Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

@KayOhtie Despite my being absolutely pissed at Bsky's concept of not moderating the discussion directly, their scalable mod tooling is great.

It's still not as robust as tools we used to kick around on ye olde forum days -- ie, moderation lists are really just RBLs/DNSBLs in fancy clothes, and we had tools that could refine from there -- but they scale a bit better and are easy for users to understand. And I like that a lot tbh.

@KayOhtie I was reading somewhere that he quickly became the highest per-user block and mute on the website.

While they should still deplatform his ass, if he's having a bad time? Good.

Anyway, to kind of summarize here: I think engagement is a terrible metric.

It's central to this idea that, from a website's perspective, people are monetizable eyeballs whose only useful output is growth and, eventually, buying product (and generating derivative revenue getting there, like ads).

And I'm... sort of relieved that there are still plenty of places to go that still care about the qualities of the website and community instead.

Contrast this with some of the observations made here (and to some degree, its followup) about Google Search: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

When your goal condition isn't giving people results, it's keeping them on the website as long as possible, your incentive becomes maximizing search time and making it hard to leave. Except for ad clickstreams, of course.

This is core to why sites choose to platform bad actors. Conflict keeps people on the site.

Person on the blue site gets it: "moderation only has limits when engagement starts looking like dollar signs": https://bsky.app/profile/brentosaur.bsky.social/post/3ld7je2uhi226

So much of this is sourced from the ads industry having power, where keeping people on a single website _is_ the revenue model. It's how these sites carve out power where relevance (eg, distribution) was once the metric, and you see it everywhere now.

It also signals Bsky wants to make people the product again.

@Aether Yeaaaah. We're currently to the "we would ban them if we could, use our cool block tools instead" stage of backpedaling. As if personal responsibility stops the asshole's brigade of flying monkeys, and they know it.

Anyway, this and my general discomfort over running my online presence like a content mill means I'm staying with Masto for the long term, I think.

Goddamn, if they're already splitting hairs over platforming anti-trans voices, their site really is speedrunning the downfall of Twitter.

Trust and Safety my ass. The whole reason people are there is because Twitter chose to platform nazis and became a nazi bar. You don't immediately screw this up by equivocating about personal responsibility and block tools. You ban the nazis so they don't get a foothold in the first place.

It's still absolutely wild to me that I can kitbash something together in Blender in less than a day, put it on a little wafer of Flash memory, and have a tiny robot 3D print it for me in a matter of hours.

Being able to make and print tiny 3D dragons and costume parts from my own designs is the future I actually want.

So I wrote a long post about my thoughts on Bsky being where the party atmosphere is right now, then stowed it because it condenses to this:

Modeling your entire online existence around a single website is terrible, no matter how good the vibes are today. While the vibes in a new places are high, we should carry them with us to smaller communities. And when they sour, we should become comfortable with being digital nomads. That way, when Bsky follows the trajectory of Twitter (or certain Masto instances go dark, etc etc), we can continue to exist and thrive.

Also, let's never repeat the era in which Twitter was too big to fail but no alternatives readily existed. That really fucking sucked.

Folks at the time specifically harped on Nintendo for its online perspective being naive and outdated, and to be fair, it was!

But in a world in which an always-on internet connection with vendor software updates means ever more elaborate ways to sneak in ads, rent you your own data, and exfiltrate your data to soulless content farms, a device with community updates, simple tools, the ability to post, and the ability to stay fully offline is the absolute best thing.

So far, my antidote to commercial software trying to sell me on increasingly more dubious AI has been to go back to creative software I enjoyed a decade ago. Which specifically means I've been spending a lot more time on my 2DS XL messing around with Colors! 3D and Pokemon Art Academy again. (I also plan to mess with Flipnote again at some point.)

I'm also very amused that Pretendo Miiverse is absolutely thriving, including and especially around the community for Splatoon 1.

@CoyoteTraveller The thing about SoT is: yes there are Xbox tryhards on there, but most folks are either just playing the game for fun or being chaos gremlins. And chaos gremlining is half the fun.

@gardevoir Anyway, I've done a lot of Bandit and took Warrior and Mystic to 11, and I agree that the RPG side needs... something.

My touchstone is, oddly, One Step from Eden/Duelists of Eden. That tells me that if there were a better rhythm to attacks and parries, and themes that were more clear to build towards, it'd be much easier to digest and play with the RPG pieces on offer.

@gardevoir Personally, I've found that the weapon masteries and utility spells give a lot of mileage, but the direct damage spells... not as much yet?

For example: Sturdy and Rage are strong enough to build just about anything around as a Fighter, especially a weapon mastery. 8s of invulnerability paired with huge damage is very, very good.

Bandit gets mobility and stabby pieces, which build nicely. Mystic gets... a lot of spells with unimplemented elemental mechanics?