VeeSilverball

The Market street tram line runs a variety of vintage cars from various different places and eras. It's a kind of "living museum" piece that complements the better-known cable cars.

I have no plans to support p92 precisely because it's going to "push" users together as a commodity. What Meta has jurisdiction over is not its communities but rows of data - in the same way that Reddit's admins have conflicted with its mods, it is inherently not organized in such a way that it can properly represent any specific community or their actions.

So the cost-benefit from the side of extant fedi is very poor: it won't operate in a standard way, because it can't, and the quality of each additional user won't be particularly worth the pain - most of them will just be confused by being presented with a new space, and if the nature of it is hidden from them it will become an endless misunderstanding.

If a community using a siloed platform wants to federate, that should be a self-determined thing and they should front the effort to remain on a similar footing to other federated communities. The idea that either side here inherently wants to connect and just "needs a helping hand" is just wrong.

I believe there is a healthy relationship between instances and magazines, actually: the way in which topical forums tend to be "hive-mindy" fits well with Fediverse instance culture. The difference is that instead of Reddit-scaling leading in the direction of "locking down" topical discussion to be a bureaucratic game of dancing around every rule, because all users are homogenous - just a name, a score, and a post history - you can have "this board is primarily about this" but then allow in a dose of chaos, affording some privilege to the instance users who already have a set of norms and values in mind and pushing federated comments out of view as needed, where you know the userbases are destined to get into unproductive fights.

This also combats common influencer strategies applying bots and sockpuppeting, because you've already built in the premise of an elite space.

There's work needed on the moderation technology of #threadiverse software to achieve this kind of vision, but it's something that will definitely be learned as we go along.

Recently I entered the world of dip pens and got a set from Deleter: Dip pen holder, G-nibs, and the Black 4 Ink. The G-nib is the most common nib used in manga drawing. It needs some pressure to do its work, but it's flexible enough to do thin and thick strokes.

They aren't hugely expensive items - the nibs can be bought in large packs for a few dollars at stationary stores, and are made to last for a few months of heavy use each. The ink is a little more expensive. It's the kind of thing where the results are better in that you can get some really sharp lines by using viscous ink that would clog anything else, but also, you'd only use it if you're deep into working with ink and aren't satisfied with felt fineliners. It's just logistically harder to deal with keeping an ink pot secure on the desk, dipping the pen, cleaning the nib, putting everything away. Fountain pens are way more popular with collectors, but dip pens are workhorses and there's almost nothing to troubleshoot, just "how do I keep ink from blobbing on it" (scrub off the protective factory coating with mild detergents or just using the ink itself) and "how do I clean it" (rinse with water).

The other tool of that type is the kolinsky sable brush - sable hair is more springy than synthetics. I am on the fence about actually getting one of those, my rubberized-felt brush pens do a decent job of getting the elements of brushes that I want, and cleaning brushes is more annoying.

I find that what is needed depends on the task. Mostly, it's about whether you need to switch views on information frequently. If you're working in a maximally focused way you already have the right info, so you don't have to make the view more diverse.

Two monitors can be really helpful if you're in a situation where you need one view to always stay the same(e.g. reading one document while editing another) and the editing app is some fussy internal thing that always wants to be on the first window when started, but I also haven't had that setup in quite a few years. Tiling can get you 80% of that if the screen is sufficiently large and the software cooperates.

When in Windows I stick to using the Win + arrow keys shortcuts to tile; in Linux I've used a few different WMs over the years but lately have been using Ubuntu defaults and basically working with it like Windows.

There is a lot of utility from not relying on screens and using a small gridded or ruled notebook with a spiral binding as the second screen. Mark it up with color multipens and sticky notes, and take it around in your jacket pocket or a belt bag.

Mastodon's export portability mostly focuses on the local social-graph aspects(follows, blocks, etc.) and while it has an archive function, people frequently lament losing their old posts and that graph relationship when they move.

Identity attestment is solvable in a legible fashion with any external mechanism that links back to report "yes, account at xyz.social is real", and this is already being done by some Mastodon users - it could be through a corporate web site, a self-hosted server or something going across a distributed system(IPFS, Tor, blockchains...) There are many ways to describe identity beyond that, though, and for example, provide a kind of landing page service like linktree to ease browsing different facets of identity or describe "following" in more than local terms.

I would consider these all high-effort problems to work on since a lot of it has to do with interfaces, UX and privacy tradeoffs. If we aim to archive everything then we have to make an omniscient distributed system, which besides presenting a scaling issue, conflicts with privacy and control over one's data - so that is probably not the goal. But asking everyone to just make a lot of backups, republish stuff by hand, and set up their own identity service is not right either.

That is a tendency with long-running MMOs. Planetside has gone the same way and until the day the subreddit closed for the protest, there were zombie players in every thread gaslighting the community about a "dead game" that is still very alive. They can't move on, there's nothing like it.

If you look at the links by each post, you'll notice that some will reference a URL that goes off of your local instance. In Lemmy these are icons, in kbin it appears from the "more" link. Sometimes it's unclear who/where I'm interacting with and examining the URL helps me get some idea of it. In federated social media different instances often develop a different subculture, but since they can access each other you have more dimensions of interaction and how to behave.

I subscribe to the Tony Seba / RethinkX view that we are in a decade of multiple major technological disruptions - energy, agriculture, information, transportation. He's lectured on the topic several times: https://youtu.be/z7vhMcKvHo8

Even if he is wrong about the details, it's great hopium.

Follow admins and moderators on other instances, that starts federation.

Reputation will vary by which instance you're on because it's just a calculation of actions people have made, and those counts vary based on who subscribed to whom and when. If you're on instance B and instance A and C are talking to you, but defederated from each other, you could be +100 when looking from A and -100 when looking from C. So the score will be increasingly meaningless-looking the more you are federated.

Meta attempts to federate and every user is immediately swarmed with bots that tell them to stop using Meta, a baby site for babies, forcing Meta to defederate.