ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝

A geologist and archaeologist by training, a nerd by inclination - books, films, fossils, comics, rocks, games, folklore, and, generally, the rum and uncanny… Let’s have it!

Elsewhere:

  • Yrtree.me - it’s still early days for me in the Fediverse, so bear with me
  • 2 Posts
  • 58 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • That’s just misdirection for all the other policy changes:

    Meta on Tuesday announced sweeping changes to how it moderates content that will roll out in the coming months, including doing away with professional fact checking. But the company also quietly updated its hateful conduct policy, adding new types of content users can post on the platform, effective immediately.

    Users are now allowed to, for example, refer to “women as household objects or property” or “transgender or non-binary people as ‘it,’” according to a section of the policy prohibiting such speech that was crossed out. A new section of the policy notes Meta will allow “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.”







  • Seems like Obsidian could easily address this need [on Android] by adding a widget feature. Allow the user to pin a note to the home screen like Google Keep, or tap the widget to open a lightweight markdown editor which saves to a new file in the vault.

    From the linked article it does sound like they are aware of the issue and will come up with a fix. For now, I’m happy with ZN but we’ll see.



  • No problem, I’ve only been using it a month or so, and haven’t really dug into all features yet but there’s a lot to like - the markdown editing is very smooth (with lists, including check boxes, automatically generating on a new line) and I’ve started drafting longer Lemmy posts in it too.

    I have some niggles, like the YAML “note_type: task” producing a much nicer check box list but it seems to stop line wrapping. I’d also like checked items moved down the list. However, the developer is, apparently, approachable so I may drop them a line or note.









  • Unlike the author, I don’t think that the internet is dying, but instead entering a new phase that resembles in some aspects the old internet: search has become unreliable and those mega-platforms enshittify themselves to death, so people shift to smaller (often non-commercial) platforms and find new content to follow by the hyperlinks provided by other people. It’s a lot like the internet before Google Search.

    It is definitely feeling like this is a trend, we are moving back to more curated ways of sharing information.

    The Fediverse feels like a return to the old, open Web before it was captured by Big Tech, just with new bells and whistles attached. With all the enshittification, it seems like it is well-placed to be the solution to the problem. It’s not there yet but it’s a start.


  • We had a bunch of Japanese teenagers run scripts on their computers and half the Fediverse was full of spam. If someone really cared about spamming, this shit wouldn’t stop as quickly.

    The upside of that attack is that instance Admins had to raise their game and now most of the big instances are running anti-spam bots and sharing intelligence. Next time we’ll be able to move quickly and shut it all down, where this time we were rather scrambling to catch up. Then the spammers will evolve their attack and we’ll raise our game again.





  • My feelings exactly. As far as I’m concerned this is what Web 2.0 should have been about - taking the energy and excitement of blogs and forums and federating them together into a collectively owned Fediverse that would have made corporate takeover almost impossible (they would have been forced into the half-assed federating some of them are now promising). Instead, the tech companies moved hard into the territory saying “if you liked that then you’ll love this even more as it’s convenient.” Unfortunately, they have now built the size and momentum that makes it difficult to stop or kill them entirely but that also means they reached the level the level where they felt confident to start enshittification and we’ll be waiting when people can’t take any more and leave. The bonus is it should help filter out a lot of the idiots who are happy in their walled garden.

    I tried the various Web 2.0 offerings and it didn’t feel right. I jumped on dyaspora but it felt like it’s time had yet to come. Web 3.0 turned out to be a grift. So, as I have argued before, I think this is the start of Web 4.0 which will be about openness, collaboration and collectivity.

    I’ll always want new services (I’m waiting on a federated IMDb replacement) and improvements to existing ones (we could really do with a wiki integrated into Lemmy) but I am already enthusiastic about the Fediverse (borderline evangelical sometimes) and I feel like we are building the next phase of the Web providing all the necessary tools for people to build the next great websites.

    As another comment has said, the issue currently seems to be search engines not returning great links and the Fediverse isn’t ranking high in search engine results, yet. Perhaps we need a federated search engine - one you can add custom algorithms to…