Any password restriction that LOWERS entropy is a bad restriction.

No, I’m not answering the question, I know. But I’m answering the better question, which is “is this a stupid thing to ask of a password?”, and yes it is.

I feel what you feel, and I agree with the dehumanizing comparison, but it is what it is. I just can’t understand the mentality of the herd because it highlights a completely different set of priorities from that of good social media environment. So I hold that comparison to all its negative contempt.

Threads comes up with minimal advertising and people join it without really caring what it does and how well it does. It comes with many of the same usability and content discoverability issues that Twitter had on a its worst of days. The hierarchy of sponsored content vs follower content vs follower interaction vs follower-of-follower content vs whatever the hell further down this clown parade Threads openly does is just completely whack. And it is still just as obfuscated as the rest in terms of being favored by its algorithm, plus monetization of content is a complete question mark. And yet people still join, and not any random person, but the every-person and the famous and the political. AOC herself ignores Mastodon and makes up an excuse, but is on Threads day one.

And Why? Why join a mediocre, underbaked, and by the numbers platform that basically doesn’t even innovate on the previous one? Because of the promise.

The promise it could be “The Next Big Thing”.

Not saying I’m above it. Not saying there’s superiority in standing to opposition to this or anything. For every thing I care about here, there will be many other things I don’t and where I frustrate someone. But it still does make me overall more jaded about the world regardless.

Not just worse, it’s also extremely dependent on instance choice when you first try to build your circle of follows. Having to follow people to find people to follow to find further people to follow makes that first step the most important, and Mastodon’s vision of an “Everything” feed is a disorganized mess. Intentionally, for anti-viral reasons.

The reason that’s an actual huge issue is that instance choice is also, easily, the highest barrier of entry to a new user. People are CONFUSED by it. Which means that if someone who would be in earnest willing to try Mastodon and give it time, may still end up coming out with a bad impression if they made a mistake with the prior step and couldn’t figure the right second and third step to overcome the hurdle.

Meanwhile, here on lemmy, our choice of instance is largely irrelevant. The only change we get on our “All” feeds is just a couple top posts, so we may not have the same starting position, but we do have something in the same ballpark.

This whole conversation is and was tiresome to have, honestly. I did see people try to solve it, but even there they’d run their onboarding environments built by mastodon users counter to what newcomers may want. For example, I saw this web wizard that would quiz me on my region and languange and also slur-censoring preferences… when all of that stuff is completely irrelevant to me - I look up entertainment communities by topics FIRST, not social philosophy, and specially not by regional peers, because fuck my regional peers.

Anyways, point was… Everyone I know who actually stuck to Mastodon… Have mastodon.social accounts. Exclusively. But here, people are already spread between .ml, sh.itjust.works and .world.

The hell?

99.99% of content on reddit is stolen. What do you think something like /r/WhitePeopleTwitter is about if not content theft from another large platform, with first come, karma served. No one, not a single person there, is ever even concerned with wether or not permission was requested and granted. Heck, not even guides are safe from this. Go visit /r/piracy, and check their wiki. Think of how cool, useful and well formatted it is. Appreciate it for a bit, right before being informed that even this was initially copied nearly verbatim from another online resource. One that, ironically, is banned from being posted on Reddit.

It’s a link aggregator, that’s the category of website it falls under.

And so is this one.

Steal and credit. Link the original directly if you feel too bad. Reword after research, but do it manually if it concerns you. You will be doing more than due diligence. Because if no one ever stole, we’d basically have no content.

Same thing for every single-game community. Dota’s deserted. Also things like patientgamers is lowering in activity.

So… A typical compass meme.