Not ideologically pure.

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 8th, 2024

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  • The EU at least is still sticking around, which is cool.

    I have to say I’m a believer in slow growth here. It wouldn’t be good if one Mastodon server completely dominated; neither would it be good if Mastodon as a software was the only viable alternative. Right now we’re in a great spot where a bunch of different solutions are being developed.

    I think this development is healthy, and it be depends on slower more organic growth. And it might not be a linear process, but eventually I believe activitypub integration will be as obvious as having an RSS feed. Doesn’t matter much if it takes a while to get there.

    On that note it would be good if governments didn’t just sometimes use Mastodon, but rather integrate activitypub into their actual web sites.



  • FediDB reports that the Mastodon active user count is on the decline the last year, from more than. 1.2 million to 820k thousand. The number seems to maybe stabilize a little, but it appears as a slow decline when studying the last year.

    Then again, this is following from a huge bump of new users with the twitter exodus. It’s natural that not all will stick around, so a decline in active user now is not so surprising. It does indicate a lack of ability to move the momentum, but it’s an open source project with very limited funding, not a venture capital startup. It’s not here for explosive growth.

    Furthermore, the number of Mastodon users is not a perfect measure. If it was matched by a huge number of users on gotosocial or misskey, it wouldn’t really matter. The Swiss should maybe have waited for Threads to federate both ways before deciding to leave on account of limited interactions.

    Anyway, they’re not entirely wrong to say Mastodon is on the decline. But they’re not entirely right either.


  • Then again, the only person in these comments actually using lemmy.world seemed pretty happy with his experience.

    It would be nice if people had an easier way of knowing the level of moderation before joining a server. One idea could be for services like Fediverser could include an indicator of moderation level - for example “relaxed” if few instances are defederated, “moderate” if moderation is more active, and “strict” for more restrictive communities. Data from Fediseer might be useful in this regard.

    That way the people fleeing Reddit because of censorship would know where to go, and the rest of us wouldn’t have to be bothered by them unless we really wanted to.

    The biggest problem, I guess, is that it’s a lot of work, and I certainly don’t have the time nor skill-set required. So people will just have to read their instance rules. :)






  • More than anything, the problem is apps. I installed Ubuntu Touch on an old device I had lying around (after replacing the battery to bring it back to life), and I ended up liking it more than my daily driver. It worked, the interface was snappy (no pun intended), and there’s a lot of solid design choices. I found myself trying to navigate with gestures on my android phone after.

    However, I could not talk to my friends, who unfortunately use WhatsApp. I could not install my banking app. There’s a bunch of small thorns in the side that makes changing difficult for most users - kind of like in the early days of desktop Linux.

    As in the early days of desktop Linux, the solution might lie in a compatibility layer (like WINE). Android emulation within at least Ubuntu Touch has gotten quite good, I believe. Unfortunately my device is too old to support it.

    Those interested should also check out Postmarket OS.

    GNOME, a major desktop environment, is also moving towards all apps being designed for all types of devices. But as long as people can’t use their banks, switching is hard.



  • The positive vibe of the comments here got me checking out the comfy channel, and it’s awesome. Perfect background music for working.

    The occasional interventions (“you’re listening to Radio Free Fedi”) tend to be a bit long, which can be distracting. But that’s honestly the worst thing I have to say after hours of listening.

    I ended up checking out their website every now and then to follow whoever I was listening to on Mastodon. So it’s also a good way to discover independent artists.



  • As far as I’ve understood, a lot of nature religions do go a long way in recognising our common origins. Not as evolution as such, but more because we’re all parts of a common body somehow. In that sense they might have been closer to getting it right than messianic religions. Not that it takes all that much.

    Learning about the belief systems of indigenous people in Latin America is incredibly interesting. There’s a lot of underexplored ancient philosophy in there, and it is still being kept alive through oral traditions often in increasingly small communities.


  • For a lot of people it’s difficult to understand that anyone would genuinely prefer not living in a house. The word homeless does not give the best connotations after all.

    You can insist you’re fine, but men tend to do that anyway. The social worker might have grown up in bad conditions with a father insisting he’s fine and refusing to receive help, for all we know. There’s several reasons they could take it personally. And men who refuse to receive help when they need it can be frustrating to watch - chances are you’re wrongfully considered part of that category.





  • The hatred is partly fuelled by people in the open source community getting really riled up when they find out some open source projects are developed by organizations that need to earn money and pay their employees, be it Red Hat, Canonical, GNOME, Mozilla, or anything else. Female leadership will tend to push people over the edge.

    In addition to the usual rage-fuelled misogyny of open source forums, there is however also valid concern out there. It can be difficult to hear through the noise.

    Mozilla’s job listings provide some insight to what many consider to be a red flag for the way forward. To work on FireFox, they are looking for:

    • Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
    • Senior Director of Product, Firefox Growth
    • Principal Product Manager, Generative AI
    • Senior Software Engineer - Layout (CSS and ICU4X Support)
    • Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
    • Staff Full-stack Engineer - Generative AI
    • Senior Front End Engineer, Gen AI
    • Senior Front-End Engineer, Firefox
    • Front-End Engineer, Firefox
    • Staff Software Engineer - Credential Management
    • Staff Software Engineer - Release Engineering
    • Senior Front-End Software Engineer, New Tab

    For fairness I include every position, highlighting in bold the ones I think are likely to do more harm than good. This is not the direction I want FireFox to take, and I believe Mozilla are misguided to try to place themselves as the ethical AI actor. That said I’m not 100% against it all of the time - I do think the local in-browser machine translation feature of newer releases is great. But I don’t think I want much more than that, and even this feature should probably have been an optional plug-in.

    There’s also some former empolyees voicing valid concerns.

    In short, I think the legitimate criticism boils down to:

    1. Buying into the AI hype
    2. Flirting with “more ethical” ads and tracking, rather than being unquestionably on the user’s side of just blocking it all
    3. Doing too many things nobody asked for, arguably while not paying enough attention to FireFox
    4. Appearing distant from the community and unresponsive to its preferences
    5. Paying company leadership too much

    I don’t really buy into point 3 personally. I use FireFox every day and it’s by far the best browser I have ever had. It never gives me any problems at all, and password sync with Android is really useful. I wish it would support JPG XL, but that’s pretty much it in terms of complaints on my end.