deadsuperhero

deadsuperhero, 4 months ago

We actually already have some interviews recorded, it’s just that some of the unedited talks are two hours long. But yes, this is something we’re actively working on!

I loved the voice of the friend who emphasizes the "sh"s :)

I assume you mean Laurens from the Fediverse Report. He’s from the Netherlands, and has a wonderful accent and demeanor.

deadsuperhero, 5 months ago

I’m a trainwreck right now.

My grandfather suddenly passed away after a prolonged battle with cancer, multiple strokes, and COVID. It was brutal, he was in so much pain for months. What really hurts is that he was a wonderful person, a source of great joy and insight, and most definitely the person who got me into computers at a young age. My youngest coherent memories are of him, and the loss is exceedingly painful.

My stepfather pointed a loaded gun at my autistic little brother and basically kicked him to the street. My little brother has had his fair share of problems with holding down any kind of job, and can barely take care of himself. He was kicked out of a shelter for a messy living space, and living out of a tent next to a YMCA.

My mom was living in fear for a while, as my stepdad increasingly became more paranoid and violent, to the point that she was no longer allowed to talk to us on the phone if he came home. She managed to give him the slip and take the kids with her to go take care of the grandfather on the other side of the country…but, she’s in for a messy divorce.

These three things have kind of converged, and a lot of it is starting to resolve finally, but it’s been a massive strain on my mental health and my marriage. I’m barely taking care of myself most of the time, and trying to live with anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation…and all of the fun side effects of trying to treat those things with therapy and medication.

I’m so tired. I’m barely eating. I have six months left in a maintenance squadron before I get out of the military, and all I want to do is scream.

deadsuperhero, 5 months ago

Thank you. ❤️ I know, and I’m doing my best. It’s just my first real experience of dealing with any of this as an adult, and I don’t think I’ve ugly cried harder in my life.

I’m about to fly East next week, to bury my grandfather. I think it will be good for me, but it hurts to let go of someone that so many of my happy memories stemmed from.

It’s also a horrifying thought to me that this is the logical conclusion of “growing old with someone”. One of you is going to go first, and it’s going to be the worst pain the other person has ever felt.

deadsuperhero, 5 months ago

Thanks, now I know not to take you seriously.

It’s all good, I don’t even take myself seriously most of the time. Most of what I have to say is dumb shit anyway.

Real talk, though: I legitimately think that Threads is incapable of actually extinguishing a federated network powered by open standards. Yeah, the infighting might fragment us, and the influx of millions of activities and interactions might overwhelm servers that connect with it. To some extent, they can propose protocol extensions and features and even make an ecosystem push with tooling.

But, so long as servers are federating via an open protocol, no entity can truly snuff out the network in its entirety. An actual EEE move would not actually work here: if they ever made such an attempt, we’d just defederate them.

My article is not a point about how we all need to shut up and start worshipping Meta, but that the things we ought to be most concerned about are in fact the things we’ve always neglected: actual user control over data, the ability for people to decide for themselves on what to connect to, and dealing with the technical requirements of hundreds of millions of people worth of traffic. And that’s just to start! If we want to reach the masses, we have to prepare for these things.

deadsuperhero, 5 months ago

My uBlock Origin extension is blocking “threads.net” on his site. Perhaps he’s got some skin in the game.

That’s a post embed.

deadsuperhero, 5 months ago

Thank you for your response, I appreciate your insights!

I think if there were really serious problems with a future version of ActivityPub, we could feasibly do one of two things:

1. Maintain a fork of the protocol - this has actually already happened once, with an implementation standard called Litepub.
2. Move over to a different protocol, such as Zot.

The second route is probably much harder, but there’s no real reason why a zombified Meta version of the protocol would do much of anything to anybody running vanilla ActivityPub at this time. You’d probably have some feature incompatibilities and breakage, but…if you’re not going to federate with them anyway, what can they actually do?

deadsuperhero, 5 months ago

Unfortunately, even if instance admins were to unanimously defederate, Meta—or any social media corporation—could create white-label instances to take their place, and we might be none the wiser of their control of them.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this idea, but they would have to justify the business case to their shareholders. As of right now, the idea of a whitelabel personal silo is a limited value proposition to people not already invested in the Fediverse. If it’s whitelabel, what will Meta do? Start a new company? Inevitably, people would figure it out, and go with something else.

It’s true that we can always choose to defederate from them. What’s to worry about is their meddling with the ActivityPub standard using their incomparably vast resources, and them making their own extensions to the standard in efforts to suck users back into the Borg. Things like that.

I said this a little further up in the conversation, but if Meta produces some horrendous, awful version of ActivityPub that only benefits them, what’s stopping the rest of us from forking the protocol or adopting a different one? If we never switch to their version of doing things, and there’s feature breakage between us and Meta, who actually loses here?

deadsuperhero, 5 months ago

Thank you for your feedback. In the interest of working around this, the embed has been replaced by a video that we downloaded from the announcement post (which we were trying to get anyway) and just used that instead.

deadsuperhero, 6 months ago

I don’t think it was intentional, the dev seemed to be struggling with health-related problems and possibly burnout. But yeah, definitely a depressing moment for an otherwise really cool project.

deadsuperhero, 6 months ago

Thanks, fixed. Posting was a little broken earlier, and I made some incorrect assumptions about manually entering in metadata for the link (Kbin lets you upload the thumbnail manually).

deadsuperhero, 6 months ago

This one is S-tier!

deadsuperhero, 6 months ago

Getting major NPR vibes from this one!

deadsuperhero, 6 months ago

You’d probably want to host it on an actual server, if you want people to be able to access it when your laptop isn’t on. The documentation seems pretty good, though, it should walk you through the steps: simonrepp.com/faircamp/manual/installation.html

deadsuperhero, 6 months ago

Fair point, I should probably clear that up. Static site generators typically work through a process that builds pages for you on the fly, based on what’s in the folder. However, for it to be available on the Internet, you’d still need a server to run the program, so that you can generate those pages.

deadsuperhero, 6 months ago

Thanks for the feedback, I added a big quote from Radio Free Fedi to call more attention to that effort.