Prolly explains why, everytime I felt burnt out and sought out a different career path, then threw the switch and continued to clackity clackity clack down that other track...
I always came back. In fact, Looking back, it should have been obvious - why would someone go to bed with a technical journal or some textbook on IT by choice when they've left (or so they thought) that career for a new and unrelated one?
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
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.
> "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?
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.
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....
If Substack is perfect for your needs then use that. Your problem with substack prolly isn't who else uses it, but rather, that you yourself are calling a proprietary, privacy disrespecting deprecated monolithic silo a "Perfect solution".
Instead of doing what's right, and for the right reasons, you eschew dogfooding on #FOSS when you should be championing it, and call a professional data mining haven perfect, when it is anything but.
Well, you're already on the Fediverse, so you should know better, but I'll dispense with the lecture now and point out a few good FOSS solutions that are Fediverse powered (and one that isn't, but still rocks as a publishing platform) for you:
Option #1, #WriteFreely, which you can find over at its git repo under https://gitHub.com/writefreely/writefreely.
Option #2, deploy yourself a #WordPress site, Then install the #ActivityPub plugin - the latest release publishes into the Fediverse and allows any Fediverse account to reply/comment threads natively - like I'm responding now. It also allows anyone on the Internet to join the discussions as well. WordPress has many options for subscriber lists, Etc., as well as #paywalled#digital_downloads, if you like.
Option #3, #Mitra is a Fediverse publishing platform that currently supports paid subscriptions for Authors: https://mitra.fediverse.observer/list - pick one that has open registrations or self-host yourself, like all of the other solutions here :)
If you're really talking about maintaining subscribers lists, but especially Having a subscriber list and building it up, then most ignorant folks would recommend HubSpot - but they would be wrong, because you can get the same powerful inbound marketing solution / #CRM, only better, for #FREE (That's a bare minimum savings of over $500/month)!!! So install #Mautic and let it do what it does, which you can get here: https://www.mautic.org/download/source-code and then after that, use it in conjunction with the following FOSS application that was tailor made for exactly what you're asking for...
#Ghost is FOSS, and in conjunction with an inbound marketing platform like Mautic is the perfect dynamic duo - like Batman and Robin. But even better, is that I'm going to point you towards a #HowTo that is an actual cookbook #tutorial written by someone expressing the same lamentations as yourself, and here's the exact solution they've provided for you:
By the way, your Mautic server also integrates directly with#MailGun (or Sendgrid, SendinBlue, SparkPost, etc.) to complete your transactional email system that will tell you when each and every recipient received, viewed (and or how long) your emails, as well as how many times they looked at those emails, with a bunch of other tools as well.
I hope that helps, and I'm very glad that you came to your senses about not using a privacy disrespecting, proprietary closed source solution like Substack - besides, registering your own domain name would have hidden the fact that you were using substack anyway, so it's about YOU doing the right thing the right way. Please choose your software in the future based upon the freedoms and ethics it offers in serving you and your customers. There's evil people everywhere, and the smart ones are using FOSS too - not substack.
I don't think I've ever actually seen a medical examiner use the words Pulverized and Liver in the same sentence when referring to a murder victim, let alone a toddler.
Up until that time, #LAMI operated and sailed the 70' gaff-rigged topsail schooner, Swift of Ipswitch (previously James Cagney's personal yacht) for it's youth sailing program. It took a few years to complete the Irving and Exy Johnson, sister Brigantine vessels built and outfitted by dozens of volunteers over the duration of the program. At some point, another gaff-rigged schooner was borrowed and enlisted, the136' Bill of Rights filling the need for accommodations of a youth sailing program that had greatly expanded over time, with many ups and downs, achievements and disappointments, but building two square rigger tall ships for and by a non-profit organization dedicated to youth educational programs for the community, a truly novel pursuit, eventually came to a close as a great success.
This photo shows the 113' brigantine Irving Johnson, on 23 March 2005, and which, after less than three years of service, she had run hard aground on a sandbar following several storms that affected local charts, leaving them partially obsolete - in short, on her way into the Channel Islands harbor, well... sadly, the pic speaks for itself.
Another year and two million dollars later to repair structural damages and flooding, the #Irving_Johnson once again joined her sister ship, #Exy_Johnson, in the pursuit of education as #school_ships, something that Irving and his wife Exy (Electa), following no less than 7 circumnavigations together, pioneered and championed in the 20th century aboard their three successive sailing ships - a #schooner, a #brigantine, and a #ketch - each named the #Yankee.
This image or file is a work of a United States Coast Guard service personnel or employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image or file is in the public domain (17 U.S.C. § 101 and § 105, USCG main privacy policy)
I've always intended on seeing it again, because IMO it's the best rendition of #Mary_Shelley's 1818 classic I've had the pleasure of seeing. The character development alone leaves all of the other adaptations in the dust, along with a large dose of empathy for those involved.
As a companion, I recommend the #Project_Gutenberg version of Shelley's gothic novel in prose; I personally prefer .epub but both the film and the original work by Shelley are more closely aligned than any of those old #Boris_Karloff horror genre flicks that, in turn, influenced the creation of the beloved television character, #Herman_Munster (an old film professor of mine would freak out in the lecture hall anytime someone raised their hand and referred to any motion picture as a flick, lolz).
In a major departure from Shelley's original, Mason's portrayal of the character Dr. Polidori isn't actually in the book - the real John Polidori was a friend of Shelley's who himself arguably launched the #vampire_genre with his 1819 short story, "The Vampyre", once erroneously attributed to Lord Byron. Discussions between Polidori and Mary's husband Percy Shelley are largely credited with the genesis of the Frankenstein story.
If you happen to watch, Frankenstein - The True Story, do please comment back to let me know what you thought :)
My favorite line from the movie, that I've often regularly recited over the years, is:
Beautiful Victor... Beautiful.
On rare occasion, I'm sometimes asked what I'm referencing when I say that, like, after a successful compile, or fresh OS installation :p
There's a few bots I like to follow, not all of them are crappola. #UNIX_Weekly is one of them that often posts little nuggets worth rabbit-holing and so I figured I'd give a quick boost for #OasisLInux
Don't trust those "little buddy heaters" and their cousins of having CO2 sensors and low #Oxygen cutoffs that their marketing indicates you can bank your life on.
You can fucking die.
I used a few of these for several years, when I lived completely off-grid, in the mountain wilderness far from the nearest humans.
They're really convenient and quick to heat a small area, or anything close to them, in just a few minutes, and you can pick them up at any Target, Walmart, Big 5, Tractor Supply, Etc., for $40 - $50.
Basically, you warm your environment, sitting on your cot and warming up your feet and toes before turning it off and burrowing into your subarctic bedding. You can leave the pilot going all night so all you need to do is twist and click it on on the morning, but seriously, why bother?
Sharp (and more importantly, observant) girl in the video - although there's no way to be sure, she just may have saved the lives of everyone in that fricken' tent.