My reading is that it’s not necessarily a problem with the platforms but society at large.

One example you mentioned: yes, html5 games (and just downloadable itch/steam games) exist and they fill the gap left by Flash games from a gameplay perspective maybe.

But the mainstream appeal of Flash games and animations was different to what we have now. The social phenomenon of people randomly hacking together terrible flash games isn’t the same as the current tiny indie game phenomenon. I feel like the old ones were a bigger piece of the average person’s internet usage than the new one (the average person’s internet usage being 5% LLM 5% web 5% email 25% gaming 30% video and 30% doomscrolling or something like that idk)

I’m struggling to put into words what I mean by this, my comment sounds really vague when I reread it. The specific creative outlet that Flash gave people is not equivalent to what we have now, and the specific entertainment experience of browsing and playing Flash games is different from the experience of scrolling through itch. Am I making more sense?

Like of course the different technologies are different, but it’s where it fits into our lives that it’s really different imo. Hell, we could say this about Flash itself for the last few years before it was discontinued. Just the two thoughts of Newgrounds in 2006 vs Newgrounds in 2016 and how they fit into the internet ecosystem and internet culture are enough to see the difference.

I wonder if there’s a more efficient way to have things sync in blocks or something. I honestly understand very little about server architecture, much less decentralized social network architecture. Maybe having a smaller number of “centralized” (community-run, redundant, independent) nodes distributing blocks of federated data to take load off the actual instance servers that would only need to upload bulk data to fewer places?

Maybe this isn’t very different from how it already operates. Fuck if I know.

The TS80P is lower wattage, technically, but the heating element is right up at the very tip, instead of having a heating element inside the handle with a long metal piece transmitting the heat. It gets hot way faster than you’d expect, it doesn’t feel like 30W at all.

It punches way, way above its weight. Unless you’re soldering pipes, comparing the wattage to traditional irons is misleading. Love that tiny thing.

Only problem is that this design necessitates proprietary tips that are relatively expensive. Not a fan of that, coming from the no name Global South Especiale 2$ firestarter irons that are the norm where I am. Not the end of the world, but worth keeping in mind.

The one I bought came with a USB-C cable that couldn’t handle the current though. That was the only real red flag. Shame too, that cable seemed like it was silicone coated and would have been ideal.

Replying under the top comment but this really applies to all of these, how do these search engines determine what counts as a personal site? For example I had procrastinated for years on finally spinning up a static, barren HTML blog. The infamous Lucidity AI post introduced me to Mataroa and I got over the hump and started writing. Would that get indexed? Etc

Does it just crawl through webrings?

I don’t find it particularly funny but the art style is cool.

I don’t think I’ve ever expressed this anywhere, but I don’t even consider that place to be a stopped clock. Always saw it as a random number generator with no brakes, which is why all the bad shit gets amplified when it wouldn’t breathing room elsewhere.

I used to like the musical discussions on there, way way back, and the conversations were pretty interesting.

Too bad vaguely gestures in every direction

It’s kind of nice how everyone is in on the joke now? Like I think if you told the average person 15 years ago that a lot of history “documentaries” are racially motivated drivel you’d get a funny reaction.

I think I could show this to my (quite conservative) parents and get a good chuckle out of them now.

Granted I’m from the Middle East and the racist theories we have here have some of the roles swapped around. We don’t have 24 hour electricity but the average person genuinely believes we are the god-chosen enlightened people who are only held back by some combination of hubris, western empire, and “western empire” (this one should have a bunch of parentheses around it, several sets, I don’t want to get caught in some spam filter).

I remember seeing people mod the iPhone 4 to replace the glass back with a nice wood back.

Metal and wood can’t be a worse idea than glass. Grippy too. Although without the right treatment it can get gross I guess.

I did get shown the ad, I thought “huh, it’s not like Apple to do ragebait marketing”. I thought that was just what that is, and that everyone can see that. The “Newphoria” marketing tagline I think was verging on it as well, but I didn’t see anyone moaning about it online. Much harder to avoid for me because it was on giant billboards and shop signs.

I guess it’s just working as intended if people are recycling it every day into news fodder, not like there’s anything else going on in the world (ongoing genocide? No we have four tweets about Apple’s new ad and boy are these tweets strongly worded!)

Funny how the bare HTML makes this feel weirdly personal. Maybe I should get around to making the shitty personal website I always wanted to make fifteen years ago.