volkris @volkris@qoto.org
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
Sounds to me like you have an inflated notion of the US position in the world.
Especially considering what a basket case the US has been lately.
There was a day when Robert Reich was a reasonable, respectable person, but those days are long since passed.
This article is just gobbledygook.
Punish Americans for rising prices? America isn't doing anything like that at all. Our legislators have been engaged in fiscally stupid policies, but that's not about punishing anybody for rising prices, that's about deficit spending that bids up prices for everybody.
Not that Reich is going to admit to that anytime soon as it doesn't jive with his political stances.
There's no real solution here. There's just distraction from the real problems.
Sounded like it was a statement of valuing superficiality over anything with any substance at all, valuing words over actions.
And just, the way he carried himself, he came across as ridiculous, as somebody without anything intelligent to offer at all.
That he took the low road in some of his insults just really rounded it up.
Alright, it was a statement of values. But very antisocial values. From a guy who just spent a week voting in alignment with hardliner Republicans against reopening the House.
Seriously, the guy is losing on just about every possible dimension in that moment.
I know, and I'm not disagreeing. I'm just saying that under ActivityPub they don't even have to scrape. The system delivers it directly to them.
@ShekinahCanCook@universeodon.com
Do you mean this bill?
volkris
boosted
Hello fellow citizens of the free and open web, it is me, Ben Brown. You may remember me from that social network from back when social networks were cool, or maybe from that one open source project that blew up.
Hi, it is great to see you again.
First off, corporate owned social media always sucked, we always knew it. It is past time for us to have better options.I am so glad for the #Fediverse and #ActivityPub and Mastodon and other projects for breathing new life into the indie web, where it is possible for us to own what we post and use whatever tools we want. I couldn’t resist building something!
My new project is called SHUTTLECRAFT. It social media server … FOR ONE.
What does that mean?
It is very small and lightweight open source app that runs nicely on services like Glitch, but it has most of what you need to host your own personal social media account.
It’s got a microblogging tool, to make posts. You can customize the design with HTML and CSS. You can follow people on Mastodon or other services and interact with posts and send messages. People can follow you on Mastodon, or with RSS. You run it on your own server so you own and operate the data and the code and the whole service. And you can hack the code and make it weirder so that we can all be part of a better, more diverse and more interesting web.
No billionaires or mega-corps required!
I made a 3 minute video showing how it works:
https://www.loom.com/share/a6441bcebdc64f54b5010c95eae1e180
Though this a person a project and only a few weeks old and with tons of stuff still to build, you can get the code right now and run your own. The official site is also has a 3 minute walk through of setting up an instance on Glitch.
Or go straight to for the code:
https://github.com/benbrown/shuttlecraft
Thanks to everyone who has already tested this or sent feedback or contributed code. Y'all rule.
Own your posts!! Make it hard for them to monetize you!
Well, it's part of the checks and balances built into the design of the US government.
Yes, it is a hassle that the executive branch has to deal with legislative branch oversight. But it's better than the alterntive.
I've heard probably half a dozen admins complaining about it in the last month or so, sharing graphs of their bandwidth, and wondering if something is going wrong.
Storage too.
I wonder how the funding works, if #CSPAN had to pay high prices for the camera operation over the last week while normally they get free footage from the cameras run by the #House.
There have been rumblings about the future of CSPAN given the changing media landscape, so this is a pretty important question to me.
It would be easier to see if it was QT'd :)
The idea that neutrality doesn't exist, that we should be forcing the world into black and white boxes, forcing sides, is unscientific and unhelpful.
If *nothing* else, if you force a person to take sides there's a good chance they'll tend to take the side against the person doing the forcing, showing that such a pressure campaign can flat out undermine the person's goals.
One thing these comments are overlooking, and a thing that needs to be shouted from the rooftops here, is that #ActivityPub doesn't just let the content go, doesn't just open itself up to scraping, but actually and actively broadcasts the content out into the world.
So many people don't realize how public this process is, and don't realize the privacy implications of this design. They need to if they're going to use this platform consentually as informed users.
In other words, there's no need to worry about the dangers of scraping content here. ActivityPub just hands the content to you, to do with as you please.
It didn't have to be this way, but the design choices were made, so be aware.
This is a good example of how we spend way too much time focusing on drama in DC and too little time monitoring the performance of our own local and state officials.
We just spent a week with wall-to-wall coverage of a technical procedure in the #House while who knows how much bad (or good!) work was done in our state houses, that will actually and directly impact peoples' lives.
And again, you're basing your statements against a particular standard that others don't necessarily hold.
In your case ActivityPub isn't causing any problems *given the resources you're already devoting to it* while other people who aren't devoting those resources are having problems.
Other people who haven't expected the platform to be so bandwidth intensive are finding themselves surprised by the amount of bandwidth it takes. Your expectations are different and you're not surprised. That just speaks to expectations, not to the platform.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending on the situation.
Traffic is not just a pure, laminar flow. Interactions between vehicles means there is friction all along the route, and that contributes to congestion. Effectively, a crowded street is its own bottleneck.
Just like a pipe carrying water, there is a pressure drop along the length even if there's no one bottleneck at the end. And just like that pipe, there is more capacity with a wider pipe even though the pressure drop remains.
@Vaniaji@toad.social @Lady_Star_Gem
From the sound of his speech is more like Idiocracy over democracy.
I seriously don't understand how anybody could have thought that speech was a good one. His climax was literally just throwing out words that had the same first letter and making jokes that took the low road.
It was like a bad SNL character who wanted to perform beat poetry at weird moments.
So when I watched #Jeffries's speech as #McCarthy was elected Speaker I thought he sounded dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb, like a bad SNL character.
I've been saying he sounded unserious, especially with the amount of pride he seemed to take in finding a bunch of words that all began with the same letter. Good job, buddy.
But one of the funnier things I've seen on this platform is somebody responding to that notion saying, what do you mean he was unserious? Didn't you see how he trolled McCarthy?
Oh gosh. When we're at the point that trolling from the Speaker's chair is considered serious, well
I think we've gone full #Idiocracy.
Wow, this article is amazingly myopic, focusing entirely on the entirely superficial without any understanding of what has actually happened here, of House rules and procedures, any acknowledgment of how the Congress actually operates.
The Democrats voted in ways that pushed the majority to adopt rules that will stymie democratic efforts to shape law. It was extremely short-sighted, and it will come back to bite them pretty much immediately.
In simple terms the Democrats enabled anti-Democrat representatives to take power.
But this article would have you ignore all of the practical results of their strategy just to enjoy a little superficial smugness. It is horribly misleading.
Democrats gave up the rules of the House. They actively gave up the ability to make law here. That really sucks, and they really need to be called out on it.
@shansterable@c.im
I just want to chime in with that many of us, myself included, lost our doctors and even health insurance policies that we were pretty happy with thanks to the ACA.
I know more than one family member now that has had less access to health care after that law was passed, and the worst part is that experts were warning that it would be the outcome before passage, but they passed it anyway.
So many people in the US were made worse off by the law, and there's the feeling that we were kind of left behind, that the press didn't cover our stories, and that we were really let down by our government.
Well no, not let down, kind of actually attacked.
Probably the drama surrounding choosing the Speaker of the House.
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
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