This was very interesting! While I don’t fully understand everything, based on what I can, I’m partial to the second one. If the the instance disappears, I doubt the hoster wants that stuff up anyway. It makes it easier on everyone, and the replies seem (?) to stay up as well. A win-win. Either way it goes, I can only be thankful to the engineers working so hard to make this a reality. 🙏

Idk. My folders are always decently organized since I’ve been nutty about since I was a kid, but the specific file structures different services can demand is a headache. This is why I prefer more simplistic services without a database, but there’s always trade-offs to be had with both options.

I’m a bit split on it, but I do agree that it can be annoying and when you mess up, services and links you’ve sent to other people don’t work and it can be quite agonizing. It’ll probably get better for me as time goes on, but man it can bite at times.

Thank you, this makes sense. Is there any hope for Mastodon and other services to achieve a similar level of parity without eating up a ton of space? I feel like it is a big hurdle for Fedi, but I understand these things take time and a ton of work.

Ehhh nah. As someone who used character.ai before there are many horrible bots that get cleared and the bots have been impossible to have sex with unless you get really creative. The most horrendous ones get removed quite a bit and were consistently reposted. I’m not here to shield a big company or anything, but the “no sex” thing was a huge thing in the community and they always fought with the devs about it.

They’re probably trying to hide behind the veil of more normal bots now, but I struggle to imagine how they’d get it to do sexual acts, when some lightly violent RPs I tried to do got censored. It’s pretty difficult, and got worse over time. Idk though, I stopped using it a while ago.

Tbh setting up all cool frontends has always mystified me but I like minimal terminal interfaces and use stuff like MPD, Yazi, etc. and it seems like a pain to manage this big thing. I think the benefit really sets in when it’s something you’re sharing with others.

Like, I’d love to have all my documents in a folder written in pure markdown via vim, but hedgedoc helps me share and collaborate with my friends. A lot of people who operate these services share them with family, so I imagine ease of use helps. Tracking can be huge for people as well, but idk I just write down my episode list or have a separate tracker app.

Speaking of, Yamtrack is really good for that.

Overall, I feel like minimal UIs really help me focus instead of getting lost, but sharing my media via Jellyfin is one of the few reasons I want to do this in the first place. I like providing access to obscure media that’s hard to get ahold of for my friends. So I’d say I’m a mix. Minimal stuff for myself, but interfaces for friend/external access.