Attempting to correct sync with lemmy.world

@ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world cover

ElectroVagrant

@ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world

Another traveler of the wireways.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

ElectroVagrant , (edited )

Original article: https://www.reuters.com/world/biden-whats-happening-gaza-is-not-genocide-2024-05-20/

It's pretty clear to me Biden's trying to thread the needle on this in a gruesome way. The argument seems to follow the form of: civilian deaths are collateral damage, this is unfortunate but this is war and they are not purposely being targeted and so this is not genocide.

However that almost willfully ignores the denial and blocking of aid to the same affected civilians, which is a deliberate action that despite the cover story being to prevent it reaching Hamas, falls entirely flat as regardless, it results in direct suffering and death of the civilians. I say almost because some small efforts have been made to push back against the denial of aid, but as is evident to anyone monitoring the situation, these efforts are all far too small to address the widespread suffering and death of the Gazan people.

This whole semantics game around genocide is simply disgusting. You know those in government know exactly what people mean when they're calling it that, they want an end to the killing and an end to the deaths of civilians, whether from military strikes or denial of aid.

ElectroVagrant ,

when you get cc'd on an email and wait till the right moment to send the CharCoal image you've had waiting for this moment

ElectroVagrant ,

Once I thought and did the thing then realized the thought was the thing to do and then it kept going and going and...

ElectroVagrant ,

You might try different media if you haven't already, as in, instead of pencil/pen and paper, maybe colored pencils or markers. Maybe even try getting some black paper and trying to draw with white color pencils instead.

I'm sure you may have tried a variety of things over the years, so I'm just spitballing, but also if you're trying to dive into the deep end with more complex drawings, you might revisit and really hone the fundamentals. Fundamentals being like getting clean lines by practicing drawing those over and over till you can get a nice, sharp line (which often isn't a single pencil/brush stroke!).

Once you have those down you may move on to the simple shapes, squares, triangles, circles, and try to recognize how those are put together for more complex forms. It's a tough skill to get down, without a doubt (I'm not some proficient artist personally), but it's just that: a skill that takes not only practice but learning methodologies. One of the toughest parts with drawing is that there's so many methods to go about it to figure out which helps you improve.

ElectroVagrant ,

Jungle is a plant metropolis

ElectroVagrant OP ,

oh, uh, for those unfamiliar: Shadowrun's a tabletop RPG as well as a computer RPG with a cyberpunk setting but with fantasy creatures and magic mixed together

ElectroVagrant OP ,

bummer, an ent using comms tech despite the classic trait of'em being against exploitative civilization didn't click as much as I thought it might

more fun imagery for me! In my head it's a clear visual of a cross between solar and cyberpunk. Then again, I don't remember ents in Shadowrun, but people play the TTRPG a little fast and loose like D&D, so I stand by my OP thought

Whatever happened to lemmy.film?

It had a few niche communities I would occasionally post to after the Reddit exodus but a couple months later I would post there and get no responses or votes. Going to lemmy.film now gives me an error message. Did they decide to shut it down or combine with another instance similar to FMHY? I am curious if they gave some kind...

ElectroVagrant ,

I don't know the specifics of what may have happened with Lemmy.film, so we'll have to see if someone else may know.

As to what happens to posts to "their" communities, my rough understanding is that with the host server gone, federation either doesn't occur or maybe attempts to reach the host but simply stops after some number of attempts. Upon failure I think it simply collects the posts on your home server/instance's copy of the community.

Not sure what would happen if a new instance was spun up of Lemmy.film either from a backup or in general, but I'd imagine there's some settings/adjustments that may be calibrated to prevent it getting a backlog of posts dumped on it causing it to get bogged down or crash.

As to questions specifically about the Lemmy software, you may try !lemmy_support or !lemmy, think either one would be okay for this.

ElectroVagrant ,

At a glance this sounds even more intrusive than it's been with Win10 (and maybe 11?), and sadly it's no surprise as even without AI junk, I think the defaults with Win10 (and maybe 11) are to track your PC use to try to provide some "convenience" features, e.g. display of recently used programs/accessed files when you go to open a new desktop (Win key + Tab).

If they would be more transparent about this and indicate whether and how much of that info, "anonymized/depersonalized" or not, is being taken by them, I think people would still be understandably annoyed but more understanding; at least with an easy opt out or better still, the default being that you must opt in for any of it.

ElectroVagrant OP ,

Right? Also here's how little I knew of it going in: I only knew the name of it and thought it might be an edgy show about some yakuza or something that was constantly going all out 😂

ElectroVagrant OP ,

I think you'll be in for a treat when you get to it!

‘My whole library is wiped out’: what it means to own movies and TV in the age of streaming services ( www.theguardian.com )

*What rights do you have to the digital movies, TV shows and music you buy online? That question was on the minds of Telstra TV Box Office customers this month after the company announced it would shut down the service in June. Customers were told that unless they moved over to another service, Fetch, they would no longer be...

ElectroVagrant ,

But compare with GOG then. They sell games, you download them with no DRM so you own the download essentially.

This is the model digital media should take, frankly. Anything less may as well be misleading marketing, as far as I'm concerned.

Where can I buy ebooks that will actually be mine for life?

I'm looking to change my reading and buying habits away from Amazon and need an alternate source for my ebooks. Where can I buy ebooks that won't expire or have their licence revoked and will allow me to download a copy of that ebook I can store on my own system regardless of the websites status?

ElectroVagrant ,

Surprised nobody's mentioned Weightless ebooks or Smashwords yet. You didn't mention region, so I can't assure these will work for you, but worth checking out regardless to see if they may.

ElectroVagrant ,

Thanks for this! I think I may have come across it at some point but never bookmarked it for whatever reason, corrected that now!

ElectroVagrant ,

I can't recall the exact details, but I've read from some other communities talk of there being some federation slowdowns between lemmy world and other instances, so maybe this is related?

...In fact, this comment in reply to you may serve as an example of the delays, as I responded only a few minutes after yours.

ElectroVagrant ,

You might look at this intro guide from one of Lemmee's admins, or this one from one of Lemmy World's admins. They give decent overviews, and you can set aside the site-specific stuff where relevant, e.g. Lemmee's image size limits.

Are there any innovative platforms in the Fediverse?

I've explored a few platforms within the Fediverse, but most of them seem to be inspired by and mimic existing mainstream social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. While this familiarity can be comforting, I can't help but wonder if there are any truly innovative and original platforms out there that offer a...

ElectroVagrant ,

At a glance, Misskey and associated forks may appear to be Twitter-clones, but dig a little more and you'll find they're a lot more, for better and worse.

The interface is highly customizable, not just with some different colored themes nor a multi-column interface, but that you can stack page elements in columns and set up "antennae" or filters to surface posts including specified keywords and/or hashtags while excluding others via keywords/hashtags as well. There's also what they call "channels" which I think are sort of like groups or dedicated topics apart from hashtags to post to and discuss whatever the channel topic is.

Oh, and because it seems *key wants to have a little of everything, there's Pages, which is basically longform blog posting, and some versions include simple games. There's also options for some other widgets I've not mentioned here. It's genuinely pretty wild compared to the other federated microblogging services with how much flexibility it has and all that it has packed in.

I think the only other federated service I've found that's comparable in flexibility may be Hubzilla, albeit I got the impression it's less user friendly, but still, very customizable and a lot you could do with it.

ElectroVagrant ,

Image description:
A cartoon sloth in the top panel looks at their to do list that has one item, "just vibe".
In the bottom panel, the sloth is laid back with sunglasses on and a drink beside them, smiling contentedly.

This sloth knows what's up

ElectroVagrant ,

i'll tell ya how to undo this, but it'll involve going over their heads, and you won't believe this but then you'll be...

you ready? you really can't undo this one

sturgeon general'd

ElectroVagrant OP ,

Aah, I'm only in the midst of season 4 right now, and I'm not sure if what I'm watching it through goes to season 5 or not. I'm only now realizing this series is still ongoing, so I may stop after season 4, particularly if that's all that's available anyway. 😄

ElectroVagrant OP ,

How do you go about following manga btw? Physical copies, or can you buy them digitally now? I used to try to follow some manga with physical copies, but for long-running series that got silly, and libraries around me only carried a few older volumes if they carried any.

(I know of other ways to get them fwiw, but a quick glance at the terms for this instance says not to discuss those, so let's not get into them 😅 )

ElectroVagrant OP , (edited )

Idea is that eventually others will be able to build atop their protocol and set up different "appviews" as they call them as well as relays and personal data servers. As I understand it, "appviews" may be viewed similar to what Lemmy and Mastodon are to ActivityPub, different ways to view data passed through ActivityPub.

Right now I think Bluesky may be the only such "appview" for their protocol parsing data from their relay, but the idea is you could spin up your own personal data server and maybe also your own appview, or choose from whichever may eventually exist, and that would be like your own "instance" connecting you to others via the appview parsing relay data.

So in other words, sort of yes to your first question, and it's sort of because right now there's only one AuthTransfer relay at the moment and that's Bluesky, but the idea is that others could be spun up, allowing more independence from Bluesky as a company.

ElectroVagrant OP , (edited )

Oh! Thanks for the notice! I swear I think the spoiler stuff may have changed at some point, but maybe I've been handling it wrong this whole time.

I've also not really wanted to use horizontal rules because of it turning things into headings, but haven't found a better way to put some spacing between the end of lists and the rest of a post's text. I think I've corrected it properly now to be less jank.

ElectroVagrant OP ,

use[r] identities are not tethered to instances

Tbh while this is technically true, given the current circumstances, identities essentially are tethered albeit in a roundabout way. What I mean by that is, there's no real point to them* without some relay and appview to work with, and for now, that's just Bluesky.

That said, I agree that it would be better to go to them than to Twitter (if they're not even considering stuff like Mastodon), but that's a low hurdle to clear.

*-A caveat, supposedly it could be possible for personal data servers to connect to each other directly instead of via relays, but I haven't come across anyone having tried this yet.

ElectroVagrant OP , (edited )

That still doesn’t touch upon the negative to tethering users identity to instances.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I was trying to point to was that despite the portability of identity, the fact that you may still be highly reliant on the Bluesky relay (or frankly, any large relay), tethers your identity to them as without the relays there's kind of no point to having a personal server at all.

Moreover, given the reference model provided via the Bluesky App, there's a good chance you'll run into similar arrangements on the AuthTransfer protocol where personal servers and appviews are joined together to essentially create instances (or entryway services I think they call them). One of the remaining distinctions from this entryway instance arrangement and ActivityPub then would be which relay or relays your entryway instance connects to.

Lastly I understand what you mean about people bouncing off Mastodon, but at the same time you kinda lose me here. You clearly mention the Fediverse preceding Mastodon yet then conclude with people having a bad experience with Mastodon meaning the rest of the Fediverse isn't for them...? We're using another variation of the Fediverse and ActivityPub here, so we're both aware there's more to it than that, even in the microblogging space, so I'm kind of confused on this point.

Nevertheless, I otherwise agree, it's good that people have more alternatives to get away from the trashfire Twitter's become (arguably even more of).

ElectroVagrant , (edited )

What would be really great is if companies could calibrate their reward structures based on what's going to make players happy to log on, rather than trying to trap them into racking up the maximum amount of time in-game.

I haven't played video games in awhile, so I don't think I'm burnt out on them, which may make this a matter of differing mentality...But might it not also help to reevaluate whether a game should rely on a reward system/structure to entertain people to begin with?

It seems like these reward system designs are largely unsustainable without constant upkeep, in some part given that the rest of a game built around them often lacks sufficiently entertaining gameplay systems independent of them.

ElectroVagrant ,

When other’s, be it corporations or people start to decide which information a person can and cannot access, is a damn slippery slope we better level out before AI starts to roll out en masse.

You highlight the bigger issue here than AI alone tbh. This is why another critical element is becoming literate and teaching each other methods of independent research, using multiple sources to develop an understanding, and not relying on any singular source, especially without careful review.

All the technology in the world can't help a person learn and understand, who hasn't yet learned how to learn, much less understand.

ElectroVagrant ,

The chomping will proceed so the explosions may

ElectroVagrant ,

from the comments as of time of writing, whosoever reads this now must adopt the name: motorcycle rule socialist

ElectroVagrant ,

love to be null

ElectroVagrant ,

Commenting to indicate my shared interest in this (despite the other comments suggesting the unlikelihood of such an option emerging).

ElectroVagrant ,

Linkblocks definitely sounds interesting. I've never gotten into social bookmarking (keeping bookmarks on another site/platform...?), but I can see the draw for building knowledge-bases this way.

ElectroVagrant ,

I agree with others saying copse, as being my first thought as well, but I'm really commenting to say I love the imagery the description, "a gathering of trees" produces.

ElectroVagrant ,

For the moment, a lot of the fun on some of the federated platforms is behind several steps of effort that many of the corporate platforms have streamlined people out of being accustomed to taking, which is part of why they've kept their larger audiences. If a single click/tap is too much, that's enough to keep some people away from here.

It's not a matter of laziness either, it's more of, how much effort do I want to put into something that I'm using for casual entertainment? For many people it's minimal, but many federated platforms currently don't really work like that. They've arguably thrown the baby out with the bathwater in an overcorrection away from commercial algorithmic feeds since existing platforms have conditioned people to not have to put effort into finding silly/fun content.

The types of people to post won't be as inclined to post if they find their posts aren't reaching people because people mostly have to actively seek them out to engage with them at all. The types of people to more passively engage won't be able to as easily as those posts they might engage with may never reach them because they mostly have to actively seek them out. The end result of a lack of feedback and content for both types of people, despite there being a possibility and existence of both for them, results in this recurring sense of dissatisfaction.

Note that this is written largely with Mastodon in mind, and to a lesser degree Lemmy. In Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin/PieFed/Sublinks's cases I think they're potentially better off in terms of structure and offering different ways to sort one's feeds, but it's a matter of more people joining to round out communities and discussion more.

ElectroVagrant ,

Finally, Nozick supposed that "plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct".

I find myself agreeing with this, particularly after a lot of time spent in such man-made realities whether in the form of books, movies, or games. At some point, some element of these I think will speak to people and inspire them to pursue on their own in some way, whether a hobby of a character, or creation of their own media or sub-field. An action that cannot be anticipated and generated by any such experience machine or simulation in a way that adequately satisfies someone.

Their AI partner, they explain, "has been treating me like no other person has ever treated me".

This is an aside, but this jumps out at me as an interesting tell...Given that these AI partners aren't necessarily sophisticated enough to fully emulate people and there's historical precedent for people seeing in them some traits they want to see, I wonder if this could be viewed as an angle to developing AI-intermediary therapy whereby one may learn that it isn't the AI treating them well, but the patient themselves.

The AI may be serving as a method to direct their inner monologue into patterns of thought that are kinder and more uplifting compared to however they may otherwise be.

"As we get more familiar with technology and especially virtual technology, we are going to care less and less that something is virtual rather than non-virtual," Weijers notes.

Frankly, I think we've already been here for some time. The technological element undeniably alters matters, but society itself has arguably been in this situation for as long as people have been capable of abstract thought. People have always existed between knowledge and ignorance, amidst facts and fabrications, and indulged themselves as much and often more in fabrications as facts.

What has consistently been of more concern is how much they draw from their indulgence rather than lose, rather than the ontology of it.

ElectroVagrant ,

I kind of agree about this not entirely fitting science, but I think the survey part is what gives it that little edge to fit here.

Without reading it in the full context, I'm also not sure what Nozick may have meant with the "want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person" idea. I suspect the idea may be that given a fully constructed context, you may be limited to however that context permits you to be instead of an independently actualized/realized person.

Although if that may be what Nozick was getting at, it's not without its own problems, much as you highlight with their position supposing existence harboring deeper meaning and significance apart from conscious creations.

ElectroVagrant ,

Personally, although the terms have become increasingly blurred over the years, I refer to changing to a new version of software (including an OS, and both ideally with some improvements) as updating it rather than upgrading.

I reserve upgrade more for changes of hardware with some form of improvement over its predecessor. I'd suspect I may not be alone in this, but I dunno how common it may be. When switching to a mix of both, I simply say I'm getting a new [insert specific device depending on which].

Although I'd hesitate to call many new phones an all-around upgrade when they're either removing features (headphone jack/expandable storage) or getting more cumbersome to hold (can you even call some modern phones a handset anymore?).

ElectroVagrant ,

On one hand, I appreciate this a lot as it's been baffling to me that this aspect of Zot wasn't adopted during development of ActivityPub. On the other, I kind of feel like some of this forgets or overlooks the benefits of running fully separate identities.

I recognize that the article points to this easing that process in a way, but it's pointing more to facets of a single identity, which benefits from some degree of interchangeability depending on those facets. This is clearest in the notion of retaining one's connections with minimal disruption should one facet's instance/host go offline for some reason, but also in it being relevant to maintain the same content between facets.

This has sort of also been the issue some see with the idea of federation and the fediverse itself. Some people enjoy the different styles of posting and interaction across different non-federated/linked sites/platforms, yet in some ways federation tends to blur or break those distinctions and try, sometimes clumsily, to blend it all together. For those all in on the idea, that's a major bonus, but for those not sold on it, it's a major pitfall.

In some respects I think this may kind of help those wanting to maintain different identity facets around here, but may also create a potential tripping point for those trying to more easily maintain distinct identities depending on implementation.

Bluesky's Moderation Architecture | Bluesky ( docs.bsky.app )

Today, we’re releasing an open labeling system on Bluesky. “Labeling” is a key part of moderation; it is a system for marking content that may need to be hidden, blurred, taken down, or annotated in applications. Labeling is how a lot of centralized moderation works under the hood, but nobody has ever opened it up for...

ElectroVagrant OP ,

I'm still not sure what I think of this to be honest, but I appreciate some more detail on how this is designed to operate on the frontend and the backend, e.g.

In the AT Protocol network, various services, such as the PDS, Relay, and AppView, have ultimate discretion over what content they carry, though it's not the most straightforward avenue for content moderation. Services that are closer to users, such as the client and labelers, are designed to be more actively involved in community and content moderation.
[...]
Infrastructure providers such as Relays play a different role in the network, and are designed to be a common service provider that serves many kinds of applications. Relays perform simple data aggregation, and as the network grows, may eventually come to serve a wide range of social apps, each with their own unique communities and social norms. Consequently, Relays focus on combating network abuse and mitigating infrastructure-level harms, rather than making granular content moderation decisions.

(Emphasis mine.)

ElectroVagrant OP ,

As I understand it so far:

Broad strokes general pros/cons:

Bsky's pros:

  • Some more influential/popular, and creative people have joined.
  • Full account migration across instances.
  • Initially at least: lower population/exclusivity, meaning less noise and fewer personality clashes, fewer trolls, so "better vibes".
  • More focused interfaces providing smoother user experience.

Somewhere in-between:

  • More social algorithm friendly, i.e. feeds with posts from what your followed accounts are liking or commenting on.
  • Quote posting (this one I'm counting as in-between because some Mastodon people really dislike them).
  • Full text search by default (see second point as to why I have this here.*)

Bsky's negatives (as of writing):

  • Fewer people overall, so can seem dead.
  • Some report phone number requirement for sign-up.
  • No post editing.
  • No video/gif posting.
  • No audio posts.
  • No direct/private/mentioned only messages.

*-Note: Mastodon now has a form of full text search but it must enabled by instance admins and one must opt their account's posts into search visibility for them to show up. This is the result of the years of back & forth over the feature and is an interesting compromise approach.

Broad strokes technical pro/cons compared to Mastodon:

Bsky/Bluesky's tentative benefits:

  • Full account migration across instances (Personal Data Servers).
  • Personal Data Servers may have lower resource costs compared to Mastodon instances, enabling more self-hosting.
  • The underlying protocol (Authorized Transfer Protocol/ATProto) enables custom feeds to help one find what they want to see and only view that.
  • As this post details, it may enable more distributed moderation so that your host/instance isn't necessarily the final say in what you can see.

Tentative negatives:

  • Relays may have higher resource costs, reducing how decentralized/distributed it is.
  • Currently Bsky's federation/decentralization is only with self-hosted Personal Data Servers, while so far as I'm aware, they're still operating the only Relay.
  • While the protocol may enable distributed moderation, this may also be viewed as a downside as it increases complexity in regards to which moderation services/moderators to subscribe to, who to report anything to, etc.
  • Custom feeds may also create a similar problem as distributed moderation in terms of choice paralysis/confusion, and further entrenching people into echo chambers more than existing social media arguably already enables.

Worth noting when compared to Mastodon:

  • Mastodon has partial account migration.
  • Mastodon allows post editing, video/gif/audio posts, and direct/mentioned only messages.
  • Each instance's local feed, and even its federated feed, may be viewed as providing a sort of custom feed produced by those on the instance.
  • Probably closer to what Bluesky means: Mastodon also allows one to make lists of others to create a distinct feed, follow hashtags, and one may pin a hashtag in a column then add others to include/exclude to create a custom hashtag feed in the advanced web interface.
  • Also although it's clunkier in Mastodon, one may export their lists, block/mute lists, and share these with others to import to their own account.
  • Bluesky also talks about different AppViews, which I think may be understood in relation to some of the different web interfaces, or apps one may use with Mastodon (one may understand this on Lemmy in a similar way, e.g. Alexandrite/Voyager~Thunder, etc.).
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