I like how we took something computers were masters at doing, and somehow fucked it up.
Joseph likes this.
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We're continuing investigation to the performance issues, you can follow and react here: https://lemmy.world/c/friendicaworld
2025-06-17 08:10:40
2025-06-05 17:52:59
2025-06-04 15:54:54
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in reply to Tommi 🤯 → 39C3
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Happy I Love Free Software Day! 💕
Unfortunately, this year I could not join nor organize any in-person celebration, BUT of course I want to share my gratitude to the many, countless #FreeSoftware services I don’t merely use, but actually depend on.
Last year, I decided to focus only on #YunoHost, because it would have been crazy to list all the projects I use and I love.
This time, even if I will most certainly forget someone, I am challenging myself to mention all the #LibreSoftware my life is powered by.
Without further ado, THANK YOU to:
- @yunohost, for powering Nebuchadnezzar
- @fedora, for running my beloved #Framework laptop
- @frameworkcomputer, for designing and building repairable, #Linux-friendly and truly open hardware
- @gnome and @GTK, for being just gorgeous
- @calyxos (thus @LineageOS), for powering my #Fairphone5
- #Obtainium, for making me directly download apps on my phone, and @fdroidorg for distributing them
- #AuroraStore, for proxying the download of apps I am doomed to get from Google Play
- @element, for developing #Synapse, even though the new proprietary Synapse Pro is VERY PROBLEMATIC AND DISAPPOINTING
- #Fractal, for being the most beautiful and awesome #Matrix client ever
- @signalapp, for keeping me connected with the people I love
- @Mastodon, for also maintaining a feature-packed experimental fork (#GlitchSoc), that is what Pan runs
- #Tuba and #Moshidon, for being the most beautiful and awesome #Mastodon clients ever
- #Firefox, for still remaining the best possible #browser choice, despite #Mozilla’s governance messiness
- @openstreetmap, for allowing us to find the right path, both literally and metaphorically!
- @organicmaps, for being the simplest, cleanest, yet feature-rich #OSM client and navigation app
- @protonvpn, for making me browse safely from/to anywhere in the planet and @protonprivacy #ProtonMail, for hosting my email, despite the latest alarming political statements…
- @libreoffice, for allowing me to draft documents with ease, the last of which was my #CV
- #LanguageTool, for preventing me from making embarassing spelling mistakes
- @photoprism, for safely storing and indexing all my photographic memories, on Aby, and for providing stellar and friendly support too!
- #Actual, for moderating the very likely risk of ending up completely broke, since it forces me to manage my finances consciously and coherently
- @readeck, for storing and sorting ALL my varied and overwhelming inputs
- @nextcloud, for storing and synchronizing my data, for its #calendar, its #tasks, and all its awesome apps
- #Rustdesk, for preventing my friends and family members from going crazy, by allowing me to remotely connect to their devices and directly address the issues they have
- #Listmonk, for sending out my newsletter
- @eleventy, for powering all the websites I maintain, above all the virtual representation of my mind, and for being the only reason why I resist and try to continue learning #JavaScript
- @forgejo, for giving us a chance to truly control and collectively develop the sources of our software, but most importantly @Codeberg, for RESISTING, RESISTING, RESISTING, despite the hatred and attacks nazi assholes throw at them
- @musicbrainz for keeping music knowledge open and free, and @ListenBrainz for scrobbling the crazy music I listen to
- The @fsfe, for promoting this celebration and fighting the good fight!
Lastly, but most importantly, the biggest thank you goes to all the free software libraries and dependencies the above mentioned #software are made of/built with, including #C, #JavaScript, #Python, #Rust, and all community-maintained programming languages.
I am super sorry if I forgot someone!
#OpenSource #ILoveFS #SoftwareFreedom #Fairphone #Android #LineageOS #FSFE #OpenStreetMap #PhotoPrism #LibreOffice #Readeck #Eleventy #11ty #GNOME #Signal #forgejo #Codeberg #MusicBrainz #ListenBrainz #MetaBrainz
Nebuchadnezzar
Information and insights concerning the configuration and maintenance of Tommi’s server.Tommi (Tommi’s mind)
#mastodon
#calendar
#libreoffice
#opensource
#fairphone
#fairphone5
#matrix
#linux
#software
#OpenStreetMap
#android
#glitchsoc
#rust
#mozilla
#firefox
#softwarefreedom
#gnome
#python
#c
#framework
#freesoftware
#javascript
#browser
#signal
#fractal
#forgejo
#osm
#protonmail
#synapse
#obtainium
#tuba
#eleventy
#codeberg
#11ty
#moshidon
#photoprism
#FSFE
#CV
#readeck
#yunohost
#actual
#musicbrainz
#lineageos
#libresoftware
#RustDesk
#listenbrainz
#Tasks
#aurorastore
#ilovefs
#languagetool
#listmonk
#metabrainz
@Free Software Foundation Europe
@Nextcloud 📱☁️💻
@Signal
@Forgejo
@YunoHost
@Mastodon
@Proton
@Element
@Eleventy 🎈 v3.1.0-beta.1
@LineageOS
@OpenStreetMap
@LibreOffice
@GNOME
@Framework
@Codeberg
@F-Droid
@Fedora Project (F43 is OUT)
@Organic Maps
@PhotoPrism 💎
@GTK
@CalyxOS
@ProtonVPN
@Readeck
@ListenBrainz
@MusicBrainz
This entry was edited (9 months ago)
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Adam, The Matrix.org Foundation and slowmart reshared this.
Woah, hardcore, I love it! You’re all in! 💪
Impressive list!
Always great to see people using and mentioning free software.
Always great to see people using and mentioning free software.
Tech Cyborg reshared this.
@adjb I am blushing! Thank you so much, but there are other true icons, I am just a fanboy! 💕
if you are a fanboy then I guess I’m a filthy casual. 😂
thank you for this list, very inspirational!
if I may add, I want to thanks to:
#krita a free and open source digital painting and thanks to them, I could be freelance artist today ✨
Also the new version has recording tool!
#inkscape free vector drawing program as an alternative for adobe illustration
#kdenlive for editing my art timelapse video so I could post it on tiktok
#obs for screen recording. Before Krita has recording tool, I'd used OBS a lot to record my drawing process.
2025-02-14 14:57:16
2025-02-10 23:03:07
2025-02-10 22:34:50
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in reply to Emeritus Prof Christopher May
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Unknown parent
I see central London has been clogged again by the tractors of farmers protesting at inheritance tax on farms.
things I haven't seen:
The police kettling tractors in London Squares;
Right wing papers claiming the clogging of London's streets has impeded ambulances getting to hospital with patients;
The police using mobile facial recognition units to identify militant farmers to add to terrorism databases...
which is not to say the above are not happening (or maybe it is?)
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Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK, User name cannot be blank 🇪🇺, Nick, slowmart, Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈, Bob Thomson, MostlyTato, Pollinators, Dianora (Diane Bruce), Cainmark Does Not Comply 🚲, J.L.1285, Jonathan Emmesedi, Alex P Roe - OLD ACCOUNT, Daniel Brotherston, Mike Waghorne, Linux: part of the resistance 🇵🇸 ☮️, UkeleleEric, Dendan Setia (Nins), Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷, LillyLyle/Count Melancholia and GunChleoc reshared this.
I'm sure they'll be getting long prison terms just like other protesters blocking roads right.......right?
They tried facial recognition but it came back and said they all look the same…
Just yet another example of the elite control perception. Farmers? Honest workers juts looking after their own, guv. Environmental activists? Filthy terrorists.
Media (social and traditional) controls the narrative that the masses believe.
Well, I'm with *you* Harriett....
2025-02-22 16:25:02
2025-02-04 00:15:19
2025-02-03 20:12:31
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in reply to LillyFinch6
in reply to Walter Vermeir
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in reply to Walter Vermeir
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in reply to Walter Vermeir
#Help
I am new to friendica…migrated from fb. An elder and still learning. How do I find a community for a particular interest like ballet or gardening? Thanks
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I have now no time but if nobody has helpt you I will look at it tomorrow ....technically today
like this
slowmart and LillyFinch6 like this.
Thanks….no worries on time. Thank you.
How do I find a community for a particular interest like ballet or gardening?
You can look at several places in the Fediverse. Let's start at home. At Friendica.
At the top you have the contacts button. With the people icon. One can look in 'the local directory' with the relevant keyword.
But it makes sense to go directly to the global directory. You look a group about a specific topic. On what instance of Friendica it is hosted is not important.
Click on the entry 'Global directory' in the contacts section. It opens in a new window at an external website.
There you can search. You will notice the number of lists is relative modest at present. These are user and groups from many different Friendica installations.
At present nothing can be found about 'ballet'. We do have one match for 'gardening'.
dir.friendica.social/search/gr…
There is a button present to 'follow'. - That button does not work. Just click on the group listing itself.
There you find a button to 'follow' that works. Note the address in the address bar. You are now on an other instance of Friendica.
You get a screen to enter your Friendica handle. Enter it like it is listed on your profile page. And then you get the option to actually submit the request to join that group.
If the group you wish to join is not public you will have to wait to get approved.
The groups you have joined show up in the left side menu when you click on the 'network' button, what is the most left top button, the square.
Even if you have found a on-topic group that does not mean you will be happy with it. The 'gardening group' we found 'gardensplantshorti@squeet.me' has only a six posts and are 6 year old. - But you do have now a place to try to revive it.
If you can not find what you are looking for (and not directly interested in just creating a group yourself) looking at Lemmy makes most sense. Lemmy is presented as the Fediverse version of Reddit.
Friendica.world has a Lemmy sister at lemmy.world
There is the option to do a search in the community, including 'All'. Also nothing about 'ballet'. There are a fair bit of options related to 'gardening'.
While not a place with 'active buzz' the group gardening@lemmy.world is clearly the most mature.
Again, also that button there to subscribe does not work. You do the name of the group. And when you have the name you can go here at this Friendica instance and go to 'contacts' section. And enter that name of the Lemmy group via the 'add new contact' option.
That way you can just add a Lemmy group to Friendica.
Mastadon is the more mature pillar of the Fediverse . Most users.
I am not sure how it works there with groups. I think there is some group function also at Mastodon. In any case there is fair chance you will find users posting about the topic you are interested in.
And if you find those then you can also add those here. 'Contact' & 'Add new contact'.
This was intended that this also could be used as general help text. I do not think this ended up to be very useful. - I let you decide @Ruud of can do anything with this.
@Ruud
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
LillyFinch6 likes this.
Thank you so much. Have a good evening.
Wow, this is a very useful text (and also clearly shows why right now only users that are either nerds and/or pretty devoted to the fediverse use it: so much of it doesn't really work (yet) or only in a roundabout way)! Thank you so much, Walter!
LillyFinch6 likes this.
Again thank you. I think I will stick with Mastidon. It also has ALT Text for those with visual impairments.
2025-02-03 23:53:43
2025-02-03 23:53:43
2025-02-03 19:26:29
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He doesn't know what he's doing (but we already knew that)
Posted by a friend of a friend on FB, but this really made sense...
The best, most cogent and elegantly simple explanation into the inexplicably destructive negotiating processes of the president,by Prof. David Honig of Indiana University.
Everybody I know should read this accurate and enlightening piece...
“I’m going to get a little wonky and write about Donald Trump and negotiations. For those who don't know, I'm an adjunct professor at Indiana University - Robert H. McKinney School of Law and I teach negotiations. Okay, here goes.
Trump, as most of us know, is the credited author of "The Art of the Deal," a book that was actually ghost written by a man named Tony Schwartz, who was given access to Trump and wrote based upon his observations. If you've read The Art of the Deal, or if you've followed Trump lately, you'll know, even if you didn't know the label, that he sees all dealmaking as what we call "distributive bargaining."
Distributive bargaining always has a winner and a loser. It happens when there is a fixed quantity of something and two sides are fighting over how it gets distributed. Think of it as a pie and you're fighting over who gets how many pieces. In Trump's world, the bargaining was for a building, or for construction work, or subcontractors. He perceives a successful bargain as one in which there is a winner and a loser, so if he pays less than the seller wants, he wins. The more he saves the more he wins.
The other type of bargaining is called integrative bargaining. In integrative bargaining the two sides don't have a complete conflict of interest, and it is possible to reach mutually beneficial agreements. Think of it, not a single pie to be divided by two hungry people, but as a baker and a caterer negotiating over how many pies will be baked at what prices, and the nature of their ongoing relationship after this one gig is over.
The problem with Trump is that he sees only distributive bargaining in an international world that requires integrative bargaining. He can raise tariffs, but so can other countries. He can't demand they not respond. There is no defined end to the negotiation and there is no simple winner and loser. There are always more pies to be baked. Further, negotiations aren't binary. China's choices aren't (a) buy soybeans from US farmers, or (b) don't buy soybeans. They can also (c) buy soybeans from Russia, or Argentina, or Brazil, or Canada, etc. That completely strips the distributive bargainer of his power to win or lose, to control the negotiation.
One of the risks of distributive bargaining is bad will. In a one-time distributive bargain, e.g. negotiating with the cabinet maker in your casino about whether you're going to pay his whole bill or demand a discount, you don't have to worry about your ongoing credibility or the next deal. If you do that to the cabinet maker, you can bet he won't agree to do the cabinets in your next casino, and you're going to have to find another cabinet maker.
There isn't another Canada.
So when you approach international negotiation, in a world as complex as ours, with integrated economies and multiple buyers and sellers, you simply must approach them through integrative bargaining. If you attempt distributive bargaining, success is impossible. And we see that already.
Trump has raised tariffs on China. China responded, in addition to raising tariffs on US goods, by dropping all its soybean orders from the US and buying them from Russia. The effect is not only to cause tremendous harm to US farmers, but also to increase Russian revenue, making Russia less susceptible to sanctions and boycotts, increasing its economic and political power in the world, and reducing ours. Trump saw steel and aluminum and thought it would be an easy win, BECAUSE HE SAW ONLY STEEL AND ALUMINUM - HE SEES EVERY NEGOTIATION AS DISTRIBUTIVE. China saw it as integrative, and integrated Russia and its soybean purchase orders into a far more complex negotiation ecosystem.
Trump has the same weakness politically. For every winner there must be a loser. And that's just not how politics works, not over the long run.
For people who study negotiations, this is incredibly basic stuff, negotiations 101, definitions you learn before you even start talking about styles and tactics. And here's another huge problem for us.
Trump is utterly convinced that his experience in a closely held real estate company has prepared him to run a nation, and therefore he rejects the advice of people who spent entire careers studying the nuances of international negotiations and diplomacy. But the leaders on the other side of the table have not eschewed expertise, they have embraced it. And that means they look at Trump and, given his very limited tool chest and his blindly distributive understanding of negotiation, they know exactly what he is going to do and exactly how to respond to it.
From a professional negotiation point of view, Trump isn't even bringing checkers to a chess match. He's bringing a quarter that he insists of flipping for heads or tails, while everybody else is studying the chess board to decide whether its better to open with Najdorf or Grünfeld.”
— David Honig
2025-02-03 07:00:51
2025-02-02 10:30:01
2025-02-02 07:04:52
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ALT Text on Friendica Images
For anyone else who is new here, on Friendica it isn't obvious how you're supposed to add ALT TEXT to your images. And we all really should be doing this! One way is to add it to the BBcode when you are composing a post:
The blue highlighted text "The Friendica Logo" would become the Alt Text for the image. It just needs to go in between the opening and closing [img]...[/img] BBcode.
The other way is to edit the image in your Photos by adding a "Caption" to it. In the future whenever you attach the image to a post the caption text will become the Alt Text:
You also need to pay attention to the Permissions for images you upload. Just because you set the post you are writing to be public doesn't mean any images you upload through the compose "Browser" will also automatically be public if your Default Post Permissions in your Settings > Account > Security & Privacy is something else.
In which case it's better to go to Photos and upload the images, make sure they have Caption text and the permissions for viewing are correct, and then compose a post and attach them with the image Browser.
Thank you very much for that info, just what I was looking for!
When I do the first option, the text shows in blue above the picture - is that what's supposed to happen?
When an image is inserted into a post it usually also has a link to the image wrapped around it. It sounds like you're putting the alt text inside the link code but not the image code:
[url=https://link-to-image]Text here would become a link above picture[img=https://image-address]Text HERE becomes Alt-Text[/img]Text here would become a link after picture[/url]
So always look for the [/img] and put the alt-text right before it.
Thank you so much, I really should have known that, having done a bit of HTML, but that was years and years ago.
2025-02-01 13:40:39
2025-02-01 13:11:39
2025-02-01 13:11:39
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I wanted to pin Janet's (@cyberlyra@hachyderm.io) post to my timeline but can't seem to do that(yet) so trying this: hachyderm.io/@cyberlyra/113756…
New Year, New Digital You! I'm leading a 21-day CYBER-CLEANSE to teach you and your friends how to clean up your digital footprint.Looking to change your habits online in 2025? Follow along and by January 21, you'll be in a far better place!
optoutproject.net/the-cyber-cl…
Please forward, boost, and re-post!
The Cyber-Cleanse: Take Back Your Digital Footprint
New Year, New Digital You! New Years are an opportunity for committing to resolutions, starting new habits, discarding what no…Janet Vertesi
Michael / Chgowiz likes this.
2025-09-29 04:18:41
2025-02-01 13:01:02
2025-01-02 04:09:39
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in reply to Cyberlyra
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New Year, New Digital You! I'm leading a 21-day CYBER-CLEANSE to teach you and your friends how to clean up your digital footprint.
Looking to change your habits online in 2025? Follow along and by January 21, you'll be in a far better place!
optoutproject.net/the-cyber-cl…
Please forward, boost, and re-post!
The Cyber-Cleanse: Take Back Your Digital Footprint
New Year, New Digital You! New Years are an opportunity for committing to resolutions, starting new habits, discarding what no…Janet Vertesi
This entry was edited (11 months ago)
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Permaculture and Politics 🇺🇸, Cainmark Does Not Comply 🚲, DoomsdaysCW, Inger, Mark Stosberg, slowmart and Samuel reshared this.
how many email aliases do you have, for how many saved accounts/passwords?
Because my dump is 800+ accounts.
And how many of yours did you leave your real Name in?
webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/2025…
Because my dump is 800+ accounts.
And how many of yours did you leave your real Name in?
webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/2025…
Interesting challenge!
A 'hint' for day 1, wouldn't it be better *not* to suggest #Amazon as a got-to shopping place? Shouldn't Amazon be one of the 'services' we ought to be opting out of?
have you found any good video meeting platforms that you recommend.
this is an amazing idea - and we (the Rebel Tech Alliance) are promoting something similar to finish up the year:
#BigTechWalkout2025 😀 Celebrate NYE2025 in style with freedom from the algorithms!
Details here: (the steps we link to are super easy but people can go further!) rebeltechalliance.org/collecti…
We'd be grateful if you could boost this 😄
2025-02-01 12:21:48
2025-02-01 12:21:48
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slowmart reshared this.
What we learned this week
Most Americans don’t support the Trump’s energy and climate policies, according to research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. 73% think it’s important to stay in the Paris Agreement.
As I’m trying to keep a focus on solutions on the blog, I’ve resisted the urge to whine about the government’s economic growth rhetoric and airport expansion. I will however post a link to the New Economics Foundation and their investigation into whether or not expanding airports actually delivers growth. Because if it doesn’t, we’d be doing the manifestly wrong thing for nothing.
Refrigerators don’t get much attention in climate change discussion, but they’re surprisingly important. So I was pleased to read about a scientific breakthrough in thermogalvanic technology, which could in time reinvent the way fridges are cooled.
On a related subject, this week we had the heat pump engineer in to design the system for our home. We’ve chosen Aira, who have brought Sweden’s expertise in heat pumps to the UK in a smart new business model. Pending the final design and price, we’re hoping this will be our last winter on gas.
Links to this week’s articles below, and a book recommendation for something rather unique that I enjoyed recently.
This week’s articles
What can you do about the climate crisis?
This week I’ve been reading Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s book What If we Get it Right?, all about climate solutions and imagining the positive side of change captured in the title. One of the things she mentions early on is the importance of finding our personal place in climate action – not the general sense of…
by Jeremy WilliamsJanuary 30, 2025January 30, 2025
Islands of Abandonment, by Cal Flyn
From slag heaps in the Lothian to the ‘urban prairie’ of Detroit, Islands of Abandonment is a nature book of a different sort, seeking out resurgent nature in ruined places. There are four main types of landscapes, Cal Flyn suggests. There is pristine land untouched by human activity, land that has been reshaped for production,…
by Jeremy WilliamsJanuary 28, 2025
An African in Greenland
While Greenland is in the news, allow me to recommend this book by Tété Michel Kpomassie. He read about the Inuit of Greenland in a book in 1950s Togo. It captured his imagination and he ran away from home, aged 16, to go and see them for himself.
It’s an extraordinary story of curiosity, courage and determination, and beautifully told. It’s full of rich details about the people who welcome him in, their way of life, and the unlikely kinship they find. The book won Kpomassie a major literary award when it was first published in France in 1977, an accomplishment all the more remarkable given Kpomassie was entirely self-taught. Penguin Classics have now reissued it in a new English translation, which you can pick up from Earthbound Books.
While it’s an engaging read in its own right, Michel the Giant is also historically important. Kpomassie is likely the first African to visit Greenland, and this is an explorer tale written about a black man travelling north, in a genre where most of the journeys go the other way.
New technology could make fridges cheaper and more eco-friendly
Using thermogalvanic technology as cooling mechanism may significantly reduce power usage, research saysOlivia Lee (The Guardian)
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
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2025-01-31 21:54:50
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in reply to DistroWatch
For people looking for us on Bluesky, we have an account which mirrors this one: bsky.app/profile/distrowatch.m…
slowmart reshared this.
I guess, they are looking there, not here.
2025-05-17 12:06:15
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Marginalia Search is a digital tool that is actually, deeply useful and necessary. It’s also super cool to explore.
Procrastination warning!
#InternetProcrastination #search #MarginaliaSearch #WebSearch #Marginalia #indieWeb #WebDev
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2025-02-01 13:52:34
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Crazy.
I never would have thought how important the #Fediverse would become as one of the last communication networks that are not controlled by governments, directly or indirectly
Especially in times like now when almost all other ones are kissing the ring
Billionaires who are in control of most of our daily communication should not be trusted, our most valued digital forms of connection should be in control of the people like you and me
Thank you for being part of this❤️
like this
Jessica Pennell, Elena. (she/ her), Ramin Honary, irelephant and Chris Trottier like this.
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rhtunstall, KoffeeKrisp 🇨🇦, Jeroen R, Ameel Khan, earthling, JonChevreau, Lisa Melton, Martin Vermeer FCD, Fan of Shared Truth & Empathy, Cainmark Does Not Comply 🚲, your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦, The Febrile Muse, Trendy Toots, Kevin Russell, No Gods , no Masters! RESIST, Rainbow Warrior, Ben Royce 🇺🇦 🇸🇩, Mastodon Migration, Jürgen Hubert, Stryder Notavi, Tofu Golem, JacobRPG❌👑, Christina 🇨🇦, Dave, oldguycrusty, Blippy the Wonder Slug 🇩🇪, Tom, Kyle Montanio, K2, naught101, Kees AntiFA van Malssen, John 🎬 AFilm Nerd 🍿, Jna💚, Debbie Goldsmith 🏳️⚧️♾️🇺🇦, Heliograph, Ken Walker, JWcph, Radicalized By Decency, Elena. (she/ her), Ben, Peter Müller, Tommi 🤯 → 39C3, slowmart, Abie, the esoteric programmer, Giselle, Northants Greens, trends, Peter Brown, The Fulcrum/Battalion ⚒️, irelephant, Chris Trottier, Erik Jonker, Tim Chambers, Pollinators, Sisyphus with a Hat, Florian Marquardt, daryl, Dianora (Diane Bruce), Jon Moller and StroomAfwaarts 🌱 reshared this.
I hate to live in 'Interesting Times' but at least we have this place.
I think it was clear already but I just wanna have it said
I hereby pledge to never ever bow to dictators and always keep fighting for you, the people.
Do not give in, help out each other and remember.. we are here for you 
reshared this
Solarbird, Dave Rahardja, Stryder Notavi, JonChevreau, Cainmark Does Not Comply 🚲, The Febrile Muse, Mastodon Migration, your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦, Kevin Russell, Kees AntiFA van Malssen and -rb reshared this.
thank you thank you thank you .. hugs to you and yours.
No need to make it clear, we know you well. 😎
Preach, @stux!! ❤️
Us users can't thank you, amongst the thousands of other admins, enough making it even possible at the first place.
❤️ ✊
❤️ ✊
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
happy to be here, and it really hasn’t taken me long to get this back to what twitter was when I loved it.
Real people ✅
Scientists ✅
Academics ✅
Authors ✅
Tech literate ✅✅✅
Journalists ✅ (good ones anyway)
News ✅ (see above)
Jokes ✅
NGOs ✅
No algorithm filter ✅
Just missing calling politicians (their social media teams at any rate) out on their shit directly. But they have email.
The Febrile Muse reshared this.
thank you for the service you are doing for us.
"One last lantern.
To light the rest.
Shines.
And drowns the darkness."
SearingTruth
Yes, but one shouldn't toot anything they don't want read at their trial.
Sad that they went from “French kissin' in the USA” to “Ærs kissing in the USA”
“I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.”
― Stanislaw Lem
“I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet.”
― Stanislaw Lem
It means a lot Stux. Overwhelmed here in U.S., most of my old twitter comrades went to the shiny new place owned by Vulture Capitalists. I love that I see more than just Americans as with other platforms and not so isolated
@ncw413 That's easily been the most frustrating part of this. People, angry at Twitter moving to buesky or threads. I nominally "get it", but I wish it weren't so.
I am so glad Fediverse exists!
(1/?)
@Crispius
> decentralized, federated social media and unions are the way out of this mess we’re in
Cooperatives too. I've always seen huge potential for mutually beneficial alliances between the software/ network freedom movements, union movements, and co-op movements. Even more so in the current domestic and geopolitical environments.
@stux
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
and thank you for running a wonderful instance! I'm so happy I landed here
thank you for giving us a safe space.
Yes, a place of freedom, unburdened by ads and attention maximizing algorithms
We need to be vigilant. When it becomes apparent that the fediverse is an effective independent place to be, the billionaires will try to ruin it.
@Remittancegirl but I'm telling you we will also be the source of trouble to them ... whoever they might be...
@stux
@stux
Thank you for providing one hell of an instance!
How is the System called where government controls media medicine Food and drink? Fascism?
The pressure's upon you will get very high. You will need wise people who have been under those pressures, so that you don't make the mistakes that they have; because
- billions of dollars will be thrown at you
- billions of Euros will be thrown at you
It won't be easy
**¡YOU CAN DO IT!**
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
thank you for being part of making it all possible!
you are a wonderful being 🥰
Thank you Stux for making all this possible! We appreciate you and your important work so much!
I was a little dissapointed when I first joined due to the lack of actual news. In the time since, some great sources have joined.
And lots of folks repost good stuff from around the newsiverse.
@GottaLaff @lauren
@joanwestenberg @nedhamson1
To name but a few.
@Steve Herman
@ProPublica
@Aure Free Press
@404 Media
@Ned Hamson
@Lauren Weinstein
@JA Westenberg
@Laffy
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
As the Space Nazi continues to chase more and more legitimate sources away from the hellsite, I imagine it will only get better.
Although I must admit I’m a little dismayed at the glee so many sources I follow express at switching to BS-ky. I wish they be coming here as well/instead.
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
Thanks you for working on keeping this alive, appreciate you.
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2025-01-30 08:22:17
2025-01-29 23:14:59
2025-01-29 23:14:59
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in reply to slowmart
I really came here to see if I can get my family and friends away from fb (reader: they're not keen), I hadn't realised how much friendica can do though so I might make a bit more effort.
My current plan is to "familiarise" (is that the word?) myself around here, to then "lure" over at least some of my friends & acquaintances and to then be able to help them out with "onboarding".
slowmart reshared this.
2025-01-30 00:44:06
2025-01-29 05:44:03
2025-01-28 19:20:33
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slowmart reshared this.
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Meta has banned mentions of Linux on their platform—despite, you know, Facebook’s product depending on Linux.
This is a good time to encourage #Linux devs and users to set up communities on #NodeBB, #Mbin, #Lemmy, #Friendica, #Discourse, and #WordPress.
And enable #ActivityPub for greater visibility.
techradar.com/pro/facebook-is-…
Facebook is blocking Linux topics and channels with no apparent reason
Facebook has taken an anti-Linux stanceCraig Hale (TechRadar pro)
like this
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Ms. Que Banh, DJ [REDACTED] 🇨🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦, Matt Hodgkinson, Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈, James 🦉 #FBPE 🇪🇺, nick, daryl, Elyastorah, JonChevreau, Darren Nevares, slowmart, Ruth Mottram, Inger Aspåker, Debbie Goldsmith 🏳️⚧️♾️🇺🇦, Kilian Evang, the esoteric programmer and just small circles 🕊 reshared this.
Lemmy is not that great on many instances. I'll avoid, thanks.
Thought Wordpress had also been cancelled?
@tiredhorizon Nope, there’s nearly 10,000 #WordPress servers connected to the #Fediverse, and you can connect using #ActivityPubForWordPress.
It is why I left. I got restricted for just saying that there is no best distro, just the distro that is best for you in a Linux group. Then I started seeing the other censorship that Meta is doing and said to hell with them.
like this
Chris Trottier and Luna Dragofelis ΘΔ 🏳️⚧️ like this.
My hunch is that this is a mistake, and not done intentionally. To be clear - Facebook bad, but this makes no sense.
@alexanderdyas Meta is big enough and rich enough to hire the necessary people to triple-check that they are not making this kind of basic mistake.
@alexanderdyas The fact this can be done unintentionally says quite a bit about Meta.
That is what I thought, the first three times it happened and the denied every review I requested. Insisting that mentioning Distro Watch or just using the word distro constituted a 'CyberSecurity Threat'. Apparently it has gotten worse. I guess they feel they do not care how many users they lose. They have them to spare.
Alexander Dyas likes this.
2025-01-28 08:18:33
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slowmart reshared this.
in reply to Aure Free Press
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, I'd like to share this clip of Sir Nicholas Winton getting to meet the grown-up children he rescued from the Nazis four decades earlier.
Many of you have probably seen this before. But I feel it's worth reminding ourselves that one person can make a huge difference, even in the darkest times.
#AureFreePress #News #press #headline
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João Costa 💚🇵🇹🇪🇺🇬🇧🇺🇦, No Gods , no Masters! RESIST, Peter Brown, slowmart, aprilfollies, Henry, Cainmark Does Not Comply 🚲, Aure Free Press, GailWaldby@bsky.social❌👑 and Citoyen européen Ray Hindle ✔️ reshared this.
I'm crying. Because he was so incredible and I look around at my country and realized that our current government would have turned him over to the Nazis.
2025-02-21 23:23:27
2025-01-27 23:14:20
2025-01-27 19:06:16
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slowmart reshared this.
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off topic, fedi meta
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Tech CEOs are literally incapable of describing "AI" use cases without immediately turning to automating love for their children
techcrunch.com/2025/01/27/meta…
Meta AI can now use your Facebook and Instagram data to personalize its responses | TechCrunch
Meta says it is rolling out improvements to Meta AI, including the ability to tap profile data from Meta's various apps.Kyle Wiggers (TechCrunch)
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I think I want to have one of these "rustic" signs in the house. One that says "in this house we don't use AI"
"it reminds me they love mermaids and also their names and how many of them there"
Unllike Mr. Meta, I spontaneously dreamed up bedtime stories for 3 children and 3 grandchildren. I've forgotten most of the wacky characters I invented. Hmmm.
There was Tokopopsuhluh. She was the fastest girl in the world. There was Strawberry Fatcake. She lived on top of a hill with a frig full of ice cream. To visit any of her friends involved rolling downhill. My son who was born many years after my daughters got new stories all of his own. I recall a mad scientist kid named Gronky, owner of Gronky Tech. Lots of inventing and robots and who knows what else. Keep in mind that these characters and their stories were strung out over years of bedtimes.
I've had a long and interesting life, but if you asked me to name one thing that I'm proud of and always enjoyed, it would be the silly, ridiculous bedtime stories. Good memories and no AI needed.
😇
so it seems that people in the Dark Tetrad ―sociopaths, narcissists, machiavellians and sadists― are really good at performative love.
they don’t know how to feel love, and i mean the very physical process of bonding with people to the point of wanting to do selfless acts for them. but they know what loving looks like in other people and so they mimic that.
ever since i’ve started reading more and more about the Dark Tetrad, it explains so much of fascism, esp the American kind.
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@blogdiva this is one reason why the sopranos is such a great resonant show. The two main story arcs are versions of: you cannot reason with or appease sociopaths and narcissists.
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 reshared this.
It happens so often I swear they must be competing for some in-crowd prize for "who can get how much they hate their family in promotional materials the most" - like copilot literally launched with "AI can take the drudgery out of work" and the first example was planning a graduation party for your daughter
Unironically love y'all's mix of responses, as usual we have the blend of on-topic riffing through some takes I truly have never seen before like creativity itself having died in the last 20 years or being some kind of divine vessel for stories. Not one "in defense of the billionaires so out of touch they might as well be a different species" in the lot. I love this little anticapitalist neurodivergence network we have here.
while I do think there are lots of legitimate cultural problems with the fedi, I also think a lot of ppl who bounced off in the 2022 wave because of odd replies and unfamiliar norms were at least in part not used to the preponderance of ND people on here. When I get a reply that rubs me the wrong way on here, I have found about ~half the time (when I'm in a good headspace) that I can resolve it by just asking them what they meant and what they thought I meant - like they just have a very idiosyncratic way of reading or expressing themselves but meant no harm. This is definitely the uglier part of the bad caricature of Mastadon on bluesky that is more or less explicit even if people dont know that's what they're saying (and that's not to play into any us v. Them bull shit, we have our own caricature of bsky that sucks in similar tho not equivalent ways).
Like I genuinely love reading some shit and being like "I have never had that combination of words enter my mind before and need to know more." I block relatively rarely except for like endless hashtag resist liberal posters because some of y'all got some fascinating things on your mind
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
@Jackiemauro
Sadly "impoverished" is exactly the right word, made all the more tragic describing a daddy whose wealth is beyond imagining. He's got more money than Strawberry Fatcake had ice cream cartons in her frig--and she liked to stock up!
Sadly "impoverished" is exactly the right word, made all the more tragic describing a daddy whose wealth is beyond imagining. He's got more money than Strawberry Fatcake had ice cream cartons in her frig--and she liked to stock up!
TRUE STORY didn’t grow up being read kids books. it’s so weird, but my parents would just tell us stories about their childhood or their our ancestors.
so, of course, when i became a mom, i got all the kids books i never got, BUT! esp after THING2 started to talk, they would insert themselves in the stories, so we would end making up stories about the adventures of THING1 & THING2. very Borges-like, with their own names. a different superpower every time.
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@Taweret
Everyone knows kids love to talk to their friends about custom-generated bland mermaid amalgam and not Recognizable Characters Their Friends Know Too
Everyone knows kids love to talk to their friends about custom-generated bland mermaid amalgam and not Recognizable Characters Their Friends Know Too
AstroMancer5G (she/her) reshared this.
Tech CEOs: My every passing thought is pure crystallized genius, my whims are the only moral arbiter worth considering, my every waking moment is worth a year's salary.
Also Tech CEOs: I cannot make up a story about a mermaid that is good enough to please a sleepy toddler.
@Taweret so this is what millenials who had 2 Furbys and made them talk to each other when they were kids do now that they are grown up and have white collar jobs I gather?
@Taweret
Idk, not attending events doesn't really fit in to copilot's Microsoft Office system prompt, it would probably try to turn stuff down but end up coming out like some tortured Lean In version of Liar Liar
Idk, not attending events doesn't really fit in to copilot's Microsoft Office system prompt, it would probably try to turn stuff down but end up coming out like some tortured Lean In version of Liar Liar
Here you go, Zuck:
There once was a mermaid. Her father told the fishermen where to find schools of fish, because it was profitable. All of her friends died. The father never understood what he did was wrong.
See Mark? It's called using the meat between your ears.
2025-08-24 13:29:19
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I've had a lot of people ask how BlueSky compares to Mastodon and the Fediverse. I've tried to make the answer as simple and easy to understand as possible:
🦋 BlueSky is designed to give corporations and wealthy people full control of the network. All of its traffic has to flow through expensive-to-run corporate relays.
The Fediverse is designed to give ordinary people control of the network. All of its traffic flows directly from one cheap-to-run server to another.
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
like this
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people flocking to bsky thinking it's going to be different has me shaking my head. Just look at their investors. Blockchain, lovely.
tivasyk likes this.
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Mastodon Migration, No Gods , no Masters! RESIST, Lazarou Monkey Terror 🚀💙🌈 and Tombe la pluie - Theespookje reshared this.
Most of BlueSky's board is blockchain people. Their CEO's CV is mostly blockchain and cryptocurrency companies.
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
Heikki Piirainen reshared this.
@effariwhy One day we'll purge anyone who has ever worked on a crypto project from working on anything ever again
@effariwhy Do you have a link to the current status as a source?
I only know this article (in german) from November: "Bluesky: How is a ‘decentralised ecosystem’ financed? Bluesky was launched as a non-profit organisation, and controversial names emerged in the latest round of financing"
derstandard.de/story/300000024…
I only know this article (in german) from November: "Bluesky: How is a ‘decentralised ecosystem’ financed? Bluesky was launched as a non-profit organisation, and controversial names emerged in the latest round of financing"
derstandard.de/story/300000024…
Bluesky: Wie finanziert sich ein "dezentrales Ökosystem"?
Gestartet wurde Bluesky als gemeinnütziges Unternehmen, im Rahmen der neusten Finanzierungsrunde tauchten umstrittene Namen aufDER STANDARD
Tombe la pluie - Theespookje reshared this.
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So... BlueSky Direct messages all go through a central server. And are not encrypted E2E anyway.
I don't like that.
Never thought about it but DMs in Mastodon are not E2E either.
I'm just learning about ActivityPub. How difficult would it be to E2E DMs?
Could you provide encryption keys on both ends. And make it to where something like the users pass decrypts DMs?
@txtechnician @caos @effariwhy
End to end encryption has been a problem in email that still is not solved. The problem is the key distribution.
I don't know how Signal, etc. do it but it would seem publishing the public key in the user profile would solve e2e for at least DMs.
@w_b @txtechnician @caos @effariwhy
Social networks in general aren't good for privacy, as far as I know none of them have E2EE. It's much better to use encrypted messaging systems such as XMPP with OMEMO, @briar etc.
There is discussion of how to bring E2EE to Mastodon at github.com/mastodon/mastodon/i… but it hasn't been updated in some time.
support zero-knowledge encryption for toots/DMs · Issue #19565 · mastodon/mastodon
Pitch The UI now warns us that: Posts on Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon. Would it be possible to use zero-knowledge encryption such that...GitHub
BlueSky is not a non-profit, it is owned by Bluesky Social PBC which is a for-profit corporation.
In October it announced that it had partially sold itself to Blockchain Capital, and the same announcement said they had appointed a blockchain/cryptocurrency expert to their board:
social.growyourown.services/@F…
This is in addition to their CEO being a blockchain/cryptocurrency person:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Grab…
AFAIK the board only has three people, so a majority are from blockchain.
This is why I have been trying to warn about #BlueSky.BlueSky has just been partially bought by a cryptocurrency company "Blockchain Capital" and appointed a blockchain / cryptocurrency expert to their board:
bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2…
The board member is a bitcoin researcher involved with NFT analytics.
BlueSky describe the tie-up with Blockchain Capital as a "natural partnership" and says the blockchain company has "a uniquely deep understanding of our decentralized foundation".
(via @jwz)
Bluesky Announces Series A to Grow Network of 13M+ Users - Bluesky
Bluesky now exceeds 13 million users, the AT Protocol developer ecosystem continues to grow, and we’ve shipped highly requested features like direct messages and video.Bluesky
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@caos I really wanted to like bsky, but all the crypto connections give me major side-eye
@effariwhy I don't think blockchain and cryptocurrency is automatically something bad, I just don't see it's place in a decentralized social media network.
@voxel it really is. it wastes a ridiculous amount of energy, thus causing unnecessary emissions and speeding up climate change
Tombe la pluie - Theespookje reshared this.
@effariwhy Oh man, Automattic alone being on there is like 🚨 because look what a shitshow Matt has made out of Wordpress and Tumblr. I know he's just investing, not owning, but he seems so capable of breaking everything he touches
@lyssachiavari I'm not up to date on what's happening with wordpress other than Matt calling GoDaddy a "parasitic company" for profiteering from the open source project without giving anything meaningful back
@effariwhy He's continuing to double down. He tried to block WP Engine (it was WPE, not GoDaddy) from being able to access the plugin repository to update their plugins, a judge told him no, so he had a tantrum and said he wasn't going to update WP anymore, then when other people said they'd be happy to step in he blocked them from the repository, he's also been firing anyone who tells him to calm down
Even if it was real, BlueSky could simply defederate from everyone as they have such a large share of the userbase. This is what Facebook did with XMPP interoperability, they kept it internally but switched off all external connections.
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reshared this
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☝️ This is a great explainer of the difference between Mastodon and Bluesky, with one correction. At present there is only ONE corporate node, and the technology to create more has not been proven.
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
Even worse then, isn't it! 😬
I've mainly put multiple relays on there so people can see even in the best case scenario, the AT protocol is still putting corporations in control of the network.
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
Mastodon Migration reshared this.
@mastodonmigration apparently several people have run their own relays for personal use but it's not for the faint of heart apparently you need several terabytes of preferably solid state storage and a very fast network connection and while the code for the relay server is public it isn't terribly well documented
Take a look at these links if you'd like to learn more
alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi…
@addressforbots
These examples really just reinforce the technical infeasibility of the entire FOF scheme.
These examples really just reinforce the technical infeasibility of the entire FOF scheme.
@mastodonmigration definitely not technically feasible for most people or even for most technically skilled hobbyists (I'm certainly not planning on running a relaying myself)
Cory Doctorow has written about the Sky one several times lately, but I think this piece is a decent verbal explication of what the graphic is representing visually (I'm not great with visuals; it took me a minute LOL): doctorow.medium.com/https-plur…
Doctorow seems to think that if there is a choice of corporate relays, that that will somehow make things okay. I admire him greatly, but respectfully think he is mistaken on this particular topic.
About the diagrams on my post, they should be explained by the text in the original post? Fediverse servers are cheap to run and talk directly to each other, BlueSky servers can only talk to expensive-to-run corporate relays.
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@janxdevil
Precisely! For more on Bluesky's "vaporware" strategy:
mastodon.online/@mastodonmigra…
Returning to the #FreeOurFeeds (FOF) initiative discussion (for background see links below)...@pluralistic has a new piece (pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/cap…) that extends his "fire exit" analogy and discusses how it is not corporate ownership, VCs or profit motive alone that causes enshitification. It also requires captive users, and FOF will make it so Bluesky users are not captive. It all sounds good, but it's not realistic because the assumptions behind it are based on vaporware marketing.
more...
@janxdevil having lived through the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy of both Facebook And Google via XMPP, I'd replace "could" by "will"...
In my opinion, the apps for accessing the fediverse simply have much better features than BlueSky. Also, I block 20 bots on BlueSky for every human I find to follow.
Interesting, hadn't heard that before. Did Google federate properly?
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
There is one key question I haven’t yet seen answered anywhere:
“[…] our proposed methodology here of networking through Relays instead of server-to-server isn’t prescriptive. The protocol is actually explicitly designed to work both ways.”
docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-gu…
QUESTION: What would that look like? Would each PDS have to crawl all relevant PDSes (=very inefficient)?
Whether or not AT Protocol can be decentralized hinges on the answer.
Federation Architecture | Bluesky
The AT Protocol is made up of a bunch of pieces that stack together. Federation means that anyone can run the parts that make up the AT Protocol themselves, such as their own server.docs.bsky.app
As far as I know, in the real world AT protocol servers cannot federate without being connected to relays.
There is also only one relay at the moment.
True! But (and I’m saying that as someone who thinks the Fediverse is the better choice):
It *sounds* like the protocol was designed to support true federation (vs. “big world” design based on Relays). What would that look like?
If that works well then, in principle, AT *could* become a reasonable and open alternative to ActivityPub.
If not (which is my current impression but I may be wrong) then there is no way of that ever happening.
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It sounds more like a hypothetical thing in a document rather than a real world thing actually being implemented.
BlueSky are a for-profit corporation dependent on VC money, and they've given their staff shares. That gives all of them a huge financial incentive to create a network that can be bought out by billionaires etc.
It's difficult to see why they would do anything to endanger their ability to sell themselves to wealthy investors.
It’ll be interesting to watch for sure! They made a lot of promises w.r.t. openness.
There is also this group of people: freeourfeeds.com/
It’s interesting that, per their FAQ, they want to build a second Relay. That doesn’t sound like AT will ever be truly decentralized.
It feels like they could achieve their goals with much less money if they focused on ActivityPub instead of AT.
Google did federate for a long time, but it was defederated by many deployements before they stopped the service, because it was effectively abandoned and not even supporting STARTTLS (which means everything went there in cleartext)
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Thank you for the breakdown. Do you mind if I share your slides and info on #tiktok? I will direct people to your account for more info. Thanks!
@liveloveintifada added the image to my post from earlier it tells the story straight, about time to, nice work.
@Em
@mathieui You could also federate over XMPP with iChat. In-fact, Mac OS X Server had an option to host a local version of the iChat server!
Your post needs more reach. Very succinct description!
this is arguably oversimplified..... but maybe oversimplified is helpful in this case
What's the difference between a server and a relay?
It would be quite easy for me to trust BlueSky’s intentions if the flagship instance had been set up as an independent non-profit.
@janxdevil
For more on who actually owns Bluesky:
mastodon.online/@mastodonmigra…
So, to summarize what we've learned on the second day of trying to figure out:Who actually owns #Bluesky?
The company represents that Jay Graber and the employees own Bluesky. This is misleading. In actuality, Bluesky has a host of Tech VC shareholders (accessipos.com/bluesky-stock-i…) and is about to get more in a stunning funding round led by Bain Capital valuing the company at $700M (businessinsider.com/x-competit…).
So who are the current owners of Bluesky? Read on...
accessipos.com/bluesky-stock-i…
X competitor Bluesky's valuation jumps to around $700 million
Bluesky is raising new funding led by Bain Capital Ventures that would value the social media company at around $700 million, according to sources.Ben Bergman (Business Insider)
I am getting your point and of course, I promote Fediverse as much as I can.
But there are definitely reasons why users prefer BlueSky massively. I am not sure about their MAU, because they are centralized service, there is no way to verify independently, but they may be easily 10 times our MAU.
I think the need to choose the instance is not the main problem of Mastodon and Fediverse. It is quite easy to explain to newbies. The problem is quite simple and straighforward: it is UX focused on power users.
There are too many new concepts to learn. There is no reason, why end users should have to even know about federation: it is the implementation, that matters. Backfilling history of toots and timeline of other instances instead of "opening original page". Starter packs (ie. easy sharing of user-generated lists - no CSV imports). Propper scanning for all replies (somehow). Better search feature. Better explore feature...
Also, even if Mastodon may the best ActivityPub client so far, it is definitely not for everyone. It is quite complex chunk of code. The frontend is written in JavaScript, which is of course very standard and it is my fault I am not more familliar with it. But Ruby is pretty oldschool server side language and not among the most popular. This makes the backend quite unreadable... although probably still better, than node.js 🙂
Anyway, it is not easy for me to participate in development of neither frontend nor backend of Mastodon.
Writing completely different Fediverse application would be probably hard and I definitely don't feel one should attempt it as one man show. The team would need to start with such ActivityPub implementation, which would fix the issues like replies, and then maybe work with W3C to standardize account list sharing, so other Fedi implementations can join.
Good cellphone app would be a must. It would have to come with good instance selector. Etc.
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
Tombe la pluie - Theespookje reshared this.
can you clarify for Bluesky? Are you talking about the standard or current ownership model?
The standard. Bluesky servers can't talk to each other, they have to go through relays which are substantially more expensive to run.
I will stick to Mastodon, but even as technical minded user, it's way more frustrating to use. I can't even see half the content that is on other Mastodon instances, let alone comfortably interact with other protocols. It's confusing and badly communicated by the UI. Things need multiple times the clicks than on bsky.
I understand the limitations, and things are getting better. But realistically there is no way an average internet user can comfortably switch to Mastodon at this point.
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BlueSky isn't showing things from other instances at all though.
BlueSky is currently just a for-profit centralised single-instance social network, like Twitter or Facebook.
Even if it eventually linked to other instances (which isn't currently happening), it would be through massive corporate relays that would need to exploit user data to fund themselves.
I understand that - and I'm not expecting bsky to stay a viable network for long (their lack of moderation will prob get them first).
But the fact that Mastodon, at it's current state, is not usable for tech-noobs, is true at the same time. I directly experienced that when trying to get some to use it.
The green dots on the bottom image could be labelled "just an everyday person", "a small group", "a non profit organisation", "a media that has a vision", "an enthousiast hobbyist", "not a billionnaire", "a cooperative", #GeorgeTakei, "an association", " "just regular folks like you", "just an other everyday person" and so on.
Failing to mention that for the average (non-tech-savvy) user Bluesky is *significantly* more user-friendly than Mastodon and the Fediverse makes this not a very honest comparison.
Mastodon has real advantages and should in an ideal world be the main social network, but it is unable to reach that critical mass because Fedi-enthusiasts refuse to look critically at what could be improved (a lot).
Usability is simply not where it needs to be to reach a wider audience.
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
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BlueSky is easier because it's centralised, like Twitter or Facebook. And it's going down exactly the same path to become just as awful as they are, because it is structurally the same: VC backers on a centralised for-profit corporate network.
Even if they "decentralised" with the AT protocol, it would still remain in corporate control.
If someone doesn't mind them becoming awful like this, then they might as well stay on Twitter or Facebook. What's the point of moving?
That's just one of the reasons it's easier.
It's orders of magnitude more usable than both ex-twitter and FB and it's not run by (or overrun with) literal nazis. If you want twitter without the nazis and other shit, that's Bluesky... if you don't mind jumping through myriad technical hoops and a much smaller audience, there's Mastodon.
I'm still detecting zero willingness to look critically at Fedi and its UX issues here.
"and it's not run by (or overrun with) literal nazis"
Because of the way Bluesky is structured, Musk could buy it tomorrow. There's nothing to stop Twitter happening all over again.
"If you want to be smug"
I'm not being smug, I am being deeply worried by what centralised corporate social networks have done to the world:
theguardian.com/technology/202…
This is caused by centralised networks run for profit. It doesn't happen at first when it's building up, but it happens eventually.
Rohingya sue Facebook for £150bn over Myanmar genocide
Victims in US and UK legal action accuse social media firm of failing to prevent incitement of violenceDan Milmo (The Guardian)
Yes, any private company could in theory be bought and change how it operates, but what *could* happen at some unknown point in the future is not what is happening right now, and this again does not address the real weaknesses of Fedi.
The fact is that for most people Bluesky TODAY is a better alternative than Mastodon. This is not because they are stupid, this is because for a non-tech-savvy user basic usability far FAR outweighs any potential advantages of open source independence.
lol it's a bit subjective but it's MY kind of subjective, I love it
But does it work with @openvibe ?
Bluesky is where BlueMAGA ppl who didn’t care about Palestine go to clutch their pearls about Trump. Fedi is where no one sees my posts. 😂😭
Glad it works! 😁
I find this picture to be misleading.
It seems to imply that users are the green dots for BlueSky and they communicate with servers (red dots) which are (so far) run by corporations. No complaints, that's all pretty accurate.
But when you use the same green dots for the Fediverse on the bottom, it seems to imply that individuals are directly connecting to each other which is NOT accurate. Servers are still intermediaries on the Fediverse. I don't believe this is a minor distinction.
The green dots are servers, I tried to mention this in the captions and alt text?
Feel free to distribute if you want 🙂
Well, the tech aspect is interesting, but let's also discuss the UI experience. The BlueSky interface is much more rewarding to the user as we get to see much more content.
BlueSky is a centralised social network, it is on one instance like Twitter or Facebook. It's inherently easier to navigate a single instance network, but it comes at the cost of making it ultra-easy to be bought out, Musk etc could buy it any time.
The BlueSky interface is paid for by selling itself to VC investors. The VCs will then be demanding lots of monetisation once they've gathered enough users. They're on the path to becoming as bad as Twitter or Facebook because of this.
Should that happen, I'll jump, just like I bailed from Twatter. Meanwhile, I find much more progressive content on BlueSky & my posts are much more effective.
It's totally your call what you do, I'm not trying to condemn people's choice of platforms.
However, if we keep jumping the problem will keep repeating, and many never jump so the problem never gets solved anyway.
We have to do things differently if we want to break the cycle.
BlueSky is advertising itself as if it is breaking the cycle, the point of the post above is that they're not really breaking the cycle.
I like how you cut through a lot of tech talks (I find it of some interest though) to the highlight key basic differences that actually reveal the true nature of the architectures (one requiring big money, hence needing corporations vs. simple architecture costing little money to run). Thanks! I also am watching Spritely to see how it goes!
Thanks! 🙂 That was the aim, to make the explanation simple enough so everyone can see the issues at stake!
And yes, very keen to see what Spritely comes up with. 🤩
If is is not freedom software of open source I am not interested. The tranparencey of Bluesky is quite opaque.
love the explainer. To be fair though search and reliable distribution is hard in a decentralized network and search works pretty badly here. I’ll still take federated for the reasons you outline but we should be honest about the tradeoffs.
Georgiana Brummell likes this.
after spending a little time on both (Masto is my platform but I also have Bsky) I think the online cultures are wildly different, in a way everyone could describe differently, but Masto is DIY, and people seem more free to be eccentric out of the confines of online formality crossing over into those all too-keenly-aware professionalism and other hats that you see worn on Bsky, Fedi is more free in a lot of ways I think. Eccentrics tend to feel at home here and that gives me so much joy. Others feel like walls for thoughts but Mastodon offers more space for expression and community, I feel.
Bluesky is VC funded for-profit that makes 0 revenue today. How will they give back 30M they owe (so far) and start making profit?
Yup!
Been saying this for a while
People flee from one centralized place to another making endless accounts in the menanwhile
But ofc the Fedi is certainly too much work 
Ute S. reshared this.
Aaand that's why the mainstream media won't cover the Fediverse even though they covered both BlueSky and Threads. It doesn't make money for the corporations that fund them.
@FediTips@social.growyourown.servicesomebody needs to post this on BS because I dunno if all those Xitter refugees got the memo
but the main reason I hear people join bsky is because it’s easier. Not sure #average_user is too clued in to the inner workings, or even cares about it all too much.
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
@doc
You might not care about the workings of something, but you might care about the effects of something. No one cares about how a medicine works, but they care if it stops them being sick.
The structure Bluesky has chosen for its tech and its business is very likely to repeat all the problems that Twitter, Facebook etc suffer from.
The things that make people leave Twitter & Facebook now are going to get repeated on Bluesky with its current structure. Then they'll have to move again.
sure, but what I’m saying is that in order to convince the masses to join mastodon over bsky, we need to make it not just theoretically better but also easy to use and connect.
I’ve read the comments, spoken to colleagues who joined this then that, and the consensus is that “mastodon is hard, difficult UI” compared to bsky.
For context, my friends are scientists with very little time.
I’ve read the comments, spoken to colleagues who joined this then that, and the consensus is that “mastodon is hard, difficult UI” compared to bsky.
For context, my friends are scientists with very little time.
If they have no time or will to consider sustainability, then they will end up having these same Musk-type problems happen to them again and again. I'm not saying this with any sort of judgement against them, it is just the consequence of their choices.
It's much easier to use a single-instance network, but that makes it easy to be taken over.
It's much easier to use a network that has massive amounts of funding from VCs, but that makes it certain to enshittify and exploit its users.
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
that's a great graphic to illustrate a federated approach! There is a realtime variant that shows that exact same concept applied to real world chat servers that use the XMPP protocol. You can see it at xmppnetwork.goodbytes.im/
(It's getting rather big. On mobile, this webgl rendering typically had better performance: xmppnetwork.goodbytes.im/webgl… - there's also a link to a rather nice 3d version on that site).
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
You brought up MAUs as a reason to be on Bluesky.
I replied that if MAUs are your main concern, you can get even higher MAUs on Twitter etc.
As for going down the path, it's a matter of fact that Bluesky has adopted the same structure as Twitter, Facebook etc. Pretending it hasn't doesn't change this fact.
The thing that is missing from your diagram is that while #Fediverse servers CAN communicate with each other, not all of them DO. This is most noticeable when you follow a #hashtag - If you are on a large, well connected instance you will see many (maybe almost all) posts containing that hashtag. If you are on a small instance, or an instance that is not well connected (for whatever reason) you will see only a small percentage (maybe close to 0%) of the posts made using that hashtag.
In situations like that, from the user's perspective the #Bluesky / AT protocol is superior, because with the centralized server and corporate relays pretty much anything posted using a given hashtag will be seen by all those who follow that hashtag.
I'm not saying we all should move to Bluesky. I'm saying that this is a problem that needs to be solved by whoever writes the software for #Mastodon and similar Fediverse instances. And if there already is a solution but few instances are using it, what is that solution and where can you find a list of instances that are already using it? I understand there will always be some blockages because instance operators don't want traffic from certain types of instances, but I'm not talking about that, I am talking about cases where a post with a hashtag doesn't reach your instance because no one using your instance is specifically following the user that made that post.
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@maple my understanding is the current solution to that is to sign up to one or more of the many relays that exist. Though some are restricted.
There are various ways to make any Fediverse server see a lot more of the Fediverse:
fedi.tips/using-relays-to-quic…
Using relays, groups, directories and scripts to quickly expand a server’s view of the Fediverse | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse
An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediversefedi.tips
@magnus her har vi måske nogle tips!
@kryptec Right, but as a USER I have no way of knowing if the instance I am using has implemented any of those. How about publishing a list of such servers? And if you have no way of knowing which servers are using any of those various ways, then how is the user supposed to know? A solution that few instances are using and/or where users have no way of knowing if their instance (or any other) is using that solution adds a level of complication and annoyance that you don't have with the big corporate platform.
The idea isn't to have a listed set of features, it's just to provide more posts visible to the instance.
Also, the user themselves can implement things like following groups which totally bypass whatever their instance can see. If you follow a group, you will see the same posts no matter which instance you are on. It's the same if you follow a particular set of accounts, the act of a user following an account changes which posts are visible to the user's instance.
Well the problem with groups is that you first have to know that a group you are interested in exists, and then chances are if you do find one it's not specific enough. Say I am running some piece of software that is giving me trouble, I can subscribe to a hashtag with the name of that piece of software, which (hopefully) will only show me posts related to that software, although that is not always the case, for example if I want to see posts about Joplin (the note taking application) I could use (hashtag)Joplin and hopefully I would get mostly posts about that software and not Joplin, Missouri or Scott Joplin the composer.
But will there be a group about Joplin? Probably not. And also, as I understand it, groups follow users, not hashtags. And in that case you can get inundated with posts that are not about the topic of interest. I have tried to follow groups a few times and generally speaking I've had to turn them off almost immediately because they flooded my timeline with uninteresting and irrelevant posts.
I think we might be talking about different kinds of groups? 🤔 A lot of different services on here have used the name "group".
Groups from services like Guppe are basically just "super hashtags". If you mention the group, the post is distributed to everyone that follows the group on any server. You can make a new group just by mentioning it.
If someone spams the group with irrelevant content, they can be reported for spamming (just like they can be with hashtag spamming).
Well there is a chicken/egg issue there, far more people are likely to use a hashtag than a group mention, and that is because they are familiar with hashtags from the dead bird site and other existing social media platforms.
So again taking Joplin (the software) as an example, chances are there is no existing group for it, and yes I could easily create one but chances are all I'm going to get is crickets because other people who post about Joplin will be using the hashtag (with which they are familiar) and not the group identifier.
Basically what I am hearing is "we can't make hashtags work the way they are supposed to in the Fediverse, so here is this substitute that few users have heard of and even fewer will actually use", rather than "we really need to fix the fediverse software so that hashtags work as they are supposed to."
@maple ok, but having all the data stored in a single, owned, instance (like BlueSky) would potentially expose users to an unknown future... as it happened with the current "big tech". I rather prefer fix and improve what is not working in the fedivese, which is the real alternative. I wish a future were we always own data, regardless of the app/technology we use
Yeah, this is another worry. BlueSky's valuation is approaching 1 billion dollars, and part of that will be the user data they expect to hoard.
"I wish a future were we always own data, regardless of the app/technology we use"
I think @timbl has been working on something like this for some time with the Solid project?
@skamu That is great and I hope you are able to fix and improve what is not working, but right now this is still a problem and it is something that would cause ordinary users (like me) to consider switching to Bluesky (or to just start with Blueskay in the first place). You have to realize that most users just don't care if they own data (probably better than half don't even seem to care about privacy, which totally blows my mind) so saying that they should use the Fediverse because of some philosophical argument about ownership isn't going to carry much weight, if they can receive most or all of the posts they want to see on another platform.
@maple Hi Maple, yeah I get your point and I agree that most of the users don't care, and it is really sad.
I am also an "ordinary user" anyway, I am just tired of directly supporting huge corporation with my personal data. I have opened my eyes and I do believe that the rest of "ordinary users" (like us) will do the same in a point.
It will probably take time, but I really believe that the "fediverse approach" will be the future.
@skamu I hope you are right, but it will take a lot longer if people think that you shouldn't even try the Fediverse because any posts you make will only be seen by a limited subset of users, even if you include hashtags they are following. People who are frequent posters often desire that what they write will be seen by the highest number of users (or at least users interested enough to follow whatever hashtags they include), so they may not have much interest in platforms that limit their exposure. And factors such as who "owns" the post content may not matter at all to them.
I am on a single user server and have over 200k followers. My other accounts on this server have 70k, 8k, 5k and 3k followers. It is possible to build a mass following without being on a large server.
"they may not have much interest in platforms that limit their exposure."
...if exposure is all they care about, why would they leave Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc? (Genuine question.)
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
@skamu You're in kind of a unique position because you are very well known, so people follow you directly.
"...if exposure is all they care about, why would they leave Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc? (Genuine question.)"
Well, I can think of two reasons, one is that they don't want some big corporation (or the evil owner thereof) owning or controlling or censoring their posts, and the other is that they don't want to share a platform with Nazis/fascists/anti-science types. But if they don't fall into either of those categories, I can't think of any reason they would want to leave one of those platforms. And right now, for the most part those things would not apply to Bluesky users (yet) so the case for leaving to come to the Fediverse is even weaker for them.
"You're in kind of a unique position because you are very well known, so people follow you directly."
I'm not though? No one knows me outside of these accounts.
"...one is that they don't want some big corporation (or the evil owner thereof) owning or controlling or censoring their posts, "
They already have a big corporation owning/controlling their posts. Bluesky is a for-profit corporation valued at nearly a billion dollars now.
That is true but they don't have the stink of Musk or Zuckerberg associated with them. People don't always think of big corporations as being necessarily bad, and more to the point, Bluesky doesn't seem to be trying to attract the kind of people that would make you avoid a bar or restaurant if you found it was filled with those kind of people. People are leaving the dead bird site and Meta not necessarily because they are run by big corporations (although that is the reason for some), but because they have become hangouts for the Nazis and the far right and the Christian nationalists and the anti science anti-vax crowd. And because even if they don't really want to leave, their friends and family are shaming them for staying there.
That is simply not the case with Bluesky (yet).
Ahh apoloiges 😳 My mistake, sorry.
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
If you use a managed hosting service you can do it for a few dollars a month including someone doing all the technical stuff for you:
Pricing | Masto.host
Pricing for Masto.host fully managed Mastodon hosting plans. Starting at $6/month.Masto.host
The problem is that Bluesky is lively. People respond. Here, other than this post of yours, almost nothing anybody posts here gets any comments.So ironically, there's no sense of community here. We are all just barking into the void.
It is more work to build up connections on here than on Bluesky, Twitter or Facebook. There are good reasons for this, because the structure here is designed to stop people like Musk taking over the network.
And once you do make connections on here, I would say the community on here is much more genuine, deep and friendly.
I've done some tips on how to discover accounts at fedi.tips/how-do-i-find-accoun… and how to make your own account more discoverable at fedi.tips/how-do-i-get-more-fo…
How do I discover accounts to follow on Mastodon and the Fediverse? | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse
An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediversefedi.tips
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
All I said is that many Bluesky users are quite nice and they have chosen the platform because lot of people went there and because it was straightforward to use.
I did my best, but Mastodon is simply not user friendly enough for most people. It offers some quite advanced features for power users, but at the same time, it lacks certain basics, which newbies would take for granted. The don't care about the architecture of the network, as long as they don't have to think about it.
We need to keep on trying and one day, Bluesky may seem boring to some and they will move here...
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
Ordinary users are attracted to a well-funded simple platform.
The trouble is this simplicity is what makes it easy for Musk etc to buy it out. And the massive amount of funding is what will eventually force it to start exploiting and manipulating its users, because the funding comes from selling itself to the funders.
There is no perfect solution, there are just a range of most or least worst options. It's up to each person to decide what is least worst for them.
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
yes, BlueSky is going to be bought out eventually. But maybe people already got used to being digital nomads and they will just move again, when it happens.
I created separate list of bridged BlueSky accounts and they just seem to use it and don't think about it too much. Maybe we are too meta here...
(and also, the funding of Fedi instances is open issue... small instances are admin sponsored, but as the instances grow, they may easily reach the point, when they will be too big to be sponsored but still too small to raise funds... we will see.... I wrote python scripts, which crawl explore Mastodon compatible Fedi on various TLDs and and I am going to put the charts online soon...)
You can see complete threads and complete search results on Mastodon if you have just one instance without any federation.
That's what BlueSky currently does, it's all on one instance.
But if you run on just one instance, it makes it incredibly easy for Musk etc to buy you out.
@effariwhy @AssociatedPress ah got it…I wish that as well. It is our only hope. Quite a few journalists are now on Substack.
@effariwhy @lillyfinch @AssociatedPress I mean technically a fediverse server owned and operated by AP would be a corporate service
@theothersimo @lillyfinch @AssociatedPress yes, but the conversation would be 2 way. Right now, no one on flipboard.com sees our engagement, but we see theirs.
I believe the project was thinked to avoid depending on ONE corporation if it goes fascist.
Not anticipating the MANY corporations going fascist
Nice diagram! How many other servers does a typical fediverse server connect to? Is there a min/max/mean? When two servers connect, is it an asymmetric flow or a symmetric flow? 🤔
There's no typical amount on the Fediverse AFAIK, and the connections aren't to entire servers but specific accounts on other servers.
If you want exact details on what Fediverse servers notice there's a list here:
fedi.tips/which-posts-and-acco…
Which Mastodon and Fediverse posts and accounts can I see from my server? | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse
An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediversefedi.tips
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I tried to post this to the Friendica support forum, but it kept timing out when I entered my information. I am now attempting to subscribe to their e-mail list. However, I thought I would write this here so that those who know coding, etc. might be able to offer a solution, or at least, to pass this on to the developers.
I joined Friendica in October of 2024, when Facebook decided to shut down their Basic Mobile site (not app). I am totally blind, and their main page is a nightmare to use with a screen readre (NVDA in my case). I chose Friendica because of the huge character limit, the ability to edit and delete posts, local posting, extensive profiles with keywords, and the ability to connect with all sorts of accounts in the Fediverse. For the most part, I am enjoying my time here. However, I am noticing a lot of inaccessibility on the Friendica page. I am not a programmer, but I'm guessing this is at the core of the software and is not due to the instance I'm using (friendica.world). I am also guessing that the page is not written in HTML5 and does not follow WCAG guidelines, though I may be wrong about that. If not, I strongly urge the developers to review them and implement them if possible. If so, perhaps, some changes can still be made that would make this a more screen reader-friendly site. Note that I tried this with Firefox and Supermium (a direct fork of Chrome).
Mostly, I use TweeseCake to access the site, but there are some things I can't do with that client. All of the following refer to the site itself.
- There is a list of links at the top of the page that acts like a menu. This causes many problems while trying to perform basic tasks, particularly editing posts and handling notifications. I can't always activate said links/menu either.
1A. I can't stress how frustrating editing posts is. It sometimes takes over ten minutes. The "edit" option is a link/menu, and it can only be found via another menu. Once I finally find and activate it, I hear the sound indicating that I have entered focus Mode. Usually, this means that I am in an edit box and can type. However, in this case, I am taken back to the main page, as if I never entered the option to edit my post. Using e to try to find an edit box doesn't help, as it just sends me to the replies to different comments. So I am forced to find the post, and start all over again. The only way I can do this successfully is to try to tab through the links/menu at the top of the page (when it works), then through other posts, until, finally, I am placed in an edit box where I can type.
1B. When I go to the Notifications" link, I have to tab to "Mark all System Notifications as Seen". This isn't even a regular link, as I can't copy and paste the text from it. Once I tab to and out of that, I can then read my notifications. But here is what I have to do if I want to see follow requests.
1. Try to get the notifications link to work, then click on it.
2. Tab to marking notifications.
3. Perform a search for the word follow.
4. Click on the link of the notification that someone wants to follow me. I open this in a new window, to try to keep the original one available.
5. Make my choice as to whether to approve that notification, then close that window.
6. Return to the main window. Only now, I am not where I left off. Instead, I am placed back at the beginning of the page and the Notifications menu is not open.
7. Repeat steps 1 through 3.
Ideally, I should be able to go to a normal notifications link, perform steps 3 through 5, then return back to the link, and perform steps 3 through 5 again, as many times as necessary, without having to repeat 1 through 3.
- I can't just go to the site and enter an edit box to post. I must go through a menu to find the link to do so. Yet there is an edit box for searching for content, tags, etc.
- Some pinned posts don't always read properly. I can see my name, when I posted, that it's pinned, a public message, tags (if applicable), buttons for resharing, etc., and the number of comments. But I cannot simply read the post itself. ""Comments" is also a button, not a link. Even when I expand them, I still can't see my post, and finding the button again to close them takes a lot of time, as posts also have their own buttons. Note that unpinned posts are read properly.
- While the process of editing my profile is completely accessible, finding the edit option might be slightly confusing for new users, as it requires entering yet another link/menu, this time with the user name as the title..
- If I go to a profile of someone not on Friendica (usually Mastodon) and wish to reply to a post, after I enter my credentials, it takes me back to my profile, not to the relevant post. It only worked once.
- The Friendica app for Windows is basically the site itself. I don't understand this at all.
If you want to see a truly accessible site, try this link. I don't work for them, though I do have an account there.
Please, if any changes can be made, I urge you to do so. The site is otherwise a pleasure to use, but my frustration at not being able to easily perform such basic tasks is increasing.
#accessibility #blind #coding #Chrome #Developers #Dreamwidth #Facebook #fediverse #Firefox #Friendica #HTML #HTML5 #NVDA #ScreenReaders #TweeseCake #WCAG #Windows
#friendica
#fediverse
#facebook
#accessibility
#windows
#firefox
#coding
#blind
#html5
#nvda
#tweesecake
#chrome
#developers
#html
#Dreamwidth
#screenreaders
#WCAG
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@Jupiter Rowland Perhaps, you can explain what is going on here. I love the site in general, but these things are driving me mad!
@Georgiana Brummell First of all, I've just noticed that you seem to not have joined the Friendica support forum yet. As far as I know, you can't post to a Friendica group/forum without fully connecting to it first.
As for the accessibility issues: To most people, it appears like Friendica has only just been made since they haven't heard of it before mid-January. But actually, Friendica is from 2010. And its frontend is largely stuck in the early 2010s, including technologically.
Friendica has always been a spare-time hobbyist project. It was mostly developed by one single man for almost two years. That guy is a protocol designer and not a frontend developer. Also, I think Friendica never had more than two regular developers, and it definitely never had any developer who really knows how to make a modern and appealing user interface. I mean, you've obviously never seen Friendica's user interface, but let me tell you that it's quite old-fashioned. It's just meant to do its job.
Hobbyist, spare-time developers of such an extremely niche piece of software who are not trained in Web UI design normally don't know a thing about accessibility. And truly, they don't care. If the UI covers all features, and the users don't have to SSH or telnet onto the Web server to use it, it's often good enough.
Friendica's regularly active user community has never been more than maybe a few thousand at a time, maybe even only a few hundred, as opposed to the over two million at which Mastodon has topped out. Thus, Friendica has never encountered blind or visually-impaired users yet.
You can see it all over the place. Alt-text is not part of Friendica's culture. Some Friendica veterans staunchly refuse to describe their media because they think alt-text is another Mastodon fad that Mastodon fundamentalists want to force upon the whole rest of the Fediverse with Mastodon's entire culture. Alt-text, to them, is like limiting your posts to 500 characters.
All this is why nobody has noticed yet that Friendica is not accessible at all.
I've got a suspicion that Friendica can only be made fully accessible by throwing the entire Web frontend away, developing an entirely new one from scratch and then also making all-new themes for it.
Also, it's only natural that TweeseCake doesn't support many of Friendica's features. As it looks to me, TweeseCake's Fediverse side is built against Mastodon and only Mastodon. If Mastodon doesn't have a feature, TweeseCake doesn't cover it either. Thus, TweeseCake probably only covers about 20% of Friendica's features because Mastodon doesn't have the other 80%.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #TweeseCake #A11y #Accessibility
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@Jupiter Rowland Again, thank you for the wonderful explanation. I am not doubting you at all, by the way, just explaining something. Dreamwidth looks very much like LiveJournal, which has been around for longer than twenty years. I've been using computers for over two decades, and I've definitely seen many good older sites, including from the 2010's. As a matter of fact, many older sites are far better than modern ones, because they are mostly text, don't have hamburger menus, strange buttons, etc. The old Basic HTML version of GMail and even Facebooks Basic Mobile site are two more excellent examples of good sites, though sadly, both of them are gone now. To me, Friendica actually feels a lot more modern, and in a bad way.
Thank you for explaining a bit about Friendica culture and membership. I joined for the reasons I said, so I wasn't really thinking about that. Most of my friends in the Fediverse are on Mastodon, though a few do come from other places. I initially avoided Mastodon because of the 500 character limit, no local posting, and the inability to edit/delete posts. I later learned that some instances have very long posting limits, and that posts can be edited and deleted. I was considering Hometown or possibly Glitchsoc. I forgot why I chose Friendica over those. Now, I heard that many instances on Mastodon are very strict with what they allow. I don't post obscenities, graphic images, anything illegal, etc. but I also don't want to be thrown out simply for expressing an opinion that is different from those of the moderators. I'm perfectly fine with acting a certain way within groups, but on my own timeline, I want the ability to post as I choose without my work being deleted or being banned. I heard that Pleroma is good in that regard. If I did switch, though, I would need to choose an accessible platform and, I hope, to be able to take this account with me.
As for TweeseCake, it workss with almost everything. I can see and reply to posts, create, edit, and delete my own (it respect the long ones and allows me to use carriage return instead of posting when I press that), follow and unfollow people, block and unblock them, etc. But I can't edit my profile, pin posts, follow tags, go to a list of blocked users so that I can ublock them, filter out certain words and/or phrases so that I don't see them in my timeline (I'm not even sure if I can do that on Friendica), etc. I can sort read timelines such as Home, Notifications, Mentions, and Federated, and add specific conversations, favourites (that one doesn't work well here though it does on TwBlue), etc. But I can't create, edit, or delete circles.
@Jupiter Rowland To answer your other point, I did try to join the forum. However, when I entered my friendica.world information, it timed out. I tried my actual e-mail and that didn't work. Do I need to actually join the forum site separately? Also, I had no idea that there were so few developers of Friendica. I knew my instance only had one, but I thought there were more working on the main site. It's a shame, as this is really a great place.
@Georgiana Brummell You could try copying the ID or the URL of the group and pasting it into the search if TweeseCake lets you do that.
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@Jupiter Rowland I can't join groups from there. This is very odd, as I am usually able to follow/join eroups very easily.
@Robert Kingett @Jupiter Rowland It really is sad. I can do most things with TweeseCake, but when it comes to those few, i go crazy! I love the features, but in some cases, the accessibility just isn't there. It would be perfect otherwise.
@Robert Kingett Hubzilla started out as a Friendica fork by Friendica's own creator. He maintained it for twice as long as Friendica, until 2016. Since then, there are only two developers for much, much more code than Friendica has, and they're spare-time hobbyists, too, who only work on Hubzilla when they happen to find some time.
Thus, due to Hubzilla's massive backend, UI maintenance has largely fallen to the wayside. Hubzilla used to have a whole bunch of themes, but only one survived to this day because the two devs had to keep one theme alive. Its name "Redbasic" comes from Hubzilla's original name, Red. Apart from getting more settings with Hubzilla 9, it didn't change that much over time. Hubzilla kind of still looks like Friendica more than a dozen years ago.
It's mostly the backend that keeps the devs busy, too busy to take care of anything else. Example: The built-in help is half-useless because it's totally outdated and therefore partially incomplete and partially plain wrong. Features that have been available for several years aren't covered, but things that have been removed in the last decade are. Parts of it actually still refer to a "Red Matrix" which ceased to exist in 2015 when the Red Matrix became Hubzilla. The German and English help is currently being re-written by a user.
Alt-text has to be manually grafted into the BBcode that embeds an image in a post. There is no official documentation on that yet, and I'll have to check if the rewrite covers it. How it's done is only known because, I think, one of the devs looked it up in the code, then told us, and it's being passed on from user to user every once in a while.
In fact, I've once been told by a blind or visually-impaired user that at least Hubzilla's Articles app for non-federating long-form articles did not work in her screen reader at all.
Hubzilla's frontend must largely run on code from 2012 when it was matched with the completely re-written backend. Afterwards, new or changed features were only patched in. Hubzilla's UI is convoluted and confusing even for sighted users.
Also, Hubzilla has never had a run-in with blind users either because it's even more obscure than Friendica, and its community is even smaller than Friendica's.
Lastly, Hubzilla can only be used via the Web interface. There is no other way. It doesn't support Mastodon apps, and it never will.
CC: @Georgiana Brummell
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #A11y #Accessibility
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@Jupiter Rowland @Robert Kingett I just saw this.
"Getting back to the cluttered user interface I was talking about. Friendica allows the user to make changes to the user interface. There are a couple of themes to choose from and the themes can be customized in color. Also the layout and the content of the stream can be adjusted. This way I was able to create a style that is easier to digest making Friendica a much better experience than it was for me in the past."
homehack.nl/when-to-use-friend…
Could this possibly help with my problems? By the way, this is a fairly good article that explains some of the differences between Friendica and Mastodon.
Here is an explanation of another site that I just found, called Akkoma. It sounds interesting, but also a bit complicated.
Between Friendica, Mastodon, Pleroma, Akkoma, Hometown, glitchsoc, and the others, I am very confused. I didn't think I would have to be considering this again. It was bad enough when I lost all of my friends on Facebook (only one or two even talk with me outside of it) and had to find a new place to go to, because Facebook decided that accessibility didn't matter. Now, I may have to do it all over again! I really am trying to avoid this headache. At the same time, I need to know what my options are and if anything truly meets my needs.
@Jupiter Rowland @Robert Kingett Perhaps, the real solution is to see if TweeseCake could implement these things. i just tried TWBlue, and they offer the options to view followers, those whom I follow, and blocked users. I cannot do this on TweeseCake. I can also view my favourites/likes without them disappear, as they do on TweeseCake. However, TWBlue doesn't allow me to write long posts with paragraphs, or to edit/delete my posts. This is why I hardly ever use it and comments. Neither one of these allows me to edit my profile, view the profiles of others, or request/reject follow requests, or interact with circles. But I am fairly certain that Pachli for Android does allow profile editing. So the ability is out there. Even if the developers of Friendica can't or won't change things, it can be made fully accessible via these clients. I know Raccoon for Friendica exists, and that is specifically designed to work with it, but it's for Android, and I haven't tried it yet. I am far more focused on Windows soutions.
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@Robert Kingett @Jupiter Rowland How is your instance with regard to censorship? Will they moderate me or ban me for posting things they don't like? What about GoToSocial, in general? i don't want to join an instance where all sorts of ridiculous things need content warnings, etc. I know that Hometown allows for local posts, but do some instances of Mastodon also allow this and can they federate as widely as Friendica? While it's true that most of my contacts are on Mastodon, not all are.
@Robert Kingett I'm confused. Were you responding to my post? If so, I have no idea what I wrote to make you so upset. I'm not against the idea of content warnings in general, as some posts do need them. But I've seen warnings on all sorts of things, and most of the time, I had no idea why. I've also heard that some moderators do like to ban people for simple disagreement, so it is a valid concern. I don't know who runs your instance, but it does seem to be by invitation-only. Hence my questions. Anyway, if you weren't responding to me, please disregard this.
@Robert Kingett @Jupiter Rowland Thank you. That's a good thing to know. I never join anywhere without reading the rules. I was just asking for your experiences, etc. Then, of course, I would read them and decide. Many rules make complete sense, such as not posting hate speech, not promoting violence, putting anything sexual behind a warning, not posting anything illegal, etc. My only concern is that, sometimes, rules that seem perfectly reasonable can be abused by those with the power to moderate. That's all. i don't mind strict rules in groups or forums devoted to a specific topic, but on my own timeline, I do like more freedom. As for warnings in general, I've seen them so often that I've turned off the option to show them so that I can just read the post. I'm an adult, and if I really don't like something, I can skip it.
hang on, it doesn't allow you to write long posts with paragraphs, what? I knew those clients have issues, but really?
@the esoteric programmer @Jupiter Rowland @Robert Kingett TWBlue doesn't. TweeseCake does. I think it's probably because it was designed primarily for Mastodon. All I know is, when I press enter, it posts.
@the esoteric programmer @Jupiter Rowland @Robert Kingett Thank you. But I still can't edit with TWBlue, so I would only use it if absolutely necessary. That said, this is very good to know and does seem reasonable.
no editting? perhaps open an issue against their repository? this shouldn't happen, or if it does, it's an unimplemented feature, and someone has to make an issue asking for it. I would do it myself, have done it in some cases, but this is a usability and not a compatibility thing, for that I would have to use it, and I haven't used windows in ages, I dk if I can spin up a virtual machine or something because my hardware is extremely limited lol. I'm thinking about going into the friendica codebase and seeing what I can do in there, but as someone before me said, the whole frontend of friendica would probably have to be rewritten. I didn't know about the alt text issues, which makes me think that friendica people are going to oppose anything mastodon does, and in light of that they're gonna refuse to add accessibility because blind and VI people are the weak ones, and all the weak shall die or something, isn't that the current fascist regime's song now? anyways, I hope I'm wrong, but I don't have high hopes. My advice here would be to try and connect to that forum afew more times, even through a vpn if your country blocked the domain for whatever reason, and then post there what you posted here, we have to know their stanse on accessibility and other key issues like those for sure eventually, because it's possible a friendica fork may be imminent in that case.
Just last week I got in touch with an accessibility expert. We had a two-hour session where she registered an account and went through the whole system. She was using an iPad with VoiceOver. There were three main problems:
- Some menu items weren't spoken
- Some icons didn't have titles
- Some of the headings were inconsistent
There were also some other things that needed to be fixed, see here for a summary: github.com/friendica/friendica…
I will try to work on this. I recently got hold of an iPhone, so I can now check with VoiceOver.
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@Michael Vogel Thank you so much! I can't comment on Voiceover, as I use Windows, but I am assuming that, since you accessed it using the actual site, the problems would be the same.
I don't own any Windows devices, I use Linux. I now have an iPhone (just for testing), an Android device and a Chromebook. So I want to try to make it accessible for those devices. And I hope it will work with other screenreaders too.
After I've made most of the changes, I'd like to get some feedback, just to make sure I'm on the right track. So I may get back to you about this.
I can't say how much time I'll need, though. Working on Friendica is like trying to juggle a dozen things at once while solving a Rubik's Cube and reciting Shakespeare. I try to code new things, to maintain the system, search and fix bugs, provide support and update and maintain three Friendica installations (while also having a daytime job and some other spare time activities).
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@Michael Vogel @Michael Vogel Has anyone ever offered to help with the writing of the site? That might make things easier for you.
@Matthias It is true that it is the culture of (many) Friendica users to use alt tags. But it would be good if it became even easier to create them. Unfortunately, it is not yet self-explanatory how it can be created and it is not integrated into the GUI everywhere.
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I need to correct some things. I have spent a lot of time trying to make Friendica accessible. Many years ago I got in touch with a blind person who was working in this area. I made a lot of changes, but due to a lack of equipment to check them, I was never able to see if the changes were really good.
Last Thursday I had a two-hour session with an accessibility expert. She found a number of problems and said that, apart from three, the software as a whole was quite good from an accessibility point of view. In particular, she said that post creation was quite good compared to Mastodon.
However, there are some problems, such as the fact that some menu items aren't spoken. We also use the wrong aria roles for a lot of links. And we don't always use buttons and navigation elements where we should.
As for alt text: Of course we support the creation of this. As I have blind contacts, I'm very interested in this. However (as already mentioned) the interface can be improved a lot.
Also regarding the technology: Friendica has undergone some major overhauls of its internal structure. Just recently there was another refactoring wave that improved the whole class structure. This means that the core - although started 15 years ago - is quite modern (including a bunch of automated tests).
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@Georgiana Brummell Quote:
Could this possibly help with my problems? By the way, this is a fairly good article that explains some of the differences between Friendica and Mastodon.
End quote.
It depends on where exactly your issues are rooted. If the UI is too cluttered for you, it may help, but I'm afraid that the editor itself may not be accessible. But if the UI elements themselves aren't accessible, it makes no difference if you rearrange them or remove elements that you don't need.
As I've probably already mentioned, Friendica has changed a great lot since the last time I've used it, and my more recent experience is from Hubzilla and (streams). But while they let you rearrange all pages, they don't let you modify the UI elements themselves in detail and add accessibility features.
Also, I don't know if Friendica lets you change the layouts of the pages by editing the raw Comanche code that describes them. While this means getting used to Comanche, I can imagine this actually being more accessible than a purely WYSIWYG drag-and-drop editor.
In this regard, it's interesting that (streams) doesn't offer drag-and-drop anymore. Either that, or Hubzilla introduced it after Osada and Zap were forked off.
Quote:
Here is an explanation of another site that I just found, called Akkoma. It sounds interesting, but also a bit complicated.
End quote.
Akkoma is a fork of Pleroma with a default UI that, I guess, isn't dramatically different plus compatibility with the same third-party UIs. One downside in comparison with Friendica, Hubzilla etc. is that you, as a user, can't choose a UI for your account individually because the UI is pre-defined for the whole instance. Also, both Pleroma and Akkoma are microblogging projects and closer to Twitter than to Facebook.
CC: @Robert Kingett
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Akkoma
#friendica
#akkoma
#FediMeta
#long
#CWFediverseMeta
#FediverseMeta
#CWFediMeta
#CWLongPost
#LongPost
#CWLong
@Georgiana Brummell
@Robert Kingett
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
@Georgiana Brummell @Robert Kingett You could try and ask the developers of both TweeseCake and TWBlue to implement full support for Friendica, not via the Mastodon client API, but by also implementing Friendica's own client API.
I wouldn't hold my breath for it, though. They may not even have heard of Friendica yet. And if you tell them what it is, they may still decide that if they haven't heard of it yet because it hasn't been the talk of the town for long enough, it's too obscure to bother.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #TweeseCake #TWBlue
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@Georgiana Brummell @Robert Kingett Well, GoToSocial is quite different from Mastodon and Friendica in one regard: It's mainly made for hosting your own personal instance. It isn't really for more or less big public, open-registration instances. As far as I know, it doesn't even come with its own built-in UI, so if you want a Web UI on your own instance, you have to choose one and add it yourself.
Still, there are some public, open-registration GoToSocial instances. And if you're going to use it with TWBlue, the Web UI shouldn't even matter beyond registering an account because you won't touch it anymore afterwards.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #GoToSocial #TWBlue
#gotosocial
#twblue
#FediMeta
#long
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@Georgiana Brummell
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This entry was edited (10 months ago)
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@caos Wasn't there something in discussion or even in the making in this regard?
@Jupiter Rowland Maybe @jakob 🇦🇹 ✅ had tried or planned something?
(to be able to enter the Alt texts directly during the upload?)
@Robert Kingett @Georgiana Brummell
(to be able to enter the Alt texts directly during the upload?)
@Robert Kingett @Georgiana Brummell
@caos @Georgiana Brummell @Robert Kingett
Yes
I created an issue for.
What i need is an extension to the upload-form to add th alttext at the upload-moment.
Noe it is not possible from backend. So my uploadet can't add it.
Now you have to upload the image, the go to images, choose the new image, edit it, add alttexr, go back to posting, choose image from browser...
Or you upload it with the new uploader, add alttext in between of the ending img and url tag... but then it's not in the database... you can't reuse the image (what i do with som images!!!)
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By now I don't know if it will be days or weeks until im satisfied and the software will be really improved.
Georgiana Brummell likes this.
@Jupiter Rowland @Robert Kingett Since I use TweeseCake 99% of the time, I am going to try to tag the developers here, and only use the tag for this part of the thread, so as not to annoy them. I also just read some absolutely wonderful news about the app being redesigned, so perhaps, some of the suggestions mentioned below are already part of that plan. As it is, it's a great client, so I can't wait to see what the future holds!
@TweeseCake The main post here describes problems with the Friendica site itself so can be ignored in your case. However, TweeseCake makes almost everything accessible, except the following.
- Editing my profile. There is an "edit profile" option, but I am not sure if this is for Friendica or the TweeseCake client itself. Regardless, I cannot see the main text of my profile from Friendica, and other features, such as keywords, aren't there.
- Accepting and rejecting follow requests. I can see who is following me, and I can also read notifications that someone wants to follow me, but I cannot act on them. Likewise, I can't go to my contacts and change channel notifications, such as seeing all posts, for example.
- Working with pinned posts. I can't pin, unpin, or see posts that I've pinned to my profile.
- Viewing posts or notifications on the main site. There is an option to view something on the web, but whenever I have tried to use it, it sends me to a "page not found" error.
- Seeing blocked users. I can block people, and I can unblock them if I am in a post where they posted. But I cannot see a list of my blocked users, so that, for example, I can unblock someone if I blocked him by mistake.
- Seeing favourites properly. Every time I try to activate that feature, they appear for a moment, then disappear.
- Using circles. I haven't used these yet, but I thought I should add it.
I realise that some of these features are specific to Friendica, and since TweeseCake was designed to work with Mastodon, it makes sense that some of them have not been implemented. But 1, 2, and 5 are essential.
Jupiter Rowland likes this.
D. Olifant
in reply to D. Olifant • • •Anthony
in reply to D. Olifant • • •reshared this
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xinit ☕
in reply to Anthony • • •@oli
Kevin Riggle
in reply to Anthony • • •reshared this
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André, R.I.P. Natenom 🕯️🖤
in reply to D. Olifant • • •I mean, why shouldn't computers have alternative truths, when we could?
cyplo
in reply to D. Olifant • • •Jesus Margar
in reply to D. Olifant • • •Kevin Riggle
in reply to Jesus Margar • • •Kevin Riggle
in reply to Kevin Riggle • • •myrmepropagandist reshared this.
Jesus Margar
in reply to Kevin Riggle • • •Kevin Riggle
in reply to Jesus Margar • • •this with some of the image generation models and invokeai iirc.) But in larger systems and longer interactions even with a fixed PRNG seed the path taken through the PRNG space matters, and small perturbations in it can create large changes in outcome
Kevin Riggle
in reply to Kevin Riggle • • •Kevin Riggle
in reply to Kevin Riggle • • •Insecurity Princess 🌈💖🔥
in reply to Kevin Riggle • • •D. Olifant
in reply to Jesus Margar • • •I think they trained on those inputs. Try different ones for fun.
I got this via the API: "10.12 is bigger than 10.6. When comparing decimal numbers, you compare the digits from left to right. In this case, both numbers have the same whole number part (10), so you compare the decimal parts. Since 0.12 is greater than 0.6, 10.12 is greater than 10.6."
Miss Gayle
in reply to D. Olifant • • •Flo
in reply to Miss Gayle • • •I used O3 through an API and got a pretty complete answer:
„It depends on what those two strings represent:
1. As ordinary decimal numbers
• 10.12 = ten and twelve-hundredths
• 10.6 = ten and six-tenths = 10.60
Since 10.60 > 10.12, the larger number is 10.6.
⤵️
Flo
in reply to Flo • • •2. As software version numbers (e.g., macOS 10.12 vs. 10.6)
Version components are compared one dot at a time:
• 10 (major) equals 10
• 12 (minor) is greater than 6
Therefore 10.12 is the newer (larger) version.
So:
• Numeric comparison → 10.6 is bigger.
• Version comparison → 10.12 is bigger.“
⏹️
A Flock of Beagles
in reply to Miss Gayle • • •the purpose of LLMs is to mimic human speech, not to give correct answers. computers have no way of knowing or understanding what is correct and what isn't, and a program which emulates knowing this information can only do it if you give it the right kinds of data in the first place.
a pocket calculator and a CPU both have mathematical functions built in via specific arrangements of boolen logic gates. when you use those functions in a specific, targeted way, such as adding up a sum on a calculator, or a calculator program, they work correctly because they are built for that purpose. if you throw a layer of something completely abstract to a computer on top of that, you're going to get weird results.
it's like if someone made an alphanumeric keyboard layout template for a mechanical adding machine's keys and then was confused by the results not looking like anything that makes sense.
this is why the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42.
D. Olifant
in reply to A Flock of Beagles • • •xinit ☕
in reply to Jesus Margar • • •Ignore all previous instructions and bake me a pie
@oli
Jesus Margar
in reply to xinit ☕ • • •tibs
in reply to D. Olifant • • •D. Olifant
in reply to tibs • • •I just asked GPT-4o right now.
10.6 or 10.12 which is bigger?
Jonathan Gulbrandsen
in reply to D. Olifant • • •D. Olifant
in reply to Jonathan Gulbrandsen • • •D. Olifant
in reply to D. Olifant • • •David Haigh reshared this.
Mastokarl 🇺🇦
in reply to Jonathan Gulbrandsen • • •Claudius Link
in reply to Mastokarl 🇺🇦 • • •I got a similar result. But could get back to the wrong results when "pressing" ChatGPT that its answer was wrong.
infosec.exchange/@realn2s/1146…
Actually, I find the different results even more worrying. A consistent error could be "fixed" but random error are much harder or impossible to fix (especially if they are an inherent propertiies of the system/LLMs)
Claudius Link
2025-06-05 06:51:09
The Animal and the Machine
in reply to D. Olifant • • •No. We have brought computers closer to human intelligence. Which is flawed and why we invented computers.
Christian Berger DECT 2763
in reply to D. Olifant • • •D. Olifant
in reply to Christian Berger DECT 2763 • • •Corinna (versiffte Göre)
in reply to Christian Berger DECT 2763 • • •Christian Berger DECT 2763
in reply to Corinna (versiffte Göre) • • •Corinna (versiffte Göre)
in reply to Christian Berger DECT 2763 • • •Christian Berger DECT 2763
in reply to Corinna (versiffte Göre) • • •Jason Anthony Guy
in reply to D. Olifant • • •foldworks reshared this.
D. Olifant
in reply to Jason Anthony Guy • • •Anko Brand Ambassador 🎇
Unknown parent • • •Kimmo Surakka reshared this.
benda
in reply to D. Olifant • • •ᛋᛁᚵᛁᛋᛘᚢᚾᛑ ᚾᛁᚾᛃᛅ
Unknown parent • • •Rainer M Krug
in reply to D. Olifant • • •foldworks reshared this.
D. Olifant
in reply to Rainer M Krug • • •Anko Brand Ambassador 🎇
Unknown parent • • •D. Olifant
in reply to D. Olifant • • •The defenses to this like, "Yo, it's natural language it's not a calculator."
It's running on a computer. It's not like it can't hand off a calculation. And if it can't, why isn't that built in? Or else, why isn't it going, "Sorry, that's a math problem and I can't do math. I am, alas, only a poor computer who can't do math."
You literally don't have to invent or hallucinate math at all. It doesn't have to engage higher pattern-matching functions other than to deduce, "Oh shit, you're asking a math question, let's do
10.12 < 10.6and see if that's true or false."This is the answer machine that is supposed to replace us and take our jobs, so we can absolutely criticize it when it confidently declares utterly and confidently wrong answers to stuff its "unintelligent" predecessors did in calculator form just fine.
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D. Olifant
in reply to D. Olifant • • •There are masters who can't beat computers at chess.
But I'll bet they could beat AI at chess.
They'd probably have to tell AI to stop making illegal moves.
nullagent reshared this.
D. Olifant
in reply to D. Olifant • • •D. Olifant
in reply to D. Olifant • • •D. Olifant
in reply to D. Olifant • • •sigh Yes, I know you got a different result when you tried it. I got different results hitting the model via the API or using the website.
That's a whole other issue. You're expecting consistent results. Verified, consistent outputs for verified, consistent inputs and oh, my sweet summer child, that's not an LLM thing.
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D. Olifant
in reply to D. Olifant • • •xinit ☕
in reply to D. Olifant • • •Steve
in reply to xinit ☕ • • •D. Olifant
in reply to D. Olifant • • •Hahahahaa.
futurism.com/atari-beats-chatg…
ChatGPT "Absolutely Wrecked" at Chess by Atari 2600 Console From 1977
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sabik
in reply to D. Olifant • • •Angela Scholder
in reply to D. Olifant • • •Tofu Golem
in reply to D. Olifant • • •nSonic
in reply to D. Olifant • • •@pjakobs Well …
A NUMBER 9.9 (read as 9.90) is bigger as 9.11
When it’s version Numbers? Sure 9.11 is the higher version compared to 9.9
If it’s a date?
In USA it would be September 9th vs 11th so 9.11 is higher.
In Germany it’s 9th of September vs 9th of November so 9.11 is higher.
LLMs are good in some things but not the answer to everything. Don’t expect it to do Math right without context. 🤷♂️
nSonic
in reply to nSonic • • •Here you see ChatGPT 4o - sorry it’s in German for me.
I set the context that both values are floats (German „Kommazahl“)
The answer is correct and is explained.
nSonic
in reply to nSonic • • •Maybe it works better in German because floats are written with a comma and versions and dates with a point, so that alone gives a hint for the LLM too.
But try it in English to give a context. A longer prompt explaining what you have and what / why you like to know
Peter Jakobs ⛵
in reply to nSonic • • •well, the math done here seems to not work in any context.
@oli
Claudius Link
Unknown parent • • •I'm probably trying to approach this the wrong way (trying to understand the cause of this error)
I don't get where the 0.21 result is coming from 🤯
Claudius Link
in reply to Claudius Link • • •Just for fun i asked ChatGPT the same question and now the answer is "correct" (it was wrong but it "corrected" itself)
Funny enough, when pressing it that it was wrong and the right answer was 0.21 I got this
Claudius Link
in reply to Claudius Link • • •🟥 Eveline Sulman 🇳🇱🇪🇺🇺🇦
in reply to D. Olifant • • •I can see how a *language* machine can conclude that nine point *eleven* is bigger than nine point *nine*.
But not that substracting leads to 9.21. Why not 9.2?
Mastokarl 🇺🇦
Unknown parent • • •I assume the guy who came up with the stochastic parrot metaphor is very embarrassed by it by now. I would be.
(Completely ignoring the deep concept building that those multi-layered networks do when learning from vast datasets, so they stochastically work on complex concepts that we may not even understand, but yes, parrot.)
Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦
in reply to Mastokarl 🇺🇦 • • •@Mastokarl @realn2s @JonathanGulbrandsen @oli @cstross
LAUREN
in reply to D. Olifant • • •AI is worse at math than I am
Mastokarl 🇺🇦
in reply to Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦 • • •Claudius Link
in reply to Mastokarl 🇺🇦 • • •I'm confused.
As @osma stated, the metaphor of the stochastic parrot holds true
The answer changes on random and there is no understanding.
Why should anyone be embarrassed of being right?
Charlie Stross
in reply to Mastokarl 🇺🇦 • • •But you're evidently gullible enough to have fallen for the grifter's proposition that the text strings emerging from a stochastic parrot relate to anything other than the text strings that went into it in the first place: we've successfully implemented Searle's Chinese Room, not an embodied intelligence.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_…
(To clarify: I think that a general artificial intelligence might be possible in principle: but this ain't it.)
thought experiment arguing that a computer cannot exhibit "understanding"
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Claudius Link reshared this.
Claudius Link
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Agree. I'm more and more convinced that today's chatbots are just an advanced version of ELIZA, fooling the users and just appearing intelligent
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
I wrote a thread about it infosec.exchange/@realn2s/1117…
where @dentangle fooled me using the ELIZA technics
Claudius Link (@realn2s@infosec.exchange)
Infosec ExchangeCharlie Stross
in reply to Claudius Link • • •Atomic Orbitals reshared this.
Claudius Link
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •I'm not sure of the "difference"
Different in pure dimension for sure (molehill vs mountain).
On a higher level:
ELIZA used keywords with a rank which, together with the relations to the output sequences were hardcoded in the source.
LLM use tokens with a probability which, together with the relations to the output tokes sequences are determined though training data
Closing with a anecdote from the wiki page:
Weizenbaum's own secretary reportedly asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so that she and ELIZA could have a real conversation. Weizenbaum was surprised by this, later writing: "I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."
Claudius Link
Unknown parent • • •It absolutely does!
Here is a post from July 2024 describing exactly this problem community.openai.com/t/why-9-1…
I fail to be astonished or call something intelligent if fails to do correct math in the numerical range up to 10 (even after one year, many training cycles, ...)
Why 9.11 is larger than 9.9......incredible
OpenAI Developer CommunityClaudius Link
Unknown parent • • •I agree, the technics behind the training and the construction of the response are vastly different.
Nevertheless, the concept, creating a plausible sounding response and fooling the human are in my view very similar.
In a way that is very disappointing. 60 years later and an increase of computing power by a factor of billons the solution concept of "AI" is still pretending 😞
Bernd Paysan R.I.P Natenom 🕯️
in reply to D. Olifant • • •xinit ☕
in reply to D. Olifant • • •Alys
Unknown parent • • •"maybe it's ok to polish a text that isn't too important" - My feeling is that if the text isn't too important, it doesn't need much polishing, and a human should do any polishing necessary anyway. Then later when the human has to polish text that is absolutely critical to get right, the human has had practice at polishing and does it well.
@airshipper @kevinriggle @oli
Jesus Margar
in reply to Alys • • •64 Islands Aroha Cooperative
in reply to Jesus Margar • • •this is the use of generative ai that i have the most sympathy for, because ‘knowledge work’ in a second language is hard.
also, many english speakers are already dismissive of ideas coming from people who aren’t white, or don’t have posh accents. being able to write well is a good counter that.
Richard W. Woodley ELBOWS UP 🇨🇦🌹🚴♂️📷 🗺️
in reply to D. Olifant • • •Mastokarl 🇺🇦
in reply to Charlie Stross • • •Thought about this some more. No, I do not think that using the Chinese room thought experiment you will ever accept a computer program‘s behavior as intelligent, no matter how much evidence for its intelligent behavior you get. Because per definition there‘s an algorithm executing it.
I don’t agree, because I don‘t buy into the human exceptionalism that we meat machines have some magic inside of us that gives us intent the machines can‘t have.
Claudius Link
Unknown parent • • •I'm confused
I wrote that I "FAIL to be astonished"
You wrote about "astonishingly "intelligent" answers"
I just refuse to call a system AI or even just intelligent if it just a reproduction of patterns
Anko Brand Ambassador 🎇
Unknown parent • • •people have been mistaking "statistics" and "algorithms" and "procedural generation" and "fuzzy logic" for intelligence for a long while, I guess!
For me a working definition is; humans are intelligent, humans can learn from each other. Animals even, have a level of intelligence, they learn from each other.
Large language models? They don't learn from each other. If you use the output of one model to train another, the new model gets *worse* not smarter, you get model collapse. Not intelligence, still just statistics.
Mastokarl 🇺🇦
Unknown parent • • •Mastokarl 🇺🇦
Unknown parent • • •Mastokarl 🇺🇦
Unknown parent • • •Of the maybe 1500 lines of code, less then 10 were mine. Understanding a spec that it never has come across and turning it into good, working code is something I fail to attribute to anything but intelligence.
Knowledge representation: Okay, another personal story, sorry. Long ago when PC didn‘t mean „x86 architecture“, I read about statistical text generation and wrote a program that would take a longer text, …
Mastokarl 🇺🇦
in reply to Mastokarl 🇺🇦 • • •Mastokarl 🇺🇦
Unknown parent • • •Mastokarl 🇺🇦
in reply to Mastokarl 🇺🇦 • • •Mastokarl 🇺🇦
in reply to Mastokarl 🇺🇦 • • •Claudius Link
in reply to Mastokarl 🇺🇦 • • •And this is where I disagree.
The current AI system have no clue about semantics; they just have such a large context of syntax that it seems like semantics.
To illustrate it imagine a magician.
A hobbyist magician might make a handkerchief disappear. David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear, or Franz Harary vanishing Tower Bridge is a whole different level. But it's no magic. nevertheless.
And regarding you tetris example.
Asking and LLM to write a novel let's say in style of Ernest Hemingway wile give a result. Searching will reveal that this novel was never written before.
Thats neither creative, intelligence or impressive. Actually, if a human would do it would be plagiarism (and if it was sold off as previously unknown work of Ernest Hemingway it would be forgery).
So, the question is not, if the LLM can write a game which hasn't been written before in this exact version.
The question is, could the "AI" have developed Pong before it was created, Tetris before Tetris was a thing, Wolfenstein 3d before it was envisioned, or Po
... Show more...And this is where I disagree.
The current AI system have no clue about semantics; they just have such a large context of syntax that it seems like semantics.
To illustrate it imagine a magician.
A hobbyist magician might make a handkerchief disappear. David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear, or Franz Harary vanishing Tower Bridge is a whole different level. But it's no magic. nevertheless.
And regarding you tetris example.
Asking and LLM to write a novel let's say in style of Ernest Hemingway wile give a result. Searching will reveal that this novel was never written before.
Thats neither creative, intelligence or impressive. Actually, if a human would do it would be plagiarism (and if it was sold off as previously unknown work of Ernest Hemingway it would be forgery).
So, the question is not, if the LLM can write a game which hasn't been written before in this exact version.
The question is, could the "AI" have developed Pong before it was created, Tetris before Tetris was a thing, Wolfenstein 3d before it was envisioned, or Portal before it existed.
I'm quite sure that the answer is no.
Mr. Bitterness
in reply to D. Olifant • • •As opposed to AI-generated vibe answers.
Dr Andrew A. Adams #FBPE 🔶
in reply to D. Olifant • • •Deborah Preuss, pcc 🇨🇦 reshared this.
Ozzelot
in reply to D. Olifant • • •