@deadsuperhero@lemmy.world

deadsuperhero

@deadsuperhero@lemmy.world

I write articles and interview people about the Fediverse and decentralized technologies. In my spare time, I play lots of video games. I also like to make pixel art, music, and games.

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deadsuperhero,

Honestly? I’m loving it. The biggest improvement for me was getting rid of those awful PIT menus that were ugly and sometimes hard to use. The new system is way more usable, and I’m tweaking the mappings on my controller to see what feels the most usable.

The improvement to EVA is also phenomenally good. You move a bit faster, there’s more precision, and traversal between EVA and ship is much smoother. As a salvager that gets in and out to scavenge cargo holds, this is a big deal to me.

The character customizer is also really fun to use, and feels pretty intuitive to use. There’s still work to be done in explaining what all of these vertices do, but I think the customization is a lot more flexible.

Some pretty nasty bugs emerged in 3.23 and 3.23.1, but it seems like the team is making pretty good progress on improvements? So, there’s that.

deadsuperhero,

One edge case that I really want to see the team nail down is crash loops. In the EPTU build of 3.23, we noticed situations where recovery effectively acted like a rewind feature, but didn’t actually prevent the cause of a crash from happening.

Having to experience a handful of the same crashes during a single play session is pretty painful.

deadsuperhero,

I mostly meant the old system where all options were just a bunch of floating neon text. It was…functional, I guess, but the new system is so much better from a controller perspective. It’s not perfect yet, things like elevator buttons are still in a weird spot, but most things are a lot easier to deal with.

deadsuperhero,

It’s a different approach with different ideas. It uses open protocols, focuses on data and account portability, and incorporates peer-to-peer concepts in its architecture. The vision behind Bluesky is to build a global square with these concepts.

I definitely wish they would’ve extended ActivityPub and collaborated on the wider network, but I kind of understand wanting to start from scratch and not get involved with the cultural debt Mastodon brought to the network.

deadsuperhero,

I can’t tell whether this is serious or sarcastic 😅

As far as the “global square” part of the equation is concerned: yeah, you’re right! A firehose of public statuses requires indexing to work, as a basic foundational premise.

However, there’s nothing preventing someone from standing up a PDS, opting out of the firehose / big graph service, and instead leaning on federation between individual PDSes. I’m not saying it would necessarily be a common use-case, but it’s definitely not impossible.

deadsuperhero,

Thank you for these insights!

Yeah, aside from developer muscle, an effort like this requires deep knowledge of the existing system. Or, failing that, a commitment to learning it.

It’s also not something that can be done as a side project, if it hopes to compete with the main project to the point of replacing it. Something like that requires an ungodly amount of effort and dedication. Someone would have to commit years of their life to solely working on that.

deadsuperhero,

Misskey is a little bit odd, in the sense that there’s constantly new forks in various stages of development. New forks emerge just as quickly as old ones die off.

It may be that the frontend and backend both being written in one language helps make the system easier to hack on. I can’t say for sure. What’s weird is that some of these forks go in really odd directions, like rewriting the whole backend in a different programming language.

The other thing is that, despite their proliferation, the effort is somewhat fragmented into all of these little projects. I’m not sure how viable any of these forks are in the long term.

deadsuperhero,

It’s an interesting and frustrating problem. I think there are three potential ways forward, but they’re both flawed:

  1. Quasi-Centralization: a project like Mastodon or a vetted Non-Profit entity operates a high-concurrency server whose sole purpose is to cache link metadata and Images. Servers initially pull preview data from that, instead of the direct page.
  2. We find a way to do this in some zero-trust peer-to-peer way, where multiple servers compare their copies of the same data. Whatever doesn’t match ends up not being used.
  3. Servers cache link metadata and previews locally with a minimal amount of requests; any boost or reshare only reflects a proxied local preview of that link. Instead of doing this on a per-view or per-user basis, it’s simply per-instance.

I honestly think the third option might be the least destructive, even if it’s not as efficient as it could be.

Interview with Matthias Pfefferle, Author of the WordPress-ActivityPub plugin (wedistribute.org)

We sat down with Matthias Pfefferle to talk about his journey in developing an ActivityPub integration for WordPress, along with the challenges of implementing a protocol for a platform that everybody customizes in a wide variety of ways....

deadsuperhero,

It’s the WordPress competitor.

PubKit Officially Launches Closed Beta (wedistribute.org)

PubKit is a spinoff project from Pixelfed, and is used by the project’s lead developer to actually develop Pixelfed. It has some pretty great ideas about mocking up entities and data, testing data streams, and working with different server implementations to see where pieces might differ.

Talking to Manton Reece about IndieWeb, Federation, and Personal Blogging (wedistribute.org)

We sat down and interviewed Manton Reece, the creator of Micro.Blog. Micro.Blog is an IndieWeb platform with microblogging capabilities that marries a social experience with a more traditional personal website / blogging concept. It federates via ActivityPub, and has been a part of the Fediverse since 2018.

deadsuperhero,

Radio Free Fedi is awesome, and I highly recommend it.

deadsuperhero,

Truth Social is such a freaking dumpster fire. It would be the absolute worst candidate to be used by governments. Some politicians? Sure. Actual departments? Ehhhh

deadsuperhero,

Literally just saw this in my feed: nbcnews.com/…/trump-sues-truth-social-co-founders…

deadsuperhero,

Gab is in kind of the same place, with the same conclusion.

“Oh no, keeping a walled garden actually increases the value of my echo chamber! Better not open anything up to dissenting views!”

deadsuperhero,

Yeah, I don’t have a complete answer here. I think that Terms of Service requiring standards of behavior are quite reasonable - people in Congress, for example, are required to conduct themselves to a certain standard or be ejected. Same goes for courtrooms.

There may be a “minimum threshold” for content or communities that are blocked, on the basis of materials provided (hate speech, harassment campaigns, doxxing, CSAM), but I’ll readily admit that this is conjecture.

deadsuperhero,

Weird, maybe you have to use an ActivityPub server to complete the lookup? I managed to get it to work with Mastodon and Akkoma, but haven’t tried anything else.

Edit: alternatively, try doing a Webfinger lookup for @potus@threads.net directly?

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