Season's the reason!
pixelscript
joined 3 months ago
Art supplies were historically not cheap. If you wanted to do this for a living, you were probably needing to aim for selling your art to the rich upper class. That implicitly meant catering to their fickle tastes and working on commission. You didn't make art for you and find your audience later, you made art for the customers you had or you starved.
And to put it bluntly, realism wasn't the fashionable hotness for most of human history. The more "crude" styles you may think of as objectively inferior to and less technically impressive as realism were in fact the styles in demand at their respective times. Fashion existed in ancient and medeival times just like it does today, and those styles were the fashion.
The idea of the independent eccentric artist who lives secluded in their ideas cave producing masterpieces for no one in particular leaving the world in awe at their genius every time they come out with something to show is a very modern concept. If any artist wanted to make a realism painting in an era where it was not popular, they'd be doing it purely for themselves at their own expense. So virtually no one did. Or if they did, their works largely didn't survive.
This is basically asking why anyone would live in or near a city like Los Angeles or New York City when Minot exists and has everything you could possibly need.
If you had to look up where Minot even is, you've proven my point.
Say what you will about whether living near the proverbial big city is worth it or not. But it cannot be denied, there is a world of experiences on offer at larger platforms that a smaller platform simply cannot provide. Network effect can be a cruel mistress.
I'm pretty sure they're referring to the concept of defederation and how that can splinter the platform.
Bluesky is ""federated"" in largely the same ways as Mastodon, but there's basically one and only one instance anyone cares about. The federation capability is just lip service to the minority of dorks like us who care.
To the vast majority of Twitter refugees, federation as a concept is not a feature, it's an irritation.
Beams? Of course not.
Beans? Absolutely.
It's "I am working" not "I be working".
From how it's used and understood, it's a lot closer to, "I am in a situation where I find myself working from time to time". "I am working" suggests you're doing it right now, "I be working" does not. This example is a unique, condensed way to convey a very specific idea that your idea of "proper English" cannot convey without a boatload of extra words.
If that's still bothersome to you, well, I guess have fun kicking that proverbial land-crawling fish back into the sea if that's where you get your jollies. IMO some prescriptivism is okay to get people on the same page, but the moment you use it as a cudgel to beat people who are very clearly already being understood, you're being a prude.
I've heard this one phrased: "Newbs deserve a helping hand. Noobs deserve a kicking."
how do people who "hate small talk" plan on being in sustained meaningful relationships
That's the neat part--I don't!
What else would your mom call you when she's pissed off?
I don't think the existence of large instances is in itself strictly antithetical to decentralization. The network effect makes them inevitable.
The power in the fediverse is everyone has a standard toolset to interact with the entire fediverse. Most people won't, and that's okay. The important thing is that, should larger communities become too oppresive as they gentrify, replacing them is a cheap decision, as you and everyone like-minded with you can squad up and leave at any time and lose nothing as the standard tooling of the platform facilitates that migration. You have mobility in the fediverse, and that permits choice to those who seek it.
This will stop being true once the larger instances start augmenting their experiences with proprietary nonsense. Features that only work there, that you can invest into and become dependant on, that you'd have to give up if you leave.
The day that happens will be the day that chunk of the Fediverse dies. Or, well, it won't die, it will probably flourish and do very well. But it won't be the Fediverse anymore. It will just be another knee-high-fence-gated community, that happens to run on Fediverse tech.
In the microwave of evil?
That sounds worse than I thought it was. I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there's only some high-profile defed exceptions.
A Fediverse where federations are opt-in instead of opt-out sounds like actual hell. Yeah, more control to instances, hooray, but far less seamless usability for people. The only people you will attract with that model are the ones who think having upwards of seven alts for being in seven different communities isn't remotely strange or cumbersome. That, and/or self-hosting your own individual instances. Neither of these describe the behavior of the vast majority of Internet users who want to sign up on a platform that just works with one account that can see and interact with everything.