maegul

maegul, 1 day ago to longcovid

I'm slowly realising that I probably have some mild #LongCovid

Since having covid (now had it twice since 2022): iron deficiencies, breathing problems, constant asthma, and now a sudden allergy to some foods apparently.

My partner and I have been careful throughout the pandemic but clearly not careful enough at times (twice each) since "opening up".

And though it could be far far worse, I feel pretty violated right now TBH.

@coronavirus
@longcovid

maegul, 3 days ago to technology

Google's play on Search, Ads and AI feels obvious to me.

• They know search is broken.
• And that people use AI in part because it takes the ads and SEO crap out.
• IE, AI is now what Google was in 2000. A simple window onto the internet.
• Ads/SEO profits will fall with AI.
• But Google will then just insert shit into AI "answers" for money.
• Ads managed + up-to-date AI will be their new mote and golden goose.

@technology

See @caseynewton 's blog post: https://mastodon.social/@caseynewton/112442253435702607

maegul, 6 days ago (edited 3 days ago) to stackoverflow

The fediverse won’t succeed at putting up a #Stackoverflow substitute and that’s a problem?

Just an impression: All the pieces seem to be there. But what’s required is a team, with devs, PMs and coordinators, dedicated to making a particular place in the #fediverse .

That’s resources and decently sized financial and organisational demands, especially to get a critical mass of users.

Is the fediverse up to that challenge? If not, is it an issue worth addressing?

@fediverse

maegul, 12 days ago to fediverse

Lemmy is experimenting with plugins.

https://lemmy.ml/post/15187879

Still in experimental prototyping stages it seems, but cool to see. Hope it gets worked on and works out well.

Could be an interesting experiment for the Fedi in general?

It’s using rust’s extism, so webaasembly for plugins.

#fediverse #lemmy #rust #extism

maegul, 17 days ago to fediverse

Nice demonstration of why mastodon's dominance is problematic

See the conversions here:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4628
and
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/federating-the-content-of-posts-note-articles-and-character-limits/4087

AFAICT, mastodon's decisions, which are arguably problematic (on which see: https://lemmy.ml/post/14973403) are literally trickling down to other platforms and infecting how they federate with each other as they dance around mastodon's quirks in different ways.

It seems like masto is ruining "the standard" with its gravity.

#fediverse #mastodon
@fediverse

maegul, 18 days ago (edited 14 days ago) to mastodon

Reflecting on the firefish/calckey "moment"

which was about a year ago now, I can't help but suspect it was a small event with wider implications on the dominance of #mastodon in the #fediverse

I think it was the last chance to direct the twitter migration energy into discovering new/different fedi platforms.

And it was blown, with alt-social in a weird steady/waiting state that's smaller I suspect, than what many hoped for.

@fediverse
#firefish #calckey

cntd: https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/112358202238795371

1/

maegul, 19 days ago to fediverse

Just watched @bret 's talk about Dynamicland (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJm44LJDU44), and couldn't help but think about applications to the #fediverse

They summarise their goals at the end with these ideals:

• What if computing was like electric light which is available everywhere (whereas smartphones are like everyone carrying torches around instead)

• What if programming was a universal literacy (to explore the ideas and problems meaningful for them)

...

1/

maegul, 25 days ago (edited 25 days ago) to ghost

I think the #Ghost and #Wordpress federations pose interesting questions about what #fediverse platforms can and should be.

Do we actually want blogs and feeds of blogs folded into a mastodon/microblog social feed?

Do we want to read and comment on blogs on mastodon?

Do we want all the diversity of the fediverse fed into a single platform's UI and hope that it works well?

Are we worried that some choices by our platform or instance admin might hinder this process?

I'm rather skeptical.

1/

maegul, 25 days ago to random

Huh ... this feels historically ominous ...

the next chess world championship (open) will be contested by an Indian and Chinese person.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/apr/22/indian-teenager-gukesh-dommaraju-becomes-youngest-challenger-for-world-chess-title

maegul, 1 month ago to bluesky

People are actually on BlueSky

There's now a decent measurement of #bluesky user numbers (https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/edavis.dev/bskycharts.edavis.dev/bsky_users_total.html) ...

They've got about 1.6M MAUs ...
& 0.8M Weekly unique users & 0.340M Daily.

That's not nothing!

Roughly double mastodon and 60% more than the whole fediverse (by MAUs, see fedidb.org).

Bluesky is quite "international" with large Japanese and Brazilian popltns, and there's real attrition happening IMO.

Still, let the protocol wars begin I suppose?

@fediverse

maegul, 1 month ago to random

Sorry, don't know who/what to tag (probably an official akkomane account on another server/platform is good best practice) ...

getting plenty of timeouts and "Server is Down" errors on akkomane.social

Started about 5 minutes ago, still happening now.

@christophertrottier

@atomicpoet

@reiver

maegul, 1 month ago to bluesky

Plugins for fediverse platforms.

Where is this up to? Is anyone thinking along these lines?

I've seen @db0 espouse such (eg https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/8581651) (sorry for the tag if annoying).

I've certainly thought of it myself ... because it's a pretty obvious idea for an ecosystem aiming for richness and sustainability.

Seems a perfect fit for reusable moderation tooling too, rather than each new platforms having that trouble.

This is essentially #bluesky 's idea it seems.

@fediverse
#fediverse

maegul, 1 month ago to moviesandtv

The "No CGI" dynamic around films is odd and reveals, IMO, that mainstream anti-tech sentiment in capitalism only flies as a consumer's affectation.

I didn't know about this apart from the usual under-appreciation and under-paying of VFX staff.

But then the "No CGI is just invisible CGI" series (https://www.youtube.com/@TheMovieRabbitHole/videos) and this clip about the Barbie behind the scenes hiding the bluescreen by filling it in (https://youtu.be/fPNpFqXraKE?si=yYu569bY8d41DZ2f&t=509) ... reveals a profession is being smothered.

@moviesandtv

maegul, 2 months ago to ChatGPT

Huh ... actually/finally tried #chatGPT (3.5, the free one) for programming ... and it was surprisingly shit.

Despite not knowing much about what I was asking I could tell pretty quickly it was spitting out incorrect crap.

I'm a little surprised as I'd heard that for programming it was actually useful and I was asking basic things. From what I've seen, unless there's a massive difference between 3.5 and 4, it's a total dumpster fire.

maegul, 2 months ago to random

Holy fucking mastodon webclient batman!: @phanpy is something else!

#phanpy

maegul, 2 months ago to politics

Not knowing US constitutional law, it seems to me the SCOTUS decision might mean that the Dems missed an opportunity when they had the house

That it’s a federal matter seems legally predictable/natural to me, and that it then falls to congress to enforce then also seems natural.

What am I missing on that?

Otherwise, what would the Dems have had to lose by passing an act when they had the house? The 14th was right there.

#uspol
@politics

maegul, 2 months ago to workreform

Performance reviews are just employers controlling the narrative when employees are underpaid

Right?
If you underperform, brutal negotiations ensue … prove your value or the deal is off.

Buuut, if you’re overperforming, you get gold stickers and praise, and the possibility of a pay bump through a process controlled by the employer …

instead of you telling the employer that they have to prove their value or the deal is off.

Instead over performing then becomes the expectation.

@workreform

maegul, 2 months ago to random

How is the Fedi NOT going to end up like email is today (ie, Gmail, outlook, employers and fringes)?

Not sure I’ve seen anyone talk about this much? With the spam incidents, talk of allow-list federation modes and the seemingly natural tendency for big instances (ATM, ~30% all MAU), and you know, threads/meta joining … it seems like an unsurprising outcome especially should the user base increase.

Single user instances already seem painful enough to not be worth it for even many who can.

maegul, 2 months ago to random

The founding myth of all alternative social media spaces is that they are in their essence better places than Twitter.

But so long as their membership is open and their quality reliant on user growth …

in reality they will be essentially the same and the differences, if any, will lie in more subtle/complex aspects easily masked by the founding myth and the celebration it receives from its adherents.

maegul, 3 months ago to mastodon

Mastodon CVE Report

Didn't expect the mastodon CVE report/account would kinda end up being about platform diversity on the fediverse (TLDR: only mastodon really had the problem, which was huge)

https://arcanican.is/excerpts/cve-2024-23832/discovery.htm

@fediverse

#CVE #mastodon #fediverse

maegul, 3 months ago to lemmy

#Lemmy wants to have private communities!

See https://lemmy.ml/post/12014733

> Private spaces are a fundamental aspect of human communication. They allow discussing sensitive topics without interruption from outsiders. Supporting private communities in Lemmy gives a major new use case for talking among friends or within organizations. This use case is currently not covered by major Fediverse projects.

Novel for the #fediverse it seems.

maegul, 3 months ago to FediPact

The Fedipact statistics are interesting

7% of active users committed to #fedipact - https://fedidb.org/current-events/anti-meta-fedi-pact

• How representative of the user base is this, or are admins gatekeeping here? A large survey would be good to clear that up.

• EG, Mastodon, relative to its userbase, seems the most "Meta friendly" with only 57% of fedipact users (but ~80% all users)

• Fractal of niche-dom? Fedi ~1% of social media, fedi-pact ~ 10% of fedi. So anti-meta-fediverse ~0.1%?

@fediverse
@fediversenews

maegul, 3 months ago to fediverse

Decent Decentralisation

https://berjon.com/decent-imaginaries/

Good counter to the focus on protocols.

> a protocol needs to achieve two things: it needs to prevent the accumulation of power imbalances between parties … and it needs to make it easy for users to cooperate in building the the rules they want for how the protocol's operation affects them … the success of decentralisation and … of a democratic digital world rides not only on liberation but also on organising.

@fediverse

By @robin

maegul, 3 months ago to bluesky

#bluesky hype right now seems pretty real. Today, they’ve probably had as many active users as mastodon did the past month.

BlueSky stats: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats (see eg unique followers)

Masto: https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon

Of course it’s just a moment, but I think there was always a question of whether people were waiting for them to just open up.

maegul, 3 months ago to TikTok

Mildly notable social media moment for me watching a Dr Becky video on YT.

In listing her "socials" she's got #TikTok , #Instagram and #Threads (and of course #youtube ).

link below

Is this the new central axis of social media?

Which is funny cuz I've never really been to any of those. No accounts and only visited IG a few times because something else linked there for some information.

Also, I didn't really notice Threads was succeeding.

https://youtu.be/3NeKR7bqolY?si=SJWzXyhk_S5jNdml&t=53

@fediverse