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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I have never strongly identified as any particular religion, so if that is where you’re coming from this answer might not be helpful.

    My parents both came from religious backgrounds, but they decided not to force me into any particular faith. When I was about 8, I started attending a Unitarian Universalist church, which certainly has religious tones but is very specific about accepting all kinds of faiths, choosing instead to focus on community.

    As a result, I’ve been exposed to many different kinds of faith. I don’t tend to believe any creation myths or creators myself, at best I am agnostic. But I do believe that faith is an integral part of the human experience. Faith and hope are inextricably tied together, even if they don’t both show up to every family dinner, to strain a metaphor.

    I may not have faith in a god or gods, but I find that sometimes I have faith in my fellow man. I hope the goodness of humanity will prevail. In much smaller terms, I have faith in my friends; I know that they will have my back when I need it. Every time I take a risk, I have at least a little faith that I’ll be okay at the end, or at least that I can pick myself back up.

    Humans rely on faith for a lot of things, and in my opinion, that doesn’t have to look like God.



  • I don’t have any interesting secrets or facts from my current ex-jobs, so I’ll share an interesting fact from a buddy’s. It’s one of those companies that offers automated phone systems (and chats, nowadays) that listen to your options rather than taking number inputs.

    This may no longer be the case, but these systems were not actually automated. There are entire call centers dedicated to these phone systems, whereby an operator listens to your call snippet and manually selects the next option in the phone tree, or transcribes your input.

    I wouldn’t be surprised at all if advances in AI have made this whole song and dance less in need of human intervention, but once upon a time, your call wasn’t truly automated - it was federated.




  • Threads is new - unless you meet someone who for some reason only has a threads account, just talk to them elsewhere.

    Otherwise, why is it the Fediverse user who has to get the threads account? Tell your people to make an account elsewhere. If you are conscientiously avoiding threads, you’re probably the only one in the relationship with a principle boundary to cross in this situation.


  • I’ve been reading up on this very thing today. Let me put it to you in paraphrase as I heard it. What we have to lose is a truly federated network - it has happened before, and it can happen again. Facebook, when faced with an app that most users preferred, chose to buy it, and now Instagram is just as big a project concern as the rest of Meta.

    You can’t buy a federated network, but you sure can improve on it, just as Google did with XMPP in days of yore. Once a federated chat protocol much as we’re on a federated social network, Google introduced Google Talk in 05, and federated it via XMPP in 06. They introduced a variety of features and QOL over the years, and being as big as they were, they held a vast majority of the users across all XMPP platforms.

    Then, in 2013, they announced that Google Talk would be phased out and as a result, a huge chunk of the federated community would be walled. All of a sudden, a thriving federated community was mostly just Google.

    People join just to talk to their friends, and to make friends; if most of those people went to Google for their features and most of their friends were there too, there was no big loss for them. It’d be like if Reddit used to be an instance all on its own and then suddenly decided to unfederate completely.

    That’s not to say that all this will happen with Meta, but I guarantee that is their goal.