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
Given the likely charges against him, Trump wouldn't be subject to bail anyway.
I'd say there are two independent but interrelated issues here: artist/author/creator intent and reader preference and empowerment.
Both are important.
As a writer, it matters to me to keep my work and personal personas separate for both practical and philosophical reasons. I'm a strong supporter of people having multiple accounts to match how they wish to have separate personas on social media. That's empowering of creators.
As a reader, I want to be able to shape my experience here and control what content is presented, and that's separate from the personas of people I follow.
That's where hashtags come in. On Fediverse, that seems to be the best way for readers to have power to get the experience they want.
So: accounts for personas and hashtags. They empower content creators and consumers, respectively. And they help empower us all on this platform.
Honestly, this was a pretty predictable result, so if you're shocked by it, perhaps you should reconsider whoever you're listening to for information about the Supreme Court.
There's so much misinformation out there these days, so much of it about SCOTUS.
What in the world?
Have you listened to much of the Federalist Society's content? They spent an awful lot of time rebuking "Christian right nationalist agenda!"
When you actually listen to them, so many of them seem to take particular joy in sticking it to exactly that sort of person.
volkris
boosted
tl;dr: All that cool new stuff you want in the Fediverse already exists in the Fediverse, right outside of Mastodon
I keep seeing lots of people who are totally giddy about the #Fediverse, who are gushing over it, who want to promote it, who want it to spread.
And who want it to advance. To learn new abilities. To grow new features.
That's all fine and dandy.
But almost all of these people are still fully convinced that the Fediverse equals #Mastodon. And nothing else. At least not until Tumblr and P92 join the fray. Okay, maybe the #WordPress plug-in that's the talk of the town now that it has become official. Okay, maybe a few of them have also heard of #Pixelfed and/or #PeerTube because their makers are all over the Fediverse.
When these people are talking about the Fediverse, they mean Mastodon. And when they're thinking about the Fediverse, they're only thinking about Mastodon. Because that's all they know.
So these people want new cool features or even new cool use-cases in the Fediverse, stuff that Mastodon doesn't have. They want Mastodon to have it, or they want new projects to be launched that have these features.
If only they knew.
If only they knew that everything, literally everything they propose has already been done. Yes, in the Fediverse. In projects which are fully federated with Mastodon. Why don't they know? Because they've never heard of any of these projects, much less what they can do.
So they want "quote-tweets" in the Fediverse. Which means they want Mastodon to introduce them.
Tell you what: Mastodon is the only microblogging project in the Fediverse that doesn't have quotes. Not only will Eugen Rochko never introduce them, but all the other projects have them with Mastodon forks #GlitchSoc such as being the exception. #Pleroma has them. #Akkoma has them. #MissKey has them. #CalcKey has them. #FoundKey has them. #GoToSocial has them. The old heavyweights #Friendica and #Hubzilla have them, and so does Hubzilla's youngest decendant, the #Streams project. Et cetera.
You want "quote-tweets"? Switch to something that isn't Mastodon, and you've got "quote-tweets".
Or text formatting in posts like bold type, italics, underline, strikethrough,
Again: Pleroma already has it. Akkoma already has it. MissKey already has it. CalcKey already has it. FoundKey already hasit. GoToSocial already has it. Friendica already has it. Hubzilla already has it (look at this post at its source in a Web browser and weep). (streams) already has it. And so forth. This time, even Mastodon forks have it.
It has been done. It has been done many times. It has actually been done before Mastodon.
Next, long-form blog posting. We need something like #Medium in the Fediverse that isn't Medium itself. Mastodon's 500 characters are too few, and Twitter-like threads are inconvenient.
Except we already have that, too. #Plume and #WriteFreely are about as close to Medium as Mastodon is to Twitter, including clean and distraction-less layouts. Oh, and Hubzilla can do that, too.
By the way: Again, Mastodon is the only Fediverse project that can do microblogging that has a 500-character limit. Pleroma, Mastodon's oldest direct competitor, raised it to a default of 6,000. MissKey and its forks have 3,000 as a default. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have character limits of "go ahead, drop your short story in one post in its entirety," so virtually none at all. And yes, Hubzilla has long-form writing on top of that.
Speaking of Hubzilla: Most recently, there has been the idea to uncouple one's online identity from a specific instance. Your online self should no longer be firmly tied to any one server exclusively. Now, this sounds so ambitious, it might just as well be science-fiction.
What if I told you that just this very thing already exists as well?
No, really. No, I'm not making this up. But you should know by now that I'm not.
Better yet: It was conceived as early as 2011. By the guy who launched Friendica in 2010. He invented a new principle named #NomadicIdentity and a new protocol named #Zot. In its early stages already, even with no technical implementation yet, Zot was more powerful than ActivityPub is today.
In 2012, Zot became reality as the basis of a Friendica fork which later became known as #RedMatrix and, upon its 1.0 stable release in late 2015, which is still prior to Mastodon's initial release, Hubzilla. Hubzilla is still being developed and improved, and it has a fledgling but growing "successor of a successor" named (streams) which offers nomadic identity, too.
Now, what does this nomadic identity even look like? Well, not only does it let you move your channel(s) around from instance to instance with ease and, unlike on Mastodon, with absolutely everything on it. No, it also lets you have your channel on multiple instances at once. Identical clones, automagically kept in sync in real-time, all with the same identity, the same content, the same connections.
Your identity is no longer strapped down to one instance. Not only that, but your channel, your posts, your content is no longer hosted on only one server. This means that if one instance with one of your clones goes down, you still have spares.
Okay, so how about community groups/forums? That'd be cool.
Well, for one, there's #Guppe. It's basically bolted on Mastodon, and in practice, it's centralised because there's only one instance. But it's impractical to use.
Besides, this is becoming a running gag here, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have exactly this built-in and open for the rest of the Fediverse.
Better yet: There's also #Lemmy which amounts to a federated #Reddit or #HackerNews clone. So not only does Lemmy offer this, it specialises in it.
Hubzilla alone can provide Fediverse feature suggestions with "has been done" for years to come. Not to mention what else the Fediverse has to offer. Even if someone should want a free, non-commercial, decentralised, federated #GoodReads clone in the Fediverse, it has been done: #BookWyrm.
And who want it to advance. To learn new abilities. To grow new features.
That's all fine and dandy.
But almost all of these people are still fully convinced that the Fediverse equals #Mastodon. And nothing else. At least not until Tumblr and P92 join the fray. Okay, maybe the #WordPress plug-in that's the talk of the town now that it has become official. Okay, maybe a few of them have also heard of #Pixelfed and/or #PeerTube because their makers are all over the Fediverse.
When these people are talking about the Fediverse, they mean Mastodon. And when they're thinking about the Fediverse, they're only thinking about Mastodon. Because that's all they know.
So these people want new cool features or even new cool use-cases in the Fediverse, stuff that Mastodon doesn't have. They want Mastodon to have it, or they want new projects to be launched that have these features.
If only they knew.
If only they knew that everything, literally everything they propose has already been done. Yes, in the Fediverse. In projects which are fully federated with Mastodon. Why don't they know? Because they've never heard of any of these projects, much less what they can do.
So they want "quote-tweets" in the Fediverse. Which means they want Mastodon to introduce them.
Tell you what: Mastodon is the only microblogging project in the Fediverse that doesn't have quotes. Not only will Eugen Rochko never introduce them, but all the other projects have them with Mastodon forks #GlitchSoc such as being the exception. #Pleroma has them. #Akkoma has them. #MissKey has them. #CalcKey has them. #FoundKey has them. #GoToSocial has them. The old heavyweights #Friendica and #Hubzilla have them, and so does Hubzilla's youngest decendant, the #Streams project. Et cetera.
You want "quote-tweets"? Switch to something that isn't Mastodon, and you've got "quote-tweets".
Or text formatting in posts like bold type, italics, underline, strikethrough,
code blocks etc. Would be great if Mastodon had that, in spite of other people saying they don't want it.Again: Pleroma already has it. Akkoma already has it. MissKey already has it. CalcKey already has it. FoundKey already hasit. GoToSocial already has it. Friendica already has it. Hubzilla already has it (look at this post at its source in a Web browser and weep). (streams) already has it. And so forth. This time, even Mastodon forks have it.
It has been done. It has been done many times. It has actually been done before Mastodon.
Next, long-form blog posting. We need something like #Medium in the Fediverse that isn't Medium itself. Mastodon's 500 characters are too few, and Twitter-like threads are inconvenient.
Except we already have that, too. #Plume and #WriteFreely are about as close to Medium as Mastodon is to Twitter, including clean and distraction-less layouts. Oh, and Hubzilla can do that, too.
By the way: Again, Mastodon is the only Fediverse project that can do microblogging that has a 500-character limit. Pleroma, Mastodon's oldest direct competitor, raised it to a default of 6,000. MissKey and its forks have 3,000 as a default. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have character limits of "go ahead, drop your short story in one post in its entirety," so virtually none at all. And yes, Hubzilla has long-form writing on top of that.
Speaking of Hubzilla: Most recently, there has been the idea to uncouple one's online identity from a specific instance. Your online self should no longer be firmly tied to any one server exclusively. Now, this sounds so ambitious, it might just as well be science-fiction.
What if I told you that just this very thing already exists as well?
No, really. No, I'm not making this up. But you should know by now that I'm not.
Better yet: It was conceived as early as 2011. By the guy who launched Friendica in 2010. He invented a new principle named #NomadicIdentity and a new protocol named #Zot. In its early stages already, even with no technical implementation yet, Zot was more powerful than ActivityPub is today.
In 2012, Zot became reality as the basis of a Friendica fork which later became known as #RedMatrix and, upon its 1.0 stable release in late 2015, which is still prior to Mastodon's initial release, Hubzilla. Hubzilla is still being developed and improved, and it has a fledgling but growing "successor of a successor" named (streams) which offers nomadic identity, too.
Now, what does this nomadic identity even look like? Well, not only does it let you move your channel(s) around from instance to instance with ease and, unlike on Mastodon, with absolutely everything on it. No, it also lets you have your channel on multiple instances at once. Identical clones, automagically kept in sync in real-time, all with the same identity, the same content, the same connections.
Your identity is no longer strapped down to one instance. Not only that, but your channel, your posts, your content is no longer hosted on only one server. This means that if one instance with one of your clones goes down, you still have spares.
Okay, so how about community groups/forums? That'd be cool.
Well, for one, there's #Guppe. It's basically bolted on Mastodon, and in practice, it's centralised because there's only one instance. But it's impractical to use.
Besides, this is becoming a running gag here, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have exactly this built-in and open for the rest of the Fediverse.
Better yet: There's also #Lemmy which amounts to a federated #Reddit or #HackerNews clone. So not only does Lemmy offer this, it specialises in it.
Hubzilla alone can provide Fediverse feature suggestions with "has been done" for years to come. Not to mention what else the Fediverse has to offer. Even if someone should want a free, non-commercial, decentralised, federated #GoodReads clone in the Fediverse, it has been done: #BookWyrm.
uspol,reproduction
It wasn't really an abortion case at this point.
Rather it was just a matter of court procedure, with the Supreme Court agreeing to the position taken by the minor's own side and Jackson saying the Court should have opposed the motion to dismiss even though both sides agreed to it.
Above you asked, "Why should it bother anyone if Mastodon is the gateway"?
Here you admonish not to gatekeep.
Well, I think you're stumbling into an answer to your own question.
@thatguy
volkris
boosted
What I know to be in the lightweight category are:
* #Akkoma (fork of Pleroma)
* #Rebased (fork of Pleroma)
* #Pleroma itself
* #GoToSocial
There are also the following in the middleweight category:
* #Calckey (fork of Misskey)
* #Foundkey (fork of Misskey)
* #Misskey itself
* #groundpolis (fork of Misskey)
You can find a great list here: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/delightful-fediverse-apps For example, maybe a writing-centric platform might be more fitting (depending on what you have in mind).
@chrisg@aus.social
This has been another of those cases where someone's quote gets mangled and the edited version gets a life of its own.
Even with the edited version of the quote in the article DeSantis didn't say the US shouldn't continue supporting Ukraine.
It's a big ol' strawman, but yes, one that many outfits have jumped on to drive drama and clicks.
Long ago I worked for a little startup business where the boss had the same attitude of, "Some of our customers will walk away disappointed. That's fine."
I wouldn't be so quick to write that off as fine.
It didn't work out well for that business either.
@jupiter_rowland @thatguy
You seem to be missing the crucial point that users who don't like the Mastodon approach don't want to use it, and won't be around to be embraced by non-Mastodon apps.
More cooperation with a flawed idea is flawed.
Keep in mind that the dispute before the Court has absolutely nothing to do with blockchain, and it will be fairly rare for the Supreme Court to actually need to understand Bitcoin given its role in the US judicial system.
The Supreme Court mainly deals with procedure, with understandings of things like blochchain settled in places like lower courts and other branches of government.
So to be specific, the question the Court will be asked is, "Does a non-frivolous appeal of the denial of a motion to compel arbitration oust a district court’s jurisdiction to proceed with litigation pending appeal"?
Those goals might be at odds with a distributed system, though.
With the shortcomings inherent to federation, it's hard to say for sure that such conversations are particularly possible.
So we have people trying to shoehorn functionality that's not right for the tools, and it's not working so well. Perhaps they simply shouldn't.
One reason it should bother people that #Mastodon is a singular gateway is because so many may dislike the Mastodon experience and never go farther, never see other things that #Fediverse can provide.
It's like counting on some barely edible chain restaurant food to introduce people to an otherwise wonderful cuisine.
(You can insert your own example there :) )
People turned off by Mastodon's operation and interface may never sign up for other instances that would serve them better.
The headline is erring as it misses that so many in the GOP literally didn't see violence.
You might say that they were mislead or ignorant or frame it however else, but it's a function of the "we live in two different worlds" environment we're facing today, where people operate on different, incompatible sets of facts.
So when the poll asks how people thought of Jan 6th it's critical to realize that people have complete opposite perceptions of what happened that day.
They're not supporting violence. They're supporting their perceptions of the event, which for so many doesn't involve violence in the first place.
That point is critical to interpreting the poll.
Keep in mind that the Court's ruling was in light not so much of Dobbs but of both parties in the case requesting that this resolution be reached.
Yes, even the side promoting abortion rights requested this outcome.
KBJ's dissent doesn't have anything to do with abortion, but only with her opinion that the Court shouldn't have acquiesced to the motion without applying a different standard.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/032023zor_8nk0.pdf
What's the source of this quote? What dispute exactly prompted it?
I also wonder how this interacts with the encryption certificates involved in the protocol.
@ashdragon@mastodon.social
Yes, unless instance A takes the additional step to censor/filter instance B content.
The reason this common claim is wrong is because the US Treasury will bring in enough revenues throughout the year to service US debt.
The full faith and credit is absolutely not a legal bargaining chip here since the executive branch has plenty of money to cover the debt even under the current debt limit.
It's even more fundamental than that, going back to the 1780s.
The Constitution assigns to Congress the authority "To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;"
But since the authority rests on Congress, Congress is under no obligation to borrow more if it doesn't think the additional borrowing is a good idea.
To say otherwise is to overrule congressional authority, in contrast to the democratic principles at the core of the federal government design.
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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