Seriously, I wish I could just set up some kind of regex filter in iOS Shortcuts or something that would let me specify what notifications to show or block.

Doesn’t help that corporate social media apps will give you controls over every single notification type except for the ones they ram down your throat daily.

I have a very specific notification in mind: I’ve opened Instagram organically maybe eight times in the past decade, but I’ll open my messages if someone send me a message there. I can’t open their shitty platform on a browser as they hate VPNs on desktop. With all due respect to the meme posters on Lemmy, the fresh brainrot my friends send me on there is much easier humor to digest than whatever mix of Everett True, Star Trek, and den Döner-Mann nicht fragen warum er nur Bargeld nimmt the Lemmy All page has for me on most days. So I keep that malware on my phone. I want a notification when they send me a message. I want a notification when someone I meet wants to follow me. I’m squarely in the lower quantile of ages on Lemmy and a lot of people I want in my life will use that platform as their primary messenger, and while it’s not ideal, I do want those notifications. You know what notification I don’t want?

See some of today’s most watched reels!

Their stupid app sent me this notification, like clockwork, about once every 23 hours.

Check out some of today’s most watched reels!

I’ve never watched a reel in my fucking life. I still call them Stories and I haven’t watched them even when they were called that. They put the button for Reels right at the bottom where all the important stuff should be, so I’ll fat finger my way into the Reels section once every three years, and it’ll still be at the tutorial screen where it tells you to swipe and tap and whatever. You can’t seek through the videos of course - not interested.

They know I’ve left it on the tutorial screen for longer than 20% of their userbase has been alive. And yet —

Check out some of today’s most watched reels!

(This is mostly an exaggeration, it was like once a week, and I left notifications off until recently because I met a group of people who use it more than my usual crowd. I have not been bombarded by unfiltered notification sewage for a decade lol)

And they didn’t have a toggle for that notification either until pretty recently. Or maybe I didn’t look hard enough. Wish everyone would stop using these apps and try hacking together a terrible HTML website like the good old days. Computers are wasted on us all. Hosting video is expensive, it must be rapaciously profitable to be trying to get everyone hooked on it.

I wrote a similar comment under a similar post here.

I don’t know if it’s considered better to link or to quote an old comment.

Culture and identity and language and all that is a continuum in the Arab world as it is anywhere else. There are people who would claim that our native language where I’m from shouldn’t be considered “Arabic” but that’s a whole can of worms.

I am not a linguist, just a layperson.

I don’t like dividing us into little categories in most contexts because that’s often used in the context of saying “look we’re much better than <other group>” but very broadly four cultural spheres is correct:

• Levant has stronger Syriac and Turkish influence (which also applies to modern Turkish). Unfortunately that’s used sometimes as evidence that we a different (that’s not bad necessarily) or inherently better (this one is bad) people than the peoples to our south. Lebanon particularly also has a strong reliance on French and to a lesser extent English loanwords. Stereotypically seen as a bit gentle (when being generous) or effeminate (when making fun of it) as far as the spectrum of the language goes.

• The Gulf is where a lot of modern Arab stereotypes come from. It’s more heterogeneous than most people give it credit for but there’s obviously a distinct culture after crossing into the desert. The line is a bit more blurry on the East side than the West but this might just be my own bias coming from Lebanon. Some surprising English loanwords scattered throughout. More aggressive in tone on average.

• Egypt is kind of it’s own thing and it’s simultaneously a cultural juggernaut, especially in the past century when it was exporting a ton of music and movies and literature (we were doing that too to a lesser extent). Egypt has a massive population, most of which is very densely concentrated, and a huge media machine. I feel like Egyptian is the most widely understood dialect because all Arabs are exposed to it. Libya is grouped with Egypt sometimes and sometimes it’s not, depending on what you’re comparing.

• West of Libya is basically alien to me. There’s been more culture coming from there that we are exposed to now, especially music in the past decade. We all like seeing Morocco and Algeria pull off upsets at the World Cup but we see them as kind of their own bubble all the way over there. Their dialects are difficult for us to grasp and even the vocabulary they use is very different. Personally, I’ve defaulted to French or English with the few Moroccans I’ve met while abroad. Yay colonialism. Although we do bond over comparing language differences (“You say what for pants? That’s funny.” Etc )

• Then there’s Standard Arabic (we call it Fus7a), which nobody speaks natively but we all learn in school. Most books and articles are written in Modern Standard Arabic. Divided opinion among the more nationalistic types on whether or not it’s important or should be taught. It’s the formalized form of the language and while I’m terrible at writing or speaking it, I do find it useful when I need to fall back to a word I can’t think of. I think of it as a kind of linguistic gear change. You can also drop the odd unexpected MSA word or form here and there to catch people off guard and punctuate your speech but maybe that’s just me.