aasatru @ aasatru @kbin.earth

Just passing through.

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1 yr. ago

The fact that you believe these platforms were the same before and after these events makes it sound like you were not, in fact, there to see it happen. In my experience, it permanently changed both platforms, transforming them from weird niche sites to genuine alternatives.

That said, what you find interesting or not is not any of my business.

I feel like this is part of what makes @fedify@hollo.social one of the most important fediverse projects at the moment - it aims to keep everyone from having to do the same, overly complicated job of activitypub integration over and over and over again.

It's frustration that nobody wants to dig into old code, but I get frustrated having to re-work my own code from a year ago. So I guess I sympathize.

I don't think anyone here is arguing that the entire world will be using pixelfed by the end of the year, and that its usage will expand to other galaxies by the end of the decade.

It's a comment about the current growth curve, and it is both accurate and interesting.

The only thing worse than misrepresentation of statistics is completely misguided criticism of statistical representation.

While we're at it, the X axis doesn't start at zero either.

I think often people find it easier to write their own code than to make changes to other people's projects, so it's not necessarily very easy to change the Bluesky app to work with the Mastodon API rather than the Bluesky one.

That said, I don't think it's a dumb idea. Bluesky has a lot of money to pump into UX development, so making sure Mastodon users could benefit from this wouldn't be a bad thing. Personally I am perfectly happy with the alternatives already out there (Phanpy is better than anything else that has ever existed), but it's all about choice. :)

Oh no :(

Nobody wants to spend money on legal work, but at a certain point it becomes necessary. It's not like they met up in a board meeting, discussed where money could best be spent, and decided that lawyers should be a priority.

However, if Mastodon goes down this path and does it well, they can create legal precedence that might benefit all open/federated social media organizations that follow. Especially in the current climate we could benefit a lot from having a strong social media actor representing the interests of an open web, in opposition to the armies of lawyers hired by the fascists of commercial social media.

Of course, when I donate to Mastodon I imagine all my money goes to developers. But rationally I'm aware that this might be a bit utopian.

Social media platforms were always badly positioned - they are failing by design. They have been able to grow in order to outrun their problems, but this cannot be sustainable because the flaw is fundamental.

I think the idea is effectively conveyed in the intro:

In the game of Go, bad shape is the term for configurations of stones on the game board that are inefficient in achieving their offensive goal (territory capture) and unlikely to achieve their defensive goal (the state of "life"). You can extend a bad shape in a fruitless attempt to make it better, but you'll generally be wasting your time.

The idea I keep coming back to is that the big platforms, like Marley, were dead to begin with, and are now something particularly bad, which is dead on their feet. Not because they’re been abandoned by users (yet) but because they’re structurally incapable of governing the systems they made, and most of the things they try to do about it introduce more and weirder problems.

I don't like it, as I don't like this technology and I don't like the people behind it. On my personal website I have banned all AI scrapers I can identify in robots.txt, but I don't think they care much.

I can't be bothered adding a copyright signature in social media, but as far as I'm concerned everything I ever publish is CC BY-NC. AI does not give credit and it is commercial, so that's a problem. And I don't think the fact that something is online gives everyone the automatic right to do whatever the fuck they want with it.

Here's OPs thread, from two days ago rather than June last year. But June last year sounds plausible, so that's good enough for a language model.

If you believe God created this place, literally everything is proof of God. It's hard to explain a good one, and particularly one that is both good and interventionalist, but the whole "God created it and left it to rot" idea one can kinda understand the appeal of. It's hard to imagine how this all just popped out of nowhere.

Of course, it solves nothing, as you just shift the problem over to God. But that's besides the point.

I think the religions that allow for multiple and often flawed gods seem easier to believe in, but if you've been taught to believe in some Yahweh spin-off I try not to judge to harshly.

This is a super interesting comment, thanks!

As for why Coca Cola made their Santa red, I guess the Scandinavian influence is also worth keeping in mind.

The Norwegian version of Santa is known as Julenissen - literally the Yule nisse - with the continental European stories of Saint Nicholas having been merged with our own traditional nisse (Scandie gnome) living in the barn (fjøsnisse). Nisses, like gnomes, traditionally wear red hats.

Where I celebrated Christmas on Tuesday, we were visited by a version of the fjøsnisse rather than coca cola santa. He told the kids they are coordinating with the Christmas nisse, as it gets busy on the north pole (there is, of course, only one Christmas nisse, but a bunch of fjøsnisser). But of course a knitted red hat was still in place. 🎅

That's beautiful! Love the perspective.

Also I guess it makes sense that they've been too busy with everything else to have a timely release of a perfectly crafted annual report.

It would be nice to have a report earlier because I'm interested, but in terms of transparency needs this is fine.

If a team of three full time employeesand a limited budget had plenty of time to write up reports, that would maybe be a bit of a red flag as well.

I meant that this "critical analysis" didn't seem to offer any substantial critiques of ActivityPub or its use, but merely a bunch of critiques of this petition itself on points that seem not extremely relevant.

It might be interesting for people who are invested in this specific debate, but I outside of that context it doesn't seem to have all that much to add to anything.

Not saying the petition is unsubstantial, I just struggled to find any substance to this critique of it.

I started reading, and it seems to criticize some Polish proposal, rather than anything substantial?

Like, paraphrasing, "the proposal says it worked well in context A, but that doesn't mean it'll work well in context B". I mean, sure, whatever. But not very juicy.

Maybe there's good points in there, but if they had valid criticism they should have spilled the beans right away. If not I'll keep thinking ensuring digital sovreignity and embracing open web standards are good things.

I find microblogging is a really hard format to work with. Being short is super important - the default for Mastodon is 500 characters, on Bluesky it's 300. On Twitter it might be even less, who cares.

So you need to try to get your message across super efficiently. Even if you can write longer in mbin, people might not have the attention span to read long texts. So watch the character counter.

Some other things:

Getting attention

On Mastodon there are two ways of getting attention to your post. The first is by getting followers; the second is by getting boosts. Until you have your own following, the best you can hope for is that people reading your post thinks it's worth promoting and then boost it. Hashtags can also be moderately effective - it's certainly good for discovering content - but you're probably not going to reach very far by shooting things into the void with an hashtag attached if you have no followers.

What helps is to interact with other users. Follow them, boost interesting content you see from them, favourite/upvote their content as a "compliments to the chef", and leave a comment when you have anything to say. Doing this, they might follow you back, which will dramatically increase your reach on the fediverse.

Hashtags

There are two general ways of using hashtags. First, you can add it to some word in your post that nicely summarizes what you're talking about. This is not too distracting, and common practice in most parts of the #fediverse. We don't expect it in forum-style content of course, so for some users it'll look a bit out of place.

The second way of doing it is by listing hashtags at the bottom of your post. Mastodon has a way of hiding these a little, so that they don't get in the way.

As for which hashtags to use, you can of course get creative. But some hashtags are more common than others. When drafting in Mastodon the interface tells you how many people visible from your instance are using the hashtag, which is useful. We sadly lack that on Mbin. In general, maybe include some general and some more specific ones, but don't over-do it.

Mentions / @s

Mentions play a very specific role in the Fediverse. Inherently they're of course simple enough - @user@example.com - but they play a fundamental role in how different Mastodon instances are stitched together.

Of course, they can be used to notify someone - if I tag you (@unknown1234_5@kbin.earth), you'll probably be notified that I did so. But more importantly, it serves the same purpose as an address on an envelope. If you respond to someone on a different instance without @ing them, your post might never reach them, as your post wasn't told it needed to travel to their instance. This is a bit weird and not very intuitive, but that's the reason why Mastodon users always tag each other like crazy in the comments.

@s are also useful to point people towards a specific account, or to include someone in a conversation that might not have been aware of it.

Not sure if that's helpful, but at least it's something!

A couple of fun things as a bonus:

• If you follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy, your microblog posts will all be sent to Bluesky as well. I have been testing this a little, and it works: if you search for Aasatru on Bluesky, you'll find my Mbin account. I don't really microblog much from here though.
• If you get followers on Mastodon, everything you boost will pop up in their feed. So if you see a comment you find to be particularly fun or insightful, and that ideally also works well as a free-standing text, you can boost it to give it attention on Mastodon and similar sites. Sometimes random comments can "escape" this way and get much more attention than the post they are responding to.

As long as he doesn't end up subscribing to the Chicago school of economics, but I have the impression that the University of Chicago has moved on and that even there it's only subscribed to by the loonies these days.

But whenever someone says they studied economy in Chicago I still get suspicious.

Ironically, the influence of the Chicago school is probably why tuition is so expensive. Supply and demand, baby.

As far as I know there's no option to boost posts from Lemmy, it's an exclusive little function for Mbin and the microblogs.

I quite like it, as it makes it easier for good comments to "escape" from here and into the microblogging platforms. Assuming of course you are followed by users over there. But it is not a function on Lemmy.

So I'm not sure what OP refers to, or how posts appear as boosted in the dadjokes community. But it is indeed possible for Mbin or Mastodon users (among others) to boost any content seen on there.

Huh. Seems pretty expansive - @dansup@mastodon.social, any comment?