Are you curious about Mastodon? Mammoth, the Google-funded app, could be the app that will use all of you to destroy the Fediverse*
Dear friends of decentralization, welcome to the end of the world!
One of the most serious limitations of Mastodon (not to mention other obscene software, such as the cumbersome Friendica or the toy Misskey) is that... it sucks!
No it's not true, it doesn't suck, in fact it has improved the ergonomics a lot, but compared to commercial social networks it still seems to be several years behind.
At the moment only Bluesky seems to do worse, but in that case we are actually talking about a dead fetus kept artificially alive by American journalists, so it's a bit out of competition...
** Did you want to know why I titled it “funded by Google”?*
The app is definitely well made and has some interesting new features.
The updated app will introduce a number of features designed to appeal to former X users, including personalized suggestions of accounts to follow, to help you rebuild your network on Mastodon, as well as curated “smart lists” that help you find interesting conversations that take place on Mastodon.…
Mammoth will also integrate with the editorial staff of Flipboard, the social magazine app for curating news on topics from across the web through accounts such as News , Tech , Culture and Science. And it is a partner with Newsmast , another curator of news and communities on Mastodon, as well as Press.coop, which imports feeds from popular news websites into Mastodon. These integrations allow Mammoth 2 to create a number of other “smart lists,” including those for News, World News, Business, Tech, Environment, and Nature.
In short, to use Mastodon more easily, users will give up the most important aspect offered by Mastodon: decentralization!
That's how: following other people's lists, integrating rubbish like Newsmast (one of the projects most oriented towards the Anglospheric centralization of news which is starting to have some singers even in the Italian Fediverse), everything we always wanted to avoid by migrating from Twitter to Mastodon!
I won't hide from you that seeing Mammoth become so popular in some way in the last few days is truly disheartening: a campaign of a few thousand dollars is enough to infest the entire Fediverse with the editorials of a small US company.
By the way, many of Mammoth's features had already been implemented by IceCubes . Not to mention, IceCubes has always been free and open source!
Mammoth has also become open source. But when you launch it, the first thing it does (how horrible!) is make you automatically follow their account (I got visual messages on the new features screen, but I wasn't able to stop the following on that screen) and they a very shitty icon similar to that of Threads.
Most concerning though is their SmartLists feature: send your handle to their official moth.social instance, which uses a Mastodon fork that serves the “Smart Lists” feature. One can reasonably see how this undermines decentralization…
In the photo, Hänsel and Gretel appreciating the ergonomics of the apps financed by BigTech
A final bitter consideration? It's not true that we always want to ruin the beautiful things we have. But unfortunately it is true that we always have this overwhelming desire to help anyone who wants to ruin what we have. As long as he is rich, beautiful and powerful…
There’s an interesting conversation to be had about making the Fediverse more user friendly at the cost of increased centralization and non-standard extensions. It’s really difficult to focus on the message you’re trying to convey when you have five other alarmist topics crammed into the post.
Mozilla’s conflict of interest taking money from one of the largest internet advertisers and browser manufacturers was widely discussed during their recent anti-trust trial. It’s not super constructive to flatten the whole conversation to Mammoth being “Google Funded”.
It’s a Jett Reno quote from Season 3 of Discovery for anyone scratching their head. They’re both no-nonsense war vet engineers. You have to imagine they’d either get along swimmingly or tear each other to pieces.
”We have blueberry, raspberry, ginseng, sleepy time, green tea, green tea with lemon, green tea with lemon and honey, liver disaster, ginger with honey, ginger without honey, vanilla almond, white truffel, blueberry chamomile, vanilla walnut, constant comment and… earl grey.”
There’s some honest to goodness swearing on the new streaming Star Trek shows. Their highest concentration is probably on Discovery. The dialog’s written a little differently on the show, and their go-to scene establishing shot on the bridge is three scientists giving very Star Trek comments, and a fourth person earnestly going, “Holy shit this is so cool / extremely dangerous.”
The other shows have a slightly more classic tone, but even Patrick Stewart got an f-bomb off in the third season of Picard. The shows mostly limit it to one-off expletives during firefights. They’re rare enough that you typically don’t even catch them when they come up. They definitely don’t have extended colorful metaphors like “cock-sucker” though. At that point they’ll reach for a sci-fi comment like the Trek film’s “pointy-eared bastard”.
Personally I like the joke someone made a while back about how swearing on Star Trek is a setting the captain gets to make on the universal translator. Picard’s a narc, and Pike’s the cool boss.
His direction on Cause and Effect was hard to beat. It would be so easy to just reuse the same establishing takes as the time loop plays out, but instead he re-shot the scenes over and over with drastically different camera angles.
The story goes that Chief Engineer Argyle’s actor Biff Yeager was eager for a full time role on the show. It had been hinted at that he could become part of the main cast if fan response was positive. Yeager was apparently a bit too zealous asking friends and family to write in to the studio. They received a wave of support for the character before an episode featuring Argyle had ever aired, and his role was subsequently quietly written off of the show.
To help contribute, here’s the only meme I’ve ever done, which I did in response to news that Abrams was working on a new ST movie. And after seeing how well the franchise is going with SNW and LD, I feel it’s even more appropriate.
The man knows how to absolutely decimate a Starfleet vessel. I’m all for bringing him back if he’s just limited to 10 minutes of an unpowered ship tumbling in free fall towards a planet.
Strange New Worlds is much better modern Star Trek, but you can’t say JJ didn’t take advantage of the theatrical scale of things.
A Final Unity! One of the best Trek games out there! I love how they managed to actually fit a real astrometrics puzzle within the context of a point and click adventure game.
If you’re a fan of Star Trek adventure games, make sure to give the new Star Trek: Resurgence a shot. It’s done by some ex-Telltale employees, and makes really good use of the genre to tell a fun Starfleet adventure off with a new ship and crew.
The TNG/DS9/VOY era was pretty famous for “Star Trek Director’s School” for the actors. Most main cast folks tried their hand at directing at least once or twice. (It’s fun when you notice it for the first time. Their characters usually have bit parts in the first episode they direct.) Jonathan Frakes (Riker) directed episodes have become known for their top-down “god shots” in a lot of episodes like Cause and Effect. observer.com/…/jonathan-frakes-on-his-journey-fro…
Star Trek: Prodigy. It’s the Nickelodeon show for kids who have never watched Star Trek. It features a cast of new alien species who find a mysteriously abandoned prototype Starfleet ship. The ship mistakes them as a batch of Starfleet recruits, and a holographic Janeway teaches them the basics of the Star Trek universe and things like the Prime Directive.
I love new Star Trek but the, “What’s your go to warp slogan?” banter feels a little like an indulgent writer’s room exercise. Each Captain had their own thing, but they never called too much attention to it on the classic shows. It was like their unique caffeine orders. Discovery’s banter with Saru felt authentic to that crew’s rapport, but the fact that it went on to become a Starfleet meme on Lower Decks and the cliffhanger ending of Picard is such an odd modern invention.
The Beastie Boy’s “Sabotage” exists at least in the Kelvin universe. It would follow that “Intergalactic” also exists in world of Star Trek. Therefore it follows that Amanda Grayson must have been enough of a fan of classical music to name her half-Vulcan son after a catchy Earth beat.
The subspace anomaly caused everyone to obey the rules of a quantum reality in which people followed the tropes of 20th century American musicals. It was observed on numerous occasions that people affected by this phenomenon would generally sing their true feelings to those around them.
Considering this, we can contemplate that high ranking members of the Klingon Imperial Fleet were more open to regular relations with Starfleet and the greater galactic society than previously assumed.
The captain of this cruiser laments that his only interaction with the Federation comes during times of conflict. As shown by Lieutenant Spock after the events of this subspace rift and the hostilities on Cajitar IV, complex diplomatic situations can be defused by respect for and participation in Klingon social activities.
Knowing this, we can assume that significant damage was done by the widespread adoption of the “Vulcan Hello” by one of the founding members of the Federation. Had the Vulcans been more forthcoming about the history of this first-strike doctrine, the Federation may have been able to avoid earlier conflicts with the Klingons by reaching out proactively to their neighbors and not only call them when they’ve got dramas.
The writers were lucky / clever that they had the musical episode to further the tension between Spock and Chapel. Only in show tunes does this much inner turmoil make sense for a three month work trip. To your home planet! Just take a couple shore leaves to visit and she’ll be back before you know it.
Considering he’s one of my favorite Trek characters it is really depressing to hear some of the really anti-lgbtq things he’s supported. Not to mention the scabbing during the writers strike.
Dan Olson has a pretty good video about that one time some geocentrics tricked a bunch of physicists and Kate Mulgrew into being in their lame documentary. m.youtube.com/watch?v=icwDF8wRgF4
Cathode Ray Dude did a video a while back about the real world equivalent of “Bypassing the relays!” and exploding bridge stations. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpJ_6LCly4A Basically on military equipment like Navy ships, it can be important to be able to bypass circuit breakers and burn out motors if the difference is one last shot getting out.
“YouTuber talks at a camera for half an hour about something he found at the thrift store” is a well worn trope at this point, but CRD is a really good storyteller. It’s interesting to see out of all the technobabble and cliches on Star Trek, the exploding consoles and EPS relays are actually informed by writers who probably spent parts of their military careers toggling real world “battle shorts”.
Who's the MVP of the MPV's? (lemmy.world)
Which of these sullen, stoic side characters gets your ire most? Main characters Spock, Tuvok, and T’Pol left out for obvious reasons.
Just imagine what O'Brien could do with a piece of black liquorice. (lemmy.world)
For all the Texan Trekkies out there (pixelfed.social)
Remember: 9 months until we build a statue of this guy. (lemmy.world)
Mark me down as scared and horny (startrek.website)
Tea Mom (startrek.website)
I have no idea why I’m trying to make this a thing.
— Mrs. McMurray
https://startrek.website/pictrs/image/96f8fb28-21cc-4256-a7fc-15241834e266.jpeg
Don't be like Gworon (startrek.website)
It was his last wish too. (lemmy.world)
I'm bleeding, making me the victor! (lemmy.world)
10/10, No notes (i.imgur.com)
The reverse shark-jumping (pixelfed.social)
Two more in comments (lemmy.world)
Gotta keep the kids off the white. (startrek.website)
One thing the fandoms can agree on. (lemmy.world)
To help contribute, here’s the only meme I’ve ever done, which I did in response to news that Abrams was working on a new ST movie. And after seeing how well the franchise is going with SNW and LD, I feel it’s even more appropriate.
So no dom-jot. (i.imgflip.com)
Bi women love Star Trek. Source me. (lemmy.world)
It was like being in an episode (i.imgur.com)
TIL that Geordi directed some episodes (pxscdn.com)
We've got some fresh faces beaming down to Risa! Here's a quick primer for you fantasy buffs out there. (lemmy.world)
They are giving out free stickers all over town (lemmy.world)
Go get yours, only took a couple minutes. They said we are at 3% turnout so far.
Gotta watch out for those hole in the wall Caitian black market shops. (lemmy.world)
Everywhere I go I see his face. (startrek.website)
🎵 Buy it, use it, break it, fix it, trash it, change it, mail – upgrade it, charge it, point it, zoom it, press it, snap it, work it, quick – erase it 🎵 (pixelfed.social)
Did he hit the wrong button with his elbow or something? (i.imgur.com)
Remember that episode when Spock traveled back in time to help write that Beastie Boys song? (startrek.website)
Car Talk with Martok - Imprisoning Sha Ka Ree (Part 2) (startrek.website)
And now the Season 1 conclusion of Car Talk with Martok as we take a brief break to not annoy the living hell out of you....
Hang in there La'an (lemmy.world)
... (pixelfed.social)
CD-ROM (lemmy.world)
Holodeck Rhapsody (lemmy.world)
The crossover everyone needs (cdn.drawception.com)
I'll solve for y in my computation... (loot.buckodr.ink)
Inspired by @FlatFootFox with this post
Only 'Akoochemoya' that Beltram is going to say is with the Commanders foot halfway up his ass (startrek.website)
Considering he’s one of my favorite Trek characters it is really depressing to hear some of the really anti-lgbtq things he’s supported. Not to mention the scabbing during the writers strike.
🤔... (lemmy.world)
I confess I'll miss the singing ♫ (lemmy.world)
Where is Burnet/Gateway? (communityimpact.com)
Are they talking about Domain? MCC?...