General Discussion

I had this aswell. Will do.

Imagine unwarping the face 😆

I think the ratio of trans to cis women on Lemmy is about even

She's a superhero. Fediverse Girl!

I did. I didn’t think it was a catfish though. I assumed it was some person promoting their streaming shit. Kinda smart, a smaller, mostly nerdy community of niche interests.

Doesn’t mean I didn’t block them though.

I can catfish you if you want

Goddamn it. I was just about to send you a gif of my genitals.

Ooh! You sound sexy and I definitely want to be your pen pal! I’ve sent you a DM!

Also, I have a great business opportunity for you if you’re interested! Have you ever heard of NFTs?

NFTs went away for a while because of crime and scams, but they fixed all those problems I swear. NFTs are the sexiest investment a sexy person could make, and they’re even better now that the leaders are implementing AI! It’s going to be revolutionary! It’s like E = Mc2, but now it’s E = Mc2 + AI. It’s the bees knees! It’ll make Stephen Hawking blush! I’ll help broker it for you, and if you send me 1 NFT, I will send you 2 back just because I like you.

Can’t wait for your reply!! ❤️

Just pm'd you asking for more deets.

The API is pretty open. you can write a script that sends individual messages to however many people you like

-- Comedy Heaven

Sure, but did you at least add context about why you're messaging them? Like some comment or post they made that you liked and you wanted to talk about similar stuff?

Because that would be kind of normal. That's what private messages are for. But this one is just bait.

Me too.

Well you shouldn’t feel loved.

This has nothing to do with you as a person and I would never want you to feel loved undeservedly. Because I care about you.

(Please don’t take my overwhelming kindness in the wrong way and feel as if you’re receiving any kind of love from me. As previously stated, it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with me being an excellent person.)

What's with that?

Is a homely looking person supposed to appear less scammy?

Wouldn’t that be THE BEST social media community where messages like that would actually happen? I would love to be a part of an open undivisive group of people who would write things like “Hey, I’m Joe, I do this and that and noticed you, lets band if you like” or “I’m jenna, I do the creative work for XY instance, lets connect”. That would be really cool.

Start c/penpals

But where is the place where I can get a message like that and trust it as it is the norm in that social network? McLuhan said “The Medium is the Message”

I'm not sure this is possible on the internet in general. Even in the early days of facebook people were forced to grow suspicious of their old acquaintances reaching out to say hi only to be hit with some "be your own boss!" MLM schtick, and that was when you could be fairly confident the sender was a real person that you actually have known for some time. Not to mention how suspicious we all are of some of the "living my best life!" type of humble-brag posts that are really just sad people playing pretend.

Add a layer of anonymity and I'm just not sure genuine trust could ever be possible. Try to take away anonymity and you wander into the quagmire that is personal privacy and still can't avoid the possibility of scams and compromised accounts.

I think that the Internet as a Medium simply cannot do what we have been trying to force it to do for years - serve as a good "third place" for socialization. Do people make friends here? Absolutely. But people make friends in the ICU, doesn't mean we should install a bar there.

The loneliness epidemic in a nutshell: we feel we can't trust people being open and friendly.

That isn't normal, by the way.