𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

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 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍 
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 26th, 2022

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  • Thanks!

    Agreed: some items are basic functionality that should reliably and easily work. Image & video uploading are among them. I’ll add some verbiage on the CryptoPad page about options which have been rejected simply because they don’t support the most basic features.

    It’s funny: I’ve been similarly searching for a good chat platform, and there are two things which I personally don’t care much about, but which a couple of my family members are insistent about: typing notifications; and gifs - as in, a widget where you can search for short gifs from e.g. Gfycat and have them inserted. My wife absolutely requires the latter.

    That being said, my position on emoji responses are almost a core feature for a social media platform IMO. They’re fast, easy, non-cluttering feedback, eliminating the need to type out some inane, two-word response. It’s infuriating (to me) that Lemmy doesn’t support them; it leads to such illuminating responses as “So much this!”, “Yes!”, but worst of all the lack subverts up/downvotes, which should be a tool for designating interest, not agreement. Not having emoji reactions muddies and dilutes any value voting has.

    Pixelfed is an interesting suggestion. It always feels like it’s intended to be public. Were you thinking each user would have to configure default privacy settings?

    You may be right. I think I read that post visibility was configurable; if I can narrow the field sufficiently I’ll start installing them and checking how they work. I do think federation would have to be disabled on any AP server.

    I can see how to restrict to followers but haven’t yet found how to stop anyone being able to follow you.

    Yeah, that would be a blocker.

    I think for me, if a new user has to set up the privacy settings to stop them posting everything public, that’s probably not the right platform.

    Agreed. The service must be at least configurable to be private-by-default.

    BTW there is PixelDroid as a dedicated Pixelfed app, but it’s only on Fdroid.

    I think I found an iOS app, too… but I looked at so many servers last night I may be misremembering.

    The table isn’t rendering on my mobility client, so I’m going to delete it from the post; I’ll keep the CryptoPad document going as long as I can, but it’s open edit, and I’m hoping others will contribute to it.


  • Argh! I’ve posted a similar question; basically, I want a private alternative to Facebook, with wall-like functionality. The second minimum requirement is that there be an iOS app that makes posting easy – including initiating a picture or video capture. So:

    • #1: private, b/c it’s family sharing toddler pictures
    • Also #1: super user friendly, because (100% - 1 person) involved are non-technical
    • Also #1: has to have a better user tool than an SPA. No web interface can ever be anywhere as good as a native app can be, and I will die on that hill.
    • #2: emoji reactions, and threaded comments

    I’m not interested in installing and evaluating a dozen different servers, so like you I’ve been hoping that people with similar goals would narrow down the field a bit. There’s no way I’d convince enough of the family to go along with evaluating all of the options anyway, and IME what works fine for me can often fall apart when other people come onboard.

    I’d convinced myself that Friendica – venerable, proven, reasonably popular – would fit the bill, especially because the design doesn’t assume public-by-default, like Mastodon or Lemmy, and the potential damage of exposed content, either through my misconfiguring the server, or some upgrade assuming users want everything public by default, is high. I’d prefer a project where the developers assume private-by-default, and invite-first. Lemmy isn’t really right, because we’re following people, not communities; Mastodon has a better model, following users, but then its conversation threading is kind of shit for this purpose, and its reaction feature set is anemic. Circles was perfect, and beloved by the key parent involved, until it first made half of her posts invisible to her (and only to her and her husband), and then locked her out. This doesn’t surprise me much, as Circles is based on Matrix, which frankly has the worst cryptography management I’ve even encountered. But if you’re saying Friendica is that painful to post media on, then it won’t work.

    I’m leery of Humhub because of the quasi-commercial nature, and its youth. I’ve had too many experiences with initially semi-commercial platforms shifting, either suddenly or slowly, to increasingly commercial positions – moving features from the “free” to the “paid” column. Vendor lock-in is a real issue with a dozen users.

    So if Friendica is out, maybe Pixelfed? It seemed to me to be mostly indistinguishable from Mastodon, but if they have better comment threading, reactions, and I need to re-evaluate the AP clients to see if any would be user-friendly enough for the parents. I’ve used mostly Fedilab, and I’m not sure it’s ideal. For one thing, it doesn’t have support more than basic reactions: you can boost or favorite, but I am – and I think you are probably – looking for something with more variety, like emoji responses, right?

    I’m watching the other reactions here, and my post on this topic is here. I may post a summary – there are comparison charts, but they all tend to focus on feature set and fall short on the overall use case. On my thread,

    • Misskey was recommended as Facebook-like, and in particular, some of its forks have features the core project is missing. I always got the impression Misskey was a Mastodon-analog, which would make it not a good fit, so I’ve skipped over it. With Friendica out, I’m going to put Misskey back on the “possible” list.
    • Diaspora has also been recommended and is near the top of my list.
    • Smithereen was recommended, but the sparsity of the documentation – not even a list of features – put it down low on my list.
    • Hubzilla has a lot of documentation; it focuses a lot on content management – assets, calendars, document sharing, etc. – which will be fine if “easily post content to a feed” and “follow a user and view a stream of their posts” is a first-class interaction model.
    • Pixelfed is still an option. I just need to confirm/refute my “Mastodon, with pictures” perception. If my perception has been skewed by the fact that I’m interacting with Pixelfed through a (mainly) Mastodon app, then maybe it’ll work. However, there isn’t AFAICT a Pixelfed app, so if the only way to get to a more wall-like view is through a web interface, it’s not going to work.

    @acockworkorange@mander.xyz is also looking for this feature set / use case. I kind of feel as if it’s more useful to think about this as a use case, because almost all of these projects can claim some or all of the requested features, and yet not satisfy what we’re looking for in terms of user experience. This would be a great opportunity for another tool: a wiki with a list of applications & features, but with a discussion section and focused on winnowing projects by consensus about suitability. Again, lots of software that have the necessary functionality and which could be wrangled to do this, but still fail to be a good tool for the objective.

    Edit

    Probably not the best place to do this, because I’m the only one who can edit this, but:

    I deleted the table, as it wasn’t rendering on some mobile clients. The table was re-created in CryptoPad.

    I’ll go find a collaborative, wiki-like document thing with discussions that isn’t G**gle.

    Edit 2

    The table is now here, as a CryptPad document. In an exercise of trust, it’s open to edits. If vandals wreak too much damage, I’ll restrict access, but that’ll require creating accounts and requesting access, and all that shiz.


  • I wish, I wish… I wish I was a fish.

    I wish there was an instrument other than the stock market whereby private individuals could combine their funds to perform hostile take-overs, and then manage them by pre-agreed conditions.

    Like: we’re going to buy Twitter, build an AP interface on it, federate it, and operate it like a non-profit. We’re going to have a set of these S core values, with yearly votes on changes proportional to investment. No single investor can own more than T percent of shares Investors can sell their shares, or buy shares. Stock will never spilt. Management salaries, combined, can never exceed more than M% of non-management combined salaries, and run it as a Holocracy. Or, maybe, shares can only be sold to employees, who have to sell to other employees when they leave.

    You know; try to design a good operating model that avoids the pitfalls of other companies, and can adapt when the model demonstrates perverse incentives. Put more thought into it than my ramblings above.

    But ten billion dollars is a lot of money to put together, and the rules I’d like to see necessarily exclude the sort of profit-only driven capitalists who’d be able to contribute heavy loads, and would limit the amount that could contribute.

    I may as well wish I were a fish.



  • Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s not CHS. From what I’ve read, CHS is similar to overdosing, and is mostly associated with habitual users. The very first time I got stoned, decades ago, I spent the entire night in my car parked outside of a friend’s house trying to not be violently ill. Since then, after legalization, I’ve gotten mildly stoned on edibles a couple of times to no ill effect, but the third time the nausea was back.

    I’ve found no reference about it online. I’ve asked about it, online. I don’t know of it’s allergies in my case; if I mini-dose - amounts small enough that I can’t notice any effect, but more than homeopathic doses - I’m fine. But as soon as I take enough to geta even a mild high, bang: nausea.

    It’s really frustrating, because I suffer from chronic lower back pain (thanks, Army!) and I’d even gotten a prescription (before it was recreationally legal in my state) in an attempt to achieve the pain relief associated with cannabis.

    I’ve now chalked it up to a paradoxical effect. I suspect the anti-nause mechanism in THC is behaving differently in my biome and instead triggers nausea. Maybe that can be classified as an allergy? Although I expect if it were a traditional allergy, any amount would trigger nausea. And a little cannabis doesn’t make me a little sick; it’s either all or nothing.

    My other theory is that it’s zero-G sickness. When I get high, I get a head-spinning effect, and that sort of thing over a long term induces nausea in me.

    I don’t know what the fuck it is, but it’s gods-damned annoying.







  • I can’t speak for other Americans (USA, in particular, which is who I assume you meant), but for me it’s the nature of the oligarchical regime and their views on individualism. I’ve read the Chinese CSL, and spent a couple of days in a session presented by international lawyers and security professionals explaining what it meant for our business, how we needed to navigate it, and how it was being implemented. It’s scary.

    Information is power; specific information about you is power over you. It’s control.

    As for the government, I think it’s more a matter of the fact that China is far more well positioned and equipped to surveil US assets. Russia is bumbling, pre-occupied, and doesn’t make any computer components we use. Chinese chips, on the other hand, are in everything. The US is worried that, in a conflict, we could discover that China is able to simply… turn off all of the F35s. Or shut down or coopt firing systems on our war ships. Or disable coms or NV gear of ground troops. All of our modern equipment is computerized to more or lesser degree, and the failure of even seemingly simple resisters, sourced from China, could result in misoperation of gear, at best. If the espionage is more sophisticated, with more important components, it’s conceivable China could locate and monitor assets; missiles which ignore counter measures and always hit because the target is broadcasting a homing signal.

    Most off these hypotheticals are probably not within the realm of current technology, and that what access China is able to embed in computer components is far more limited. But we don’t really know, and it’s far more dangerous to underestimate than to overestimate capabilities.






  • Exactly. Mastodon-ish would be unsuitable as a server for a number of reasons: the loose, but still expected, character limitation; the lack of emoji responses; generally poor threading support; and the overall subscription feed-like model. OTOH, it’s based on a follow-the-user model, which is nice. I’m less familiar with Friendica, but AFAIK that’s also a follow-the-user model.

    The issue with Federation is the general expectation that these are public places. You can lock them down, but that’s not what they’re designed for, and in my case, the risk of misconfiguration exposing a bunch of toddler pictures that the parents want to keep private is too high. I think of the server is federated-by-nature, then it must also be paranoid-by-default; I don’t trust share-public-by-default projects to not introduced something in an upgrade that exposes data. At least if the base presumption of the developers is that all information is private by default, the risk is limited to true accidents rather than false assumptions.

    ActivityPub is enticing. It’s an exciting spec, and offers many client options. I’m worried only about those base assumptions.


  • Photoprism’s app space is pretty bad, but there is an completely hacky yet reliable solution for Android:

    1. PhotoBackup
    2. The PhotoBackup server on your Photoprism server
    3. A cron job that runs the photoprism import command every few minutes.

    Since I’ve had this set up, it’s worked as well as Google Photos ever did for keeping my phone snaps synced to the server. It’s been more reliable than SyncThing for my data, reacting and syncing faster, and it doesn’t mysteriously periodically just stop running like SyncThing.

    I don’t know if PhotoBackup is available for iOS, but if it is, it works a treat.




  • You need to inflate it to just over 100 so that the air that escapes when you pull the inflater leaves the tire at 100.

    An easy trick is to press in on the tire with your shoulder as you’re inflating; really push into it, and it adds just enough to offset the air loss when you stop inflating. Dad used to use his head, and that worked great because the smaller surface area of the top of his head meant more PSI, but I’m not as tough as dad and it hurts my neck to do it that way, so I use my shoulder.

    Anyway, don’t give up! You can get there, and a properly inflated tire can improve your mileage. Most people don’t keep their tires properly inflated and are just wasting money.