early_riser

Ah the humble service set identifier! It seems to have grown from a simple way for access points to identify themselves to potential clients to a little public bulletin board for airing one's grievances toward noisy neighbors or showcasing one's wit.

What notable SSIDs have you run into out in the wild or created yourself?

Is it number of times the community page is requested? The number of users that post, comment, or vote? Or something else?

It would be nice to get separate posts per day and comments per day etc. to see in what ways a community is active.

Do you rarely vote on anything at all?

Do you upvote when something is interesting but rarely downvote? Do you downvote when something isn't interesting but rarely upvote?

Do you vote to signal agreement or disagreement?

Do you vote to encourage insightful replies regardless whether you agree or not?

I rarely interact with the voting system on sites, aside from the occasional missclick, that is. While I think it can be useful when searching for answers or tutorials, especially on topics you're not familiar with and can't judge competence vs BS, I think in more social spaces it leads to both echo chambers and karma farming, and it feeds social media addiction by giving you little validations for every upvote you receive.

I also think it prevents people from having more meaningful interactions. Rather than replying with 'This was insightful", "I disagree because..." or "that was really funny" You just make a number go up or down.

On a good day I'm up around 5 AM, but I often find myself up even earlier than that. I joined my first Lemmy instance during one of these bouts of insomnia, prompting my username.

My avatar is from a worldbuilding project I work on.

The closest I can offer isn't quite the same, as I wasn't working retail and it wasn't on Black Friday, though it was directly related to the Thanksgiving holiday.

I used to work in a high-volume call center for the local transit authority, booking rides on the curb-to-curb paratransit service. We only book trips for the following day, but since we're only open weekdays we have to book for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday on Friday.

Even on slow days we get around 200 calls per agent per day, and Fridays are even worse. 3-day weekends are a notch above that, since now we also have to book for Tuesday. But the granddaddy of call-center gauntlets is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, since we're booking Thursday through Monday. It's a 12-hour shift, calls from wall to wall from 7 am to 7 pm.

As I mentioned on another post on here, I have a guide dog. I have had 3 over the course of my adult life, and the time this story takes place I was 1 year in with guide dog 2. Guide dog 1 was retired and living with other family members.

So I wake up at 4 AM and catch the bus to work, dreading another pre-Thanksgiving soul grinder. I'm sitting at my desk. I glance down, not without a hint of envy, at guide dog 2 sleeping blissfully under my desk, then turn my attention to the Sisyphean torment that awaits me. My mouse hovers over the start button on the Cisco agent desktop, as I glare at the clock in the corner of the screen. I'm determined to start this living hell no earlier than necessary.

Just before I left-click, the phone in my pocket starts ringing. I'm pretty introverted and rarely get (relevant) unprompted calls on my phone, and anyone who would call me knew where I was, so I figured this was important. The caller ID says it's my dad. Now I know this is important.

Dad: "Early_riser, guide dog 1 passed away this morning."

I had to process that for a second. We had a pet dog, a positively ancient lab mix who managed to hang on another year or so after this, and thought he was referring to her. After clearing that up I ran into the conference room off of the main cube farm and started ~~balling like a baby~~ giving my body's moisture to the dead. My supervisor heard me and came in to check.

Now guide dog 1 had accompanied me to that job for a good year before she retired, so my supervisor and coworkers had seen, known, and interacted with guide dog 1. She wasn't just "some dog" to them, and I believe that served to make my situation more real for that supervisor. She actually asked if I wanted to go home, on this the busiest most grueling day of the year, to say goodbye to my dog.

Of course I said yes, and me and guide dog 2 took the elevator downstairs to catch the bus back home. Because of the time I couldn't take the express, so I caught the longer local route that would take about an hour and a half. As it happens, a friend of mine, a fellow commuter who often sat near me on the ride into work, got on the same bus. She had also seen and interacted with guide dog 1 on the regular, so I told her what was going on and she offered her condolences.

We talked about other stuff until we arrived at my stop. I said my goodbyes and waited to get picked up to go to the vet. We arrived ahead of guide dog 1, so I went in and paid for her cremation. When my dad arrived with guide dog 1's body, we all spent a few minutes saying goodbye.

At the particular place that gave me this dog, on the day you meet the dog you're sat down alone in your room and the trainers go from room to room introducing the new dog, then they leave you alone for an hour to get to know each other. It's a scary and exciting time, the wait before the reveal, seeing the creature that will keep you alive for the next 10 years. I had wanted a german shepherd, but ended up with a little golden retriever. My initial disappointment melted away after I spent some time rubbing her belly, and I caught myself humming a song my parents sang for me when I was a baby.

"You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray. You'll never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don't take my sunshine away."

Right then and there I had a thought. "She's going to die someday. This little furry ball of oxytocin with deep brown eyes will be gone someday, and you'll think back to this moment, sitting on the waxed tile floor of your room at this guide dog school, petting this dog you just met. And you'll remember singing her the same song you were sung when you were little. And you'll sing it again, in front of her lifeless body, with tears streaming down your face."

And so I did.

This may sound heartless, but I'm happy she died when she did, in the way she did. I was terrified of having to make the decision to end her life, having to decide whether I could afford to keep her comfortable, having to put a dollar amount on our friendship. If it came down to it I would do what was best for her, but I wouldn't feel good about it. That's part of why I gave her to someone else (well that and I lived in an apartment at the time and couldn't take care of two dogs). So I was relieved to hear she passed on her own, peacefully in her sleep.

I was also miserable at that job. The lady next to me in the cube farm had been working the same sort of call center job for over 20 years, and just imagining that as a career made my skin crawl. Now I'm sure this is a coincidence. Guide dog 1 couldn't have timed her death like that, but I like to think she knew I'd get the day off, so chose the perfect time to go. It was her last gift to me, sparing me from 12 straight hours of screaming customers.

Google isn't what it used to be, but the free alternatives like DuckDuckGo aren't really that great. Given how vital a good search engine has been to make any use of the internet since the late 90s, I think it's not unreasonable to offer quality search at a reasonable price.

I'm not aware of any paid-for search engines, and I'm not sure what they could charge for without seeming greedy. Perhaps have a free tier that limits you to so many searches per day and a paid tier with unlimited searches and another with API access or something. The key would be to have a good-better-best system that makes everyone feel they're getting a reasonable product for what they're paying while keeping the experience serviceable for free riders.

Email is similar. While it's not too hard to set up a bare SMTP server, a bare SMTP server will get you absolutely nowhere because every reputable email service will flag it as spam. The hard part is making the server pass all the sniff tests that other services use. You also cannot self-host because residential ISPs block port 25, again as a spam prevention mechanism.

I pay for Proton, not because I trust them per se, indeed the more a company trumpets about how secure and anonymous they are the more suspicious I get. But I trust them more than I trust Google and that's what matters.

I miss traditional message boards. No karma, no sorting algorithms, you just get new topics on top and replies are sorted oldest to newest.

You can have forum threads that go on for decades, but Lemmy's default sorting system quickly sweeps older content away. I'm aware you can mimic the forum format by selecting the "chat" option in a thread and sorting by old, and you can sort posts by "latest comment" which replicates the old-school forum experience pretty well, but nobody does it that way, so the community behaves in the manner facilitated by the default sorting algorithm that prioritizes new content over old but still relevant content.

I also notice that I don't pay attention to usernames on Lemmy (or Reddit back when I was on it). They're just disembodied thoughts floating through the ether. On message boards, I get to know specific users, their personalities and preferences and ups and downs. I notice when certain users don't post for a while and miss them if they're gone for too long.

EDIT: given this is my most upvoted post on here to date I'd say the answer is yes.