YouTube Video

I might have to look into it again. I’ve been primarily saving links using Obsidian synced to an S3 bucket. There’s a nice plugin that converts links to pretty markdown. I even made an iOS shortcut to automate the saving of pages. It’s nice and minimalist, but it does require Obsidian to view the pages (excluding just opening the bucket directly), so I can’t see my links on my work computer.

There are people who would be okay if it were Sony making the acquisition, but I want to believe that most people who are against it feel that no large company should be allowed to buy another large company.

It’s like, does no one remember what Microsoft did in the 90s? They were literally forbidding PC manufacturers from not selling any systems that didn’t include windows.

This deal is bad. It rewards shitty individuals and shitty companies, and hurts consumers and employees. This deal will be a calendar marker of when the gaming industry started to fall. Like when Disney bought Marvel and LucasArts.

I used Joplin for a while but found that it was a bit too clunky. Also, yes it does store the notes locally, but they weren’t in a plain text format. My notes were fragmented across different files.

I switched to Obsidian after that and will never switch back. Yes, people make Obsidian complicated, but it’s honestly only as complex as you make it.

For me, all it does is text and sync. All the files are stored locally in complete markdown format. That way I can read them in any program that can process text. My personal workspace syncs to an S3 compatible service, while work synced to Google Drive.

I loved Joplin and felt so conflicted when I found Obsidian. But now I would recommend it over Joplin any day.

I remember the first time I came in contact with DLC, coincidentally it was my first Steam game: Supreme Commander 2.

My first thought was: “What the fuck is this? Why isn’t this in the game?”. Later on, when DLC were getting more substantial, my thoughts changed to; ”Are they just rebranding Expansion Packs?”.

As other people noted, I don’t care about cosmetics. Even for Dota 2, which I’ve put over a thousand hours in and have played it 10 years, I just sell them on the marketplace to fund my next summer sale. The only time I buy stuff is when I want to support the game’s development.

My gaming time is too limited to worry about battle passes and shit like that. I just wanna click heads and farm creeps.

Edit: the one thing that does bum me out though is that back before item shops and shit, skins and unlocks used to mean something. Like, you’d see some dude in your Halo 3 lobby with a dope-ass helmet and you knew that he earned that from getting a Killtacular with only deagle headshots. Now it’s just, dude’s level 150. He must’ve swiped for the ultimate edition, XP boosters, or has too much free time.

Unrelated question, but how did you get kbin to embed a mastodon toot as an image? I’ve been trying to find the best way to cross-Fedi post stuff to kbin but haven’t found one yet.

What if Zuck comes out of his lizard hole and utters the word:

FEDIVERSE.

to proclaim that Meta, formally known as Facebook, is now changing their name to Fedi.

Here’s a link to the video on YouTube:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIYMn8eDskg

Dude a federated SO would be a dream. Imagine actually be able to post something without it being flagged as a duplicate of a 10 year old outdated question.

It’s because you can’t “kill” a the AP protocol. XMPP didn’t go away when Messenger and GChat removed support for it, it just went back to how it was before hand, a fraction of tech enthusiasts using it for private communication. It would probably be the same with AP. A separate collection of sites using it to federate information.

… even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.

Granted this leaves out how Google used it’s influence to control and stagnate the XMPP protocol, but that’s another can of worms.

How are the titles generated for non-threadiverse posts, like those from Mastodon?

Identity federation isn’t the main point of the Fediverse, though. Federation is just meant to distribute content and facilitate communication. So you can have a book blogger manage their reviews and bookshelf on BookWyrm, a vloger can upload a video on PeerTube, and a city government can share water outage updates on Mastodon, and someone can interact with that content from a single interface and account of their choice.

That’s interesting. I’m not a huge supporter of it, but wasn’t account portability one of the reasons that Bluesky created their own AT protocol?

That’s pretty much what the controversy is about. People are, rightfully, afraid that Facebook will dominate AP and eventually destroy it (akin to Google and XMPP[1]). There are also those who, also rightfully, believe that this will help adoption of the AP protocol and bring innovation into the Fediverse (maybe like podcasting and Apple Podcasts have done for RSS). Both are valid, and we as members of the community and those who develop for this space should be cautious of corporate intrusion leading the innovation.

[1] https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

It’s using ActivityPub. It’s interesting because Bluesky (basically, former Twitter) explicitly stated that they didn’t think AP was robust enough and created their own shitty protocol. Facebook might be one of the first traditional SNS platforms to experiment with AP. I would’ve been happier if it were Tumblr, who said they were working on implementing AP last year.

I wonder how much of the recent Twitter drama has influenced Facebook’s decision to release Threads so soon after its announcement. It’s probably going to be shit quality and just try and monopolize on people leaving Twitter but not wanting to jump to Mastodon.

I think mostly 50/50 between both camps, at least on my instance.

I think this is one argument in favor of having public boost/favorite lists, either on a post level or account level. Might help expose karma farming.

Yeah this seems false. SD cards are unreliable, hard to keep track of, and don’t actually store that much data for the price. I do think they use tapes though to store long term, low traffic data.

Reddit also had an aggressive recommendation system, where posts from your most recently interacted subs would show up more often. I would literally only open one sub via a post on the front page and the next time my /all would be filled with trash for that sub.

I think one thing that might help is to distinguish bot accounts from user accounts. This would make it obvious the intentions of the post.

That’s one trend I hope doesn’t spring up over here. I hated the fact that 95% of the subs on /r/all were literally the same thing. Like, what was the difference between MadeMeSmile, DamnThatsInteresting, NextFuckingLevel? Just all the same clickbait trash, and then, as you say, some “organic” marketing campaign for the latest Marvel movie.

Edit:
Mastodon handles this by not having an algorithm. In order for a toot to gain traction, it actually needs to be boosted around so that people can see it. A great example of how this prevented “organic” marketing was with @Raspberry_Pi.

When they first joined, their SNS team tried the same easy brand tactics that they used on Twitter, trying to force engagement. It had the opposite effect, and the community backlash was fierce. They have since changed their messaging and become more genuine.

Since link aggregators usually need some kind of algorithm for a “front page,” I think the most important thing is to have it be transparent and static. No changing it every 4 months to increase engagement.

Most importantly, the community should also have a shared opinion on what kind of stuff they are okay with, and this can be more localized per instance.