit mastodon.social with an instance-wide suspension (which I have already done).

Bad politics and AI are infecting everything, and it is sadly becoming more and more prudent to hollow out your own space, and put up a firewall to keep the theft machines and the genital obsessed weirdos out. Why this had to be a double-issue involving both of these things today, is beyond me, but here we are.

I put this post up in order to be fully transparent about my thoughts, and my evolving opinions about things. Yes, I have issues with Mastodon and some of the people who occupy the fediverse. I also have issues with Threads, and the questionable decisions Meta makes in regard to its health and development.

The question is now, do I still recommend people who don’t like the concept of Mastodon to just sign up on Threads?

I’m still thinking on that topic, and I’ll get back to you. But, just in case this has you thinking you might want to look at Mastodon as an alternative, head on over to my instance sign-up page, and give it a shot! If I don’t immediately respond to your user request, please feel free to leave a comment on this post.

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/07/09/a-two-for-one-threads-net-sale-transphobia-and-llms-oh-my/

#000000 #00000026 #999999 #ai #jkrowling #mastodon #threads #transphobia #twitter

No, I’m not being paid by MiHoYo to write about, or stream Zenless Zone Zero (or ZZZ). I felt like I wanted to write about it, because, as an adult who has to work, a lot, and is always out and about with less time at home in front of my PC than I am wandering the world: Mobile games have kind of become a staple in how I find a little enjoyment in the day-to-day usual activities.

Imagine one of those isekia animes, or gacha games, where you’ve got a new life running a store, meeting new people, and sometimes fighting monsters. That’s kind of what this game is. But it’s not. It’s a little bit like Persona kissed a gacha, and then gave birth to an Isekia, but one where you didn’t die and become reincarnated (or did you?).

When you start the game, which you can play across your phone and then also on your PC, it’s the usual fare: Start it up, get a ton of exposition through dialogue, and then embark on your mission in quarantined little zones where you fight monsters. Then you’re introduced to the skill system, and eventually the gacha system.

But then, you’re also introduced to the fact that you own a video store, and you can open it for business. You can visit the coffee shop down the street and have a cup, or go on over to the arcade and play a plethora of arcade games … just for the heck of it!?

And that’s just in the little town you start in???

You have a little van at the back of the video store that you can jump into and then “travel” with in order to reach other areas. So far, I’ve only seen the VR place, but there were, uh … quite a few other locked-out places to visit.

Also, did I mention, you can go to bed? For some reason? Like, you can put your character to sleep until the following day. I’m not sure if this is exclusively part of advancing the story, or if you can just do this whenever you want (I haven’t tried it).

There are other things scattered around the main area you frequent between commissions, too. Such as a gadget store (for increasing your character’s gear level), and a restaurant of some kind where you can eat some food. It’s got all these little details.

You know, when I launched ZZZ, I was expecting kind of a Honkai Impact sort of game. Nothing that would really rival Genshin, since it is their cash-cow, after all, but at least something that could be a neat little distraction.

Little did I know, that there is some kind of huge world built around this, where you don’t even have to kill anyone, or anything.

Oh, and sometimes you can spend money to roll for new characters to collect.

Did you know … MiHoYo is using money they make from these games in order to fund a nuclear fusion reactor? I don’t really spend a lot of money in these types of games, but it is fascinating that, when I choose to, I’m kinda sorta, pretty much funding future clean energy.

Whether that energy is used for good, or for the destruction of creativity through LLMs, is yet to be determined. But … I am under the impression that the devs behind Genshin, ZZZ, and Star Rail, are using actual artists, with skills they employ through use of their hands and tools … even if they are, sometimes, a little bit, uh …

Anyway! It’s also got this cyberpunk vibe, but like, with technology from the present, the apparent future, and also the past. I mean, I’m pretty sure you’re renting out VHS tapes, and checking notifications on an advanced smartphone at the same time. So, it would seem, this is some kind of future where we still romanticize the eighties, but are very much involved in embracing the tech of the future. I’m not sure what that’s called, but I think there’s a name for it.

I don’t really write a whole lot about games. In fact, the last game I wrote about was POOLS, a liminal walking simulator based on the Backrooms, that absolutely terrifies me to my core. But, every once in a while, something interesting and different comes around. Something that isn’t just a copy and paste of Breath of the Wild with anime girls (this is actually a really cool concept, and I’m not ripping on Genshin Impact at all, honestly), or a blatant rehash of Warframe, but really, actually different.

And, I feel like this is kind of just, that.

Anime, and anime games, are enjoyed by all types and walks of life, from teenagers to the oldest heads you know. I first discovered the concept of anime in the nineties when I was just a kid, and turned on Dirty Pair for the first time.

Cheers to continuing the condition of being a weeb, as I grow older, and more bored with triple-a, multi-decade development games that lose my focus and interest in about half a second. I’m looking at you, the game Formerly Known as Dread Wolf.

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/07/09/lets-talk-about-zenless-zone-zero/

#gacha #Gaming #mihoyo #zenlessZoneZero #zzz

As someone who is very much into Linux and open source software, and therefore by extension, the fediverse (Mastodon, Wafrn, etc), you might think it’s weird that I’d write up an article about how I feel Threads is doing versus Twitter. Thing is, I understand there are people out there who … let’s just say, need to be on corporate social media. It’s the only thing they can envision themselves being part of. Like someone who always buys the expensive purified Smart™ water instead of just grabbing one of the Great Value brand bottles, because they somehow think it’s healthier. Or more … watererer.

Me, I keep my foot in corpo-media because I am a creator and there are needs that Mastodon can’t always yet fill.

Maybe someday that’ll change, and we can get a vast majority of the world on-board with user owned social media. I believe the building blocks are firmly in-place, and we’re ready for them. But! Until then, there will be plenty of hold-outs who rely on mega-corporations for their ability to interact with strangers and share things.

Enter: Threads, in comparison to Twitter, one year later.

It’s no secret that Threads is a major point of contention on Mastodon. Some people, who pride themselves on extreme black and white thinking, will even call you evil for using Threads. I think those people need some professional help, or, at the very least, to touch some damn grass. I don’t believe in “guilt by association” and I think every single person has different, specific reasons for why they do things, or why they feel they need to do things. Such as, being on Threads, and not Mastodon. I can respect that some people just aren’t ready for that, yet.

I mean, at least they’re trying. At least people are abandoning Twitter. That was one of the goals when Mastodon launched … to get people off of Twitter.

But, I’ve gone on about this before and have done so too much here and now. Let’s talk about how I feel Threads is doing in comparison to Twitter.

Yes, people still use Twitter. I have mutuals over there who haven’t even given any thought to switching to something else. Posting like nothing’s happened. Like their timelines aren’t filled with strangers intruding on their personal space with intentionally antagonistic garbage. But, again, people have their reasons … I guess?

Threads launched to a lot of hype, and quickly exploded to 100 million users. If Mark Zuckerberg is anything to go by, and he’s telling the truth (we assume), there are something like 175 million active users on Threads.

Post by @zuck View on Threads

Listen, I don’t trust anyone who makes billions of dollars a year. I don’t think Zuck is being entirely truthful at all times. But, some part of me thinks he’s at least somewhat better than Elon Musk, in some kind of light.

This is a far-cry from what Bluesky can boast, in fact, I don’t even know how many people are on there, but I know a few months ago it was maybe 2 or 3 million people. I do know that when I go on Bluesky, it seems more like there’s 5 people there.

On Twitter, the Musk recently boasted billions of active user seconds. And, I mean, it’s just my own inkling feelings, but if you have to put user activity under a microscope down to user seconds, something tells me there’s a bit of hidden truths in there.

𝕏 US usage reaches all-time high! 🚀

76B total user-seconds in the US, beating the previous record by 5%.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 29, 2024

And it’s no secret that many of the replies on Twitter recently have been revealed to just be bots utilizing ChatGPT to look like regular people. That’s alongside the usual content on Twitter, which is just zillions of people engagement baiting all day every day, which all adds up to a hollow, and mostly annoying social media experience.

But, is Threads any different?

Sort of?

The algorithm on Threads is much like Twitter’s, except the volume is turned to eleven. Any slight interaction with a thread tells the AI behind the frontend that you want to see more of that thing, indiscriminately.

You interacted with a generative art post to tell someone how much you hate generative art? Guess what, NOW YOU’LL SEE MORE!

You interacted with a thread about World of Warcraft to say how much you like the game? You’ll see tons more of that, too.

Threads is all about not touching the things you hate, and only interacting with things you enjoy. In that way, it can be good, but only if you have self-control

Which, admittedly, I have very little of.

But, Threads is also full of engagement bait and content theft.

The brains behind Threads have said that they’re working on solutions to clamp down on this behavior, and at the very least, make muting these people easier. But that was at least a month ago, and it’s still a growing issue on the platform.

There is also no shortage, like on Twitter, of people champing at the bit, waiting to sling some toxicity your way for not having exactly the same opinion on mundane things that they do. Which, unfortunately, is exactly like Twitter.

I’m reminded of a post I made about DC Comics that I had to mute the notifications on, because it got near 20,000 views, and tons and tons of nerds telling me I’m stupid and an idiot for liking Batman and the newest Flash film.

That isn’t something that happens on Mastodon very often, and when it does, I just outright erase their existence from my entire server.

Twitter has its own AI, Threads … sort of has its own AI, since it’s linked to Instagram, and Meta has an AI. Neither of these things are objectively good, because AI sucks about 98% of the time. But I won’t say I haven’t tried the text based Meta AI, just to see how it responds. And, I have to say, most of the things I’ve typed into an AI, such as meaningless questions a Google search could answer … were better off just being a Google search.

Google’s shoddy and likely future graveyard-fodder AI is another story entirely.

Twitter has hashtags, and Threads has the ability to tag a single word or phrase in order to increase the reach of a post. This is where I have to give both Twitter and Mastodon a point, because I really do prefer the old school way of just using hashtags to tag subjects for people who are searching certain things. Meta’s way of avoiding hashtags on Threads is weird, and I’m not sure if it even works well, and I’m also not sure why they’re avoiding hashtags. Especially because, with full fediverse integration, there will be hashtags coming from Mastodon.

Future Threads updates also include an incoming content warning feature, which I believe is part of an effort to conform more with Mastodon standards. Which is actually fine, that’s a good feature. This is also something Twitter sort of has? But it’s mostly only for porn. Twitter has porn. Meta is more conservative about porn-posting, and I guess I can understand it, but there is value in not being so prude-ish. I mean, we are all human, after-all.

Meta’s more prude approach to “not safe for work” content has, I believe, at least something to do with minors who populate social media, and not subjecting them to adult content. But, I also feel like children should get the hell off of social media forever until they’re adults.

No, I won’t argue that point. Kids don’t belong on social media. Go outside and ride a bike, motherfrikkers.

But, at the end of the day, and one year later after having launched, is Threads really any better than Twitter? At least, if you’re one of those people who are afraid of, or don’t want to use Mastodon?

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s fine.

As long as you take control of your own behavior and content, Threads can be a decently pleasant place to fulfill your posting needs. It’s not really a great source for as-it-happens news, but I believe Meta is specifically avoiding being a hot-spot for political content and news media, because they don’t want to end up in a situation where they’ve accidentally influenced global politics and are in the hot-seat in front of the supreme court.

We all know how Zuck handled that last time.

Twitter, despite still having at least some active users who aren’t bots or people who exhibit NPC behavior posting nothing but bait all day, is a dying platform. Dying a slow death of disease and misfortune as its less-than-business-savvy owner shoves it into the ground like a horse that’s been dead for five years.

If you refuse to join Mastodon, or are, for whatever reason, afraid of tinkering with open source software, just join Threads, alright? That way, in the future, once full fediverse integration happens, I can follow you, and we can have conversations across our chosen networks, and we can all just forget X ever happened.

Deal?

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/07/06/threads-vs-twitter/

#000000 #00000026 #999999 #mastodon #oneYearLater #socialMedia #threads #twitter

I push myself out of bed at the bright and early hour of nearly ten in the morning. My cat jumps at my chest and threatens to eat my keyboard wire unless I pour him a can of his favorite morning food. After slapping on some clothes and feeding the orange ball of fur, I sit in the indented couch in front of my fifty-five-inch TV computer screen and mess around in AFK Journey for about an hour and a half.

All is normal and procrastinat-y, just the way I like my days off to be.

After hitting a progression-wall in AFK, I kick on my PC and refresh the Mastodon feed … to find that there is yet, more “drama” going on in the dev world (I despise the word drama, because it is frequently misused by white supremacists as a phrase and a way to downplay actual harm). Specifically, drama in relation to SerenityOS and its companion browser (now forked), LadyBird. Both are open source projects, both headed (previously, but not now) by one, Andreas Kling, who calls himself awesome on Github.

First I see random toots, “This dev is a jerk, an asshole, a douchebag.” And I’m intrigued. What did this guy do? And then I see glimpses of male-aligned language being used in the source code of one of these projects, and the flat-out rejection from the aforementioned dev to address this in the name of keeping politics out of his projects.

Oof, chief.

After a little searching via the Fediverse, since Google doesn’t seem to be indexing any of it, and the guy himself is attempting to downplay and bury it via his own blog post (wherein he states that he is forking the LadyBird browser project and leaving SerenityOS), I’m bringing it here. Mostly because I greatly dislike when bad people try to hide the things they’ve done, and dislike it even more when others encourage that it be hidden, locked out, and forgotten.

To what ends do people do this? So that a bad actor can be harmful to another group of people in the future?

Anyway, I found what I was looking for on Mastodon, and, just in case the post gets deleted in the future, we’re going to go over all of it here, directly.

What started the controversy is something so simple it’s almost hilarious. The dev had been writing code into SerenityOS that assumed the operator was male.

A pretty weird decision. Something as small as this can say mountains of things about the person who wrote it. You can insert your own ideas about their motives, and why they’d do this. I, of course, have my suspicions and what I would think if I saw this (that the developer probably hates women). But we’ll just look at what he said, himself, when someone questioned this, here (screenshotting important bits so that information regarding these things cannot be lost).

There are, of course, some angry comments following this, but expressing these things solely on Github gives these types of people a license to hide and bury and deny.

Then there was as second pull request where someone else attempted to make the pronoun adjustment, again, and it was once again denied. With quite a few more people expressing concerns as to why neutral language is considered a bad thing, or “political,” when it is definitely political to enforce that your code refers to every user as a man.

As someone who is very confused about their own gender, and isn’t quite sure where I want to be or go in the future, I can attest to the fact that this is a very simple change, and shouldn’t garner this kind of strange pushback.

For a third time, yet another user suggested changing “he” in the source code to “they and them,” which resulted in more talks about code submission policies and their rules in avoiding hot political topics and controversies. And, much to everyone’s surprise, people are still confused as to why this is considered controversial (if you haven’t noticed by now, at least a few of the people involved in the SerenityOS and LadyBird projects are probably unwell and not good people).

In order to not look like I’m just repeating myself over and over, here is another pull request where a user fixed the specifically gendered language, and was denied. And then another, where a trans woman is called “spam.”

And then one more time, in relation to their companion web browser, LadyBird, wherein a user removes white supremacist language, and is immediately shot down and locked for “spam.”

I’m sure there is even more to it than this, but with the head of these projects stepping down and forking LadyBird, I think it’s safe to say that LB is likely a browser you want to stay away from. SerenityOS, on the other hand, may be in better hands without Andreas and his influence. I can’t say that for sure, though, because, in just these little snippets I’ve arranged here on this post, it definitely appears to be a problem with more than just one person and their far right beliefs.

As many know, woman-hating neo nazis are a real and legitimate problem in the tech world. From the top, all the way to the bottom. You can see this in how generative AI treats non-white imagery, and you can see this in niche code written for an OS that probably less than a thousand people will use.

Regardless, it is something I am very passionate about addressing, challenging, bringing to light, and keeping the bad actors from burying.

I’ve had numerous abuses cast against myself from so many terrible people, it’s hard to count, and most of what they’ve done has been buried for a long time, and will likely never be addressed–In music, in tech, and even offline.

Even with surface level knowledge of what SerenityOS and LadyBird are, I wanted, and needed to put this here. I will continue to document things like this in the future, so that people who experience injustices online and in tech don’t have to sit in silence and think to themselves, “Are the people who marginalized me going to just be allowed to bury their grievances and continue, unchallenged?”

No, not if I can help it. And, of course, I’m not saying that the hundreds of people currently talking about this on the fediverse aren’t properly documenting this, or properly talking about this–they are, for sure! I just think it is also a good idea to have this stuff in one place, where you can catch yourself up and know what the hell’s going on.

‘Til next time!

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/07/03/serenityos-and-ladybird/

#bigotry #github #ladybird #misogyny #serenityos #tech #transphobia

I wrote sort of recently about engagement farming, and how ridiculous, annoying, and bad it is. How there are people out there who will post things, not because they believe in it, think it, or like it, but because it’s what will get them the most clicks and views. Either because they believe it’ll bring in monetary gain, or because they have a severe addiction to the serotonin pump of getting likes in their notifications. And that, at the end of the day, it’s money, and lack thereof in our current society, that likely drives people to waste their time on the internet in this way.

In the past couple weeks, I’ve spent a little more time on Threads. The only reason I have an account on the platform is largely due in part to the fact that I was banned from what was my home on Mastodon at hackers.town after a little over three years. At the time, I had briefly sworn off Mastodon, until I realized that federated, open source social media is still probably the only road forward online, even if millions of people still haven’t convinced themselves that corporate social media is not good, and is completely designed to wear you down.

Bluesky is a different story. Their developers have decided to create a new protocol that … uh, well, doesn’t connect to anything but their own central server. And, after missing the mark about seven different times to garner mass amounts of users, I’m 99% sure Bluesky is not a healthy platform and will likely die out sometime in the near future.

Side-tracked thoughts on Bluesky aside, yes, even after writing a few times about the issues I have with Mastodon, and how some on the fediverse view creators and artists through an uncharitable, and sometimes nasty lens, I don’t think there is any other choice besides the inevitability of remaining on the fediverse.

Now, with all of my initial thoughts as to why I wanted to write this post out of the way, what exactly am I getting to?

In spending more time on Threads over the past couple weeks, and briefly viewing Twitter here and there, I’m noticing now that because of engagement farming, whether it be a tech bro posting a bad opinion for the sake of likes, or forty-seven different bot-like accounts on Threads copy/pasting each other, or posting empty questions: I personally feel like it’s becoming harder and harder to determine, on corporate social media, who’s being genuine, who’s sharing things they actually like and believe, and who’s just saying whatever for disingenuous reasons. Who on Threads, or Twitter, is replying to something you said with genuine thoughts, and opening conversation in good faith, and who’s intentionally fanning flames, and baiting you, and others, so that maybe in some mythical future, these corporate platforms pay them thousands of dollars.

And it’s in the past couple of days, I’ve realized, this is exactly why federated social media, run on software that is not designed and maintained by billionaires, is the only way you can meet and talk to people without having to sit for minutes wondering if a person is just using you for their own potential financial gain.

It’s making me feel like, despite having met a few cool people who are genuine on Threads, it’s probably best to keep corporate social media as a way to share things I’m doing, or working on, and almost nothing else.

I work a stressful job, I spend a lot of time at home relaxing, and recovering. I don’t have the mental … space, to wonder if I’m making a fool out of myself by interacting with someone who wasn’t being genuine. I’d rather not go through any of that. And then you have to worry about whether the person you’re interacting with is even real. Although, I’m pretty good at detecting AI generated photos and text, it can still sometimes slip by my bullshit-o-meter.

But, if I’m feeling like this about corporate social media, then it’s likely others are, too.

I see, all the time, people saying things like, “If Threads isn’t a good place to be, I guess there’s just no social media!” and things about Mastodon like “The only people who use that platform are tech obsessed dudes who hate women.” And, I cannot stress enough, despite some of my grievances with people on the platform, that is by and large not true, and hasn’t been true since 2017.

Are Mastodon servers that are set up entirely and only for shitposting annoying? Yes. Are Mastodon servers full of dudes who breathe stock options and tech trends loathsome? Yup. Are these two things a reason to subject yourself to the disingenuous slog of a social media feed on Threads, or Twitter, in the hopes that at some point, someone might say something genuine, or disprove the theory of the Dead Internet? No.

Time and time again, these websites: Threads, Twitter, Instagram, even TikTok, are themselves a stark reminder as to why these places are bad for your health. They don’t need any outside help to prove this. They are, by virtue of existing, a testament to their own volatility. And I keep writing about these things in hopes that more people will someday go, “Oh, yeah, you know what? Maybe I can put up with a few tech industry dudes who have bad opinions every now and then as opposed to every single person on my feed bullshitting for clicks.”

And that’s the sauce on that, chief.

I think, personally, I’m likely finished experimenting with corporate wasteland social media. It’s like, oh boy! I got 1000 followers on Threads! And, without a doubt, more than half of them are probably bots.

It may be harder to gain a following on Mastodon. There may be people with severe issues that you need to block immediately. There may be entire servers full of assholes and jerks–But the difference is, you do have the ability to completely erase them from existence, at least from your own point of view. I can’t really say the same for corporate social media, where reporting functions often lead to dubious or a lack of results. But hey, maybe that’s a topic for another time.

Until the next time.

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/07/02/corporate-social-media-engagement-farming-extended-special-edition-max/

#billionaires #corporate #engagementFarming #mastodon #socialMedia #threads #twitter

Have you ever had surgery? What for?

Today’s prompt asks a very specific question, that should have a real clear-cut answer. I’m not even sure why I’m answering it, aside from the fact that I just need something to write about! So here we are.

No, I haven’t ever had for real surgery, where they cut and stitch. But! This does remind me of the time I had pneumothorax, and the reasoning the doctors gave me for having it absolutely blew me away.

It was a long time ago, back in my twenties, when I’d just barely started working in retail. I was grinding the third shift and going about my day as usual: Throw freight, tear boxes, put things on shelves, take a lunch, do it again. I remember at some point in the middle of the night, I suddenly had a real hard time breathing.

In covid-culture, you’d probably call it shortness of breath.

I distinctly remember telling my manager, “Hey, I think I have to go to the hospital, I’m having a hard time breathing.”

And I still remember him saying something along the lines of, “Well, if that’s what you think you need to do.”

Because, obviously, he wasn’t inclined to let me go anywhere without some kind of pushback. I was supposed to be working the product to the shelves, after all.

I did, in fact, believe that’s what I needed. I didn’t call an ambulance, I didn’t call either of my parents to ask them to take me. I hopped in my jalopy of a car, and drove myself to the emergency room and explained to them what was wrong. And, for whatever reason, the next moments would be something that scarred me for life.

They sat me down in a waiting room that had curtains around it, where they’d do the procedure. It wasn’t a real room, it was just a row of sheets hanging from metal poles in some kind of big, huge room.

And then this freakin’ doctor walks in, and he says, “Well, strip down to your skivvies!”

I didn’t know what the hell that meant. But I waited for him to walk away, and I took off all of my clothes down to my underwear (it turns out, after a Google search fifteen years later, that’s what skivvies means). Then, a woman about my age at the time brought in one of those medical gowns patients wear, and she asked if I wanted help putting it on.

I think I said yes because a lot of movement made breathing pretty painful. And, I guess that’s why it seemed like I needed help doing this. So she assisted me in wrapping it around my body, and she got entirely too close for comfort.

But, that was only the beginning of things I would think about forever, and ever, in the middle of the night when my brain needs something to go “What the fuck?” at: This girl, pulling a sheet around me, staring down at my skinny underwear-ed body.

What the fuck, indeed.

She left, and then I was all alone again, and I think about twenty minutes passed while I sat there in this gown.

But they came in with these machines and a tube, laid me down on the bed and I think there were like five of them. They stuck a hole in my chest, and ran that tube down into my lung. There was a lot of pressure, and I remember expressing that it was pretty painful.

I remember the female doctor looking down at me and remarking that it’s not that bad, as if she was me, and I wasn’t me.

Later, after the little procedure, that I guess we can think of as some sort of “surgery,” they asked if I wanted some kind of pain meds. You know, the strong stuff. I kind of chuckled, because I had no experience with this stuff, and I was thinking about TV shows where patients tried to trick doctors into giving them strong drugs so that they could get high.

They took my chuckle the wrong way and gave me some ibuprofen.

It didn’t help.

I spent about a day there, and when the doctor who shoved the tube into my chest came in to speak to me … she told me this happened to me … because I was tall and skinny. And, being a smoker at the time, a male doctor told me that if I didn’t quit smoking, he’d have to chop off half of my lung.

I don’t smoke cigarettes anymore, I vape.

When all’s said and done, my Dad came and took me home, and then I had two weeks off of work in order to recover.

Now, it’s been about fifteen years or so, but Hershey Medical Center, or Hershey Hospital, in Pennsylvania, I just wanna know one thing: What the hell?

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/06/30/prompt-have-i-had-surgery/

#collapsedLung #dailyprompt #dailyprompt1984 #doctors #hospitals #medicalProcedures #surgery #weird

I remember when I first discovered Reddit back in 2010, and spent hours and hours basically living there reading things constantly. I also remember when I started wanting to find places to share my work as an author, and then suddenly finding out that largely, Reddit as a whole, is extremely hostile to people who want to share what they do, unless they’re already famous. In order to share your work as an independent artist, writer, or musician on Reddit, your work needs to already be known by the masses. Else you will be harassed, you will be moderated, deleted, and banned.

And you might think, “This is really only an attitude central to Reddit, and nowhere else.” And for thinking that, you’d be wrong. In the years since, this kind of mindset has taken over spaces all over social media. One of the biggest spaces this thinking has infected, is, unfortunately, Mastodon.

Identifying details blotted out because this person doesn’t deserve any more attention from myself, or people who read what I write.

In the post I did here yesterday, I was kind of going on about this conundrum I have where: I really like Mastodon, but I find it really hard to reconcile going all-in with the platform. Because you run into people like this. People who don’t use the internet to share creative work, who aren’t trying to build a career out of things they enjoy doing. Who don’t use social media, partially, to share what they do.

They’re here to post, fabricate uncharitable ideas about strangers in their own minds, and then log off.

In fact, there are a minority of people across the fediverse, like this person, who believe it to be some sort of capitalist, consumerist, corpo crime to engage in the act of … showing other people things you’re doing, or making. To the point where you’re thought of as no better than people who post in a disingenuous fashion in order to get you to engage (see: engagement farming). Which, couldn’t be further from the truth.

I brought up Reddit in the beginning of this post, because this is where this type of behavior and mindset sort of comes from. An arena of people who don’t want to know anything about you, or what you do, unless you’re already at the top of the charts, already a celebrated artist, already an A-list author with millions of fans.

It’s the least counter-culture way to look at things, especially if you’re on a platform that is in itself, counter-culture. To believe that all the creative work and entertainment that’s worth a damn are things the media tells you to like, and anyone using social media to share new things, that others might potentially like, is bad, and evil, and click-farming, parasitic behavior.

Someone on Threads was talking to me about all of this, and mentioned to me, they’ve probably muted, blocked, and suspended more people on Mastodon than they have on other platforms. And thinking about it, the same is true for me.

With an open source platform, run by the people, for the people, inevitably you’ll run into people who are unsavory, unpleasant, and toxic, even. And that’s just an unfortunate fact. But maybe that’s the trade-off. You can be on Threads and be hit with hundreds of pornbot follows in a month, or join Mastodon, curate your feed, and sometimes be told that you’re corporate scum for creating things that you enjoy.

And, whenever I talk about these points and experiences, some people assume that I’m brand new to Mastodon, and that’s why I talk about this stuff. But I definitely ain’t. Like I said before, I’ve been dabbling in the federated network since 2017. I’ve run my own GNU Social instance, and multiple Mastodon instances.

The only thing keeping me from throwing corporate social media in the garbage, is the fact that I don’t like posting things on Mastodon, and running the risk of being told that I’m scum for making things, wanting to share them, and maybe build some kind of following.

But maybe I just need to be even more militant about suspending people. I really don’t know.

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/06/27/closet-redditors/

#antiArt #contentCreator #creator #fediverse #harassment #mastodon #threads #toxicity

I’m confused about your comment, but I’ll let it stand in case you want to elaborate

Just recently, Threads initiated phase two of their federation with the fediverse. Now, users on Threads can finally see posts from those replying to them from, say, a Mastodon account. For the longest time, you were simply sending your Threads posts to the Fediverse, and never seeing much info about who was interacting with you. Like firing a gun at a wall and hoping you hit your targets.

Post by @threads View on Threads

Those who use Threads, who are actually interested in the fediverse, are still waiting to simply just see posts from the aforementioned on their Threads timeline. The problem? There may not be much to see once that time comes.

Why?

There are a lot of people across Mastodon and other pieces of fediverse connected software, that completely block out any and all federation with Threads, and within good reason. Meta runs Facebook, and Instagram, alongside Threads. They’re very much a mega corporation that absolutely sells your data, and absolutely have ulterior motives in regard to what content they want to have shared on their platforms. Which, honestly, isn’t much different than the motives of individual Mastodon instance admins. Save for the part where data is sold (that doesn’t happen on Mastodon, at least not to my knowledge).

As for the instance I’ve been running all year, I’ve chosen not to block Threads. Why?

Threads has decent people, funny people, people that are actually worth following. Sure, there is a lot of riff-raff, and garbage, but, back in the day when Twitter was actually okay, it was the same deal. And with Bluesky, it’s no different. With individual fediverse instances, topics and themes are usually much more concentrated, or extremely specific.

So, if a nazi launches an instance, there probably isn’t anyone worth following on there.

Maybe now you’re starting to see my reasoning. And maybe also why, I both run a Mastodon instance, and an active Threads account.

With how specific things on Mastodon can be, it’s really hard sometimes to find people I actually want to follow, topics I actually want to see, content I actually want to consume. But, on Threads? It’s right there. And that’s my major conundrum, to why I find it hard to decide whether I should just post on my Mastodon account, or not. And the second reason why I’m not really on-board with the “#fedipact” (check out this list where they color code anyone federating with Threads in red, which obviously means bad and evil and not good) and blocking out its influence entirely.

I feel like, if I don’t block Threads, and if other instances don’t block Threads, it’ll be easier to bring those people we actually want to see from Threads, to a better, healthier Mastodon instance.

If Facebook is anything to go by, I don’t know for sure that I trust Meta not to throw the steering wheel out the window and let the site run wild with whatever the loudest users dictate.

But, this whole thing, at least in my own eyes, and with my own experience, and situation, has a lot to do with the fact that I’m a content creator. A very unconventional content creator, but I am one, regardless! I’ve been writing since 2008. I’ve been making music since 2017, and I also make little videos, I run a store in Second Life, I try to be interesting on social media, and sometime in the near future, I’d like to find some kind of tech related remote job.

Blocking myself, or my entire instance from the mainstream internet would do me more harm than good. Part of that, is because it’s so hard to find, and sometimes even reach people on Mastodon.

I’ve been dabbling in the fediverse since 2017, and I’ve never had more than 200-some followers on Mastodon (maybe partially because I’ve had to switch accounts so much). But, on Threads, I’ve been there since day one, which is under a year, and I’ve nearly reached 1000 follows, and about half of my posts actually go viral. Sometimes, for no discernible reason.

This is something that’s really good for someone who is actively trying to reach people on social media. This is something that could lead me to having the career I’ve always wanted.

I’m not saying Mastodon is bad, and you shouldn’t use it, you should! But I’ve yet to crack the code on how there are people on Mastodon that have over 500, or over 1000 follows. How’d you do that? Why don’t my posting habits on Mastodon get me to the audience I’m trying to build, but the same habits do get me there, on Threads.

Some people go online to post, and forget. I go online to post, and try to build a future. And that’s the biggest reason I can’t block Threads, and it’s why it took me a considerable amount of time to finally swear off using Twitter (for the most part).

A lot of people on Mastodon aren’t really online trying to reach people with financial and career building goals. They’re just there to share and have friends (not that there’s anything wrong wit that, I would love to have a bunch of regular online friends again) so, to a lot of them, it’s really no big deal if they’re only reaching 1% of the potential social internet. But to me, it is kind of a big deal.

These are my thoughts, as of right now, though. They could change. Tomorrow I could let my Threads account go dormant and continue with my efforts to build only on Mastodon. Who knows! I don’t, at least not yet. What are your thoughts though? Do you think I’m making a bad decision? Should I swallow my worries as as content creator and just focus on Mastodon?

I would love to know what your opinions are!

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/06/27/threads-vs-mastodon-the-trilogy/

#000000 #00000026 #999999 #federation #fedipact #fediverse #mastodon #socialMedia #thoughts #threads #twitter

Warning: This post mentions acts of inappropriate interactions with minors.

It was four years ago, everything was pretty normal, or as normal as normal could be on Twitter (or, at least, nearer to the end of Twitter’s life, before it became an X). Maybe some people followed and watched Dr. Disrespect. Maybe some synthwave creators who fancied themselves part of some obscure, secret boys club, were in his Discord building an exclusive playlist. And maybe some people hated him for his abrasive, sometimes homophobic or transphobic words, and actions.

And maybe some people remember his first ban, which came after he filmed within a bathroom at TwitchCon.

The second ban came in 2020, with nothing but an enormous amount of secrecy, that erupted literal conspiracy theories about what actually happened.

After a day of silence, Disrespect has made only a brief statement on Twitter, saying that Twitch has not notified him of any reasoning behind the ban. In the days since he was banned, speculation has run rampant throughout social media, but there has been no official word or credible leaks about why this ban happened.

Twitch has yet to specify a reason or speak about Disrespect specifically. The company’s only statement has been a vague update regarding community guidelines and terms of service:

“As is our process, we take appropriate action when we have evidence that a streamer has acted in violation of our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service. These apply to all streamers regardless of status or prominence in the community.”

Dave Thier, Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2020/06/28/statement-respond-why-dr-disrespect-banned-from-twitch-for-mysterious-reasons/

And now, four years later, we finally know why he was banned.

Dr. Disrespect exchanged inappropriate messages with a minor via Twitch’s own software.

Just after publishing the above piece, Dr. Disrespect issued a lengthy statement, admitting to inappropriate messages with a minor, though he denies that it involved anything illegal and pushes back against accusations that he is a predator.

“Were there twitch whisper messages with an individual minor back in 2017?” Beahm writes. “ The answer is yes. Were there real intentions behind these messages, the answer is absolutely not. These were casual, mutual conversations that sometimes leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate, but nothing more.

Erik Kain, Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2024/06/25/dr-disrespect-makes-a-big-streaming-announcement-amidst-allegations/

I’m not sure why it took this long for word to finally come out. Maybe Guy, or Twitch, thought the heat would die down enough that it wouldn’t kick up so much dust.

But, I think they were wrong.

Obviously, Beahm is a predator, despicable. And I’m willing to bet what he details happened is probably the light beer version of what really happened.

The bigger question, I think, is why did Twitch keep this a secret, and why did they pay him?

Twitch had these details, they knew what happened, and they kept it under wraps for four years. A website that’s supposed to be rock solid, open to all, safe. … kept a secret about a prominent streamer contacting a minor, inappropriately, on their own website.

Uh, guys?

I think Twitch kinda fucked up here. I mean, maybe they were wrapped up in all this legality that Beahm keeps talking about, but you WOULD THINK, maybe … They’d come out and be like, “Yeah, he did this. That’s why we banned him.” You know, four years ago. I don’t know, maybe there’s more to it than that, but if I were in-charge, I don’t think I’d keep secrets for the man.

What do you think?

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/06/25/dr-disrespect-twitch-ban/

#banning #disrespect #drDisrespect #guyBeahm #predatory #streaming #twitch

How do you waste the most time every day?

In today’s writing prompt, we’re asked how we waste the most time every day. I feel like this can be really subjective, and it matters most what you consider a “waste of time.” I feel like, if you’re making progress toward a passion, or something you enjoy doing, then ultimately, that thing isn’t a waste of time. But, there are definitely things that I know I could personally cut down on, in order to expand the amount of time I have to do things each day.

Such as sitting for hours scrolling social media, posting every once in a while, and then continuing. I kind of do this a lot when I’m in “waiting mode,” or when I’m nervous, or thinking about what needs to be done the next day. It leaves me feeling like I never have time for the things I need and want to do, but “unpacking” and just existing is something I frequently feel like I also need to do.

Maybe in that way, I’m not really wasting time. I’m just recovering energy.

I’ve always been kind of an introvert. Heck, I won’t even write the first message to people on dating apps, even though I get matches all the time. And this has been one of the major driving factors as to why I’m still single.

But it’s true, I need a lot of time to exist, and without outside interference or noise. I’m not sure why I’ve gotten like this, or how I became a person who needs a lot of me-time. It’s just how it is now.

If I think back to my twenties, I remember I spent all my time working, drinking, and meeting girls. It took me nearly a decade to write a single book, and that was the only thing I was working on. I was unfocused, I wasn’t really doing much to better myself, and then twenty-nine hit like a Mack truck.

Maybe the biggest issue with time, is just that there’s never enough of it to go around. You can’t pause time, you can’t rewind time. But you can definitely watch it move forward, with, or without you. And as you get older, it seems to go faster and faster.

One evening is spent having some drinks and scrolling your phone, and suddenly it’s two weeks later and nothing significant has changed in your life.

Suddenly, it’s a year later, and you’re still in the same spot.

Time just keeps on going, doesn’t it?

I think the biggest waste of time is thinking about time. Because it’s just going to keep flowing, regardless of what you do, and it’s ridiculous to think that every single person should be making massive strides with every inch of time they have. Statistically, that’s impossible. You need time to unpack, you need time to just, exist, to be human.

The idea of “wasting time” is something that emerged from a society that expects you to work and be productive until you retire, or die. And we all know what retirement is going to look like in thirty to forty years.

Enjoy your time, however you see fit, while you still have it.

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/06/23/prompt-my-biggest-time-wasters/

#dailyprompt #dailyprompt1977 #Life #time #wasting

I actually really dislike the phrase, “content creator.” It sounds like a bleached version of things creative people produce, made more easily digestible for the masses. But! That is the world and future we now live in, where everything is watered down in content, and also in language.

Would you call me a successful content creator? It depends on how you look at it. One of my albums under Eyeshadow 2600 FM was a bestselling dark synth album on Bandcamp for a short period of time upon its release. Before I abandoned the NFT-arena (a long story, but I will say that everything I made here was drawn by hand, not by bots, and I did this alone), I got featured by the official Twitter account (pre-Musk).

Today, I regularly get five to one thousand views on shorts I post on Tik Tok and Youtube.

But am I famous? Absolutely not. Is fame something that is required to call yourself successful?

I don’t think so.

But I do feel like, my own measure of success, and whether I am, will only come when I can financially stabilize and support myself only from things that I, myself, create. And, no, we are not yet there. Being a “content creator” is a long, hard road, especially if you weren’t born into a million dollars.

Lately, I haven’t been posting as much here (lately, as in the past week). It’s not really burn-out or anything, I’ve just been working on yet another project.

Over the past decade, Tik Tok, Youtube, and Instagram have all become a place for “shorts,” or short videos up to or under a minute (although, Tik Tok now encourages longer videos). And, for whatever reason, if you make at least slightly interesting content, and find a way to smash it into a short, people will watch it.

Thousands of people.

In an effort to be always transparent, and talk about the things I’m doing, I decided to start making gaming shorts, with the robotic voice “Jessie” as my narrator for facts and stories that go on top of that footage.

@cmdr_nova/video/7382777977517493534" data-video-id="7382777977517493534" style="max-width: 605px;min-width: 325px;" >

@cmdr_nova Fun facts for you on this Thursday evening! The more you know! #facts #gaming #gtaonline #funfacts ♬ Conspiracy – Kieran Rogers

Believe it or not, this stuff is actually bringing eyes to my channels (I know it sounds like I just discovered shorts, but believe me, I have been aware, and am an avid Tik Tok user). And that’s what intrigues me. Innocent, or even funny, little gaming videos, are bringing thousands of people to what I do. Obviously, the idea now is to keep on doing this, indefinitely. If this is going to bring people to my stuff, maybe to my music, maybe my website, and my writing, then it’d be foolish not to.

Of course, I can’t discount the fact that over the years I’ve received and still do receive a lot of support for what I do through channels on Mastodon. But, as bills mount, and debt continues, I’ve got to become more ambitious than I used to be.

Which means I’m also going to be returning to Twitch.

Years ago, sometime in the 2017 and 2018 era, I used to stream Dark Souls 1 and 2 to a tiny audience, and it was fun for a time. But as issues arose, and even after attaining the affiliate tag, I kind of dropped off. Then my life greatly changed. And now, years later, I find myself in a spot where I need to do more. It’s not a matter of want, it’s that I need to explore every avenue I can.

And I really don’t think that’s far off from the reasons why anybody else does any of this. We’re all being crushed under the weight of a financial prison.

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/06/22/the-life-of-a-content-creator/

#contentCreator #creativity #financials #Gaming #money #shorts #tikTok #video #vlogs #youtube

Write about your first crush.

I don’t know how many people remember their first crush, or the first person they liked. I mean, I guess it depends on when it happened, or at what point in your life you started noticing those you were attracted to. But, come to think of it, I’m not sure if this was even anything to do with attraction, because I was only in the fourth grade.

It must have been 1993, or 1994. I was born in 1985, so the years kind of match up with where I was, I think?

At the time, I was an avid Goosebumps reader, and there was a girl who liked to lend me her copies … that I didn’t take very good care of. I was an inconsiderate 9-year-old. I was also very bad at picking up on social cues, as I still am, in 2024.

Needless to say, I didn’t like the Goosebumps-book-having girl, or, I should say, I didn’t want her to be my fourth grade girlfriend, and I couldn’t tell that she wanted me to ask her to be that. I was just borrowing her books, reading them, and giving them back. It was a beneficial friendship for me at the time, and that’s all I saw it as.

The girl I did like was a girl named Lauren. I guess it was a crush. I don’t much remember what she looked like back then, but that’s okay. We were all very young children going to school at Millersburg, PA elementary. I don’t remember exactly how long I had this crush, but I do remember asking her to be my girlfiend … in the middle of the classroom, in front of everyone.

I think this is where my phobia of rejection comes from.

To my question, she said, in front of the entire class, that I wasn’t her type. Where a 9-year-old learned that phrase, “You’re not my type.” in 1994 is well beyond my comprehension.

It was probably one of my more embarrassing moments as a child. My second most embarrassing moment was burning a babysister’s coffee pot on her oven, just because I was messing around with the burner dials.

Fast-forward to around 2007 or 2008, by random chance, she showed up on my Myspace. It was like some kind of ridiculous coincidence. And I remember, I also found her attractive as an adult. But I think at the time she either had a boyfriend, or she was married.

It’s not that being married is bad or anything, but I guess I had, for years and years, this image in my mind that she was the first person I was ever “interested” in, and that seeing her as an adult could have been a fresh chance at trying again. And that was all kind of deflated. I wouldn’t call it devastating, she wasn’t and hadn’t ever been part of my life, but it’s a theme with most of my relationships, that what I want and what I expect is rarely what reality is.

Where my first crush is, today, in 2024, is anyone’s guess. Maybe she moved to California, maybe she’s rich and living it up in some remote part of the world. Or maybe she’s just like me now, thinking about crushes and past relationships and the nature of all of these things that bring us to where we are now…

Writing on a blog about our first crushes.

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/06/19/prompt-my-first-crush/

#crush #dailyprompt #dailyprompt1974 #myFirstCrush

I’m sure most people didn’t really know who Embracer Group was until they acquired Tomb Raider from Square Enix in 2022. And, although they have a long history, in the past three to four years, they only seem to be acquiring studios, and also killing studios.

Before Embracer, there was Nordic Games Licensing, and THQ Nordic, names that are probably a bit more familiar. But the history of this company as Embracer is relatively short, as they continue to speak about themselves as if this is an entity that has been around forever, and also fairly well-known.

Such as recently, when they announced that Embracer Group was coming to an end, and splitting into three companies, they talk about this news, and themselves, as if they’ve done something. As if they’re major players in gaming. But, if you look back, the only thing of note that Embracer Group has done is destroy the studios behind Saints Row, Time Splitters, and now also Alone in the Dark (there are more studios than this that they’ve killed). All this, while making cuts to staff at Crystal Dynamics, and cancelling a new Deus Ex game, while selling off Saber Interactive and Gearbox Studios (among many other things).

It’s starting to look like Embracer is a studio-laundering company.

They say, “We can’t make all the games we want to make.” And I continue to ask the question, “what games have you made?“

Sure, there was THQ Nordic, but that’s a thing of the past now. This is Embracer we’re talking about.

What exactly have you done, as a company?

It couldn’t possibly be about inflating their stocks, since they’re actually sinking themselves as we speak.

Source: https://companiesmarketcap.com/embracer/marketcap

Is Embracer just a bunch of amateurs with delusions of grandeur? I don’t know, probably.

But, this speaks to the gaming business as a whole, right now, and it would be unfair to say Embracer is the only company that’s conducting themselves like a studio-slaughter-house.

It would be unfair to write all of this without also mentioning that Microsoft, an actually well-known company, has and is killing other beloved studios. And they’re doing it entirely to inflate their stocks.

In a world where the poor and the middle-class can’t seem to get a grip on making enough money to be stable, we have these companies in entertainment that are grasping at straws for every imagined extra dollar that they can. And some of them, such as Embracer, are failing miserably.

And yet, we have to sit here, and watch as the studios behind our favorite games are murdered in broad daylight, while they attempt to restructure, to cover their tracks, to rehabilitate their image.

Is Tomb Raider next?

https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/06/17/embracer-group-embrace-destroy-repeat/

#aloneInTheDark #cyrstalDynamics #deusEx #eidos #embracer #embracerGroup #Gaming #greed #tombRaider #vultures