Notices by lost time system ✂️ (oracle@phantomthieves.net)

the more we use Apple Music’s desktop offerings on either macOS or Windows we’re just…increasingly more convinced that Spotify is running circles around them. Apple Music is a very powerful tool but not a great music streaming app

Updated Introduction Post! ✨

Hi, everyone! We’re the Digital Star System! We’re the owner and admin of our very, very small personal instance, PhantomThieves.net!

We’re a fictive-heavy plural system with a fascination with tech and the cozy internet. We’re a graphic designer, and we used to admin a forum.

Formerly known as @koda.

There’s more info about our system at the link in our bio. Otherwise, it’s nice to meet you! <3

Fedi will never replicate what twitter had. Bluesky will never replicate what twitter had. what twitter had was special, and entirely circumstantial; any attempt to recreate it verbatim will only ring hollow. it was a happy accident and any attempt to build something like it with intention will inevitably fragment and lose the magic

and it’s not a matter of, like, “we’re fedi, we don’t want to be twitter, so this is good”; it’s that fedi is actively held back by twitter-like design decisions yet lacking in that same magic that made twitter work. it is trying to be “twitter but better” and is failing at both of those things

it is so easy to convince ourselves that twitter was always this shithole, a cesspool, but it wasn’t always like this. not more than any other social media site, fedi included. I can only really miss what was had, because we’ll never see anything like it again

@weeble I’m sorry but posts like this one are exactly what I was attempting to address. I disagree with this sentiment heavily.

twitter used to be great. it was an astoundingly good place at building community, and spaces, and finding people. it has, arguably, done more for me than fedi has in that aspect, and it still is good at that. despite everything, it has been and always will be good at that. the artists helped, but the artists were only there because a community had already grown. it became a cycle in and of itself, but I don’t remotely want to try and write off twitter as “it always sucked”, especially as someone who was on it back during it’s “heyday” (at least, imo, 2014-2016). the best aspect of this, though, was that communities would often melt together, and blend, and they weren’t these isolated social circles the same way they are on fedi, and (to a lesser extent) Bluesky. one of my favorite examples of this is watching mutuals from different “places” come together - “my Porter Robinson mutual and my Hatsune Miku mutual are talking to each other in the replies of my post about Sonic 2006” is just not an experience you can get on fedi, because fedi’s structure and systems are inherently hostile towards fandom of any kind. (individual, themed instances, i.e. vocalounge.cafe, are not a replacement for this.)

and honestly, I still think twitter is actually just straight up better than fedi in a lot of ways. self-censorship isn’t as rampant there as it is here, for instance; it is, for better and for worse, an edgier place. I have friends who would never be allowed to survive on fedi but are able to find their people on twitter, and there’s something to be said about that. (that is, of course, entirely anecdotal though, and this could be representative of me being stuck in a specific fedi bubble - but then again, it’s so difficult to break out of that specific circle, unlike twitter, which….well.)

fedi is bad at what it is trying to do. I am not going to insinuate that it is just “overall bad” (I’m here, after all), but it is explicitly bad at what it is trying to do. federation is not suitably functional for building community. it is, at most, an obstacle. fedi is excellent if your goal is to build a personal bubble, but for engaging with the world at large, it is deeply, deeply isolating. if you don’t “pick a lane”, so to speak, it’s only going to be devastatingly frustrating to work with.

twitter was a “happy accident” because of it’s loose controls on audience settings. all of your posts could be seen by anyone, and (Circles notwithstanding) there was no way to limit them outside of a private account. it made for a great, beautiful melting pot of people, which fedi is both too small and too fragmented to ever properly recreate.

I’ll end this with a link to a recent blog post by @hikari , who touched upon a lot of this already, and put much of it better than I could: https://hikari.noyu.me/blog/2024-10-02-the-algorithm-is-killing-twitter-and-its-driving-me-insane.html

@weeble my general point is this: anything fedi does is only ‘better than twitter’ on the surface. building an audience is harder, because the audience is smaller and so vehemently against the idea of an ‘algorithm’ of any kind. building a community is harder, because instances and federation work against it, and getting “people recommendations” just isn’t a thing. if anything, fedi has more of a ‘clique’ problem than twitter does. (case in point, Yaseen)

you are not in any more control of your posts than you are on twitter. posts get scraped, indexed, whatever, and any malicious actor isn’t going to listen to bio hashtags. if we’re talking about “controlling your content”, you get slightly more granular control over who gets to see your posts on fedi than on twitter, but not by much, and even then there is no reason to believe any single instance admin is more or less hostile than a social media company.

fedi’s biggest selling point is that it’s “smaller”, which means that any issues that it does have are generally more isolated and not as visible. it also means that communities end up being tighter-knit because there are less people overall. but those problems are still there, and they’re not inherently much better (if at all) than they are on competing platforms.

@weeble I’m going to take this section by section here

firstly, as annoying as it can be, I don’t see anything inherently wrong with “attention-whoring” or “short, fleeting posts”, the latter especially; arguably, that’s what I like about twitter compared to fedi. it Is generally shorter, faster, messier. stream of thought, which is what I want out of my social media. if I wanted to do anything different, I’d be posting on my blog instead. ‘attention whoring’ is a hard thing to ‘describe’, so to speak, because like…what are you referring to here? bait posts designed to incite arguments? sure, those suck. but what about someone trying to grow an audience, for other reasons? artists, streamers, musicians, etc? that kind of thing is borderline impossible on fedi, at least not on the scale of twitter or even bluesky.

I also disagree with your point about “that’s what forums are for”, because forums are dead, and have been for a long time. I’m not saying this is a good thing, per se (I also miss them), but I’ve used them myself and they’re just not the same as twitter. again, it’s slower (which is a pro or con depending on who you ask), but also they’re just less active. forums are also more difficult for sharing things like visual art on, compared to a service with image and video upload functionality. and wrt Tumblr, we use it! still! but even then, the community we share our art and jokes and thoughts with is bigger on twitter than it is on Tumblr. the amount of people we have to share our passion for things with is noticeably bigger on twitter!!! we have met literal lifelong friends on twitter. people we’ve met irl. we’ve met friends at irl concerts because we were mutuals on twitter. we’ve had several IRL relationships with people we’ve met on twitter. I think what twitter does better than anything else is discovery; it’s not great for hosting a more dedicated community, but it’s a very, very good gateway. (for instance, almost all of our communities for fandom and whatnot have dedicated discord servers or w/e, which are designed for actual community. but we would never have discovered them if we didn’t meet people on twitter. the discord issue is Another Thing Entirely but literally no social media site is Good for community)

and legitimately, I do not see a reason for communities not to blend together. I, as a person, do not exist within the confines of my interests. I do not want to exclusively talk about Sonic the Hedgehog, or competitive Smash Ultimate, or Mac hardware. Twitter was a very good space for being able to be truly authentic 100% of the time, because there was always someone ready to talk about that one thing. i actually dislike the concept of “themed community spaces” like subreddits, themed fedi instances, and general fandom discords for this reason.

the self-censorship point is hard to really argue, but I raise a secondary question: “there are plenty of places to talk, you just have to find the right instance.” I host my own instance. I am literally the only person using this one. if I didn’t want to use this one, where would I find one without risking constant social rejection on all of them? where would I go if I wanted to find a place to post openly and candidly about my mental health struggles? where would I go to find a community that would welcome someone so schizophrenic and traumatized? like legitimately, where would I find a new space? I certainly don’t want to just keep signing up to new, random instances, until I figure it out. especially if those instances end up degenerated or isolated from many others on the fediverse. my point here isn’t necessarily that fedi is inherently more censored, it’s that twitter is very good at letting your posts get seen by people who will like them. on fedi it’s entirely a gamble, which requires inherently playing it more safe, unless you want to risk getting hurt, dogpiled, or otherwise attacked. and bluntly, I hate playing it safe. I’m much more stream-of-thought than fedi seems to want me to be.

fedi arguably fails at anything wrt brands. this is, partly, by design, but it also becomes a problem for, again, smaller creators like game studios, artists, and streamers. for numbers’ sake, our tuber account has ~1,000 followers on twitter, and ~250 on fedi. twitter post engagement is also significantly higher. it’s a network effect, but it’s still worth noting that fedi being ‘slower’ than it’s contemporaries do work against it for that kind of thing.

I also do not think I have more control of my content on fedi than I do on twitter. I can limit audiences, sure, but I can do that on twitter too. and when I delete a post, what’s stopping a rogue instance from not listening to that? all it does is put the fate of my content at the hands of an instance admin instead of a venture capital tech company. It’s not functionally any different.

you know what sure asus why the fuck not

@tk @mikoto I don’t know how to say this, but even with the current resale market, it’s still universally cheaper to buy and mod/upgrade an iPod nowadays than it would’ve been to buy one new

@mori dns servers should be cherished. everyone always blames DNS but no one ever tries to comfort it afterwards

i can’t believe it. mkbhd got Website Boy before the yascast did

@rat Eh, not our speed. We’re looking for less Winamp, more iTunes >_>

hey linux people

what are some good music players for the desktop? on Windows we’d use MusicBee but everything on Linux seems to either be kind of underbaked (Rhythmbox) or the ugliest app you’ve ever seen (Clementine/Strawberry)

heyyy so like,,

how’s bazzite. as an NVIDIA user

neo super mario bros

where’s euro bus simulator. i don’t want to haul freight i want to drive public transit

OH YEAH

we never posted our new build here!! ^_^

Ryzen 7 7800X3D, GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, 32GB DDR5-6000

3TB of NVMe storage (WD_BLACK), 1TB of SATA SSD storage (WD Blue), 4TB of HDD storage (WD Red)

PowerSpec 750W 80+ Gold PSU, DeepCool AK500 cooler, Lian Li Lancool 216 case

rate our new trans pride flag proposal