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
volkris
boosted
People complaining about #search in the #fediverse and I'm LOLing here that Google indexes my posts in #mastodon replies to me from other people, even though I have `noindex`on my instance.
So maybe instead of shouting down people who do it with good intention, you should shout at the Mastodon Devs and instance owners who allow content to be indexed by the world's largest search engine 🤷♂️
Ahhh, US Press Secretary asserting that her untrue statements to journalists just goes to show how much the White House respects the independence of the Department of Justice.
I don't know what's worse, that spin, or her not seeming to know that the DoJ isn't independent but a key part of her branch of government.
All she had to say was that she was given outdated/inaccurate information to pass along. The reporters seemed to be fishing for that answer.
What times we live in...
The drama of the week over the debt ceiling is another case of a failure of civics education leaving Americans vulnerable to disinformation about how that whole thing works.
Just to shout it into the void: based on the US system of independent branches, first Congress authorizes spending, **then** the executive spends it.
Congress does not spend money. Legislation does not spend money. The executive's writing of checks and signing of contracts is what spends money.
There's so much talk about money already having been spent that's just wrong because they don't realize how the US system works.
Most importantly here, though, the US has plenty of revenues incoming to service its debt. **Default is not realistically on the table** regardless of whether the debt ceiling is raised.
volkris
boosted
Mastodon crops images to 16:9 by default with no visual indication it has done so. That's a pretty awful experience for photography and digital art, so I've opened a proposal to scale images instead.
volkris
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When playing Marry, Fuck, Kill, I always marry the person who seems most likely to be accepting of the adultery and murder I'll also be engaging in. I want that marriage to last.
This is probably a pretty neutral summary of the story that hasn't gotten as much international attention as I'd have expected.
The timing of these embarrassing revelations about the mishandling of classified material does not reflect well on Biden. Read the story: https://r...
volkris
boosted
me: *screaming into the abyss"
the abyss: this could have been an email
volkris
boosted
Inflation fell to 6.5 percent in December, but new House rules ensure that Congress will have to consider the inflationary impact of future spending bills.
https://reason.com/2023/01/12/the-best-inflation-news-this-week-actually-came-out-of-congress/
I'm a bit surprised that the discovery of #Biden's classified document mishandling didn't get as much international mention as #Trump's.
It seems like the appointment of a special council to investigate a sitting president by his own Department of Justice, especially with all of the rhetoric around Trump, would have given that news extra impact.
Ah, well. #Journalism .
(And #USPolitics )
volkris
boosted
Personally, I think mastodon is a pretty poor choice of a Fediverse server platform for a #smallweb (single or few users) instance.
It is severely lacking in features that most other platforms have been delivering for a long time and perhaps the worst aspects are the resource requirements considering all you are really using it for, or those that a novice self-hoster needs to be saddled with.
In all fairness, if your aim is to approach #silo level habitation for your users (you said it isn't), then mastodon really does start to shine around the 20,000+ user account level where performance and stability under such loads would require significantly more horsepower than your probably likely to be pleased with spending on hardware - virtual or otherwise.
Lack of support for other types of text input, the paltry stock per post of 500 character count limitations, and a "local-only" post option that is absent for community based instances, among many other limitations, provides many compelling reasons for choosing other #Fediverse server options.
For example, since your objective is to provide yourself with a #single_user_instance, one of the lightest platforms with a few of those missing features might be that of
https://MicroBlog.Pub - engineered from the ground up to be a very lean, easy to install, and simple to administer platform.
Other "low energy" and simple to install alternatives might be #Calckey or if your not adverse to having an over the top feature set that can provide two way communications with other networks like twitter and Diaspora, Etc., then #Friendica affords extremely simple installation for anyone who's ever installed even a #WordPress site - because it only requires a simple and straight forward LAMP stack that most #Linux distros are already endowed with by default (basically, simply dump the files into a directory and your running).
#Pleroma and its family of fine forks is also very conservative on resource requirements and is a very stable and quite performant on an old #Raspberry_Pi in your home LAN (although installation is a non-trivial affair).
I'm any case, for the time being, you've chosen a platform to roll with, so the best advice I think anyone can give is to read up on the docs and ask plenty of questions as you go. Folks will be generally anxious to offer assistance.
One more thing. If you find that your okay with the resource hog that you've chosen, and become comfortable with administering your instance, but wish to avail yourself of the many other features that everyone else has available to them, there's an alternative you should really look into that's pretty awesome: The #Hometown Fediverse server platform has many rich features mentioned above and much more, while having the added advantage of already being familiar to you, since it stems from a fork of mastodon and is actively developed and maintained by a former Mozilla fellow. It's worth checking out 🙂
I hope that helps!
#tallship #FOSS
⛵
.
It is severely lacking in features that most other platforms have been delivering for a long time and perhaps the worst aspects are the resource requirements considering all you are really using it for, or those that a novice self-hoster needs to be saddled with.
In all fairness, if your aim is to approach #silo level habitation for your users (you said it isn't), then mastodon really does start to shine around the 20,000+ user account level where performance and stability under such loads would require significantly more horsepower than your probably likely to be pleased with spending on hardware - virtual or otherwise.
Lack of support for other types of text input, the paltry stock per post of 500 character count limitations, and a "local-only" post option that is absent for community based instances, among many other limitations, provides many compelling reasons for choosing other #Fediverse server options.
For example, since your objective is to provide yourself with a #single_user_instance, one of the lightest platforms with a few of those missing features might be that of
https://MicroBlog.Pub - engineered from the ground up to be a very lean, easy to install, and simple to administer platform.
Other "low energy" and simple to install alternatives might be #Calckey or if your not adverse to having an over the top feature set that can provide two way communications with other networks like twitter and Diaspora, Etc., then #Friendica affords extremely simple installation for anyone who's ever installed even a #WordPress site - because it only requires a simple and straight forward LAMP stack that most #Linux distros are already endowed with by default (basically, simply dump the files into a directory and your running).
#Pleroma and its family of fine forks is also very conservative on resource requirements and is a very stable and quite performant on an old #Raspberry_Pi in your home LAN (although installation is a non-trivial affair).
I'm any case, for the time being, you've chosen a platform to roll with, so the best advice I think anyone can give is to read up on the docs and ask plenty of questions as you go. Folks will be generally anxious to offer assistance.
One more thing. If you find that your okay with the resource hog that you've chosen, and become comfortable with administering your instance, but wish to avail yourself of the many other features that everyone else has available to them, there's an alternative you should really look into that's pretty awesome: The #Hometown Fediverse server platform has many rich features mentioned above and much more, while having the added advantage of already being familiar to you, since it stems from a fork of mastodon and is actively developed and maintained by a former Mozilla fellow. It's worth checking out 🙂
I hope that helps!
#tallship #FOSS
⛵
.
volkris
boosted
Interesting details from @aral on how expensive and computationally intense Mastodon can be.
At the time, he had 22k followers. Every post he made, and each reply, kicks off ~3k Sidekiq jobs.
He's on a totally self-hosted server with just him. A €20/month plan won't cut it, nor will a €50/month plan.
Pricey pricey.
volkris
boosted
I like to give back to the #fediverse. A complimentary and completely free (and worth it) list of potential domains for new Mastodon instances:
pukeinyour.limo
ofcourseofcourse.horse
fedi.academy
lebron.baseball
mytoots.boutique
threeohs.ooo
whatitootismy.business
badtakes.catering
isthatanemailaddress.wtf
newsyoucan.shoes
birdsite.rehab
plumming.plumbing
tedcruz.wang
dotcom.pizza
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!
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.
volkris
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RT twitter.com/@MuseZack: I like Twitter's view count feature because it lets you see things like how @hradzka's epic deep dive thread about a minor yet pivotal character in Conan the Barbarian is getting more eyeballs than, say, The Daily Show and the entire CW network. https://twitter.com/MuseZack/status/1611895965476323329
volkris
boosted
@matt I'm perfectly fine with Gargron making money off of Mastodon, but he should stop running it like a business, acting like everybody else is their competition. It's called the Fediverse for a reason.
One example: I read earlier today that he was considering implementing quote-posts. Problem is, there are already QP in the Fediverse, just not in Mastodon. That means there is already a standard, set by Misskey and adopted by everyone else except him. Do you think most people even know that? Of course not. For them, everything that's not Mastodon is Mordor. And do you think Gargron will implement QPs is a compatible way? Of course not. He will use his “market share” to say: “I don't have to listen to anybody else. This is, after all, _the Mastodon Network_.”
The Fediverse exists and thrives because of its diversity, but he just strives for uniformity. And don't be mistaken, he's been like that from the start. This behaviour is not new at all.
volkris
boosted
A machine that builds ATMs would be called an "ATM Machine"...
-Shock_Hazzard, Jan 2014
-Shock_Hazzard, Jan 2014
volkris
boosted
How each House member voted for speaker in 15 ballots 👇
volkris
boosted
All these people boosting stuff about #USPolitics #Speaker #SpeakerVote and none of them using hashtags so I can mute them. 😡
Some make comparisons between the #House Republicans being frustrated by a few fringe members and the #Senate #Democrats being frustrated by their two dissenters last year, but there is a HUGE difference in the circumstances:
The Senate Republicans strategically let that situation unfold because it pulled the Democrats toward them. It was in Republicans' interests.
This time the drama is pulling Republicans AWAY from Democrats' position. It was in Democrats' interests to intervene, and they are dropping the ball by letting the situation unfold in a way that makes them worse off.
It's amazing how many miss this distinction in #USPolitics
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
