I want to chime in on the subject of community sidebars.

To my understanding, many of the mobile apps people use to interact with the fediverse (and more specifically the threadiverse) haven’t figured out a great way to render community sidebar content in a way that a new user knows that it exists. Sidebar content is accessible, but often hidden in a sub menu or a non-obvious interaction. I use Boost, for example; in it you swipe inwards from the right side of the screen to slide the sidebar into view. This isn’t surprising to me, a somewhat veteran Reddit user that expects communities to have sidebars and for those sidebars to be on the right side of the screen. However a user that doesn’t already know about community sidebars has almost no way of discovering their existence when they use Boost. Mobile apps have limited screen width so they tend to focus on their “principal use” (visiting a community to browse their posts), but if you don’t know that communities have sidebars in which they describe themselves and their posting and commenting rules it’s very easy to end up in OP’s position.

Not to excuse their comments nor question their ban; I agree with the decision by the mods of c/196 to not spend any more effort dealing with such an oblivious user.

I suspect many Lemmy clients are designed for experienced users who already know how to navigate the space(s) and how they function. Yet much of the “how do we introduce new people to the fediverse and onboard them?” discussions I’ve seen seem to settle on “suggest a generalist instance like LW or .zip, suggest a mobile app like Voyager, and make them start browsing! Newbs are put off by having to do work like read up on an instance”. I wonder how much this end up contributing to creating cases like OP’s.

Then again, !womensstuff@piefed.blahaj.zone was plagued for over a year by men claiming they were “just responding to posts in their /all feeds”. When told about the community’s rules and sidebar, the most common response was along the lines of “I can’t be bothered to read the community name before commenting on a post in my feed, now I need to navigate to the community and find their sidebar?? This community should find a way to prevent their posts from appearing in /all instead”. If these users aren’t going to the effort of reading the community name as displayed on posts then there’s no guarantee they would read community sidebars even if they were already on-screen, in front of their eyeballs.

Even in the comments on this post I can see the argument that basically boils down to “spaces that don’t cater to me should also bear the effort of keeping out of my way” being voiced.

It’s a very clever follow-up to their previous project, the fediverse schema observatory (also mentioned in the Last Week in Fediverse published October 30th of last year).

Title changed, lol. Damage control for the damage control?

If you’ve ever watched his live streams, he lets the mask slip from time to time. […] There are other tells and dog whistles if you pay attention.

Totally. I’ve never even heard that comment on Michelle Obama but it tracks with all the other things I’ve seen slip by. I couldn’t point to a single moment that convinced me, but one of the earliest warning signs I saw was him defending another dev streamer who’s decidedly more lib-coded (theo-of-the-t3-stack/ping.gg/the-t3-llm-chat-app) to his community by stating “he helped me out when some people were trying to accuse me of being alt-right, which I mean come on <smirk>”. This being when he still had skinny anime girls as his pc desktop on-stream and would make “blue hair + pronouns” jokes about rust while simultaneously advocating to use the language.

It should have been obvious earlier to be honest.

But we’re supposed to be the unprejudiced ones, not the crypto-fash (I’m only being half sarcastic). It’s tiring how they exploit benefit-of-doubt, and it’s so hard for me to tell the difference between someone who’s well positioned to fall down the pipeline and someone who’s actively part of said pipeline.

this screenshot hurts me.

So “update omarchy” just means “do a git pull on the dotfiles repo” and it doesn’t even seem to be passing --depth 1 because we see info on several branches being updated and the entire “update” weighs in at 1.01 MiB just for 1 line change in the conf file to (I assume) make steam work nicely with hyprland…

This really reeks of not caring in the slightest about your users, almost to the point of “if they don’t know better and can’t figure out how to do it properly on their own, then they deserve to suffer”.

Omarchy is a pre-configured installation of the Arch distribution that comes with a TUI installer on a 6.2GB ISO.

According to https://archlinux.org/download/, the base arch iso is 1.4 GB. Why the heck does a wrapper for arch’s installer take literally 5 times the disk space?

EDIT: ah, I see the article brings this up in the details, along with pointing out that the install process ends up needing to download an addition 1.8 gigs. 🤦

For the unaware:

In the small town where I grew up, the train station got turned into a supermarket + gas station + mcdonalds (yes, really 🤮 ). To take a train to anywhere else in France, you first have to drive 25 minutes (not the longest, but really defeats the point of taking local / regional trains).

I know it’s been years now since the cult scandal, but South Korea really isn’t having much luck in terms of leaders not falling for scams. Their people deserve better.

I see, thanks for the explanation!

I’ve been working on a frontend/browser client for “exploring” activitypub instances in my spare time, and CORS basically requires me to have some sort of separate server process that can fetch and auth using my account(s). I’m unsure of how much sense it would make to try to bolt my client on top of your software, but at least now I know I can try without needing to involve a Microsoft account.

ASP.NET Core Identity is backed by an in-memory database (since 11.1.0); the only allowed login method is via Microsoft account, but DeviantArt and Reddit accounts can be added in user management (which will connect these accounts to Pandacap’s main database).

Does this literally mean I need a Microsoft account to run this on my own machine, or is that only for deploying on Azure?

McKinsey about to slash it’s own headcount after slashing everyone else’s

Where are the places to discuss the systemic issues in tech and have non-judgemental discussions on solving problems? For the first part, this place has been pleasant to lurk for the past years. For the second part, I’m not so sure.

I have seen some productive and/or informative discussions on solving problems, but only really in communities that don’t solely exist online. I would suggest looking into local tech-related meetups and the details of the schedules of any conferences that you can physically attend; even in more tech-focused events there are sometimes 1 or 2 dedicated spaces for “people” problems. Depending on what the sociopolitical landscape around you looks like, unions and/or non-profits can also provide a place to discuss concretely solving problems.

In my experience, in-person contexts tend to provide the best opportunities to form acquaintances that will then be open to discussing these things, online or offline. I don’t really know how to find online-first spaces that aren’t corrupted by the current advertisement-based, profit-seeking incentive that underpins most online community infrastructure and directly leads to this “influencerization” of tech culture.

From my own experience querying public mastodon timelines via API (edit: removed incorrect /api/v1s in the AP_IDs):

• Mastodon user accounts have an ActivityPub URI of https://<instance.domain.tld>/users/<username>
• Mastodon posts have an ActivityPub URI of https://<instance.domain.tld>/users/<post_author_username>/statuses/<post_id> (they also have a url property of https://<instance.domain.tld>/@<post_author_username>/<post_id> but that tends to serve the html view of the post)

To see for yourself, pick an instance that allows viewing their public timeline without logging in (mastodon.social is perfect for this) and follow the “Playing with public data” section of the docs. That page ellides most of the info you’re looking for in the example payloads they give (as the JSON payloads themself are quite large and nested), but I can assure you that AP_IDs for user accounts and posts can be found pretty quickly from a single timeline query.

I don’t think Mastodon has any notion of community, nor does it distinguish between posts and comments (when following a lemmy community, both posts and comments show up in my masto feed as “top-level” statuses (ie posts)).

If we want to keep it silly, then "pie-munchers’ gets my nomination.

Op, I appreciate that you seem to be genuinely interested in these topics, and are not just farming engagement (which is kinda meaningless here on the Fedi, anyways…). If I may offer a suggestion, try to find a tone that doesn’t sound like a roadmap for some corporate brand strategy. Most of us that are here and would be interested in a “fediverse permaculture” are severely put off by the structure of your post, not to mention it lacks in depth for most suggestions to be directly actionable (for example, the merch you would sell to support the insurance still needs to be made somewhere, by someone, who either needs to be paid for their time or are already independently wealthy).

Have you taken a look around !permacomputing@slrpnk.net ? Permaculture is not just about principles of mutual support but also a long process of experimentation to see which combinations of which plants and practices works out “for the best”. You might foster more of the conversation you’re looking for if you can bring some more concrete examples or proposals to serve as topics instead of an all-encompassing manifesto post.

The next time I’m about to moan and complain about how nobody directly implements activitypub apis “the standard way”, I’ll remember this article and be mollified.

As @abeorch@friendica.ginestes.es states, diversity is a strength when it comes to resisting capture.

For instances that already have a user base, admins should not make any significant decisions without the consent of their users. This goes against our values, and we will not permit an instance to use Bridgy Fed in this manner. We’ve had conversations on how to handle a situation like this, and we would block instances [3] from doing so. We strongly expect admins to be loud about bridging, especially during signup. 3/10

This is very encouraging to read from a project that initially did not understand why many would be opposed to an opt-out bridge to ATProto.

Oh, man, thanks for that link! I thoroughly enjoyed Dave Barry in Cyberspace back in the day; glad to see he’s still writing about computers in this way.

Wanted to try it, signed up for the beta, still waiting on my invite code.

On the surface, bluesky integration makes sense if they’re trying to onboard people onto “the social web”. Still, I’m disappointed they seem to want to be a curated view on what they determine is a feed, and not some kind of plug’n’play feed viewer beyond RSS.

I see the tumblr culture is already present, congrats! Although I never personally used tumblr, my understanding is that more than features or functionality it was very much the culture that its users cultivated that made that site special.