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.
I have no idea why Mastodon does what it does, but I also have no idea why anyone would build a weird auto reposting group thing for Mastodon. I honestly don’t understand how I’m supposed to use it, or preview what a group is. The listing I saw doesn’t tell me anything. Very odd.
US joins in other nations in swearing off coal power to clean the climate::The United States committed Saturday to the idea of phasing out coal power plants, joining 56 other nations in kicking the coal habit that’s a huge factor in global warming. U.S. Special Envoy John Kerry announced that America was joining the Powering...
TLDR: A study by Consumer Reports found that found that across the industry EVs tended to have higer rates of reported reliability issues compared to conventional gas cars. The authors contribute this to the large number of new EVs models that have come out in the last few years as well as new car companies, and doubt that it has much to do with the drivetrain technology itself.
Interesting they also found that hybrids were 26% more reliable than conventional gas cars dispite the addition of an electric drive train. Even more oddly with that information they found that plug in hybrids were the worst, at 146% worse than conventional gas, though note that the Rav4 plug in version was one of the most reliable vehicles surveyed.
“Most electric cars today are being manufactured by either legacy automakers that are new to EV technology, or by companies like Rivian that are new to making cars,” says Jake Fisher, senior director of auto testing at Consumer Reports. “It’s not surprising that they’re having growing pains and need some time to work out the bugs.”
“While Tesla’s EV components are generally reliable, the company continues to struggle with the build quality of its vehicles,” says Steven Elek, who leads the auto data analytics program at CR. “Tesla powertrains are now pretty solid for the most part, but Tesla owners report a lot of build quality issues including irregular paint, broken trim, door handles that don’t work, and trunks that don’t close. All of these pull down the brand’s reliability score.”-
So TLDR of the TLDR, expect manufacturers new models to have teething issues, especially if not owned by Toyoda, Hyundai, or Kia.
Actually interesting video! I’m clueless when it comes to fonts, but a few comments about the start (when he gives it some historical background):
What the Phoenicians did was to take a look at the hieroglyphs like, “Yeah! Love that! But… what if we made the symbols even more abstract?”
I know, he’s oversimplifying it (as it is not the focus of the video), but it’s worth noting that this abstraction was done by the Egyptians themselves, while writing hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs often use something called the “rebus principle”, where you represent a word by a similar-sounding word. For example, “son of” /sa/ was often represented with ⟨𓅬⟩, a white-fronted goose /za/ - because they sound practically the same.
(It’s a lot like writing “I like The Beatles” as ⟨👁️👍🪲🪲⟩. Why ⟨👁️⟩? Because it sounds the same as “I”.)
What the Canaanites (including the Phoenicians) did was to use this rebus principle in a more consistent way, and only for the first consonant of the word. For example, ⟨𓉐⟩ (a house) representing [b] because “house” in those languages usually starts with that sound. That’s the start of the phonetic principle (graphemes represent sounds instead of concepts).
There’s yet another level of abstraction, that it’s hard to pinpoint when started to become relevant: instead of representing the “raw” sounds, you represent the underlying phonemes. It’s the reason, for example, that the /p/ in ⟨pit⟩ [pʰ] and ⟨spit⟩ [p] gets the same letter - because although they sound different, they’re still the same phoneme.
Now, there were a couple of problems with this early alphabet from the Greeks, there only had uppercase, and while they wrote in rows, sometimes they wrote LTR, sometimes RTL
Ah, come on, that’s silly - neither is a “problem” of the lapidary early Greek alphabet. It’s just the absence of a feature that he’s used to, and the presence of another.
For comparison: this is on the same level as an Arabic or Farsi speaker saying “now, there are a couple problems with the modern Latin alphabet, such as lack of initial/medial/final forms, and writing the vowels with their own letters as if they were consonants.”
Enter the Romans…
Further info on the alphabet. Be warned that it’s mostly trivia.
⟨G⟩ is a later innovation, more specifically from 230 BCE. Originally the Roman alphabet used ⟨C⟩ for both /k/ and /g/.
Including ⟨J⟩ was a mistake - it was not a letter back then, it originated as a curled ⟨I⟩ in the middle ages. ⟨I⟩ and ⟨J⟩ got “split” into their own letters rather recently.
⟨U⟩ was not a letter back then either, but he got it right. Same deal with the above, except between ⟨V⟩ and ⟨U⟩.
⟨K⟩ was only marginally used. You do see it popping up for native Latin words, but it’s usually for Greek borrowings. Specially after Latin shifted /k/ to sound like [tʃ] (as in chill) before front vowels.
⟨Y⟩ was mostly used for Greek borrowings, representing the sounds [ʏ y:] (as in German Müller and über). Latin itself lacked the sound, and odds are that most speakers butchered those words to sound like [ɪ i:] (as in bit and beet) instead.
⟨W⟩ is not there because, although ⟨V⟩ represented three sounds in Latin, [w ʊ u:] (as in wool, book and boot), confusing [w] with [ʊ] was not a big deal (more on [u:] later). It wrecked havoc for Germanic dialects though, so they started representing the consonant with a digraph, ⟨VV⟩.
⟨Z⟩ used to be the sixth letter of the alphabet. Then it was kicked off the alphabet for being “too foreign”. Then it came back at the end.
The Romans used a diacritic, to represent vowel length, the apex. For most time it looked like its descendant (the modern acute), except over ⟨I⟩ - because then people wrote a longer ⟨I⟩ instead.
So, my question is, what would you want to do in your final days?
Honestly, that’s a good question that I don’t know the answer to.
I don’t know that I’d care doing anything super specific, but mostly that I’d want to spend at least some of that time with the people I love.
Not even as a goodbye, really.
There’s just something about connecting with people that is its own reward, for one more moment.
Maybe I’d like to watch the stars on a clear night, away from the big city lights?
Gazing at the light from a star from a billion years ago, there’s always been something calming to me about the sheer vastness of the universe. Our time here, almost a blip, but ever precious.
Know that whatever happens next, your story has touched me.
I really wish you the best.
Some people have survived unimaginable odds, and I hope you do too.
I’m swapping the first-aid kit for the crossbow, but spot on for the rest. Body armor is rare and definitely raises your odds of survival in the short term after the initial spread. A machete is the ultimate all-purpose blade, good for defense as well as butchering, breeching, and it is easily maintained. And the water purifier is a no-brainer. Waterborn diseases are a real problem in any situation where public utilities become inaccessible and clean drinking water grows scarce.
Assuming that I am obviously able to expand my kit as I survive, the ranged weapon that uses easily craftable ammo would be ideal. A first aid kit could be cobbled together over the course of a few days of persistent scavenging. No promises on the crossbow, they are far less common than bandaids, gauze, sterilization solutions, and splints. Really the thing that would likely be the hardest to source is the suture needle that you should have in there.
I always loved 10k in Z-Nation for using the wrist rocket slingshot because that is truly the king ranged weapon for a survival scenario. Lightweight, ammo that is infinite and easily accessible, and lethal out to ranges that matter. Not to mention that they are very easy to maintain and repair.
All that said, I would likely accumulate the aforementioned electricity/fuel items as I am familiar with the production of biofuels and can build some alternative generators (wind, methane, solar concentrators) for electricity once I have somewhere secure. Methane in particular has always been attractive to me for survival scenarios because anaerobic decomposition is a great way of dealing with biowaste and what is left over ends up making really good fertilizer. Just need a couple of propane tanks, some steel, and a car battery to rig as a welder and you can turn one into a digestor and the other into storage, then get a couple 2 cycle lawnmower engines and some AC motors and you can get a power supply running. At least enough to run some incandescent bulbs. Need a voltage regulator for more complex electronics to keep the line clean, but that is a different conversation.
I’m not caught up yet, haven’t seen season 4 so I’m not going to watch the trailer yet and can’t comment on it. However, I do think it’s…funny? That the thumbnail image for the trailer shows Burnham looking like she’s about to cry. The fact that she shows emotion doesn’t bother me but I know a lot of fans gripe about it so it strikes me as an odd choice to feature that.
Several key COVID-19 trends that authorities track are now accelerating around the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday. It’s the first major nationwide uptick in the spread of the virus seen in months....
Flu is a dangerous virus, I wouldn’t say we’ve “adapted to it.” Viruses evolve much quicker than humans. They go through countless generations in the time we have one. Flu in addition has an interesting genetic mechanism for change most other viruses don’t have, where it can exchange entire large sections of its genome at once with other distinct flu viruses, very quickly creating an entirely new strain. This is one of the reasons we’re constantly updating the vaccine.
I’m the US, it hospitalizes half a million or so a year and kills between 10,000-50,000 a year, comparable to all people who die from gun violence in a year in the US including suicide. We’re always only one unlucky recombination event away from another 1918 flu pandemic, and the more infected people and the more it spreads the more chances for that to happen.
Sorry, I don’t know if this was your intention, I just have a pet peeve for flu getting written off as no big deal. It’s a huge deal and we should be continuing to work on vaccine and treatment improvements. Oddly our anti viral treatments for covid are probably more effective than anti viral flu treatments at this pont, if people actually take them.
I also cannot believe that after this recent experience governments around the world aren’t pouring even more investment into pandemic monitoring and response. I mean I can, we’re notoriously short sighted, but seems governments and people in general are all pretending the pandemic never happened and can never happen again.
You know, I always used to think praying was incredibly stupid, and I’m sure plenty of people treat it in a way that’s… not really in the right spirit / ineffective? But recently it’s started to make a lot more sense to me. If you’re praying to god in an effort to directly influence the real world I think you’re misguided… If you think of prayer as a time to consider what you’re grateful for and what you want for the future, it actually seems like a really sensible mental health practice. To be clear, I am and always have been an atheist, and I don’t particularly like religions as a whole, but it seems like some of these things I’ve always found odd (like prayer) stem from something that could actually be reasonable and helpful but got corrupted by some game of telephone and people not understanding metaphors lol.
Default? Top left. It should be visually appealing to most people, and it would honestly just be odd to have the default wallpaper be cartoon styled. And the bottom left looks too much like W11. But I think they should all be included as options.
New York could soon start to get more recreational marijuana dispensaries after a judge on Friday approved legal settlements to end lawsuits that halted the state’s legal cannabis licensing program....
Earlier in November, the UN Women made a similar post on its official Instagram account. The post was soon removed and replaced with a statement calling for hostages release.
Inside the ‘arms race’ between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.::YouTube’s dramatic content gatekeeping decisions of late have a long history behind them, and there’s an equally long history of these defenses being bypassed.
I would argue it’s not “against all odds”. The add-on devs probably know better how YouTube is working than the bunch of underpaid, outsourced script writers that are tasked to implement the stuff. The latter also have to make sure that it doesn’t break for legitimate viewers (oh, sorry, I meant “impressions”).
What’s nice is it provides a similar level of protection to using a VPN with PKI, but just for that specific subdomain. While a VPN would be have to be connected manually before use (or all the time), this is built-in.
The odds of someone breaking through the mTLS and breaking through that application’s security at the same time are much smaller than either separately.
If you don’t have a valid cert, you’re dropped by the reverse proxy before anything even gets passed to the server behind it.
This is a public forum. Where debate and conversation takes place. Having a conversation with someone doesn’t mean you care about them. That’s an odd conclusion to reach. Chill out guy. It’s ok when people disagree with you. It’s a good thing. It’s a way of being exposed to new ways of thinking. If you’re looking for an echo chamber, I’m sure reddit is taking new users.
If you’re genuinely curious, a lot of it has to do with traffic management. I will blindly assume that you live near a large city in north america.
Trucks are big and cumbersome, especially semis. They’re fine ok the highway, but on city roads around busy places like grocery stores they’re like one man traffic jams.
Your typical American grocery store moves literal tons of product every single day, very little of which is produced locally. They require constant, daily replenishing, and it has to be done without disrupting the flow of shoppers and surrounding traffic.
The solution is to start your night at a store or distribution center in a major city. Pick up your trailer of paper products or whatever, make your first stop in town, then hit the highway. Stop at towns and cities along the way, dropping off a pallet or two at each until you reach your final stop in another major city where you swap trailers and take a nap before doing it all again. Many grocery stores employ a small team of (frequently underpaid) workers to process all this at odd hours in the night.
Facebook faced a ton of backlash for it and only stayed around because they are big enough that companies thought they’d lose more money by not offering their app then they’d lose by offering it. Also, as bad as Facebook moderation is, they were actively removing posts and banning users for things they said about J6 (odd to call it a protest but ok), which Parlor was refusing to do until after they were removed from the app stores. Parlor wanted to be all about free speech (hmmm just like Twitter now says they want to be) and refused to moderate the calls for violence until they were forced to by the big three, which led a lot of users to be angry at them and leave for other free speech platforms even less moderate than FB or Parlor.
So, are you saying you don’t have any evidence they colluded in the past, and no evidence that they colluded now, but are still believing it?
Leftists that praise and defend authoritarian communism and oddly enough oftentimes anything right wing too if it happens to be aligned against the west like Russia.
Pending home sales drop to a record low, even worse than during the financial crisis (www.cnbc.com)
US joins in other nations in swearing off coal power to clean the climate (uk.news.yahoo.com)
US joins in other nations in swearing off coal power to clean the climate::The United States committed Saturday to the idea of phasing out coal power plants, joining 56 other nations in kicking the coal habit that’s a huge factor in global warming. U.S. Special Envoy John Kerry announced that America was joining the Powering...
Electric Vehicles Have 79% More Reliability Challenges Than Gas Powered Cars (samrome58.substack.com)
I promise this story about fonts is interesting (www.youtube.com)
cross-posted from: feddit.de/post/6296251...
Abandoned babies found decomposing in Gaza hospital weeks after it was evacuated (www.nbcnews.com)
The cease-fire is over, but not before it offered a glimpse of the war’s horrors to Palestinians in Gaza and people around the world....
How would you spend your final days on Earth?
Hey Lemmy,...
Survive the zombie apocalypse (lemmy.zip)
Star Trek: Discovery | Final Season Exclusive Clip (CCXP 2023) | Paramount+ (www.youtube.com)
It should also be found at the official site, but the actual clip doesn’t seem to be working right now.
COVID-19 now increasing again, especially in Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, CDC says (www.cbsnews.com)
Several key COVID-19 trends that authorities track are now accelerating around the country, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday. It’s the first major nationwide uptick in the spread of the virus seen in months....
What are some common everyday examples of this phenomenon? (see body)
Rob is blowing a whistle, over and over....
One of these 6 will become Plasma 6. Wallpaper Which one do you prefer? (lemmy.world)
New York could see more legal pot shops after state settles cases that halted market (apnews.com)
New York could soon start to get more recreational marijuana dispensaries after a judge on Friday approved legal settlements to end lawsuits that halted the state’s legal cannabis licensing program....
After 8 weeks, UN Women condemns Hamas's sexual violence on Oct.7 (www.i24news.tv)
Previously, the UN body for gender equality has faced severe criticism for not calling out the terrorist group on the sexual assault...
yes you too (lemmy.world)
G7 agrees on first comprehensive guidelines for generative AI (asia.nikkei.com)
Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies. (www.engadget.com)
Inside the ‘arms race’ between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.::YouTube’s dramatic content gatekeeping decisions of late have a long history behind them, and there’s an equally long history of these defenses being bypassed.
Do you run a private CA? Could you tell me about your certificate setup if you do?
Hi, I was looking at private CAs since I don’t want to pay for a domain to use in my homelab....
Walmart, Costco and other companies rethink self-checkout, some stores removing them (www.cnn.com)
Advertisers Say They Do Not Plan to Return to X After Musk’s Comments (www.nytimes.com)
Elon Musk, the owner of X, criticized advertisers with expletives on Wednesday at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit.
Chinese celebrity chef offends China with egg fried rice video (www.theguardian.com)