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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: December 11th, 2019

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  • Sort of the same deal for “what can one do to be a good citizen of the world.” That is, “do your best to operate in an ethical way and encourage others to do the same despite how the broader system is constructed.”

    To be slightly more specific, stuff like finding, using, and publicizing more ethical websites, platforms, and technologies where possible. And most importantly, contribute in whatever way works for you. The web is meant to encourage collaboration and sharing but it has turned largely into a medium to Consume - spend some time Creating things.


  • Let’s get this straight: How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he is engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country that is desperately trying to make sure it maintains its standing as a major world power.

    For those of you not interested in watching a YouTube video.


  • I don’t, per se, disagree with this post, but I think I have come to different conclusions.

    Gemini is not a protocol that is ever going to (nor does it intend to) supplant the web. But it also doesn’t intend to. It’s a cool little protocol to play around with. Building clients and servers.

    Establishing standards, both de facto and documented. Collaborating with like-minded folks around the world. Creating content and experiences within a unique set of constraints.

    One of the major issues with tech is that we by and large continue to forget the last and spend a lot of time learning and relearning the same lessons, going in circles.

    Gemini is a fun experiment in remembering, reliving, and learning from the past.



  • I’ve been on fedi since 2017 and I largely agree with this post. Well the linked article, this post on lemmy oddly focuses on one small detail.

    I think activitypub is a fine protocol, for what it is trying to do. I don’t know enough about the internals of the protocol to write up a list of improvements, but I reckon there’s some work that could be done to make federation a little bit more granular and to increase privacy and security. Some of that can be done at the application level, others need to be done at the protocol level.

    As for mastodon specifically, there’s a lot going on there. Mastodon itself is hugely complicated. And it’s not even a native speaker of activitypub, having it added only later. So in some ways it had to bend activitypub to its will to keep working the way it had, and in some ways it had to absorb some complexity into it’s application to sort of graft on support for it.

    A lot of long-lived software has problems like this. In some ways it’s unavoidable, in other ways it’s requires a very strong community with a well-aligned vision to take decisive action.

    But the community doesn’t really have that aligned vision. Or rather there’s a disconnect between the community and project leadership. I haven’t ever interacted directly with any of the regular contributors so I don’t want to ascribe motives or personality traits to them.

    But whatever the case or cases there’s a lot of people trying to address some of these fedi issues as far as personal safety tools, federated blocking, privacy and security tools, etc. But mastodon - perhaps as one of the more established fedi projects - is a little bit more conservative about pursuing or implementing some of these ideas.

    Some of the issues, as one of the commenters on the post point out, is just that microblogging is an inherently unhealthy interaction pattern for a lot of people - especially when corporate platforms have trained users for so many years specifically to have those unhealthy interaction patterns.

    But ultimately I believe fedi is worth saving and capable of being saved. But it’s going to require a strong community with a strong vision. Which may require a new generation of developers making a new generation of software.

    Hopefully Lemmy can be a part of that.


  • Both companies are acting incredibly cynically here and I don’t think apple actually makes a good point.

    Epic only has this partnership with itch so they could prove the point “it’s cool and easy to provide third-party stores.” Then they accidentally proved the point “you can’t moderate content on a third-party store and it’s content may run contrary to the first-party’s policies which may confuse users.”

    Notice how Epic was like “uhh we probably won’t do this on mobile though” when they realized what had happened. They don’t actually give a shit about itch beyond using them as a pawn. Hopefully creators on the platform are getting some increased sales out of it though.

    But ultimately, apple should not block additional stores. If they’re as worried about content moderation as they say they could only allow sideloading and instead of serving them via the app store.




  • It’s more like someone selling their Apple stock to buy a Lambo.

    Sure they could keep their Apple stock and (probably unless the stock drops) buy two Lambos later. But they also want a Lambo.

    Same deal here. Sure maybe in a year they’d be able to get two Teslas. But also maybe in a year bitcoin will be worthless.


  • I’ll admit I haven’t heard of hispagatos before so I don’t want to immediately jump to judgement and will check out some of their blog posts and stuff (to hopefully brush up on my spanish if nothing else).

    But I will say it’s not really a great look having my first contact with an “anarchist hacker collective” being a shopify shop selling t-shirts/hats/etc with no information about sourcing and a link to a blog where the most recent post is supporting them by mining cryptocurrency.

    Edit: after checking out some of the blog posts, I see they espouse a lot of good ideals and principles. I’m very slow at reading spanish so I haven’t had a great overview yet, but I am heartened to see what appears to be some good content.

    I still have some questions about the discrepancy between the content of the blog and “visit our shopify store,” but I guess I can understand from a practical standpoint that money is generally required to further an organization’s goals.





  • I love the creativity engendered by the constraints of the protocol. I can do simple stuff for the web (and do sometimes) but building web services is part of what I do for my day job. So gemini helps me look at things from a different perspective.

    Specifically, I’ve been doing some work building and refining GemIF, for interactive fiction, which has been a lot of fun.

    Also enjoyed chatting with the community. There’s a lot of characters on the mailing list, but for the most part folks are nice and have interesting things to say.




  • Neat. Lagrange is such a pretty client, though I tend to find myself using Amfora more often.

    Though Lagrange is if nothing else a great reminder that text of my capsules aren’t always rendered monospace and I need to make my ascii art in preformatted blocks.


    Trying my hardest not the bring the drew-related drama from the mailing list to this thread based on your screenshot.


  • This is a really great idea! Though I don’t know of any software with these features.

    As mentioned below, plume sorta fits the bill but is still early in it’s development and isn’t currently actively maintained. I ran an instance for a few months about 8 months ago and it was a very promising start, so it’s a little sad that it isn’t getting the development love it deserves.

    Anyway like I said I don’t know of anything that can really do this out of the box (though I’m sure wordpress can be round-pegged into that square hole). Might be a fun side-project, though. Which, now that my interactive fiction on gemini project has sorta stabilized I am looking for a new side-project. 🤔