I'm not paying for YouTube. It's algorithm sucks, it routinely sells your personal data, and virtually none of the money you spend goes to its creators--that YouTube pretends otherwise is repulsive. How did we get in the situation where we're being asked to pay more and more for worse and worse services? I'm not gonna be a part of it.

It's hard to imagine that situation wouldn't always lead us here. The advertiser-centric internet has got to go.

Why wouldn't they want to stay? It works for them. Before ideology, before morality, before any other thing you can conceive of is plain, simple convenience. And Reddit is certainly convenient. Once enough users leave, they'll leave, too.

My remote call-center job. It takes it out of me like no other job has. Every single second is measured and tracked and "optimized". Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful to have the job. It pays better than anything else I'd be qualified for (probably) at 18.50 an hour, and I'm immunocompromised, so I need remote work. More than that, I'm genuinely good at it. But I can't help but feel that it's not for me forever, and I don't know how to transition out of it.

(It's iOS and macOS tech support)

It's worth remembering that morality has little to do with it. Back then, sharing was simple and consequence-free. Now it's not. If you want to create a community like that, it needs to be a curated space where only people who are able to share can join.

Usually a disposable MMO or idle game. I like the feeling of progression.

Heehaw! I exist in this space now!

Some excellent games mentioned so far, so I'm gonna go with "Night in the Woods". It's this crystal-clear reflection on what it's like to grow up now, what it's like to live in America--good and bad. It's gut-wrenching and funny and beautiful.

Simple: if what you want is to try to get eyeballs on your art, you're not going to post it on a website that restricts its visibility. I'm never going to see that much content beyond my own instance. I need to follow the artists individually to see their art, or they need to be somehow connected to someone on my instance.

That's the ultimate non-starter.

Twitter doesn't have this problem, and Twitter still works (mostly). It's still the only reliable source for commissions.

Night in the Woods. It's hits you in places you never knew were sensitive until you're acutely aware of each and every exposed nerve.

What's the point of that? Does it improve your experience using the website at all? If anything, I'd prefer the opposite: a sizable number of people that are available for me to follow and post things relevant to my interests.

Be active in your community, whether that be online or off. People do notice you, even if you're not sociable.

Twitter and Reddit got so awful I needed to leave. Lemmy is fantastic and underpopulated, but Mastodon isn't what I would want. I can search for hastags, but there's no other way to search beyond the instance I'm in. That's not what I want. I want a space that I can curate AND I want a local community. I got the latter, but the former...not so much.

So in a sense, I'm still a skeptic. But what else is there?

It depends on the mechanisms that govern atomic arrangements, doesn't it? If we have infinite time, and infinite space, and if it was an (essentially) random process, then sure. On a long enough timescale, the probability of that arrangment approaches 1. But I don't think those are the circumstances that we're dealing with.