vaguerant

What’s the quality like of the people who are still on Twitter in 2025? Does the fediverse want them? (These are real questions, I have no idea if there’s still any decent people on Twitter.)

That document seems to use communities in the normal English sense and spaces in the “collection of Matrix rooms” sense. I would say spaces are what they’re called and a community is just an informal group of like-minded people who can be better-organized using spaces.

I already knew about massive Pokémon, they were famously included in Sword/Shield.

the old URLs (with the subdomain blog) will no longer work…

if you’re trying to open an old URL, just swap “blog” with “news” in the subdomain.

This seems pretty fixable, doesn’t it? Once the old blog shuts down, can’t you just redirect the subdomain so that the old links redirect to your current blog and everything is fine?

Both things are technically true: the article is primarily made up of content literally written by the company or people contracted by them for PR purposes, and it is a Good Article (Wikipedia jargon for having passed a review of certain quality standards around writing, coverage and sourcing, but not the higher standard required to be classed as a Featured Article).

How much of a problem this is probably depends on the subject. Does Juniper Networks have any bad practices which the article omits because the people who researched it (i.e. Juniper Networks) didn’t think they needed to go in the article? You’d basically need an independent observer to research anything that potentially should be in the article but isn’t there, but how many people that aren’t getting paid are invested in researching a corporate networking business?

There’s absolutely merit to Wikipedia having articles that are written by people paid to write them by their subjects, because a lot of it would otherwise be missing from Wikipedia entirely. But it’s also good to know that many articles are not necessarily written by impartial authors.

Here we go, I found lemmy.zip admin Demigodrick’s Mastodon.

marcusclaxton

Hey what’s going on with lemmy.zip? I’m getting host errors when I try to connect. I’m new to the whole fediverse thing so just trying to figure out what’s up?

Demigodrick

hey, currently a substantial server error - I’m looking to restore a backup ASAP but need the time to do it, so hopefully later on today

https://mastodon.zip/@Demigodrick/114313339395366563

This was posted about an hour ago at time of this comment.

The last post in !announcements@lemmy.zip was for a scheduled downtime yesterday while they did server maintenance and possibly updated their Lemmy version. Did they ever come back up after that, or have they been down since then?

Mate, wtf is an old carburator?

This one’s not strictly enshittification-related, but I find YouTube Comment Search (Firefox, Chrome) extremely useful. YouTube videos frequently have way more comments than any sensible person is going to read through. By searching for keywords, you can check whether somebody else already said what you were thinking and 👍 that instead of posting another duplicate comment that will get buried forever.

It really whips the Lemmy’s ass.

I don’t think that’s quite what the situation is. “Creator” is a tag you can set when uploading something to Archive.org. People have uploaded things that are tagged with BBC as the Creator, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are either from the BBC or got their approval.

Clicking on a couple of uploads at random from the above link, they don’t seem to have obvious corporate names for their accounts. Not going to list any real uploaders because I’m not a snitch, but they have names in the realm of SherlockXWatsonLover1998, which probably indicates they’re not official.

The big headline is understandably that it crashes into a fake painted wall like a cartoon, but that’s not something that most drivers are likely to encounter on the road. The other two comparisons where lidar succeeded and cameras failed were the fog and rain tests, where the Tesla ran over a mannequin that was concealed from standard optical cameras by extreme weather conditions. Human eyes are obviously susceptible to the same conditions, but if the option is there, why not do better than human eyes?

Those things aren’t strictly related. Lemmy is open source and there are a bunch of apps. There also used to be a bunch of Reddit apps, but Reddit wasn’t open source. The important factor is that the Lemmy software provides an API (application programming interface) which app developers can use to talk to Lemmy instances. API access is free, like it used to be on Reddit.

Everyone else took all the good critiques of this article, so here’s mine.

We’re still bullish on the fediverse, and on Bluesky, if it manages to become a truly federated platform.

Bluesky appears to have reached their goal as far as federation. Users can self-host a personal data server (PDS) which federates with Bluesky. If you want an analogy from somebody extremely unqualified to offer it, it’s sort of like bringing a bucket of water to a swimming pool. You can’t go swimming in the bucket, but you can pour it into Bluesky’s pool and swim in there. If the pool closes down or implements segregation and if somebody else opens a swimming pool, you can take your bucket to their pool instead. However, if nobody else wants to open another swimming pool, your bucket is useless. In this analogy, buckets are only useful to very slightly fill somebody else’s swimming pool and for no other purpose. It’s a very good analogy.

Bryan Newbold, the protocol engineer at Bluesky, said the following about PDSes and federation:

Overall, I think federation isn’t the best term for Bluesky to emphasize going forward, though I also don’t think it was misleading or factually incorrect to use it to date. An early version of what became atproto actually was peer-to-peer, with data and signing keys on end devices (mobile phones). When that architecture was abandoned and PDS instances were introduced, “federation” was the clearest term to describe the new architecture.

i.e. In Bluesky’s terminology, federation is not a future goal they’re hoping to achieve, it’s what they’re already doing right now.

The (ActivityPub) fediverse is different, because … damn, I really screwed myself with this swimming pool thing … it’s like a bunch of boats in the ocean. There’s one-person dinghies and giant cruise ships, all with different owners. You can bring your own boat, or you can hitch a ride with a friend or a generous stranger. If you want to hang out in a different boat from the one you arrived in, that’s fine too. Ultimately, we all float on the same ocean which we all have to share. Crucially, nobody is in charge of the water. There’s rules on the boats, but the ocean is just the ocean. If your boat crashes into an iceberg and sinks, the ocean will still be there. You might lose some of your stuff, but there’s plenty of other boats to pick you up.

The failure state in both cases is better than nothing. With Bluesky, you lose the swimming pool, but keep the bucket. With ActivityPub, you lose the boat, but keep the ocean. If Bluesky dies, ideally you can take your federated identity with you to an alternative service that exists in the future, but you no longer have access to Bluesky, because it’s gone. When a Lemmy instance dies, you pretty much have to start over: register a new account, subscribe to all your communities again, etc. But the whole fediverse is still there: all the communities you were subscribed to, the people you followed, all your old comments, they’re still out there floating on the ocean.

It’s true this is a thing that you can do, but the experience seems pretty degraded vs. just registering an account with a Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed/Sublinks (did I miss any?) instance which is natively configured for the kind of threaded conversations that exist on this segment of the fediverse. The instructions basically amount to “Go to a Lemmy instance and use its interface to find a community you’re interested in, then copy the link to the discussion you want to interact with and paste that into your Mastodon instance’s search bar, then reply to the post that appears. It’s that simple!”

If you only interact with threads occasionally or you just want to try it out from Mastodon, this is workable, but you need a lot of patience for the busywork that’s involved.

The Leta FAQ confirms this:

Did you make your own search engine from scratch? We did not, we made a front end to the Google and Brave Search APIs.

Our search engine performs the searches on behalf of our users. This means that rather than using Google or Brave Search directly, our Leta server makes the requests.

Searching by proxy in other words.

What a cool service, thanks for sharing. You can also check the Exodus database via web if you can’t or don’t want to install the native Android app.

And specifically, a reference to It’s the Sun Wot Won It, a headline in the Murdoch press, not-good-enough-to-be-toilet-paper tabloid rag The Sun, crowing that they had enough influence in the 1992 general election to secure a win for the Conservatives.

I feel like Google would tell you the same thing if asked.

Maybe this is a me problem, but especially on the threadiverse side (Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed), how much are we really in tight-knit communities based on our servers? I’m from Fedia, but I don’t really interact with Fedia people any more than I do anybody else, or even bother to take notice of where other people are from, unless they say something especially goofy. Communities in the “subreddit” sense are more likely to feel tight-knit than servers

I definitely get how allowing people to skip choosing a server is good for some types of potential fediverse users, I just don’t think Gmail works as an analogy for that. When Gmail was in its invite-only era, people weren’t paralyzed by choices of providers, they specifically wanted the one that was the best, and that was Gmail.