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
As I thought, quote-tooting is being implemented by apps because so many people want it, it's so obvious UX wise, and so straightforward technologically, that it was inevitable (it's really just a link preview that recognises the link is to a Mastodon post and opens in-app).
Mastodon needs to build in consent-based QTs fast, or it will be irrelevant pretty soon, and we'll just have a QT system that doesn't ask or notify you.
volkris
boosted
If you’re planning on hosting your own instance on the fediverse, you might wanna take the time to think about not using #Mastodon.
It’s a really heavy, and resource-consuming, piece of software. Plus your server’s drive will get filled really fast (even though you can clear the cache on a regular basis).
If you’re, even slightly, into #SustainableDesign, please consider using Pleroma / Akkoma. A single-user instance can run on a RasPi!
If you want a slick interface (which you don’t have on Mastodon anyway :blob-grin: ) we’re always improving #Mangane. :blob-lurk:
Or you can use one of the many existing clients since #Pleroma & #Akkoma are compatible with Mastodon’s API.
volkris
boosted
If you don’t have classified documents at your home, are you really living?
volkris
boosted
The new issue of Reason is available online now for subscribers: https://reason.com/issue/march-2023/
volkris
boosted
“I don’t mind the decision because I hate serifs, but I don’t love Calibri.”
. . . is pretty much my reaction. Sans-serif? Great! Calibri? Ehhhhh
#fonts
#uspolitics
#histodons
@histodons
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/01/18/state-department-times-new-roman-calibri/
volkris
boosted
#DebtCeiling UST can still use funds from Treasury General Account #TGA, the federal Govt’s operational account at #Fed, and it can implement “extraordinary measures” to continue to meet its obligations, chart @JPMorganAM
Another practical way to think about the #debtceiling is as providing a halftime checkup of how budgetary estimates are actually working out, and one that gets triggered sooner the farther the Treasury is falling from those estimates.
If the government is running out of money faster than expected, you WANT that alarm to go off sooner so the situation can be addressed.
Remember, after spending is authorized the Treasury spends it throughout the year even as tax revenues continually come in. The Treasury's balance changes from day to day based on both flows out and in.
Congress authorizes spending based on estimates of both flows, what projects will cost AND how much will come in over time. That makes federal budgets doubly uncertain.
Should receipts fall far short of estimates, Congress would need to reevaluate as its planning was faulty. The #debtlimit would be triggered more quickly as a warning that couldn't be legally swept under the rug until it's too late.
It's vital that people understand the different roles of the different branches here. People are acting as if it all happens in Congress, but in reality, that's the other branch of government.
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!
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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