ElectroVagrant

ElectroVagrant , 16 days ago

This is buried toward the bottom of the release notes so I’m bringing it up here:

Added instance-level default sort type

Any admins out there considering changing their instance sort settings or asking people on their instance if they’d like this changed, given that we can individually set sorting anyway? Taking into account the inclination of people to never adjust default settings (I remain deeply curious about this tendency, as an aside), I think it might be worth at least bringing up to one’s instance community.

If they decide they want it to remain the same, all good, and even better, it raises some people’s awareness that they can change it themselves.

ElectroVagrant , 16 days ago

I think while some of this may be people being people (i.e. tendency to only discuss issues/problems vs accomplishments/solutions), I think there’s also a technical element to it as well in Lemmy’s case.

Up to the latest release of Lemmy (as of writing this is v0.19.4), admins couldn’t adjust the default sort setting, which was Active. Read the docs on the sort setting and Active does what it says, surfaces those posts with recent commenting activity (taking into account score as well).

So you get this unfortunate mix of: people gravitate to discussing negative stuff, people tend not to change default settings (since despite defaults being Active, we can change these if so inclined), and the default sort settings surface whatever is being most discussed/commented on, resulting in this sort of negativity feedback loop you’ve observed.

I noticed and posted about this a few months ago, have tried to upvote and comment on less negatively-focused posts occasionally, but I think this may be an interesting example of a small scale systemic issue as it takes more of us doing similar to address what’s being encountered. However, as more instances update to v0.19.4, I’ll be interested in seeing if admins decide to switch away from the Active sort setting to try to address this in their own way.

I don’t know what sort setting may be better for instances to run with instead, but I’m glad they now have the option. In the meantime I think it’s worth reminding people that they currently have the option to change their default sort settings to something different to try to see different kinds of posts. Personally I switch between New and Scaled to see a variety of posts beyond many of the regular doom and gloom posts.

ElectroVagrant , 20 days ago

Huh. I had to take a quick glance at the timestamp of this article to make sure it wasn’t old, as this was the same issue that inspired a short-lived fork a few years ago.

I get where this article’s coming from, as I got where the people trying to fork it under a different name were too, however for better or worse I think what matters even more to people is that the software works well and has a good UX. If I remember right, I think Glimpse intended to focus on improving the UX but it didn’t last long enough to do much in that regard.

Better than my memory though, here’s an article that gives some insight into what went into the cessation of its development.

ElectroVagrant , 20 days ago

Little feedback on the UI from taking a peek at this.

When I went into settings and adjusted post display style from card to anything else, it wasn’t clear to me that this wouldn’t apply to the new For You feed, which left me confused and less inclined to use it. I still gave it a try to make sure I wasn’t missing anything and to see how much the feed seemed to change with some light interaction, but I think you’d need to use it more than I did to see an effect.

Problem being: display settings not applying to the For You feed means I’m not going to use it much with the default card view.

Second part is that there was some comment display lag as I looked through posts, so if I looked at a post about cats with cat-related comments, those comments would linger and appear for a moment under a different post about possums. It’s just long enough to be noticeable, so thought it worth mentioning.

ElectroVagrant , 16 days ago

Appreciate the adjustments and responsiveness! Gave it another try after this and the different formatting hit the spot! Still need to use more to see more finely tuned results, but dig the idea.

Also as others have already said plenty, would be cool to see this cleaned up for an open source release. If you’d like to see how some others are handling a sorta similar idea but with RSS feeds, you might look to Nunti for ideas on how to approach it.

ElectroVagrant , 26 days ago

Given the absence of specific communities (or active ones so far), if people would like they could start these conversations over in !general.

I recognize it’s not the same, particularly for getting to those deep dive points you mention with ATLA, but gotta start somewhere, right?

Also I can easily give this go-ahead being one of the mods there. Up to now I’ve hesitated popping into threads like this and pointing people there because I’m not a fan of consolidation, but it’s become apparent some simple meeting area may help to get more niche communities spun off and going.

ElectroVagrant , 26 days ago

You might give the programming.dev instance a try for the first couple subjects, as they have an open !programming community that may work for them.

ElectroVagrant , 24 days ago

Seeing as this thread is still active, instead of continuing to reply to people throughout, gonna go ahead and put this out here.

If you’re not finding an active community for something (safe for work, that is) or any community whatsoever for your interest, you’re welcome to post about the topics that interest you in !general till you find enough likeminded people to get a separate community going. This was always allowed tbh, but I’ve tried to make it more explicit and clear that it’s cool.

ElectroVagrant , 1 month ago

Original article: reuters.com/…/biden-whats-happening-gaza-is-not-g…

It’s pretty clear to me Biden’s trying to thread the needle on this in a gruesome way. The argument seems to follow the form of: civilian deaths are collateral damage, this is unfortunate but this is war and they are not purposely being targeted and so this is not genocide.

However that almost willfully ignores the denial and blocking of aid to the same affected civilians, which is a deliberate action that despite the cover story being to prevent it reaching Hamas, falls entirely flat as regardless, it results in direct suffering and death of the civilians. I say almost because some small efforts have been made to push back against the denial of aid, but as is evident to anyone monitoring the situation, these efforts are all far too small to address the widespread suffering and death of the Gazan people.

This whole semantics game around genocide is simply disgusting. You know those in government know exactly what people mean when they’re calling it that, they want an end to the killing and an end to the deaths of civilians, whether from military strikes or denial of aid.

ElectroVagrant , 1 month ago

when you get cc’d on an email and wait till the right moment to send the CharCoal image you’ve had waiting for this moment

ElectroVagrant , 1 month ago

Once I thought and did the thing then realized the thought was the thing to do and then it kept going and going and…

ElectroVagrant , 1 month ago

You might try different media if you haven’t already, as in, instead of pencil/pen and paper, maybe colored pencils or markers. Maybe even try getting some black paper and trying to draw with white color pencils instead.

I’m sure you may have tried a variety of things over the years, so I’m just spitballing, but also if you’re trying to dive into the deep end with more complex drawings, you might revisit and really hone the fundamentals. Fundamentals being like getting clean lines by practicing drawing those over and over till you can get a nice, sharp line (which often isn’t a single pencil/brush stroke!).

Once you have those down you may move on to the simple shapes, squares, triangles, circles, and try to recognize how those are put together for more complex forms. It’s a tough skill to get down, without a doubt (I’m not some proficient artist personally), but it’s just that: a skill that takes not only practice but learning methodologies. One of the toughest parts with drawing is that there’s so many methods to go about it to figure out which helps you improve.

ElectroVagrant , 1 month ago

Jungle is a plant metropolis

ElectroVagrant OP , 1 month ago

oh, uh, for those unfamiliar: Shadowrun’s a tabletop RPG as well as a computer RPG with a cyberpunk setting but with fantasy creatures and magic mixed together

ElectroVagrant OP , 1 month ago

bummer, an ent using comms tech despite the classic trait of’em being against exploitative civilization didn’t click as much as I thought it might

more fun imagery for me! In my head it’s a clear visual of a cross between solar and cyberpunk. Then again, I don’t remember ents in Shadowrun, but people play the TTRPG a little fast and loose like D&D, so I stand by my OP thought

ElectroVagrant , 1 month ago

I don’t know the specifics of what may have happened with Lemmy.film, so we’ll have to see if someone else may know.

As to what happens to posts to “their” communities, my rough understanding is that with the host server gone, federation either doesn’t occur or maybe attempts to reach the host but simply stops after some number of attempts. Upon failure I think it simply collects the posts on your home server/instance’s copy of the community.

Not sure what would happen if a new instance was spun up of Lemmy.film either from a backup or in general, but I’d imagine there’s some settings/adjustments that may be calibrated to prevent it getting a backlog of posts dumped on it causing it to get bogged down or crash.

As to questions specifically about the Lemmy software, you may try !lemmy_support or !lemmy, think either one would be okay for this.

ElectroVagrant , 1 month ago

At a glance this sounds even more intrusive than it’s been with Win10 (and maybe 11?), and sadly it’s no surprise as even without AI junk, I think the defaults with Win10 (and maybe 11) are to track your PC use to try to provide some “convenience” features, e.g. display of recently used programs/accessed files when you go to open a new desktop (Win key + Tab).

If they would be more transparent about this and indicate whether and how much of that info, “anonymized/depersonalized” or not, is being taken by them, I think people would still be understandably annoyed but more understanding; at least with an easy opt out or better still, the default being that you must opt in for any of it.

ElectroVagrant , 1 month ago

But compare with GOG then. They sell games, you download them with no DRM so you own the download essentially.

This is the model digital media should take, frankly. Anything less may as well be misleading marketing, as far as I’m concerned.

ElectroVagrant , 1 month ago

At a glance, Misskey and associated forks may appear to be Twitter-clones, but dig a little more and you’ll find they’re a lot more, for better and worse.

The interface is highly customizable, not just with some different colored themes nor a multi-column interface, but that you can stack page elements in columns and set up “antennae” or filters to surface posts including specified keywords and/or hashtags while excluding others via keywords/hashtags as well. There’s also what they call “channels” which I think are sort of like groups or dedicated topics apart from hashtags to post to and discuss whatever the channel topic is.

Oh, and because it seems *key wants to have a little of everything, there’s Pages, which is basically longform blog posting, and some versions include simple games. There’s also options for some other widgets I’ve not mentioned here. It’s genuinely pretty wild compared to the other federated microblogging services with how much flexibility it has and all that it has packed in.

I think the only other federated service I’ve found that’s comparable in flexibility may be Hubzilla, albeit I got the impression it’s less user friendly, but still, very customizable and a lot you could do with it.

ElectroVagrant , 2 months ago

i’ll tell ya how to undo this, but it’ll involve going over their heads, and you won’t believe this but then you’ll be…

you ready? you really can't undo this onesturgeon general’d

ElectroVagrant OP , 2 months ago

Idea is that eventually others will be able to build atop their protocol and set up different “appviews” as they call them as well as relays and personal data servers. As I understand it, “appviews” may be viewed similar to what Lemmy and Mastodon are to ActivityPub, different ways to view data passed through ActivityPub.

Right now I think Bluesky may be the only such “appview” for their protocol parsing data from their relay, but the idea is you could spin up your own personal data server and maybe also your own appview, or choose from whichever may eventually exist, and that would be like your own “instance” connecting you to others via the appview parsing relay data.

So in other words, sort of yes to your first question, and it’s sort of because right now there’s only one AuthTransfer relay at the moment and that’s Bluesky, but the idea is that others could be spun up, allowing more independence from Bluesky as a company.

ElectroVagrant OP , 2 months ago

Oh! Thanks for the notice! I swear I think the spoiler stuff may have changed at some point, but maybe I’ve been handling it wrong this whole time.

I’ve also not really wanted to use horizontal rules because of it turning things into headings, but haven’t found a better way to put some spacing between the end of lists and the rest of a post’s text. I think I’ve corrected it properly now to be less jank.

ElectroVagrant OP , 2 months ago

use[r] identities are not tethered to instances

Tbh while this is technically true, given the current circumstances, identities essentially are tethered albeit in a roundabout way. What I mean by that is, there’s no real point to them* without some relay and appview to work with, and for now, that’s just Bluesky.

That said, I agree that it would be better to go to them than to Twitter (if they’re not even considering stuff like Mastodon), but that’s a low hurdle to clear.

*-A caveat, supposedly it could be possible for personal data servers to connect to each other directly instead of via relays, but I haven’t come across anyone having tried this yet.

ElectroVagrant OP , 2 months ago

That still doesn’t touch upon the negative to tethering users identity to instances.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I was trying to point to was that despite the portability of identity, the fact that you may still be highly reliant on the Bluesky relay (or frankly, any large relay), tethers your identity to them as without the relays there’s kind of no point to having a personal server at all.

Moreover, given the reference model provided via the Bluesky App, there’s a good chance you’ll run into similar arrangements on the AuthTransfer protocol where personal servers and appviews are joined together to essentially create instances (or entryway services I think they call them). One of the remaining distinctions from this entryway instance arrangement and ActivityPub then would be which relay or relays your entryway instance connects to.

Lastly I understand what you mean about people bouncing off Mastodon, but at the same time you kinda lose me here. You clearly mention the Fediverse preceding Mastodon yet then conclude with people having a bad experience with Mastodon meaning the rest of the Fediverse isn’t for them…? We’re using another variation of the Fediverse and ActivityPub here, so we’re both aware there’s more to it than that, even in the microblogging space, so I’m kind of confused on this point.

Nevertheless, I otherwise agree, it’s good that people have more alternatives to get away from the trashfire Twitter’s become (arguably even more of).

ElectroVagrant , 2 months ago

When other’s, be it corporations or people start to decide which information a person can and cannot access, is a damn slippery slope we better level out before AI starts to roll out en masse.

You highlight the bigger issue here than AI alone tbh. This is why another critical element is becoming literate and teaching each other methods of independent research, using multiple sources to develop an understanding, and not relying on any singular source, especially without careful review.

All the technology in the world can’t help a person learn and understand, who hasn’t yet learned how to learn, much less understand.

ElectroVagrant , 2 months ago

Linkblocks definitely sounds interesting. I’ve never gotten into social bookmarking (keeping bookmarks on another site/platform…?), but I can see the draw for building knowledge-bases this way.

ElectroVagrant , 2 months ago

For the moment, a lot of the fun on some of the federated platforms is behind several steps of effort that many of the corporate platforms have streamlined people out of being accustomed to taking, which is part of why they’ve kept their larger audiences. If a single click/tap is too much, that’s enough to keep some people away from here.

It’s not a matter of laziness either, it’s more of, how much effort do I want to put into something that I’m using for casual entertainment? For many people it’s minimal, but many federated platforms currently don’t really work like that. They’ve arguably thrown the baby out with the bathwater in an overcorrection away from commercial algorithmic feeds since existing platforms have conditioned people to not have to put effort into finding silly/fun content.

The types of people to post won’t be as inclined to post if they find their posts aren’t reaching people because people mostly have to actively seek them out to engage with them at all. The types of people to more passively engage won’t be able to as easily as those posts they might engage with may never reach them because they mostly have to actively seek them out. The end result of a lack of feedback and content for both types of people, despite there being a possibility and existence of both for them, results in this recurring sense of dissatisfaction.

Note that this is written largely with Mastodon in mind, and to a lesser degree Lemmy. In Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin/PieFed/Sublinks’s cases I think they’re potentially better off in terms of structure and offering different ways to sort one’s feeds, but it’s a matter of more people joining to round out communities and discussion more.

ElectroVagrant , 2 months ago

Personally, although the terms have become increasingly blurred over the years, I refer to changing to a new version of software (including an OS, and both ideally with some improvements) as updating it rather than upgrading.

I reserve upgrade more for changes of hardware with some form of improvement over its predecessor. I’d suspect I may not be alone in this, but I dunno how common it may be. When switching to a mix of both, I simply say I’m getting a new [insert specific device depending on which].

Although I’d hesitate to call many new phones an all-around upgrade when they’re either removing features (headphone jack/expandable storage) or getting more cumbersome to hold (can you even call some modern phones a handset anymore?).

ElectroVagrant , 3 months ago

You might look into either the OnePlus Nord N20 or N30. N20 had an AMOLED display like the S10+, whereas the N30 has a LCD display but high refresh rate. I’m not entirely sure but I think the processor specs are comparable, storage and RAM definitely are.

I know someone with a N30 and they’ve had good experience with the battery life on it so far, albeit they also aren’t heavily using it either. Here’s a little comparison chart.

ElectroVagrant , 3 months ago

Nobody was tbh

ElectroVagrant OP , 3 months ago

Thought this was interesting coverage of a mix of different issues from inattentiveness, prompt resignation at slight effort, and tech and media illiteracy. It’s difficult to determine what all the contributors to these behaviors are across different age demographics, as you see it both with the young and the old in different forms.

There’s a sort of expectation from some of both to operate software more like simple machinery (appliances, more than applications) where you tap or click the buttons and it promptly and predictably responds (ideally), and when it doesn’t…To simply give up and try to find a different app that works as desired, or a person to help them.

ElectroVagrant OP , 3 months ago

Yeah, some interfaces have somehow contorted themselves to being utterly inaccessible in efforts to be maximally accessible.

Whether that’s removing any immediately visible buttons whatsoever, only displaying vague icons (with no text labels) only to be seen in that software, or weirdly expecting a certain degree of old/new tech familiarity that may be too old for younger people or too new to make sense for many to be that familiar with yet.

ElectroVagrant OP , 3 months ago

This is just a hypothesis, but I believe that one of the roots of the problem is a lower ability to retrieve information, caused by increased exposure to advertisement.

I’m not sure I follow where you’re coming from here. Is the idea that over-exposure to advertisement is processed the same as being provided general information, reducing people’s inclination to seek out information independently, despite the fact that advertising is only the provision of specific, narrow information?

ElectroVagrant OP , 3 months ago

Thanks for elaborating!

I think I better see what you meant now. Potential degradations in processing ability possibly from a combination of cognitive overload and exhaustion from the volumes of information encountered, both of which may be more frequently reached from a mixture of a lack of self-regulation, not knowing & exceeding one’s limits, and inadequate education and practice regarding the former two alongside reasoning abilities to more effectively navigate info without as often being overloaded/exhausted.

ElectroVagrant , 3 months ago

I would feel better if stories like this gave us background on the people involved. Who is Mike Macgirvin? I don’t want the person to dox themselves but I do want to know where he came from, what work he’s done before, what companies he’s worked for and what kind of people, organizations or groups he has worked with in the past. What school, university or program did he come out of? How old is he? What nationality? Where does he live and work now?

Did you miss the interview linked in the article? They interviewed Mike Macgirvin a few years back, and it goes into some of the background you’re wondering about.

ElectroVagrant , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

On one hand, I appreciate this a lot as it’s been baffling to me that this aspect of Zot wasn’t adopted during development of ActivityPub. On the other, I kind of feel like some of this forgets or overlooks the benefits of running fully separate identities.

I recognize that the article points to this easing that process in a way, but it’s pointing more to facets of a single identity, which benefits from some degree of interchangeability depending on those facets. This is clearest in the notion of retaining one’s connections with minimal disruption should one facet’s instance/host go offline for some reason, but also in it being relevant to maintain the same content between facets.

This has sort of also been the issue some see with the idea of federation and the fediverse itself. Some people enjoy the different styles of posting and interaction across different non-federated/linked sites/platforms, yet in some ways federation tends to blur or break those distinctions and try, sometimes clumsily, to blend it all together. For those all in on the idea, that’s a major bonus, but for those not sold on it, it’s a major pitfall.

In some respects I think this may kind of help those wanting to maintain different identity facets around here, but may also create a potential tripping point for those trying to more easily maintain distinct identities depending on implementation.

ElectroVagrant OP , 3 months ago

I’m still not sure what I think of this to be honest, but I appreciate some more detail on how this is designed to operate on the frontend and the backend, e.g.

In the AT Protocol network, various services, such as the PDS, Relay, and AppView, have ultimate discretion over what content they carry, though it’s not the most straightforward avenue for content moderation. Services that are closer to users, such as the client and labelers, are designed to be more actively involved in community and content moderation.
[…]
Infrastructure providers such as Relays play a different role in the network, and are designed to be a common service provider that serves many kinds of applications. Relays perform simple data aggregation, and as the network grows, may eventually come to serve a wide range of social apps, each with their own unique communities and social norms. Consequently, Relays focus on combating network abuse and mitigating infrastructure-level harms, rather than making granular content moderation decisions.

(Emphasis mine.)

ElectroVagrant OP , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

As I understand it so far:

Broad strokes general pros/cons:Bsky’s pros:

• Some more influential/popular, and creative people have joined. - Full account migration across instances.
• Initially at least: lower population/exclusivity, meaning less noise and fewer personality clashes, fewer trolls, so “better vibes”.
• More focused interfaces providing smoother user experience.
  — Somewhere in-between:
• More social algorithm friendly, i.e. feeds with posts from what your followed accounts are liking or commenting on. - Quote posting (this one I’m counting as in-between because some Mastodon people really dislike them). - Full text search by default (see second point as to why I have this here.*) — Bsky’s negatives (as of writing):
• Fewer people overall, so can seem dead.
• Some report phone number requirement for sign-up. - No post editing. - No video/gif posting. - No audio posts. - No direct/private/mentioned only messages. — *-Note: Mastodon now has a form of full text search but it must enabled by instance admins and one must opt their account’s posts into search visibility for them to show up. This is the result of the years of back & forth over the feature and is an interesting compromise approach.

---

Broad strokes technical pro/cons compared to Mastodon:Bsky/Bluesky’s tentative benefits:

• Full account migration across instances (Personal Data Servers).
• Personal Data Servers may have lower resource costs compared to Mastodon instances, enabling more self-hosting. - The underlying protocol (Authorized Transfer Protocol/ATProto) enables custom feeds to help one find what they want to see and only view that. - As this post details, it may enable more distributed moderation so that your host/instance isn’t necessarily the final say in what you can see. — Tentative negatives:
• Relays may have higher resource costs, reducing how decentralized/distributed it is.
• Currently Bsky’s federation/decentralization is only with self-hosted Personal Data Servers, while so far as I’m aware, they’re still operating the only Relay. - While the protocol may enable distributed moderation, this may also be viewed as a downside as it increases complexity in regards to which moderation services/moderators to subscribe to, who to report anything to, etc. - Custom feeds may also create a similar problem as distributed moderation in terms of choice paralysis/confusion, and further entrenching people into echo chambers more than existing social media arguably already enables.
  — Worth noting when compared to Mastodon:
• Mastodon has partial account migration.
• Mastodon allows post editing, video/gif/audio posts, and direct/mentioned only messages. - Each instance’s local feed, and even its federated feed, may be viewed as providing a sort of custom feed produced by those on the instance. - Probably closer to what Bluesky means: Mastodon also allows one to make lists of others to create a distinct feed, follow hashtags, and one may pin a hashtag in a column then add others to include/exclude to create a custom hashtag feed in the advanced web interface.
• Also although it’s clunkier in Mastodon, one may export their lists, block/mute lists, and share these with others to import to their own account. - Bluesky also talks about different AppViews, which I think may be understood in relation to some of the different web interfaces, or apps one may use with Mastodon (one may understand this on Lemmy in a similar way, e.g. Alexandrite/Voyager~Thunder, etc.).

ElectroVagrant OP , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Kind of hard to say given the structure of it. Going off the approximate data from FediDB’s charts, we may be looking at around 2 to 3 million more user accounts (around 8 million to 7.25 million), as compared with data from Stats for Bluesky of 5.24 million.

Although I’m not sure how each is measuring this, a better point of comparison may be active users and daily posters. FediDB uses the former, and shows about 940,000 to 920,000 active users, compared to Bluesky’s about 220,000215,000 to 190195,000 daily posters. The latter is honestly being kind of generous, as going off the data there posting has been declining. Interestingly liking has stayed somewhat higher, hovering between 240,000 to occasional peaks of 260,000 recently.

According to their CEO just before they opened registrations they had 1.6 million monthly users, so maybe if you run the numbers differently it looks better…But the raw stats don’t paint a great picture, at least as I read them.

Going off Join Mastodon’s servers page (under network health), we see a figure of 942,000 monthly active users, which would suggest Bluesky should arguably have slightly more activity going off the monthly active users figure, but… 🤷‍♀️

ElectroVagrant , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Despite its name, Bookstack isn’t an ebook organizer or ebook organizing server software, it’s more in line with a wiki or personal knowledge organizer software.

I inadvertently found myself coming across software you might sorta like @Spiffyman in the form of Zettlr. It’s FOSS, uses Markdown formatting, and is able to export to a variety of different formats.

Downsides are that there’s currently no mobile app, nor plugin/extension support, so the base software is what you get. Nevertheless, it’s a very fully featured piece of software from what I can tell and has pretty good documentation to help learn your way around it. Bonus as well is that it’s cross-platform, so you can run it across different OSes on desktop.

Edit:
Also OP, if you’re really fond of TiddlyWiki but want more guidance on making it more structured, you might look through these notes. TiddlyWiki is really cool, however it certainly takes some getting used to with its style.

ElectroVagrant , 3 months ago

OP mentioned TiddlyWiki, which I think is a good option if you’re wanting to keep everything together and in a pretty longlasting format, plus there’s a small but creative community that’s made all kinds of interesting plugins for it.

However, if you’re looking for something very small and similarly flexible, there’s also Feather Wiki. Outside of these two, another person already mentioned it but there’s Zim, which may feel a little more comfortable to use as it’s separate desktop software from your browser.

I’ve not made anything with Feather Wiki, but I’ve dabbled with TiddlyWiki and Zim and liked both for different reasons. TW for possibility of sharing/publishing in a nice looking format, and Zim for linking together different offline notes and files (it can also export to bare html which you may then make look nicer with some CSS).

Lastly there’s also Zettlr that I’ve only just started playing around with. I think it may work a little better than Zim in terms of handling offline note sorting and linking files, but I’m not sure yet.

ElectroVagrant , 3 months ago

Blogs are cool.

The whole setting up a website and justifying the cost for a public log/journal…Not so much. It’s still clunky and costly enough that it pushes people to platforms handling all the tech backend for them, whether nonprofit or for profit. I think if enough of the technical side were made less cumbersome (and this is from someone that’s okay with tech jank), then the financial costs wouldn’t be as much of a factor for many since for modest sites they’re already rather low.

Although if I’m overestimating site setup stuff, I’d love to read how. All the research I’ve done has been somewhat discouraging when it comes to handling hosting a site yourself (i.e. security concerns, traffic handling, etc.).

ElectroVagrant , 3 months ago

For sure, and I’m kinda hopeful too, for more personal sites of all sorts in general tbh.

It’s that technical part though that I think remains the big barrier for many, at least for those that want to more fully hold the reins over their online space.

ElectroVagrant , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Unfortunately I remember during people moving from Reddit to Lemmy, several people on Mastodon trying to warn others away from doing so due to its lacking moderation tools, and some mainly focusing on the developers, both of which have proven to hold true in various ways.

However, at the time, there really weren’t all that many federated alternatives developed enough to go to. If memory serves Kbin was kinda scrambled out to meet the moment, and it’s been struggling along since then with its own issues. Aside from those, there were a couple centralized options with Tildes and Postmill being open source, but some were understandably wary of moving to yet another site with a centralized structure (and one of those closed source alternatives people did try out didn’t last long).

Now it’s kind of interesting as we see another open source centralized option developing (Discuit), Sublinks as you mention in your post, and also Piefed. It’s unfortunate that first there seems to have needed to be this rough proof of concept stage before more options appeared, but with any luck they may pave the way to better, more robust sites, and maybe give Lemmy some incentive to improve itself.