Interesting little dilemma I'm facing with the testing of conversation containers. The parts I'm having the most difficulty with are 1) groups and 2) moderated comments.
Ironically, conversation containers make both of these things a piece of cake. A constrained conversation by definition relays all content to its audience, which is exactly what a group does. A constrained conversation also by definition is a moderated conversation because a comment isn't part of the conversation until it has been added to it by the owner.
So why is there a problem?
Mastodon.
We altered everything we did in bizarre ways a few years ago just to make our consent-driven communications compatible with the elephant in the room. And even though this new architecture does away with all of the ActivityPub hacks and performs the same operations in completely legal ActivityPub objects without requiringany extensions, Mastodon doesn't recognise the entire concept of groups and moderated content. So we'll either need to come up with hacks that make our stuff compatible with their primitive data model, or just say "fugg it" and do it the right way and "fugg them" if they don't want to play in a more capable vision of the ActivityPub universe.
I'm leaning towards the latter. We're creating a better, friendlier, and safer fediverse. This train has been building momentum for 14 years and has no brakes.
#Fugg it, and Fugg them - they don't play nice in the sandbox anyway, and can take their little broken toys and go home.
Just concentrate on:
1.) Doing it right (as you relate you are).
and
2.) Doing what you can (within reason) to accommodate and interoperate with the other prominent, responsible projects. A few I would note would be:
https://epiktistes.com/uploads/c34e37a4/e56e/4f48/1.jpegc1978 schwinn spitfire 5’slatest project… we got my wife’s parents bikes out of storage where they’d been collecting dust for about 25 years, put new tires on them, tuned them up, cleaned them up and went riding!
Looking through the poppies in my garden towards my old #cabin in the mountains of #Humboldt, #California.
These were wonderful times... Before the fires of the #August_Complex.
This is one of my fav photos of my old home in the serene isolation of #nature.
I had a few wonderful years here, before having to #evacuate to a world consumed by fear and uncertainty amidst the calamity of the global #Wuhan pandemic.
IOW -the reader doesn't have to leave their comfy Fediverse client, experience or venture into unsafe outside networks or sites with trackers and other data mining engines.
A mission statement? As a decades long FOSS and Privacy advocate, it's really not much of a question to me. My immediate answer is, "But, of course." We should strive for a UX that users will adore. Fact: I love Faceplant - I do! I don't use it, and stay in a galaxy far, far away, but I'm not gonna lie and say it's not one of the niftiest UIs in existence. Everything is smooth and just the right amount of opaque and glossy and smooth scrolling through the stream, wall, timeline, *whatev.
If we make it pretty, then that's going to win adopters from the general public. And if we gain people from the general population.... pretty kewl.
The Fediverse isn't a single, particular protocol powered network - OStatus, ActivityPub, Diaspora, Zot6, Nomad, Etc. #DeSoc is a horizontally scaling, logical network topography. It's the foundational concept that disrupts a monolithic architecture. Both are great, but when you're talking about human social intercommunications it sure sounds a heck of a lot more safe when there's one, three, or twenty seven accounts on a single Fediverse instance than twenty seven hundred or thousand user accounts. I'd argue that with that many active user accounts, you're really accommodating the deprecated, monolithic silo model.
I was successful, very recently, in encouraging a popular sharing service to completely drop the mastodon logo and stop using it. The project lead related to me that of note was the fact that all of the folks who had galleries had different #Fediverse addresses, not half of them actually mastodon addresses. All of the mastodon logos have now been replaced with the Fediverse logo. AND - THAT - IS - AWESOME
> "It has been an honor to be of even passing value to the users of Linux. I wish all of you well."
What was hitherto, your awareness, or understanding of these events? I'd love to hear any comments on the matter and boosts are most welcome to widen the pool of available input. There's an awful lot that can be said on many facets of this.
NOTE:Mikhail Gilula is now the owner of https://keyark.com/ (KeySQL).
1.) No. It is not (Short answer, in direct response to your question).
2.) Not linking directly to YouTube videos is actually ahead of the curve not behind it.
3.) Your current pactice to date of not linking directly to YouTube videos has a lot of benefits to your readers whether they bother to directly appreciate it or not. Here are some reasons for that, and facilities waiting for you, as a #Fedizen in the #Fediverse, and one who can appreciate the protection of people's privacy and data integrity free of being quantified by industrial data and privacy mining engines:
PeerTube is a great resource, and you can link directly to any video hosted on PeerTube. Not only that but #PeerTube has facilities to quickly clone any YouTube VoD (check the license at YouTube or contact the Copyright owner (creator/publisher) directly if they didn't take the time to avoid the default YouTube license.
If you're the publisher/creator of the VoD then what some folks do is to upload part of it to YouTube with a big splash banner alerting the viewer to visit a particular URL to the PeerTube instance (Many also specify Odysee) video. There are a lot of very prominent so-called YouTube influencers or creators that do this as standard practice, even splitting their videos into two versions - the beginning, which is on YouTube, and the rest of the video which is hosted somewhere else in its entirety, and this works very well for them.
If it's not your creation, then there's a few #FOSS tools to instantly convert a YouTube URL to a VoD into an Invidious URL to stream the video. What's especially awesome about doing it this way, is that, on almost all Fediverse platforms, even the decrepit stock mastodon instances, a very pretty link preview of the video is presnted, and most Fediverse platforms even support an embedded player experience right there in your stream so you never have to leave your Fediverse client.
Following up on that last suggestion, is the fact that when you post an invidious link to a video anyone who clicks through to view it can simply click on the download button, choose the quality of the video, and voila! They now have a local copy for themselves!
NOTE: There are a lot of invidious servers across the Internet, I recommend choosing a good stable one that's been around for a while, and using that one by setting up a shortcut for yourself (you only need to insert the YouTube ID in the URL). If anything ever happens to that server you can quickly replace the actual Invidious instance for all of your vids :)
So again, to recap what I said in response to your poll, No. You're not behind the curve at all, you're a #pathfinder, ahead of the curve, doing your part to respect the privacy of others who may otherwise be deprived of the content that you publish.
As a #Privacy conscious publisher and obviously, a member of the Fediverse thank you for your commitment to user safety and the protection of their own Intellectual property and privacy, free from the tracking and privacy mining operations of the deprecated, monolithic silos!
Someone actually, somehow, went to the trouble of packing in a fricken' piano from the outside world. A feat that still, I scratch my head over.
The piano didn't make any sounds, save for dull thuds, but most of the keys weren't even raised. Somewhere I've a few shots of it, and I'm sure it has served as the nest of many a critter, lolz.
I find this oddly fashioned cabin intriguing, but precarious on the side of a hidden canyon
First discovered in 2002, paleontologist draw comparisons of #Dinocephalosaurus_orientalis with other aquatic species having no modern day analogs - why did the entire family of #Tanystropheidae or the genera exhibiting these morphological functionalities not continue?
Perhaps just as interesting is the convergent evolution (especially with respect to their necks) between that of Dinocephalosaurus and members of the Tanystropheus genus. A close resemblance on the surface, yet Dinocephalosaurus orientalis was strictly an aquatic species.
I've included an artists reconstructive rendition of Tanystropheus longobardicus for comparison between the two, but note that Dinocephalosaurus had four flipper-like feet of the same size, and unable to exist, or at least thrive in a terrestrial environment, where Tanystropheus exhibited larger feet in the rear - not unlike your hands being smaller than your feet.
And yes, as Yuki (@youronlyone) offers up as a contemplative inference, the whole "Dragon" and "Loch Ness Monster" corollaries are uncanny, raising questions as to why would pre-industrial societies actually have such fables, or in the case of the latter, claims of sightings, if not rooted in some previous observation by humans?
Exposing my DID and then farming my contact database so it can tell me when people I know sign up for #Signal (and Vice Verse - it tells people who have your DID in their contact database when you're a signal user too) is an egregious invasion of my privacy!!!
I do understand that Signal has been working to get rid of the #DID requirement, and received notification of such a day or so ago, but there's still a bad taste left in my mouth for encroachments.
Now here's something really special - I don't come across things so refreshingly kewl this often. I follow and test with AlienBob's Ktown endowed LiveSlack CDs but I've been running my own installed from scratch Slackware -current workstations (or moving them to new machines) that I've continued maintain w/bleeding edge software for many years.
This is more like the latter (My warm and fuzzy, just how I like it, personal OS install) than the former (LiveSlack CD) - You're getting the benefit of seeing how someone else sets up their machine to incorporate their daily business flow, with all the kewl tweaks and progs right there for you to moll over. You can run it as/is or take it as a starting point to diverge from, incorporating your own style and improvements for years to come.
You prolly wanna bookmark this for sure and I know that I'mma spin this up myself this week!
A couple of things that I feel are pertinent to mention:
You start off with a running system, like any #LiveCD, but already tweaked with plenty of customization and integrations to make this a plug and play daily driver right out of the gate.
It's a great way to skip over the parts that led you to believe it was too much work to justify getting started with #Gentoo.
Fediverse! I’ve been building a bridge to Bluesky, and they’re turning on federation soon, which means my bridge will be available soon too. You’ll be able to follow people on Bluesky from here in the fediverse, and vice versa.
Bluesky is a broad network with lots of worthwhile people and conversations! I hope you’ll give it a chance. Only fully public content is bridged, not followers-only or otherwise private posts or profiles. Still, if you want to opt out, I understand. Feel free to DM me at @snarfed (different account than this one), email me, file a GitHub issue, or put #nobridge in your profile bio.
Johannes, There isn't one - they're talking out of their ass.
They're just making noise and emotionally distressed to discover that this is how the #Fediverse currently works, and always has worked - and it's not just the #ActivityPub portions of the Fediverse, or even the Fediverse - it's the entire #Internet...
"If you affect a public post, you have no expectation of privacy".
For those who still feel some sense of having been offended, I welcome them to unplug their computers and toss their iPhones and Androids into the trash. That's really their only option, and they'll come to that realization some day, maybe, and it is of no consequence for anyone else in the world if they don't.
Want to find ACTIVE journalists on Mastodon? This spreadsheet is just amazing. A couple days ago Martin Holland @mho posted a project of his to promote journalists. It starts with known journalism accounts from the @tchambers list, but also tracks their activity, so you can see who is actually posting regularly.
This is an absolutely wonder resource, and a great asset for the fediverse!
Collating reams of journalist accounts is a good thing.
The problem I have with most of the folks on that list is that it's almost misleading, in some respects. The old Twitter mentality is persistent with the perceptions of these journalists (that's our fault), and as a result, we get a tease and a link, and depending on the particular Fediverse platform or client we're using, we may or may not get a link preview.
The volume of journalist published information is minimal, much akin to what things like Lemmy and Kbin, HackerNews, or Reddit might afford us - and it's unnecessary. A list of external, 3rd party news resources is great, but I am here.Right here - In the Fediverse, with my Fediverse client (That's my reader), and a shitload of journalists who themselves have already migrated over. I have RSS, ActivityPub Follow and alert capabilities, and can appreciate journalists actually publishing their articles here, in the Fediverse, much more than elsewhere that I have to travel to, so to speak... and maybe hit a God damned paywall.
I think part of the problem here is that many of the journalists flowing into the Fediverse are indoctrinated with the old mastodon/twitter decrepit shortcomings that left them with little capability other than to publish elsewhere and link to it from here. I don't want to have to go somewhere else to read the things that interest me - and there's no need. All the tools are here. In the Fediverse. Now.
Most Fediverse platforms don't constrain the users and publishers like the old mastopub way of doing things. i.e., lack of #Markdown or other #Rich_Text capabilities and the inclusion of inline graphics or other multimedia file types in articles, or that persistent, cringy, paltry, 500 character limit that the draconian mastodon interfaces are constrained with, along with their inability to Quote-post. This is why the so-called #mastoforks have been so successful, overcoming many, if not most of those barriers, although they're still almost indistinguishable from the typical #mastopub interface.
We're building critical mass amongst journalists, and this is remarkable, yet we need to encourage greater awareness initiatives on just what the Fediverse platforms have to offer nowadays (and it's only getting better).
Those journalists that I've had the pleasure of admiring here have for the most part, leveraged things like one of the Misskey family of platforms with multiple link previews per post, and quite the rich formatting of their text to make their articles pop with life and entice the reader to visit.
Another issue? Many of these journalists and commentators publish their articles and provide links, but they resolve to paywall sites. I think we need to rethink our ability to, at the instance level for each and every individual user, block shit that links to paywalls. We already have several good browser plugins that do so.
The sooner we sufficiently inform the lions share of these journalists to the opportunities they have on Fediverse platforms that are more contemporary and capable than mastodon, the sooner they can get down to the business of focusing on the monetization of their repertoire here in the Fediverse (and keep ALL the money earned); in turn, we (the rest of us) get quality, original, unique content here, compelling even more folks from the world of the proprietary, privacy disrespecting, deprecated monolithic silos to come and co-exist here with us as fellow Fedizens.
Already, several Fediverse platforms enable the full immersion into the ecosystem here with facilities for monetization - either native to the platform or as a plugin. For example, one of the quickest ways for a journalist to take advantage of a "Substack", "Medium" or other popular monetized platform in the Fediverse is to merely create an account on one that provides these utilities - Like WordPress or Mitra or WriteFreely - create an account, plugin your donation/subscription payment info, and start publishing interesting, informative, original content :)
***One thing we as consumers of the news can do right now, is take the time to individually contact each person we can on this list of journalists and let them know these things. Point them to this article with a link, or to the actual resources that they can experiment with and deploy their unbridled and untapped resources to reach out and in turn themselves be reached.
I'll leave links below, to a couple of the Fediverse platforms I've referenced above. If you're viewing this post on a platform that is one of the Misskey family of forks, then you'll see the graphic below as well as all of those link previews for all of those resources.
Let’s take a look at the recent announcement of the “astonishing” discovery of a global subsurface ocean on Saturn’s “Death Star” icy moon Mimas.
The discovery is based on new modeling/simulation of Mimas’s "wobble" (libration) around its axis, its orbital shift over 13 years and Mimas’s tidal heating. It rules out the alternate hypothesis of an oval shaped rocky core. There is no direct evidence of liquid water.
Wow... Just Wow! That's all. Nothing to see here folks.... NOT. Go visit this profile! Seriously, it's a completely unique refreshing take on emerging knowledge.
I'mma (too late, I already just did) follow this account. There's some really thoughtful publishing going on and being shared with Fedizen's... @tallship (if you're Fediverse instance supports Gemini protocol) rates' the feed from this account as ⛵️⛵️⛵️⛵️⛵️'s (Five Sailboats).
Seriously though, this is the most compelling Fediverse user whose posts I don't wanna miss at this time. I highly recommend giving it a #doomscroll (and a follow if you're so inspired) and then thanking me later (I like Maker's Mark and Knob Creek).
This is the kind of publishing that is going to help popularize greater support for RSS in Fediverse clients.
Literally, I was off bucking up logs earlier in the day with a chainsaw and peeled these natural bark costumes from some of them. You can't make this stuff up, but a sick imagination does help you see the potential to use them as Halloween costumes while they're still wrapped around the logs.
Reprinted from the Fediverse-City Matrix room, with permission from the author (myself):
I was just participating in another discussion elsewhere on the connotations and perceptions relating to a global feed of the entire known Fediverse, as it pertains to what various platforms call it (in their selector tabs).
Lots of suggestions, and every platform uses a different nomenclature. Some use 'global', some use 'live', and there's a few others as well that try to convey that type of extremely busy feed.
But then I touched on the subject of Local feeds - not all Fediverse platforms utilize this type of concatenated feed. I related that the Hometown fork of mastopub was [at least one of] the first to incorporate this as both a feed, and a type of post that is localized to only that particular instance.
I also, because I've read his contention, included the Dev's reasoning on having such a utility as a feature - because he intended Hometown to be a Fediverse platform that could encourage a Highly localized "community".
So you can select the other various, common types of scope for a post when making a post, as well as posting something that is only viewable to other users on your local instance - thereby supporting the 'local community only' aspect that has eluded and mostly deluded users on other platforms.
Why "deluded", because having a Fediverse account in the minds of most folks coming from the deprecated, monolithic silo space is something that has been heavily promoted by Fedizens as one of the reasons why it's better to use the Fediverse instead of those impersonal deprecated silo systems.
And that's simply not true.
Take me, for example. I have several accounts and interact using them with different circles of people (I won't get into the power of recursive circles as they were implemented in gplus). So I'mma just use mastodon.social, one of the biggest monolithic-like silo instances in the Fediverse, as an example here.
People there, most often n00bs from the November Rain or later) talk about the sense of "community" they have there, when they're really only speaking of the connections they have by following and being followed by not just people on that instance, but across the entire Fediverse.
The sense of community that almost everyone in the Fediverse perceives is mostly a compilation of the follows and followers that they each have, and is unique to themselves alone.
For example, I prolly know 4 or 5 people on each instance I have an account on. My community is comprised almost entirely of the direct connections I have made with others across the Fediverse at large, and yes, people on platforms with 'local-only' feeds to see my posts, know them to be local, but so do folks on other instances watching their 'global feeds' (or home feeds where someone they follow includes a follow of my account).
So to me, in my experience, my community is comprised of those who I've made connections with and the people they are connected to, with very little traffic from the local instance I am on at any given time.
To think that you're going to have a community on mastodon.social consisting of people primarily from that instance is a bit naive, IMO, coz your default feed grows exponentially with foreign user's posts the more you connect with anyone - not just the people you follow that are local to your instance. You see something, you interact because it's interesting, pertinent, or relevant to you - you don't do that because you've discerned that you will only interact with local accounts... that just ain't natural, human tendency.
So the creator of the Hometown fork realized that one type of vehicle in the feature set to mark this kind of delineation was that of the ability to post and see in your feed, local only posts, with the overt assertion that Hometown is a fork that in part, is a platform that can facilitate the social diaspora consisting of a 'mostly local' community.
Even entire instances, named or stated as localized geographically or topically, as having publicly open registrations miss this mark in a big way - people for whatever reason, want a Fediverse account, pick a host/instance, by whatever criteria, and then inadvertently end up creating their own diaspora of social connections across the entire Fediverse anyway.
nostr, Bluesky (when it eventually fully supports other instances), Threads (yeah, I know, it's a bastard, lolz), Minds, and other, bigger instances or monoliths, don't try to capitalize on this notion of "Your instance is your community" because overwhelmingly, it just isn't the case in reality.
I'm not saying that there aren't Fediverse instances are successful in cultivating small communities consisting of connections with others on those particular instances, but the most successful of those are the instances that have actually disabled Federation on those instances, lolz.... There's lots of examples of that, which is kewl - to each their own.
But the tendency of everyone to follow the Ew! Shiny! paradigm of simply liking and following what you like irrespective of whether it's on your local instance or not is the lions share of how people interact with each other.
Your thoughts, observations?
Attached graphic attrib: A Jack Russell, happy as can be, sitting in the pilot's seat flying a Cessna, not knowing WTF he's doing.... but he's really happy! The caption reads: "I have no idea what I'm doing".
Oddly enough, This morning I tuned into TCM coz I didn't really wanna be paying attention to the TV while I was working on wrapping up the deployment of an enterprise cloud platform for a client; not that I was under a deadline, but I needed focus, AND some chamber music of a sort in the background - something I wouldn't be rocking out to.
Well, one of those films that played earlier today was starring Jean Simmons. I'm always looking up the talent, I can't say if it's to glean a bit of perspective on the art form or just to glean some aspect of the industry.
Anyway, Jean played a lot of glamorous, gorgeous characters, and was cast in some pretty high profile roles, with Academy Award nominations and even the role of a Starfleet Admiral in TNG.
But the real topper, I think, was me wondering what it must have been like to in some way be overshadowed during the last 40 years of her career by a money grubbing narcissist that might not have ever even really cared about the music itself...
And then you go and draw down with a humorous, tongue in cheek simile, an astute observation on the same day, lolz....