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
I think people complaining today about #CNN giving #Trump airtime should consider that it seems his performance served to show the country that he hasn't changed, and he's not being misreported on, we see directly from him that he really is just as awful and not worthy of election as he was last time he lost.
Had the event not been broadcast there would have remained a more doubt among people on the fence, that maybe his handlers finally got through to him that he has to act different if he wants to be president.
So it's a case of, Don't deplatform, instead let people show you for themselves how awful they are, so they can be judged with even more finality.
Also, I suspect it was a no win situation for Trump. Had he pretended to be moderate then his supporters would have gotten upset.
volkris
boosted
Neato!: https://subtls.pages.dev/
This page produces an annotated transcript of fetching itself via HTTPS over TLS.
Maybe the hearing was a complete lie. Maybe all of the evidence is fabricated. Maybe this is nothing but a witch hunt.
But I really do think that there should at least be discussion about this congressional hearing on this platform, and even after specifically searching for discussion, I see literally two people talking about it.
Echo chambers are so dangerous to our society. It's really unfortunate that this platform seems to be embracing echo chamber effects, often very deliberately.
NEW - House Oversight reveals the nine Biden family members that received wire transfers from foreign nationals via shell companies. 1. Hunter Bide...
volkris
boosted
Someone around here recently linked to this two-second explanation explaining why they wrote Bluesky.
With ActivityPub the Fediverse has us all counting on instances.
Sure, we can sort of change from one instance to another, but it's a kludge. We don't really move but rather start a whole new account and set up a note on the old instance pointing to the new one, IF the old instance decides to cooperate. See how tied we are to instances here?
I always thought this was a huge issue, a huge mistake in the core design of ActivityPub, one that can't really be changed at this point.
Bluesky does this better, putting the power in users' hands and allowing users to actually move from one node to another, decentralizing all the way down to the user.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/issues/255#issuecomment-1287953987
No, separation of powers doesn't allow the president to unilaterally borrow money without authorization.
It's exactly the opposite:
BECAUSE of separation of powers, the Congress cannot stop the president from performing his constitutional duty to service the debt, as per the 14th Amendment, when when the Treasury has the cash to do so.
And it's just shameful that Biden has been using those threats to duck his 14th Amendment responsibilities to push for greater borrowing power.
volkris
boosted
volkris
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🚨 MASTODON NOW HAS COMMENT THREADING! 🚨
This makes following a conversation much easier, especially in long threads with many participants.
It's a major usability improvement, and makes Mastodon much easier to use.
https://mastodon.social has comment threading right now, and only on the native web. This feature should be available on other servers and clients with a future update.
See screenshot as an example.
How do you feel about the addition of this feature?
volkris
boosted
pspsps fedi
if anybody here wants to try out owncast but is on the fence about actually doing it from the effort of setting up and paying for a server
from today until june 1st i'm willing to host an owncast instance for anybody at no cost
the only catch is just that this is just temporary, a trial offer to make it easy for people to give it a try basically, its open from now until june 2nd, after which everyone will be provided with the full backup to continue with on another host if desired
why? i'm doing this because i setup a server for myself to try owncast, but my internet isn't good enough to use it myself, however the server is fine and its not going to cost me anything to keep it running for the next month
so instead of letting the server go unused i figure i could use it to give others who are on the fence about it the opportunity to try owncast
you can either bring your own domain (which i recommend, because that will let you continue hosting with little effort)
or i can provide a subdomain (<name>.cast.tela.moe) just be aware that you can't change the domain after the fact, and i don't have the setup to allow you to keep the subdomain
i'm not putting up any strict rules on what you could stream, i'm not twitch or youtube i'm not going to bonk you for swearing too much, just no illegal content or hate content, and because the server would be shared no 24/7 streams
if anyone is interested send me a DM and we'll sort it out
#owncast #fediverse
I always find it funny when "fascist" is apparently the term for someone pointing out simple facts or science or math.
It's one of those things where you can see that name calling doesn't promote any argument, when it ends up being that whatever derogatory term is conflated with people who actually know things.
"Oh you can do calculus? Well you must be a <insert slur>!"
Well apparently those <slur> people are pretty smart and informed! Go figure!
Just to highlight another case of how we live in completely different worlds when we don't stop to figure out matters of basic fact, compare this week's breathless reporting on mifepristone against the Supreme Court's release:
"As narrowed by the Court of Appeals, the stay that would apply if we failed to broaden it would not remove mifepristone from the market. It would simply restore the circumstances that existed (and that the Government defended) from 2000 to 2016 under three Presidential administrations."
Press outlet after outlet said the opposite. So, would have been nice if we could all get on the same page about this kind of thing.
It's pretty funny that two big dramatic things in #USPolitics right now is Thomas taking vacations with friends (how dare he not disclose that?!) and NPR accepting money from the US government (how dare #Twitter disclose that?!).
Well, funny might not be the right word.
It's sad. But this is Fediverse.
volkris
boosted
I’ve found the BlueSky team to be very purposeful. It’s not run or owned by Jack, it’s not Jack’s thing, although he is on the board (it’s a Public Benefit Corporation in the US).
Jay Graber is the CEO & founder who fought for it to be independent of Twitter & calling it Jack’s thing erases her. It’s not great.
It’s another open protocol that makes different trade offs than ActivityPub.
I wrote more about the protocol and open source code earlier https://cosocial.ca/@boris/110149727703071833
volkris
boosted
Here we go again ... this time browsing profiles ... fitting for silent Sunday ... why is this even happening? Is it Mastodon's version of Twiter's fail whale? Anyone know? @Gargron
#silentsunday #mastodon #ratelimited #socialnetwork #fediverse #activitypub #foss #opensource #lazysunday #gargron #twitter #failwhale
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.
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).
What the what?
I had been waiting for it, and a few weeks ago it finally happened: I saw high profile, mainstream conservatives have to try to reconcile their celebration of #Trump as having delivered #COVID vaccines through Operation Warp Speed against their denunciation of those same vaccines as scams upon the American people.
Those two parallel lines of thought couldn't coexist forever. At some point they were bound to collide.
And I, for one, had spent about a year with my popcorn ready to watch.
Well, I didn't quite get the fireworks I'd hoped for. The commentators sort of acknowledged the conflict and settled on criticizing Trump for it--I guess the denunciation is the more relevant factor today--before swiftly moving on.
I sure hope to see that conflict rise to the surface more often in the future.
volkris
boosted
@volkris Yes I can confirm it, you get 85-90% of each $ paid to you (minus a paypal or credit card fee). So 250$ for 30 album purchases at an album price of 8 to 10$ is totally normal. Even the Spotify rate is correct. Youtube: If you upload a dj mix on youtube youtube will autodetect what tracks you have used in your mix & will pay the royalties to the rights holder of these song. But not everyone knows: YouTube streaming rate payouts are less than them from Spotify. Bandcamp is still the best!
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
