It occurred to us that CrowdStrike is an absolutely terrible name. It sounds like a terrorist attack. Of course, it felt like one on Friday.

When I first heard about what was going on, I assumed that “CrowdStrike” was not the name of the software/company, but rather some sort of advanced DDOS-like attack where they used systems they’d previously hacked and had them all do the same thing at once to another target.

I’ve had this happen to me, and even said to the person, “No nevermind! My train of thought is already derailed. Say whatever you were going to say now.”

I’ve got one engineer, only one in the two teams of like ten each that I work with, who doesn’t understand the concept of sending out a short email or IM to ask, “Hey, I’d like to give you a call about XYZ. When would be a good time for you?”

I mean, email is by far the best. It doesn’t demand real time attention and ALSO gives a body of text and attachments to refer back to whenever.

IM also offers these but not as easily organized and searchable.

Phone is worst: there’s no lasting record, no attachments, and you have to drop what you’re doing to participate.

Most of my team realizes these things and prefers email. There are a few who still rely on calls but they at least set up a time for calls.

Only this one guy (a young guy too) thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to call without any announcement or warning, then take up 30-90 minutes of your time with a call to convey information that could have been in a short email or taken care of in literally 5-10 minutes.

He always wants to chat about random shit before getting to the point, then give you a bunch of extra info you don’t even need.

Thus, I’ve started just ignoring his calls when it’s not a good time for me.

If he feels it’s okay to just randomly interrupt, I feel I’m just as justified in refusing to allow said interruption.

Well duh.

They’re selling your data to these companies, so that they can then sell them the ad spot.

They’ll also sell them access to the analytics around the ad campaign.

I get what you’re saying, and even partially agree.

But at the same time, if I’m looking for a social media/content aggregation platform, and I have to choose between “idealistic vision, small and problematic community, low quantity and low quality content” vs “corporate/capitalist asshole vision, large and mediocre community, variable quality and quantity content” the latter is going to win every time, based on the fact that there is actually at least some content there that’s worth my time.

So far with Lemmy, the only thing I get here is memes…and news that I am already getting from 4 other sources first. None of my niche Reddit communities have any real presence here, so my visits are brief and unsatisfying.

There’s concept and there’s execution.

Gotta have both.

I’m not wasting time on, or making any commitment to, a flawed execution, no matter how much I might appreciate the concept.

And for that matter, while I know this isn’t a receptive audience to the idea, decentralization isn’t the be-all-end-all concern for a platform like this. Idealistically it’s nice, sure. But for me (and I’d wager most), it’s not even in my top 5 concerns when deciding how (or if) I spend my time on social media.

For me, it has to be relevant, informative, fresh, and well-delivered. If that means trading some of my personal data to their collectors, I’m fine with that. Lord knows everyone else is gathering it too. In the case of Lemmy, the benefits don’t matter if it’s not delivering on my main needs of it.

I mean… My own experience here completely agrees with their overall appraisal of the situation.

The only reason I’m still here instead of back there is 3rd party app support…but rather than 100% of my Reddit time becoming 100% Lemmy time, it’s more like 100% of my Reddit time becoming 20% still Reddit, from a computer, 20% Lemmy on mobile, and 15% in disbelief that I’m spending time on Facebook, and the remaining 45% of that time I used to spend on Reddit, I’m just not spending it on social media anymore.

So yeah. Lemmy wants to be a reddit alternative, but for me it’s just not. It’s similar, but with less content overall, less relevant and less interesting content, less interesting comments, and on average a worse community. Other than the shitty spez business practices (which are a big deal, don’t get me wrong), Lemmy’s just “Reddit, but worse in every way” to me.

Unless Lemmy gets better, it’ll never be more than an occasional visit for me…and if Reddit were for some reason to right the ship, shit can spez, and reintroduce 3rd party app support, I’d probably go back in a heartbeat.

I read that as “proactively…before these people can speak up and add to our current issues”.