The joke’s on us, we’ve been in the dystopic megacorp era since the 00’s.

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

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

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

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

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

They are. The Republican playbook in every state is to slash education funding, make abortion and birth control as hard to access as possible and then wait 20-30y for a big poorly educated population to grow that they can control easily with media and the Jesus

That depends. Are you doing this just for your own enjoyment or trying to use that art for commercial purposes? Do you have the artist’s permission to modify and pass on their work?

If it’s just for you then go hog wild. If you’re planning to use the modified art commercially or post it online publicly you should get the artist’s permission first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the big one I want too. I’d love to curate topic based feeds from multiple communities so that other people could subscribe to a single coffee feed instead of 5-8 communities that they had to find themselves. I think this would be particularly useful for new people joining Lemmy, it would save a lot of time if they could just sub to a couple of multi’s and start getting content they’re interested in rather than needing to build their sub list entirely from scratch.

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

They’re using the same playbook the FBI used to split leftists and prevent successful rallying around community leaders in the 60s, 70s and 80s. It’s time tested and it works.

When I logged in about six weeks after the ownership change my feed included Elon Musk, Andrew Tate and 2-3 other right wing influencers. I follow none of these people, I have zero interest in what they have to say and I find them reprehensible. I deleted my account and haven’t used the platform since.

The BBC, NPR and the NY Times. NPR in their effort to seem unbiased allows Republicans to frame the discussion of all things political and NPR participates rather than calling out obvious falsehoods or reframing any issue around facts. I bucket them firmly in the neoliberal controlled opposition camp. The NYT has become yet another corporate mouthpiece and the BBC does whatever they do. I never paid much attention to CNN but I engage with them even less now that they’ve switched to FOX’s manufactured outrage “entertainment” model rather than engaging in journalism.

So, uh, all of those? I can’t handle popular Republican “news” sources, they tend to twist facts in the name of this week’s political expediency or simply lie.

Edit: I’d like to say “literally any corporate news source” here too, all of them present a view of the world that reinforces their owners’ worldview and/or lobbies in their interest. All media should be carefully evaluated for a slant that benefits the owner of the publication regardless of their apparent political stance.

CR has been on my retirement radar for a while. It remains to be seen how viable that thought is once global warming and sea level rise really ramp over the next 20-30y.

I mean, wouldn’t you if the rake handle had huge bags of cash tied to it? They’ll always step on the rake but they’re practiced enough that they only get hit in the face occasionally.

If only they had a safe place to put their money that was protected by law and insured against losses.

Ask around, your company may have some kind of tuition assistance or vouchers to cover exam fees for relevant certs.

Whenever possible take advantage of your company’s continuing education budget. Get relevant certs, take university extension classes, buy study materials and books, etc.