ThatOneKirbyMain2568

joined 2 years ago
[–] ThatOneKirbyMain2568@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I think there are a few culprits here.

  • Not everything wants to be an everything app. While everything in the fediverse uses ActivityPub, that doesn't mean everything has to aim to be interoperable. I wrote a lengthy rant about this here, but essentially, it's important to have things with a more specific, restricted purpose if we want the fediverse to be accessible. If someone just wants a thread aggreegator (i.e., just Reddit's style of media), they shouldn't be forced to grapple with microblogging features more fit for a Twitter-like. There are some platforms that aim to combine different media types—Kbin/Mbin has both thread aggregation and microblogging, and I've heard that Friendica tries to work well with everything. Even so, if someone wants federated Reddit, they should be able to have federated Reddit, and Lemmy aims to provide that. The same way that Pixelfed (an image-sharing platform like Instagram) doesn't need to incorporate Reddit-style threads or Twitter-style microblogs, Lemmy doesn't have to do it all.

  • Federation is still in the works. Something to keep in mind is that most of these platforms are early in development and still working out a lot of bugs. Kbin (the platform I use) is an obvious example due to its currently incredibly spotty microblog federation (tho I've heard that Mbin has implemented fixes to fare better in this regard). We have to be patient while all the kinks are worked out. As much as we all wish it didn't, software development takes time—a lot of it.

  • Admins can sometimes be a bit trigger-happy with defederation. I don't think the fediverse has quite grasped that defederation is essentially the nuclear bomb of instance moderation tools, cutting off interaction with all users of an instance. While there are times where this is justified (even preemptively, such with Threads imo), there are times where the nuke has been threatened over a quarrel between admins or disagreements about other defederations. Hopefully, this will cool down as the fediverse matures, but we'll have to see how that pans out (especially with Threads federation growing ever nearer).

[–] ThatOneKirbyMain2568@kbin.social 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Continuing with the trend of vexillological organizations having their own flags, the Flag Society of Australia has one. While the flag within the flag looks really cool and has a nice color palette, I think the flag as a whole looks a bit odd. The Southern Cross looks weird since its stars are crowded closer together but not shrunken themselves, and the arrangement of everything just doesn't work imo.

[–] ThatOneKirbyMain2568@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

You can go to "Settings" or "Profile" and you'll find a subscriptions tab.
Alternatively, you can install a userscript that adds a faster way of accessing them. Here's one I recently made and one made by raltsm4k.

Sounds fun. I've messed around with Godot a bit myself, though I unfortunately don't have the work ethic to make a full game out of it. Great to see more people using the FOSS option!

Sweet. I've found that trying to make solutions to problems is always a great way to learn more about a programming language or to introduce yourself to a new one. I imagine you'll definitely learn a lot from this (alongside the more important achievement of making something you can use to maintain your health).

[–] ThatOneKirbyMain2568@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Not forever ago

[–] ThatOneKirbyMain2568@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Just released a new update. Is it fixed?

I myself have taken up two new things:

  • This past weekend, I tried my hand at JavaScript. I ended up making a helpful userscript for Kbin, and I'm working on adding some features like settings.
  • Since Geometry Dash 2.2 released, I've been playing around with the game's level editor. Currently working on my first level, and I'm pretty happy with how it's going so far.

I'd definitely be up for that! I also got a lot of use out of raltsm4k's sub list, so I can see how some might prefer to have it in that format.

As for sorting collections and magazines in my script, I plan on making a setting so that you can toggle which comes first.

These are great ideas, and I'll look into implementing them soon. Thanks for the pointers on turbo mode support!

 
 

From the description:

Highlights include:

0:51 Looking back on Mastodon’s epic year
3:22 Small team, big goals
4:55 The arrival of Threads/Meta: pro or con?
9:01 The way Mastodon/Fediverse is architected to provide a better social media experience
11:24 The “big win” of Meta adopting an open standard
12:10 The game-changing paradigm shift in how social media works
17:30 Why Meta is committing to Threads — a significant moment for the social web
18:10 Mastodon community’s reaction to Threads’ entry
19:24 Preemptively building walls to block Threads: self-defeating?
21:10 Tools and advice for instance owners on interoperating with Threads
26:09 Gaining momentum: who will federate next?
28:34 Bluesky
30:00 ActivityPub: the beauty of a generic protocol
38:24 User experiences in the Fediverse
41:06 “Embrace, extend, extinguish” and the XMPP comparison
50:28 Funding Mastodon through Patreon donations
53:10 U.S. nonprofit version of Mastodon and grant applications
54:23 On outside contributions to Mastodon’s code base
57:42 Hopes and dreams for the future

 

For-profit tech companies like #Threads and #Flipboard are beginning to implement #ActivityPub, and that's been causing a lot of chaos lately. Thus, I've found it helpful to take a step back, consider what it is about the fediverse that I value, and think about whether federation with these large platforms will bring us closer to or further from those goals.

With that in mind, I've come up with a few statements (in no particular order) that describe what I think is an "ideal" fediverse:

  1. No actor controls a large portion of visible activity.
  2. Users can move between instances without penalty.
  3. Creating and running an instance requires minimal effort.
  4. People on or entering the fediverse understand the variety of available options.
  5. There is no downside to using free and open-source platforms over proprietary ones.

While this ideal fediverse isn't necessarily realistic or achievable, I'd like to see instance owners act in the interest of these principles. These definitely aren't comprehensive and are of course my opinion, so what do you think an ideal fediverse looks like? Do you think these statements are good goals to aim for or not?


Now, to elaborate:

No actor controls a large portion of visible activity.

This is important for instances to be able to defederate from those with bad moderation, harmful values, etc. If a person or group controls a big portion of the content that people see on an instance, then that instance will lose a lot of that content should they defederate. That person or group would essentially be able to do whatever, and instances would find difficulty defederating because they'd lose so much visible activity and thus users.

If a single entity gets enough dominance over activity, they could make defederation from them out of the question for a ton of users. Furthermore, that entity could cripple the fediverse by simply leaving it, taking a bunch of users from other instances with them. This is a big concern many people have with Threads; if 90% of the activity you see on mastodon.social comes from Threads, then Meta would be able to nab a ton of mastodon.social users by leaving the fediverse, facing those users with the choice of either losing a ton of their connections & follows or jumping ship to Threads.

But you don't even need a supermajority of content to cause that much harm. For example, take the threadiverse (Lemmy/Kbin). A large portion of visible activity is controlled by the admins of lemmy.world. Thankfully, they seem to nice people, but if they were to start (for example) being more lax with hate speech, other Lemmy/Kbin instances would either have to deal with it or lose access to a large portion of the activity pool. If any threadiverse instance were to defederate from lemmy.world — even if the lemmy.world admins started acting against the interests of the fediverse and its users — that instance would lose a dangerous number of users.

Users can move between instances without penalty.

One of the main benefits of the fediverse is that you can move to a different instance and still be able to view the same content. If the admins of your instance start making moderation decisions you disagree with or you just decide that you want to be on an instance that you yourself run, you're able to move and still interact with the content pool. Thus, as long as the platform your destination instance uses (e.g., Firefish, Kbin, Mastodon) supports the same type of content as your old one, you should be able to move without any downsides. The more penalty there is for moving, the more people will feel trapped on an instance even if they want to leave.

This is partially a matter of robust systems for moving accounts, but it's also a matter of having good options available. Mastodon has a ton of active, stable instances, so if you ever want to move (e.g., because your instance is or isn't defederating from Threads), you can do so and still be able to use Mastodon. However, the only such instance on Kbin is kbin.social (not counting instances that run Mbin, a fork with different features & development). If you want to move from kbin.social to another Kbin instance, you don't really have a lot of options. And if you're on something that's closed-source, you'll be forced to move to a different platform entirely, which may not be great for the user — an important reason why free and open-source software should be prominent on the fediverse.

Obviously, this is something that might be impossible to achieve. But even if we can't eliminate the strings attached to moving to another instance, we should try to minimize them.

People can create and run their own instances to their liking with minimal effort.

If a user wants to, they should be able to control their interactions on the fediverse through running their own instance, and doing so should require as little effort as is feasible. Many people have already set up single-person instances for the purpose of having more control over their data. If people can't do that, then they're forced to put their account and content under the control of other people. Of course, most people are fine with this provided that they trust their instance admins, but the option to be your own admin should be as available as possible.

This is part of why it's so important to have prominent open-source platforms. If Mastodon weren't open-source, then anyone who likes Mastodon but wants to control their content would be out of luck. If you like the Threads interface but don't want to be on an instance run by Meta, you just don't have that option.

People on or entering the fediverse understand the variety of available options.

If someone isn't aware that they're on the fediverse, then they can't really benefit from the openness and customizability that it provides. A mastodon.social user who knows nothing of the fediverse won't know that they can move to a different Mastodon instance or interact with the same content using Friendica, as they won't know that the options exist to begin with.

Furthermore, people will have more incentive to preserve an open fediverse if they're aware that it exists. If the fediverse is filled with people who, for example, think that Threads is all there is or didn't come to Threads with an awareness of the fediverse, the fediverse becomes much easier to undermine.

There is no downside to using free and open-source platforms over proprietary ones.

If someone wants to join a closed-source instance run by a for-profit company, they should absolutely be able to. However, that should ideally be because they prefer an instance moderated by Meta, not because the free and open-source alternatives are relatively lacking. Open-source software is extremely important in order for users to have options and agency, so we should aim for these factors to not come with a sacrifice. Otherwise, companies will be able to draw most newcomers to their instance and attain a large share of the content on the fediverse, which is bad as discussed with Statement #1.

Going by this principle, if the owner over a closed-source fediverse platform starts trying to create exclusive functionality that would attract people their instance, they should be regarded with extreme caution. If you're familiar with the whole "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" thing, a company doing such would be the "Extend" phase of EEE, and that's a situation we should avoid at all costs.

 

I literally just opened Geometry Dash and was met with a terms of service pop up.
"…Why are they showing me this? Did my data get wiped or something?"
And then I see the Tower and realize that 2.2 just released.

Glad to finally see it here. Played through Dash (which is really easy for an insane imo, beat it much more quickly than usual), and it was mostly great! Only issue is that I REALLY don't like the swing copter. It's not fun to use at all.

#gaming #geometrydash

 

The State Emblems Redesign Commission made its final edits to the new state flag. The banner will go up in May unless lawmakers intervene.

I'm not a fan of how much the design was changed (i.e., the fact that they just completely got rid of the stripes), but it's still a pretty solid flag!

 

Now that for-profit tech companies are beginning to implement #ActivityPub, I think it's important to establish what we want with the #fediverse and whether federation with #Threads, #Flipboard, Tumblr, and the like bring us closer to or further from those goals.

With that in mind, I've come up with a few statements (in no particular order) that describe what I think is an "ideal fediverse" — a fediverse that's not necessarily realistic but that we should aim for:

  1. No actor controls a large portion of visible activity.
  2. Users can move between instances without penalty.
  3. Creating and running an instance requires minimal effort.
  4. People on or entering the fediverse understand the variety of available options.
  5. There is no downside to using free and open-source platforms over proprietary ones.

These definitely aren't comprehensive, and if you have anything you'd add, let's discuss that! They're currently helping me reassess my stance on Threads now that Flipboard is also entering the stage, and I hope they're helpful for others as well.

I'll elaborate on these five statements in the comments.

1/3

 

The design has a number of variations, and the panel will meet again [Tuesday, December 19] to settle the final details.

 

Flipboard has recently begun federation, starting with 25 accounts. These accounts can be viewed from Kbin with their posts showing up as microblog posts.

What do you guys think about this? I don't really know much about Flipboard or its implications for the fediverse, so I'm curious what others think about the matter.

If you're interested, here are the accounts that have federated:
The Verge — @theverge
Fast Company — @FastCompany
Semafor — @semafor
SPIN — @SPINMag
News Literacy Project — @NewsLitProject
Medium — @Medium
Digiday — @Digiday
ScienceAlert — @ScienceAlert
Polygon — @polygon
Frommers — @FrommersMag
Kotaku — @Kotaku
The 74 — @The74
Pitchfork — @pitchfork
Refinery29 — @Refinery29
Mental Floss — @mental_floss
The Root — @TheRoot
Joysauce — @Joysauce
IndieWire — @IndieWire
LGBTQ Nation — @LGBTQNation
Smithsonian Magazine — @Smithsonianmag
AFAR Media — @AfarMedia
The Christian Science Monitor — @csmonitor
Erin Brockovich — @ErinBrockovich
Canada's National Observer — @NatObserver
The Conversation (US) — @ConversationUS

 

For some reason, my comments occasionally duplicate when I post them. Only started experiencing this issue today.

 

One of the things I find cool about Kbin is the fact that it's a platform for both thread aggregation and microblogging. How much do you use the latter side of things? Do you make microblog posts, actively browse the microblog tab, view them in your home feed, or rarely touch them?

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