maegul

maegul, 4 months ago

Yea, while I’m not sure I agree with that as a policy, I can see it making sense.

But this isn’t Reddit. We’re much smaller, and frankly, should be thankful that people are here and posting. So long as a post isn’t way off topic, or obviously toxic or of a kind that is known to bother the community members, honestly, at this stage of things, mods have no business removing posts.

I can see exceptions to this for communities that have rather specific purposes, but for anything that’s a discussion community intended to be driven by its users, come on, let the users discuss!!

maegul, 5 months ago

there are and have been conversations around the fediverse about this very same concept or need. See, eg, a cousin comment in this thread on the same idea: lemmy.ml/comment/7026804

And the short answer is no … the fediverse basically sucks at providing such a thing … so enamoured is it with federation that localised communities are obviously a bit of an afterthought. Thing is people actually want and need more private or local spaces as well as the big public spaces. Its why all the old school forums are still kicking.

And the worst part is that federation offers a great opportunity to provide both in a really useful and seamless manner on a single platform. But neither lemmy nor mastodon have a feature for it (with mastodon lead dev actively opposing the idea it seems).

I have to believe it would be easy for lemmy to implement.

As a contrast, misskey and its forks such as firefish, catodon, iceshrimp etc (and yea, these names are a choice, in a good way I think), actually provide local only groups and people like them.

maegul, 5 months ago

It’s funny … for me The Eternals for me was the moment I knew the MCU was dead to me … because unlike everyone else … I liked it.

At the time, looking on all of the comic and MCU fans criticising it, I couldn’t help but notice that there was a kinda lack of appreciation of the film as a film and that most criticism came from some relatively undefined (or unspoken) expectation of epicness and big-arc tie-in momentum. And at the time, I personally predicted that the MCU was going to “fail” because its fans didn’t quite know what they wanted except for some massive hype dopamine hit to cheer along to in the cinema.

Which is great, except that the MCU had clearly bottomed out with its ability to do that in Infinity War (clearly better than Endgame IMO) and was trying to spread its wings and create films and characters with different vibes and energies … all within the same universe. I was there for it and rather enjoyed Eternals. Many said it wasn’t an MCU film … and I was like yea … that’s why I enjoyed it. It seemed pretty clear to me that the MCU and its fans were in a mutually dependent downward spiral. And if you look at what’s come out since then, it sure looks like that’s come to pass.

If MCU fans (and producers) had understood that you gotta enjoy different palettes and vibes to enrich the universe and make the big moments hit hard … the MCU could have been an rather interesting film phenomenon by leveraging comic’s ability/tradition to fuse sci-fi and fantasy at multiple scales. Instead, what we’ve gotten since Inifinity War is a fusion that’s taken all the worse parts, IMO.

maegul, 5 months ago

Well he’s not alone … a number of relatively vocal “fedi-advocates” are positive about it too, even those who also acknowledge that meta/facebook are fucked and defederating from them would make sense.

Which reveals, I think, a curious phenomenon about tech culture and where “we” are up to.

From what I can tell, mainstream Silicon Valley tech culture has permeated out fairly effectively over the decades such that there are now groups of people walking around who consider themselves “the good guys” and have generally progressive political views and believe in OSS and the importance of community etc but are also fundamentally interested in building some tech, making it grow in usage and effecting some ideology or agenda through creating “significant” technology. Some of them seem to have money, or tech know-how or a network into such things and some experience working in the tech world. They’re all mostly, to be fair, probably middle aged white cishet men.

When face-to-face with the prospect of having “your thing” accepted by and (technically) grown to the size of Meta/Facebook/IG, these people seem to not be able to even think about resisting. “Growing the protocol” and “growing” mastodon is what they see here and all the rest is noisy nuance.

This may not be the full corporate buy out worth millions, because they’re “the good guys” and don’t work for big-corps, but this is the equivalent in their “ethical-tech” world … the happy embrace of a big-corp on OSS terms.

Which in many ways makes sense, except in the case of social media so much is about culture and values and trust that sheer “growth” might completely miss the point especially if it’s by riding on the back of a giant that would happily eat or crush you at a whim and has done so many times in the past.

And this is where I’m up to on this issue … both sides seem not to be talking about it much.

What is the “emotional”, “social fabric”, “vibes and feelings” factor in all this … that a place, protocol and ecosystem, predicated on remaking the social web with freedom, independence, humanity and fairness at its core, openly embraces the inundation and invasion of the giant for-profit evil big-corp social media entity this place was defined against? How are we all supposed to feel when that just happens … when Zuck and all the people on his platform is literally just here, not with some consternation but the BDFL’s loud gesture of welcoming embrace? I’m betting most will feel off … like something is wrong. The vibe will shift and fall away a bit … passion and senses of ownership will decay and we may even ask ourselves … “what was the point of coming here in the first place?”.

Now, to be real, it’s not like a big-corp connecting over AP can be prevented, it’s an open protocol after all. But the whole thing would be different if there were open discussions and acknowledgement from the top about the cultural feeling of the disproportionate sizes and power here and the possibilities that it won’t be completely allowed without a more decentralised model. Maybe Threads would have to create their own open source platform which people could run instances of themselves? Or maybe Mastodon could wait until the user sizes are more equal (though that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, which is kinda the point here in many ways right? … that Mastodon is kinda giving up and saying it’d rather be a parasite on a big-corp in order to be significant than just own its niche status?)

Eitherway, it seems clear that many of the power brokers over on mastodon are there to create their own form of influence and this sort of deal with the devil is exactly the poison they’re willing to drink for their ends.

For my purposes … I don’t think I’ll want to hang around mastodon much after Threads federation happens … the embrace from the BDFL and a number of users is just off putting and the platform is too crappy to care about it … I’d rather just go back to twitter than suffer through that swampy egotistical place.

maegul, 5 months ago

So it’s run by the firefish lead dev, and it’s been well known for a while that they don’t have much time anymore for Fedi stuff, at least not as a full time commitment. I think/suspect they were getting paid by some people before but that’s now run dry. So they’re working full time and studying it seems.

Firefish dev seems to have slowed and their flagship instance is dying a slow but sure death.

To anyone who knows this it’s not surprise that stop.voring.me is down too.

I’d recommend you move one and forget about the instance. Maybe later you can pull your stuff out, but for now that account is stranded on a dead instance and dying platform.

maegul, 4 months ago

Yea right. Me too I think. It’s out there and has been for a while. Just don’t think it’s ever taken off.

You might find this interesting: pfrazee.com/blog/why-not-p2p

maegul, 5 months ago

So I got curious and did a little digging (and from what I’ve seen this comment/post may be removed by the mod?).

From what I can tell this comment is most of the story: lemmy.world/comment/6413246

And it has lead to the creation of this community (lemmy.world/c/tenforward) … on which see this welcome message (lemmy.world/post/10461985) from @Stamets who used to be a regular poster here and is the author of comment above.

TLDR: some don’t like the moderation here, which is done by a single mod, and have gone and made their own community over on lemmy.world.

If this drama was real and the instance admins knew about it, I think I’d be happy to conclude that the instance admins did a bad job here given their status as a star trek instance. If there was a split amongst Risa people and its mod, then create another community (with TenForward being a great name for it) with a different moderator and let them co-exist as part of the same federation.

Now there’s probably some unnecessary fracturing (which is fine, that’s what the fediverse is all about in the end) … and I can’t help but wonder if the admins here are maybe a tad too much used to a reddit culture of allowing mods and admins get away with things … which is of course me being rather quick to judge, I can only speculate here clearly, but still … kinda funny to see.

maegul, 4 months ago

Yep! Me too (as a near 40 year old). When I was young (90s/00s), I went to many youth meetings about what can be done, hearing from prominent activists and politicians, and even then there was a degree of fear about where things were heading. In my small circle I even started trying to give a little talk about the basic science of it … as in “how do we know climate change is caused by humans?” … a question that most then and probably now don’t know anything about.

In the end, it’s going to end up as our era’s or generation’s holocaust.

“How did you not know it was going to be this bad, the information was everywhere for ages?”

“Why didn’t you do something?”

“It doesn’t matter that no one else was doing anything, how could you not have done something?!”

And our answers, even amongst most of us who have done something will mostly be a “sorry” and a shrug, because we could have done more and we know our generation(s) were collectively dumb and that we will be remembered for this and our obnoxious looking concurrent consumerism (how many smartphones, new laptops, cars and flights have we all bought over the past 20yrs while not really doing anything?)

I’ve said it elsewhere … even amongst those who “believe” in climate change etc, there is I believe an endemic of “climate denialism”, not of its existence, but of the possibilities available to us to do something about this. Should a protest occur that is disruptive to traffic, there’ll sooner be a conversation about how that sort of protest doesn’t achieve much, from people who believe in a need to act mind you(!) than any conversation about what else could be done or whether simply joining in the protest would be the right thing to do … because the easiest way to remove the disruption of such a protest is to remove the need for the protest. Imagine if, instead of honking at the traffic, some people just got out of their car and joined in? How many need to do that before others get the picture?

maegul, 5 months ago

There’s a YouTuber called Sideways who talks about music in films. As I recall he talked about the force awakens and said that as far as he could tell they didn’t have the story worked out ahead of time.

He could tell from the way Williams was managing his musical themes, which, according to Sideways, was in the vaguest way possible which in turn gave s William’s as many options as possible down the line.

Once the trilogy was done Sideways posted basically “I told you so”. I always thought that that was an awesome demonstration of expertise by predicting how a movie trilogy would go from the music.

maegul, 5 months ago

All your posts on the fediverse are effectively a public blog of your thoughts that will be scraped and stored in servers you have no control over.

If you care about privacy, which I understand, you probably want to leave quickly.

Here’s a rundown from someone who got fed up with the fediverse and kinda rage quit: blog.bloonface.com/…/the-fediverse-is-a-privacy-n…

Another example of this is that it’s not just about lemmy. One way in which lemmy actually federated well worth microblogs like mastodon is that users can be followed from mastodon etc.

So any number of servers running a number of open source easy to run platforms could be taking up everything you specifically post.