Back in 2016, I got to taste a new flavor from Ben & Jerry's called "Feel the Bern" which showed their support for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. Anyone who gets surprised that Ben & Jerry's is political hasn't been paying attention.
Then again, some people became shocked that Rage Against The Machine was political leading to a commenter asking "what machine did you think they were raging against?"
I joined it to see what it's like (and to keep my "TechyDad" name from being taken by someone else).
It's nice, but it has 4 major drawbacks that I spotted pretty quickly.
First of all, your timeline consists of a random selection of people, not just people you follow. Apparently, this was a launch-day decision because they were afraid that people would sign in before anyone they followed was online and then they'd see no posts at all. I can understand this and hopefully they fix it quickly.
Secondly, the timeline isn't in chronological order. I'll see a post from 2 hours ago, followed by one from 5 minutes ago, followed by one from 7 hours ago, followed by one posted 30 seconds ago. There's no rhyme or reason and it's annoying.
Third, you can't search for topics. Let's say I want to see who is talking about LEGO. In Mastodon (or even Twitter), I could search for "LEGO" and find discussions to join. In Threads, you can only search for people. So unless the person's username includes "LEGO," then I won't see them - even if they exclusively post about LEGO.
Finally, there are no hashtags. This is another way of finding discussions and people to follow. Using the above example, I could look at #LEGO on Mastodon to find posts I like. With Threads, you can't use or search for hashtags.
It's definitely got potential, but it needs some more development before it is a Twitter killer.
I've only gone to Reddit for 3 things since the Great API Crisis:
In all cases, I went to Reddit to view what was happening, but didn't feel the need to comment myself.
I'm loving it except for one thing. I used Boost when I was on Reddit and loved it. The developer of Boost is working on a version for Lemmy and started up a community for everyone to congregate in. So I went to subscribe to it and I can't.
My best guess is that the instance that I signed up for (BeeHaw) defederated from Lemmy.world where the Boost community is. So my BeeHaw account is refusing to allow me to subscribe to it. If this is the case, I might need to consider moving instances.
The multiple instances is both a strength and weakness of Lemmy. It means that no billionaire can buy Lemmy and gut it. At best, a Musk/Spez/Zuckerberg wannabe could buy an instance or two. However, users could easily jump to another instance and escape their grasp. On the flip side, it means that a user on one instance could find themselves disconnected from other instances for various reasons (which the user may or may not agree with). Of course, even if this case, the user could jump to another instance if they think it's too big of a problem.
Whether this is more strength or more weakness remains to be seen, but it'll definitely be interesting.
I was the victim of a cyberstalker about a decade ago. This person was convinced that I was really someone else that she had a beef with. Her reasoning? We both like taking photos. (Apparently, I'm the only one posting photos online. All those pictures you see online? That's all me. No wonder I have no free time!)
I couldn't argue with her to let her know that she was mistaken because she had it on "very good authority" that I was lying about who I was. Namely, "God told her." And I'm not exaggerating here. She literally thought that God talked to her and told her stuff like who was committing crimes.
Oh and I was guilty of those crimes according to "God." I won't name those crimes because they're heinous, but suffice it to say she thought I was doing unspeakable things to kids. She was threatening to call my employer, the police, and everyone who knew me to tell them about what I was doing.
Luckily for me, all she had to go on was "TechyDad." I blogged at the time, but didn't post my exact whereabouts or my real name. The guy that she thought I was wasn't as lucky. She contacted his employer (a school in New Zealand) and everyone with the same last name as him that was on Facebook and near him. All to tell them what he did to kids. (Again, her source was "God." He didn't really do anything and he had to have quite a few awkward conversations to clear things up.)
I finally got rid of the stalker by grabbing her IP address (from one of her comments) and modifying my htaccess file to report 404 Page Not Found for only that IP. She crowed on Twitter about how she singlehandedly took me down and then moved on. (I and her other targets would report her to Twitter, but she'd constantly have dozens of other handles ready and waiting and would switch to them the second her main one was banned.)
To my knowledge, she's still out there stalking people.
Now, how would this have been different had she had my real name? Well, with a little work she would have been able to look up my location. (My name's pretty common, but she'd find me eventually.) Then, she'd locate my employer, my address, and other information. She could send me packages or mail harassing me. She could contact my local police to swat me or just to report my "crimes." She could contact my employer to report me and try to get me fired.
Now, I eventually did tie my real name to "TechyDad." I wrote a book and didn't want to publish under "TechyDad" so I used my two name. That being said, it was my choice. I definitely wouldn't want it to be required for me to use my real name everywhere.
I still have Boost on my phone and it's still working. (Reddit realized that turning off the old API was more complex than they thought and it'll take another few days to weeks to turn off.)
Once it stops working, I'll uninstall it. Thankfully, the developer of Boost for Reddit is working on Boost for Lemmy. So hopefully I'll be reinstalling Boost soon - and staying here.
I bought one with Bluetooth headphones built in. I have tinnitus and going to sleep was torture. I'd lay in the quiet room and be unable to sleep thanks to the loud ringing in my right ear. During the day, my hearing aid helps, but I take it out at night. With the Bluetooth sleep mask, I can put on white noise, drown out the ringing, and fall asleep.
As a bonus, I made a specific white noise mix for sleep and I seem to have trained my brain to have a Pavlov-type response. When that white noise goes on, my brain says "time to go to sleep" and I'm able to quickly fall asleep instead of having my brain run a mile a minute in the dark. (At least, on most nights. The Pavlov response isn't strong enough to overcome me being stressed about something if I go to bed.)
The sleep mask with Bluetooth cost me about $30 and it was worth every penny!
I heard about Boost coming to Lemmy also. I don't have any information about development progress, but I'll definitely be trying it out once it launches.
Boost is still working for Reddit because Reddit realized that turning off their API access was harder than they thought. It will take them a few weeks to do this. Once they do, Boost for Reddit will be dead.
I'm still using it to look into a few subreddits every so often. (Ones that I haven't found Lemmy replacements for.) When it dies, my time spent on Reddit - already very reduced from the pre-API crisis levels - will drop even more.
I like Liftoff and Jerboa. I flip between them depending on my mood.
I'm proud of my son. He decided to read a book based on "it was banned in some school districts" (not ours). He then scoffed at the reason for the ban.
I can't recall the book title at the moment, but the reason was that two characters have sex and the incident takes up one page. From what my son described, it wasn't overly graphic. This wasn't an erotica sex scene tossed into the book. It was just the normal kind of story description of events. Books like the Bible have much more graphic content.
I can't speak for every company, but what I do is have a separate development database and web server. I make my changes and test them in development. If something breaks, no problem. I revert the changes and no users were impacted. When everything looks ready to deploy, you move it over to live.
Of course, there are also QA and security testing steps in between development and live to ensure that your new code, while not showing visible bugs, isn't opening security holes.
As for the ability to nuke the entire database in 2-3 words, pretty much every developer has a story of the time when they accidentally wiped out data. In my case, I was working on an expense report application that I had written and was trying to delete some date. I wrote a query along the lines of "Delete From ExpenseReports where ID = 7." Then I highlighted the query (since I had many queries in that SQL tab) and hit F5 to run it.
Unfortunately, I realized the second that my finger hit the key that only "Delete From ExpenseReports" was highlighted. I had deleted ALL of the data. I spent the rest of the day recovering data and learned a valuable lesson about being too quick on running queries.
It was the worst possible response. Had they stuck to their guns, the right would have remained angry, but the left would have been fine. By ditching Mulvaney over the "outrage," the left became upset and the right wasn't mollified.