Well I did the first step which was disassembling the existing couch, unfortunately turns out assembly requires two people and wife is still at work, so back on the floor I go
One thing Mastodon (or a fork) could do to win some users over from Bluesky, is support taking your account private. It's wild that X and Threads are the only big post-Twitter microblogging platforms that allow this.
@misc I don't know very much at all, but that sounds extremely dicey to implement in ActivityPub since other forks and systems could just ignore the changed flag.
Maybe I'm wrong, but since doing a wholesale "going private" move is so frequently used when shit gets super hostile, it seems like it would be important to bulletproof in ways that…may not be available? Idk.
We understand "clients" as a concept but what would a browser for the social web look like? Something that would let you dip into a convo on Mastodon, or Bluesky, or whatever, and help you track the throughlines
@misc I think a fedibrowser could have built in functionality similar to Graze, which allows you to easily interact with any other Mastodon server as if it were your own. https://faqabout.me/iam/graze
Taking that a little further, I could sign in to my primary fediverse accounts and choose one whenever I'm looking at a pixelfed post, or a peertube post, or a mastodon post, on any server. It could even work when I leave a comment on blogs, as long as they are connected to ActivityPub.
@misc does it still have leaves? By the size of that trunk it likely has an extensive root system that will hardly be bothered by fighting for moisture with fungi
@Kevin Lots of leaves! Did a quick google and saw it suggested that mushrooms indicate root rot - they don't kill the tree but suggest that it may be terminally ill.
Do you (or anyone following the hashtag) happen to know if #cambridgema has an office that will come out and diagnose a tree like this?
@misc Honestly I think we need to talk less about Mastodon. Frankly, I think Mastodon and many of the decisions made by Gargon have been bad for the Fedi at large. I'm glad to see some of the other software gaining mindshare.
In the end, Fediverse will be here for the long term, and I think it's going to be small communities connected to it that bring people here.
It seems like one way to avoid scraper protection would be to not automate the browsing part, but rather have distributed volunteers with browser extensions to download the target data as they access it.
(Trying to think of ways to get Instagram story data in a more useful form)
Like, the social media team for my org chapter has a weekly schedule of shifts, and it’s hard to track and coordinate on what we’ve seen and shared. I just want all that stuff chronological.
Please consider helping my friend Myoshi, who was fired for her support of Palestine, and who has been pouring her heart and soul into activism with IfNotNow Baltimore.
In a world where everything is kinda federated but it's through a patchwork suffused with blocks, bridges, and feature mismatches - does the inscrutability of all that become the new opaque algorithm?
For a long time I was critical of any would be post-Twitter than didn't federate from the start, because that seemed like the obvious essential way to bootstrap a critical mass.
But now, I'm starting to feel like there is gonna be some strength in the fact that Mastodon + the broader microblogging fediverse, Bluesky, and Threads are going to come together after developing separately.
@misc Admittedly this topic gets negative, and I'm not feeling like going there right now. I've ranted about this a few times in the past, and I'm sure I'll do it again.
I'd like to find a way to automate it so that people on a social media team can fave tweets and those automatically get compiled into a google sheet. I see github has some Selenium X scrapers that could be useful, but none of them seem to have an option to load someone's faves. I guess I could try to figure them out and retrofit this myself.
@jonny I have never used any of this stuff before, and apparently IFTTT can do it, but I might try this just to learn. (Part of me kinda just wants to learn how to scrape X out of spite.)
A few months ago I saw a link to a web app for making trolley problem memes, where you could drag the components in all kinds of wild configurations - anyone know what that was?