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.
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:
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.
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".
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.
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.
It's good to receive feedback that helps people determine information that has value to others. It helps us focus on topics with merit.
There are a couple of additional things I'd like to address though, as briefly I can, considering I'm a rather loquacious sort ;)
I think it was @frogzone that brought up the general controversies that typically do follow #Cloudflare around. I have privacy conscious friends on both sides of that widening chasm...
In general it tends to be the developer sorts that although are cautious, reserved usually, when passing around compliments where Cloudflare is concerned, they're also the pragmatists where performance and dare I say security is concerned, and are often quite willing to turn to Cloudflare (specifically, as a #CDN).
With respect to security concerns, it is true that incorporating a CDN does provide a level of obfuscation of the IP spectrum, that is often cited as a major reason by hosting providers for the customer to incorporate/subscribe to CDN services (more often than not, Cloudflare - because they offer better kickbacks (er.... incentives) to hosting providers.
Then there's the hard core privacy concerned folks. #Last_Mile delivery performance considerations typically being much less of a compelling reason to use, let alone pay, for a CDN like Cloudflare to be injected into the website admin's #DNS. This is because, and let's be real here folks, most websites don't generate anywhere near the levels of traffic that their Nginx or Apache Servers can easily serve up, and for folks on the other side of the world from the particular website, a few milliseconds on a clear day is negligible.
Now, if you're running a very busy site, like... Etsy, or even really popular sites with thousands of requests per minute then you can really benefit by spreading your cache around the globe on super fast CDN services. Even a site that receives on average 1 request per second (60 per minute - and that's pretty respectable traffic) doesn't really benefit enough from the #caching related benefits of a CDN to mark a compelling case - the Last Mile Delivery, however, to Oslo, Norway, from a website in Melbourne, Australia... that can indeed improve perceived response by 250ms (2.5 seconds) or so.
So, just like these so-called VPN services, like NordVPN, etc., there needs to be an effort to educate the consumer as to the actual benefits expected for specific matters - some may be important considerations for the consumer, while others may just be a tech support person in a boiler room trying to reach that bonus number for the month... I've seen waaaay too many people purchase services they really didn't need or would receive much benefit from, and many support desk personnel upselling customers with things they probably shouldn't have.
Now, there's another thing I didn't mention - #Denial_of_Service attacks... Good ole #DDoS campaigns. Well, first of all, one should check with their hosting provider - whether they have the benefit of protections against such attacks, and then, weigh the added benefit of using something like Cloudflare to do the same job (are you paying for protection that you might need twice?).
I personally would probably not have included Cloudflare as part of the #HowTo. It can be added at anytime, but some folks swear by it, so it's not that I'm on the fence about Cloudflare, it's just that I look at it more from the engineering and security perspective, with an eye specifically focused on the veracity of any perceived needs by the customer. And I'm not super fond of turning all of that DNS control (and valuable #metadata) to some third party.
I realize that may have only served to raise more questions, so I'll just say that this is why you pay your trusted IT support professionals who make all of their money on labor they've billed you for, to sit down and discuss what you may or may not need, and especially, why 👍
Brenden Eich was invoked by @marathon - and I too, concur that It is only right to measure technology based on it's own merit and capability - without regard to superfluous and unrelated matters of personal politics.
When haters start fomenting hatred, disparaging everyday, average people for their informed choice of technologically capable software relevant to the task at hand, I like to remind those vile, adolescent, sniveling children that they're literally denigrating things like Brave Browser and Soapbox (the platform I'm authoring this post on), while at the same time availing themselves of the full compliment of features that #JavaScript's technology affords them - JavaScript, invented by#Brenden_Eich...
And they have my blessings to completely swear off and forgo ever using JavaScript again - but they won't, will they? Why? Because they're filthy, hateful, hypocrites consumed by their own criminal commiserations.
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)
Questions always follow after such, 'salty talk', or 'nautical nomenclature', or in #Star_Trek terms, #technobabble.
What's the difference between a mizzen topgallant sail and a main royal staysail? Just a few rules is all it takes, but in today's world, one need only avail themselves of the basic Marconi rig on a single masted sloop. There's a mainsail (the big triangular one aft of the mast), and a jib, or foresail. Typically, when speaking about a jib (the one forward of the mast), people will typically categorize them into about three classes:
a #Storm_jib - smallish, for reduced sail area in high and gale force winds.
If you're rigged to run one jib, you're a #sloop; two, and you're #cutter rigged.
tl;dr: Unlike elections, rigging is a good thing. Without standing rigging you have nothing to hold your masts up in place and they'll just snap or fall over. Without running rigging you have no way to control your sails, hoist them up, or catch the wind.
So when it comes to sailboats, it's a very good thing that they're rigged :p
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