This is going to sound a little strange, but playing music on stage works for me. At least in moderation, and provided you aren't the lead singer/MC who has to interact with people. You just wanna be some guy in the corner jamming on whatever you jam on.
You kind of get the best parts of being in a social situation in terms of seeing new places, having interesting experiences you can ponder for days to come, and occasionally getting free food and/or a green room where you can veg out in isolation and no one expects anything of you. But you can avoid the negatives: having to make small talk, looking awkward with nothing to do and no role to play, being labelled antisocial, getting roped into some horrible activity you did not sign on for, etc.
And it turns out there are a lot of introverted musicians. You only really need one extravert in a band.
Apparently, it's an American thing, though my Canadian daughter was showing off her beans on toast yesterday which left my puzzled and googling.
A better RSS experience
I've been playing around with RSS views of the fediverse hoping to get something comparable to multireddits, but there is a problem.
First of all, it is possible to get reddit feeds on both kbin and lemmy. The URLs look like:
``` https://KBIN_INSTANCE/rss?magazine=MAGAZINE_NAME https://LEMMY_INSTANCE/feeds/c/COMMUNITY_NAME?sort=new
```
Unfortunately, these are problematic when dealing with instances that are not your home instance. Any links to the post page will be absolute remote instance URLs, which means you cannot interact with the post (e.g. leave a comment). The URL really needs to be made relative to your home instance for that to work, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to fix that for a specific post. I can only fix the URL to the magazine/community itself and then hope to locate the post within it again.
If there is a way to get home instance-relative RSS feeds, I'm all ears! Failing that, I might work on a scraper that can take URLs of the form:
``` https://KBIN_INSTANCE/m/MAGAZINE_NAME@REMOTE_INSTANCE https://LEMMY_INSTANCE/c/COMMUNITY_NAME@REMOTE_INSTANCE
```
and generate RSS feeds out of them? But I don't want to reinvent the wheel if something like this is already possible?
It might also be useful to someone trying to write an app with a multireddit-type feature? I will definitely release source if I come up with anything.
EDIT: fixed a typo in URLs
Can the fediverse really scale?
I'm thinking about kbin/lemmy here, but my understanding is that every instance has to maintain a copy not just of the magazines/communities it hosts but also every other one its users subscribe to? So in a worst case scenario, the storage requirements would grow in sort of an N-squared fashion, would they not? If all of reddit wound up here, that's a lot of storage.
I guess the idea is that a smaller instance would only have to manage some subset of magazines of interest to its membership. But all it would take would be some bots sneaking in there and subscribing to everything, sort of like the kid who hits every button on the elevator.
I'm not sure what the solution is? I think it's good to have more than one copy of any given magazine/community kicking around in case its host instance goes dark/defederates/whatever. But maybe there is some sort of middle ground? Like perhaps a somewhat torrent-like scheme for backup where instances can contribute as much storage/bandwidth as is realistic for them? I'm not sure how that would work, but you would somehow want to ensure that there are a few redundant copies of every community distributed across all instances. And of course an instance could still go on caching the more active communities for practical reasons.
Is there a way to get an rss feed from a kbin magazine? I noticed I could do that with lemmy communities but haven't found a way in kbin yet.
Fwiw I am trying to group subscriptions in the absence of a multireddit-type feature, and rss lets you group feeds. I don't think anything like that already exists, does it?
At the beginning of the blackout, I thought if spez changes his mind I would go back, but while I haven't severed all ties, I feel reddit growing increasingly distant to me now. I have long felt that it's not great when one profit-driven entity takes over an entire category of social media, and I've found some kindred spirits here.
In the Fediverse, I feel I've discovered a new continent with a strangely medieval society, and to my surprise, it's been winning me over despite the feudal bickering.
I haven't severed ties completely but have unsubscribed from almost everything but a few fringe subreddits that haven't developed communities here yet. And I joined /r/redditalternatives and /r/modcoord during the blackout.
I think it's saved properly, since when I go back and look at Settings -> Appearance -> Homepage, it does say Subscriptions. But when I load https://kbin.social it always gives me the All view and I have to change it manually.
Though actually, now that I'm looking at it, when I choose Subscriptions, the url changes to https://kbin.social/sub so maybe I just need to make that my bookmark?
I think there may be a bug in Settings? I changed it there but for me at least, it keeps reverting back to the All view.