I mean, you’re paying them either way. Businesses money for salaries comes from customers. It’s still silly and indirect, but it’s not like you wouldn’t be paying the workers’ salary anyway.

Crap, it never occurred to me that “lame” was even related to disability. I mean, obviously it is - though in my mind that aspect of the word was almost exclusively related to animals. Is lame rude now too?

You’re right, I can learn the basics of regex in 30 minutes. Then I can write my one regex. Then I can forget the basics of regex in 3 minutes, because regex’s syntax is random garbage that makes no intuitive sense, and I hate and suck at memorizing nonsense. Repeat every 4-16 months.

It’s true though that regex is entrenched enough that even if something is easier to read, it’s unlikely that it’ll replace regex any time soon. You’d need a couple big names to adopt it, then many years.

But if there’s a readable replacement that can convert to and from regex - well, screw it, I’m in. Even if I’m required to use regex in some program, if I can write something that makes sense without the requisite half hour of googling crap, I’ll just use it as a separate tool to make and read regex strings.

That or a in depth description of your last bowel movement.

I hope to get to that point soonish, but without a starting set of mostly interesting and inoffensive subs, building a collection of subscribed thingies is slow going. In the meantime, I’m scrolling all and blocking all the communities that seem mostly like a place to be angry.

The connect app has the ability to block instances, which I find very helpful.

I have no feel for what, “In 140 yards, turn right”, means.

“In a bit less than 140 meters, turn right.”

These people need to learn how to conversation then. Remember: it’s not an interrogation or exam, you don’t have to exactly answer the question as though you’ll be flunked out of a class for the wrong answer. So:

“Oh man, I don’t remember. But I really like x by y. What kind of music do you listen to?”

It’s not that hard.

I can’t speak for anyone but myself.

I am not attached to the fediverse. The federated aspect is, to me, interesting from a technical standpoint, but irrelevant to my decision to be here. I’m also not particularly attached to foss principles.

I came here because I got annoyed at reddit. I’ll continue to poke around here exactly as long as it’s entertaining/informative. That purpose is not contradicted by leaving here for threads (it’d have to be a reddit clone instead of a Twitter clone to pique my interest at all, but leaving that aside).

So if, over the next few years, more and more of the content that I was interacting with was coming from threads, then threads split off, it’s reasonably likely that I’d want to continue interacting with threads. And if the majority of the stuff I was interested in was on threads, I probably wouldn’t bother coming back here.

A reasonable reaction to that is “don’t let the door hit you on the way out”, and that’s fine. But what could conceivably happen is that something like threads uses what has been built here to gain ground, then starts leeching away communities. They start moving to Facebook servers because Facebook has butt tons of money so the servers are stable, and besides, everyone else can still get there from other instances. Then Facebook starts adding incompatible features, which motivates more migration to their instances, and so on and so on, then there’s a split.

Now Facebook’s threads has devoured your communities, taken your users, and so taken your content, mostly just to jumpstart it’s own growth. To get what they are familiar with, people like myself stay on/move to Facebook, leaving the fediverse to rebuild the communities that it built in the first place, out of the people who care more about foss principles. While appearing to external observers like an inferior clone off the Facebook threads thing, to add insult to injury.

So the issue is that you wouldn’t lose just the new stuff from Facebook, but a fair bit of the preexisting stuff that sided with Facebook after the split out of convenience. What you’d keep are the people who stick it out out of loyalty to foss or federated or some other principle - and that may not be enough to carry on the level of content that’s desired, even with the fediverse’s “size isn’t everything” philosophy.

Of course, it’s possible that either a) none of that would happen even if there were federation with Facebook and everything would be fine forever, or b) all of that would happen even without federation with Facebook, just without the intermediate stage where there’s interaction. But the above seems to be the concern, and it’s not without merit (both because of past examples and, well, because I know I personally wouldn’t stay if the content were more appealing somewhere else and I don’t think I’m unique).

Personally, I think that with Twitter reeling at the moment, all the Facebook version has to do is be similar enough to be familiar, have good performance, and be easy to use to have a shot at that nabbing that part of the market (including users from the fediverse) - interoperability with mastodon or not. But predicting the future is rather difficult, so it’s hard to say.