Sharkey already has quote posts.

Maurice tends to have connotations of effeminacy.

Perhaps a gender-neutral name like Sam or Alex would work. Hilary is also technically unisex, even though you won’t find many men named Hilary nowadays.

Francis is a masculine name that in most modern English dialects is pronounced the same as the feminine form, Frances. Francisco might also work if you want to be more clear it’s a masculine name; Francisco also calls to mind an expensive city in California with a very prominent queer community, and you can always shorten it to Francis.

Please don’t impugn illiteracy. Being able to read is entirely uncorrelated with being a good person.

[About 21% if Americans are functionally illiterate] (https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp), and most have perfectly good reasons, including learning disabilities, poverty, lack of decent education, and domestic abuse.

That’s the whole point of this magazine.

Bread and Circuses is a tricky phrase, but no. This isn’t for the People, it’s for the Emperor. (The Emperor also wants to take people’s bread away)

It even has two Frances!

Also, mbin allows you to follow individual users as well as groups.

Mine was a NES. My dad had a 286 running DOS. I remember when my primary school got a PC with Windows 95, and I was gobsmacked that it booted to Windows directly.

Write your journal by hand, with a pen or pencil on paper. You’ll know you wrote it because it’s your handwriting.

Perhaps.

But the ICE agents on the ground are just following orders™. You know, like the OG Nazis.

The enemy of your enemy is your enemy’s enemy. No more, no less.

I use it to follow several ladies who post to multiple communities on lemmynsfw.com.

Depends on how you define social media.

Some people say it refers to any online social interaction platform, including forums, Usenet, IRC, and even email; the logical conclusion of this point of view is that the phone network is social media, and one can make the case that so is the postal service. This definition strikes me as too broad; I feel like it was dreamt up by people who have never known a world without facebook.com and try to force predecessors into a bucket where they don’t belong.

Personally, I would define social media as online communication systems which are account-oriented rather than conversation-oriented. Forums and pre-web communication systems are conversation-oriented. Yes, you have an account on a forum, but the forum is structured around threads. You can get notified of replies to a thread, and you might be able to follow individual threads, but you don’t follow individual accounts. Same with Usenet; there are some workarounds to follow individual people, but the entire network is based around threads. IRC doesn’t even need an account.

Social media is all about accounts; the whole idea is that you follow individual people rather than threads. I would further divide social media into post-based and file-based. Post-based social media is built around text posts. Replies to posts are the same as the post they reply to. Posts can have other media attached, but are still text posts with pictures, videos, or sound files stuck on. This includes MySpace, Facebook, the website formerly known as Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, BlueSky, Mastodon, Sharkey, Akkoma, Friendica, Threads.net, and so forth.

In file-based social media, posts consist of non-text files; responses and replies to posts are not the same as the posts themselves. This is things like YouTube, PeerTube (video), Instagram, Pixelfed (pictures), and Castopod (audio files).

ActivityPub allows post-based and file-based social media to interact with each other. Somebody can post a video with PeerTube, and get replies with Mastodon and Sharkey.

Then there’s what might be called the Slashdot model, which covers Slashdot, Fark, Digg, Reddit, Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed, and Substrings. Reddit is an interesting case of something which was not originally social media, but became social media when the people in charge added the ability to follow individual accounts, and have been trying their darndest to add in more and more features from traditional social media.

And that brings us to the threadiverse. Threadiverse programmes are built on ActivityPub, the same protocol that powers Mastodon, Sharkey, Akkoma, Friendica, PeerTube, and Pixelfed, all of which are social media. You use Lemmy, specifically, lemmy.world, and posted this question to a community on the same instance. Lemmy does not currently allow users to follow individual accounts, and thus under my definition, it does not qualify as social media.

However. I use Mbin, and thus I would refer to @NoStupidQuestions@lemmy.world as a magazine rather than a community. (Actually, I mostly use Mastodon, but I’m posting this with my Mbin account). Mbin does allow users to follow individual accounts; in fact, I follow several Lemmy accounts, and I can directly follow your account as well, right from the web interface. I could also follow your account with my Mastodon account. This means that even if Lemmy fails the definition of social media, it looks and acts just like social media to a bunch of things that do.

So is Lemmy social media? Honestly, yeah, I’d say so. Maybe it isn’t social media to Lemmy users, but it is to most of the rest of the Fediverse.

Fortran.

No I’m not joking.

Yes, it’s fine and it works perfectly well, but it can be better.

Let’s refactor it into metal and rubber instead of wood, put an air-filled tube between the inner and outer layers. That will result in dramatically less wear and tear while also smoothing out bumps, thus making for a more comfortable ride.

I genuinely regularly forget that other people consider mayonnaise to be food. The result is that people ask me if there is anything I don’t eat, I tell them the real foods I don’t like, and then they serve me something with mayonnaise in it, and I’m surprised and confused why they would do that before I realise that to normies, this is acceptable.

The whole point of the Internet has always been to spread memes.

Because the Internet is a communication medium, and communication is made of memes. I’m not joking. Words, language, music, and art are all memes. (The concept of memes is also a meme). Before the Internet, there was ARPAnet, email, IRC, and BBS boards; all about communication, and thus memes.

Before that, there was the phone network. Before that, the post office. Before that, books, pamphlets, and people telling stories down the pub or around the campfire. All memes.

In fact, this very post is made of memes. The previous sentence contains at least nine memes – the words In, fact, this, very, post, is, made, of, and memes. But there are more memes in there. The phrase in fact combines the words in and fact to make a new meme – in this case, when those two words combine, it asserts more forcefully that the overall statement is true. There’s also the spaces between the words, which makes reading the sentence much easier. Yes, believe it or not, spaces between words is a meme. Before the 8th century AD, WORDSWEREWRITTENINALLCAPSWITHNOSPACESBETWEENTHEM. Alcuin of York, a scribe and poet at the court of Emperor Charlemagne, came up with the ideas of lowercase letters and spaces between words to make reading easier, and his ideas were so popular that they spread across most of Christendom. Those memes were so successful that people think of them as natural and obvious parts of (alphabetic) writing, but they aren’t. They aren’t even a millennium old.

Writing is another meme, going way back to the Stone Age, and it has evolved and developed into numerous other memes, such as the Roman alphabet (which I am using right now), Arabic script, Chinese characters, the Cyrillic alphabet, Brahmic script, Ge’ez alphabet, the Greek alphabet, Cherokee script, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and many others.

Asking for social media without memes is like asking for food without proteins, fats, or carbohydrates. It’s like asking for sunlight without electromagnetic radiation.

“Whites” today now comprise literally every fair skinned ethnic background that isn’t east Asian. I shit you not, I think Hispanics who are fair skinned will be the next group subsumed into the white category

Funny story. Before the 1980s, Hispanic people were considered white. (Modern people praise I Love Lucy for including an “interracial” marriage, but people in the 1950s just saw a white couple). But since Hispanic people in America tend to be a bit culturally distinct from the ruling class, other white people wanted to be racist against them, and so the meme arose and spread that people of Spanish and Portuguese descent are a race distinct from all other people of European descent.

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There’s also ladies, which has been popular for a while. Chicas has some currency in places with large Hispanic populations.

We also had dames and broads in the 1930s, but those have fallen out of favour.