Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
The term Threadiverse has nothing to do with Meta’s Threads platform, I think the term is actually older than Meta’s announcement. The Threadiverse refers to the platforms that organize things into threads similar to Reddit or forums, right now this mainly means Lemmy and Kbin
I find mastodon boring and I just think people who wanna use defederated twitter are different and more common than people who wanna use defederated reddit. Peertube though, now that is a compelling argument.
Oh great someone posted a thing about how “ADHD and autism are only disorders in a capitalist society” again.
Speaking as a person with #ADHD I say unto you all that this take needs to die. I can’t speak for #actuallyautistic people but ADHD is difficult in a lot of ways that would still be difficult in, like, a post-scarcity space socialist paradise or whatever!
Dr Craig Lamont looks at how Robert Louis Stevenson & his literary creations have been – & continue to be – remembered & memorialised, in Scotland & around the world
Anyone else using Mac minis as VM hosts for self hosting? My Friendica server is a Linux VM on a Mac Mini in my living room. The VM is bound to a VLAN tagged network interface so it’s completely firewalled off from the rest of my network. Also got a second Linux VM on the same box for hosting local stuff on my main VLAN (HomeBridge/etc).
I feel like they’re really nice platforms for this, if not the cheapest. Cheaper than one might think though; I specced up an equivalent NUC and there wasn’t a lot of difference in price, and the M2 is really fast.
Just to add to the Asahi Linux chorus - I’m self hosting a bunch of things, not on VMs but installed on the actual OS, and it’s been incredibly fast and reliable. I do have thorough offsite backups happening because one should, but loving it so far.
@EU_Commission This is guarded good news, but it is about disability paperwork, which all disabled people have to deal with quite a bit.
What announcements are there about how accessibility will be extended and improved throughout the EU? How are disabled people being included in leadership in the EU?
"Endorsing countries include the United States, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Ghana, Hungary, Japan, Republic of Korea, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom. "
Starting my thread with this essay about my books & my cats. I created it a few years ago & keep it updated. It's whimsical, it makes me happy, and it's a good intro to my writing. I hope you enjoy it.
Note: All images in the blog post had alt-text last I checked. Book pages on my site should all have alt descriptions as well. Should. It's a work in progress.
Today in things I'm proud of making: this brand-new blurb graphic for my ongoing series, the Rollover Files.
TL;DR pitch: midlife crisis superpowers. Contains swearwords, moms & teens saving the world, idealism, and good people dealing with bad situations as best they can. https://books2read.com/kmherkes
Really struck by what @neilhimself says in this interview about writing with fountain pens: "...the process of writing is always a process of trying to trick my brain into thinking that what I'm doing is not important. And I remember the joy of moving from the typewriter to the computer (which shows how old I am) and the great thing was I wasn't making paper dirty. And suddenly writing became easier. And then, I remember the point where I went 'You know, I think it's time to try writing on paper again because that feels less important.'
"But also I was getting fascinated by the way that medium creates sentences. I noticed that when I write on a computer I don't necessarily know where I'm going. I can make false starts and change things. If I'm writing in fountain pen I don't want to see lots of crossings out so I may actually think my way through to the end of the sentence without sort of approximat(ing). I'll get a little bit more precise."
I've had similar feelings. In the typewriter days I used to draft by hand in a throwaway spiral notebook, make notes in the margins, then do my final draft with the machine. First, word processing freed me, but for a long time it's been a trap of always being able to go back and revise. There's never a final draft. I almost embraced my fountain pen a couple years ago. Maybe I'll give it another shot. https://www.ruv.is/sjonvarp/spila/kiljan/32201/a005i3
(quote starts at 26:24, full interview at 19:05)
Part of what I’ve been struggling with lately, feelings of disorientation and guilt about being inattentive to the phenomena of my life, presumes that I, as the individual subject, remain central and yet discrete from the world around me.
@nathanlovestrees@writingcommunity for what it’s worth, guilt about this is not helpful. Which also isn’t helpful to say, because emotions just happen, unbidden. But it might be worth exploring why guilt is the emotion that comes up. For me because, I’m where I am, it’s mostly regret that dominates my life, which is likewise not helpful. But I’m trying to sit with it and interrogate it and shift it.
Comment classer des dizaines de milliers de diapositives sans s'arracher les yeux sur une table lumineuse ? En les numérisant d'abord !
En zoomant sur les fichiers numériques, il devient possible de trier, identifier et (re)classer les photos.
Le retour d'expérience sur un 1er fonds a été présenté par les #ArchivesDeLyon au colloque des archivistes municipaux de l'#AAF à #Valenciennes.
@26aafa19 Great story!
"Since stone carving & installation were the most expensive items for the overall project, the monks decided to tackle that job themselves. This meant learning the whole CNC stone-carving workflow, all about stone cutting machinery, operating CNC machines, CAD modelling, CAM programming, stone masonry & construction techniques...
not without a few disasters..."
Hey, if you're seeing this and you are a published author (indie self-published or otherwise, doesn't matter, so long as you're on fedi) or a writer in general please reply with a link to your work and maybe a gist of what kinda stuff you write.
I'm gonna get some money for the holidays, and since I'm gonna be treating myself to books I don't really need anyway why not support some fedi friends? (consider doing the same too this holiday season) :ablobcatheartsqueeze:
The terrible human toll in Gaza has many causes.
A chilling investigation by +972 highlights efficiency:
An engineer: “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed.”
An AI outputs "100 targets a day". Like a factory with murder delivery:
"According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”"
"The third is “power targets,” which includes high-rises and residential towers in the heart of cities, and public buildings such as universities, banks, and government offices."
Joseph Fructus, dit Fructus-Rey, est un peintre et dessinateur français (1744-1831) obsédé par son #art. Sous son autoportrait, il déclare :
"Toujours a dessiné je passerois ma vie,
mon amour pour cet art tend presque à la follie".
Les #ArchivesDeLyon conservent 2 albums de vues des environs de #Lyon en 1820 et 1825, qui offrent des paysages inédits à la perspective... fuyante !
(Cote 17Fi 53)