Mastodon has limits for number of pictures. Pixelfed has higher limits out of the box. Pixelfed has image filters available. Mastodon doesn’t seem to. Pixelfed’s UX is oriented toward picture management. Mastodon’s is oriented toward the textual experience.
They’re different products that happen to share a protocol.
I’ll be scrolling through lemmy world and occasionally I’ll see comments where a word in them has been replaced with removed. Usually from context it’s early a swear word, normal stuff not slurs....
I don’t agree with lemmy.ml’s simpleminded word policing system at all (not least of which because it suffers from a variant of the Cunthorpe Problem), but I really do find terribly amusing the people who are OUTRAGED at their inability to use slurs and choose that as the reason to switch instances. I find it very telling.
I don’t recall any particular criticism of the Community College of Philadelphia at lemmy.ml being memory holed. Can you point me to some example? What do people have against that august institution anyway?
Oh, you mean the Communist Party of China. Which would be CPC.
Generally when you can’t even get the name of an entity right (and that is its actual English name!) it kind of undermines your credibility when you start talking about what it does or does not do.
It is actually wrong, but you’ll never admit to being wrong.
You’re right on one point, however: I will be denying the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Because there was no massacre at Tiananmen Square. The massacre in Beijing was a couple of kilometres away and wasn’t of students: it was of workers. The very link you so smarmily threw at me like it was evidence of your stance contains this:
In 2011, three secret cables from the United States embassy in Beijing agreed there was no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square.
Embarrassed yet? Of course not. Your kind is never embarrassed by being flatly wrong. You’ll contrive some excuse why you’re actually right or why being right doesn’t matter or some other horseshit like that. So don’t bother reading past the line here. The rest isn’t directed at you. It’s directed at people willing to actually learn and understand.
The problem is that you’re on the receiving end of as much propaganda as any citizen of China. It’s just that your propaganda is slicker and less centralized so it’s less obvious. But if you actually read that thing you so cavalierly linked to (without bothering to note that it directly contradicts your stance), you’d note that the Tiananmen protests were an absolutely tiny part of a very widespread set of protests that had spread out across the nation. And the core of these protests wasn’t the students in Tiananmen (nor even students in general) but rather workers.
So why is it you only know about students in the square? And “know” about a “massacre” in that same square that never actually happened?
In two words: lazy press.
Tiananmen Square is near the hotel favoured by foreign journalists (then and now, even) in Beijing. It was easy to “report” by walking out the door, sauntering down the street, and watching the antics of the student protestors. Further, there was a certain adorableness about these kids building their “Goddess of Democracy” statue and it suited the messaging and narrative that people the world over just wanted to be just like Americans. Nothing quite like pandering to your base, after all, when you need their money to keep operating, right?
But the real story was far larger, far messier, and, here’s the critical part, far less what the wealthy owners of your press owners wanted to have published. Because the real story was of abused workers nationwide having had the fuck enough and starting to rise up against it. (Can you think of any reason why that message would not be one that wealthy press owners would want promulgated?) The fact that these protests were all over the country, nowhere near universities outside of cities known for being university towns, and, this is the part that terrified the government most and drove them to irrational stupidity, included PLA members (!) is what led to the 1989 Beijing massacre. (There were massacres in other cities too, but information on these is very hard for me to access and no western sources have it because they couldn’t even bothered to go more than about 500m from their hotel in Beijing, not to mention other actual cities!)
Of course if you thought for even a few moments (and didn’t “other” Chinese people—that’s critical too!), you’d understand why the narrative of massacred students never made sense whatsoever. In 1989 Beijing, university students would have been the scions of the cream of the fucking Party. They’d have been the sons and daughters of the most powerful men in the country. Do you really think that the authorities would order the slaughter of their own fucking children?! Just how fucking much do you dehumanize people who disagree with you!?
So on to the actual massacre. On June 4 the square was cleaned out. Riot police went in and brutally beat the students that hadn’t yet fled: the students had been leaving in the 48 hours leading up to that because they knew what was coming (courtesy of negotiators’ frank language), leaving only the hardliners behind. (Apologists for the authorities will point at students fighting with the cops, but I have no sympathy for that view. Of fucking course the students fought with the cops. That was the entire point of this: fighting authorities and demanding better!) By the end of June 4 the student protest was gone. In the process students had been killed … but not in the square. A dozen or so had been crushed by tanks on nearby Chang’an avenue. Other civilians who tried to storm the square (including parents of the students who mistakenly believed their children were still in the square) also got shot with, likely, a few more dozen dead. (Actual numbers are impossible to get and anybody who claims to have them is a fucking liar.) But by evening of the 4th the square was empty of all but soldiers and, critically, the massacre had not yet begun.
The real massacre happened the next night near a bridge at Fuxingmen (about 2km or so away from Tiananmen square) where the aforementioned protesting workers had laid an ambush for APCs using burned out vehicles to corral them and then attack them with molotov cocktails and other improvised weapons. They were, predictably, gunned down in large numbers. (Realistic numbers say in the high four figures to low ten figures.)
So in your zeal to “score” something, not only were you wrong (and proved by the very link you provided, comically enough!), you also erased a far darker story in favour of a fantasy pitched to you by wealthy press owners and lazy reporters for over 30 years now. Congratulations! You’re a free thinker!
If any evidence was needed that you don’t bother actually reading, saying I’m “simping” for China is right up there after your very obviously not reading the Wikipedia link you tried to use as a weapon. Allow me to quote my “simping” for the members of the audience who can actually read:
… abused workers nationwide having had the fuck enough …
Because calling the protestors inside China “abused” is simping in simpletonspeak apparently.
… this is the part that terrified the government most and drove them to irrational stupidity …
That well-known simping expression: “irrational stupidity”.
… led to the 1989 Beijing massacre …
And here I am denying massacres! What a simping job!
… So on to the actual massacre. …
Denying it TWICE even! Jeeze I fucking simp a lot!
… also got shot with, likely, a few more dozen dead. (Actual numbers are impossible to get and anybody who claims to have them is a fucking liar.) …
MORE denial! My simping knows no bounds!
… But by evening of the 4th the square was empty of all but soldiers and, critically, the massacre had not yet begun. …
“Not yet begun.” The language of denial in action!
The real massacre happened the next night near a bridge at Fuxingmen…
And denial after denial! How could I possibly live with myself!? Do I live in a house without mirrors!?
They were, predictably, gunned down in large numbers. (Realistic numbers say in the high four figures to low five figures.)
MOAR DENIAL!!!111oneoneoneeleventyone!!!
You are a fucking putz with no ability to read. Just thought I’d make that clear.
YSK: Just because something is easy for you, does not mean that it is easy.
ETA; Why you should know; everyone has natural talents, everyone has skills they developed with practice or over time. Something that feels easy to you might be difficult for someone else to grasp, or they might have a different background or a different way of doing things. When you show someone else how to do something, or when you ask someone else to do something, you need to set aside your expectations on how they might do that thing, or how quickly, or how well.
Be patient. Understand not everyone comes naturally to every new skill or new talent. Some people have learning disabilities or just a lack of familiarity with skills you consider "basic." And try not to belittle someone for needing extra time to master something you find "simple" or they may never try again!
Edit2: Kind of like how I can't figure out how to edit this to save my life. I've been belittled in the past for being bad at things so my instinct was to delete this, but seeing all the conversation, I couldn't bring myself to do it! Consider me a lesson in action!
What you (hopefully) mean: Don’t be intimidated! You can do it!
What they hear: You must be stupid if you can’t do this.
What you say: It’s so simple even a child can figure it out!
What you (hopefully) mean: Calm down and work through it. You’ve got this.
What they hear: Even a child is smarter than you!
Keep in mind that if you’re dealing with someone who is struggling it is self-evidently not easy for them. Claiming that it is invalidates their experience and makes them feel small and stupid. Don’t do that.
What you should say: I get it. This can be pretty intimidating. Let’s work through this together.
Obviously Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. are federated decentralized equivalent to their centralized counterparts, but what is the counterpart in the fediverse to TikTok? It is a dominant app for millions of people, and as far as I can tell the closest thing is Peertube, but isn’t that more of a YouTube equivalent? Does it...
Indian music went metal ages ago. “I’s looking behind us now into history back” and seeing Demonic Resurrection (c.2000), Reptilian Death (c.2001), Gruesome Malady (c.2003) and Kryptos (c.2004). If you want stuff that is very Indian (as in Indian folk metal) this years release from Bloodywood (Rakshak) is a powerhouse, but Moosa Saleem and The Down Troddence are both pretty decent as well.
That said, this is a cool find. Women-fronted metal from India is hard to find.
As a new user, I’m enjoying Mastodon’s vibe so far but the one thing that is a letdown is the trending hashtags. I’ve been checking them regularly over the past couple of weeks and it seems like they’re pretty much always like this....
I actually use an ad blocker to block that section on the instance I use. “Trending” anything is of zero interest to me on any platform. It’s anti-interesting when it’s on a platform whose selling point is hand-curation.
Weird. I have exactly the opposite experience with Mastodon. Without the algorithm it’s been great. I get the content I look for instead of the content some ragebait-mongering corporate entity thinks I need to see so that I stick around and click their ads.
I get more useful and/or interesting content on Mastodon than I ever got on Twitter before I ditched it.
Search on hashtags. That alone gave me loads of useful and interesting content (to the point I had to make lists to separate them out into columns). Also look for community aggregation accounts. That’s a bot account that automatically boosts any post that mentions it. So if you’re interested in, say, progrock and there’s a @progrock community aggregation account, every time you post something on progressive rock, you mention @progrock and your post is seen by everybody who subscribes to @progrock.
There have been a lot of creative ways people have come up with to make finding content easy. Start with the hashtags and you’ll find the aggregation accounts in no time.
Bot accounts are supposed to register as such, and you can ignore them. As in ignore all bot accounts. If there’s a bot account that’s not flagged as one, you can complain to the instance admin.
Define “boring” here? If you mean “as full of shitposts and memes as Twitter and/or Reddit” then yes, you’re going to be bored on Mastodon. Since, however, I found those very posts boring as all shit on Twitter/Reddit, my feed suits me. A few hundred posts a day on topics that interest me, with about … say … 50% of them being somewhat insightful and/or thought-provoking. (The equivalent on Twitter was “however many posts the algorithm could shovel into my heap per day with about 0.01% of them being even slightly interesting”. For Reddit it was so low I never bothered with an account.)
Why YSK: Online platforms, particularly some very prominent offenders, may artificially spike prices before creating “discounts”. Whether this is intentional or the result of third party sellers fighting amongst themselves, I cannot say. Either way, don’t blindly purchase something because of a deal (camelcamelcamel is...
I’ve been telling a lot of people about it, but everyone’s a skeptic. I’ve heard a lot of people saying that they’re just going to wait to see which Reddit clone comes out on top before switching. Most of them haven’t heard of the other parts of the fediverse like mastodon. I’d like to leave fb/instagram, but like...
I have several friends on the Fediverse and several more (by orders of magnitude) not. I’ve recruited some who I thought would appreciate it and left the others where they’re happy.
Fact is, the Lemmy ecosystem needs money to handle the growing server reqirements as more people migrate as well as the development cost of new features (I know Lemmy is OSS but the devs should still get some compensation for their effort)....
I used to (a very, very, very long time ago) contribute on StackOverflow. How much? I haven’t even logged in for over 7 years (and didn’t contribute a good two years before that) and my account is still in the top 0.71% overall.
Let me tell you how I racked up that score.
I monitored the site in off-hours (easy to do with my time zone). I found new questions for the most popular programming language on the site (back then this being Java). I then did what the asker should have done: I Googled. I then wrote an answer (a correct answer: this is important) and got first-responder points.
And here’s the funny thing: I don’t program in Java. I hate the language. I know enough Java programming to be dangerous. VERY dangerous. But 18% of my points came from answering Java questions. A further 15% came from answering C++ questions which is at least a language I know … but also despise and won’t work with any longer.
This is how easy it is to game fantasy Internet points: whether “karma” or “gold” or whatever you like. And if you start providing these fantasy Internet points you’re going to start attracting people for whom high numbers of them are important and they will do what I did to the detriment of the ecosystem. (I mean at least in my case my answers were right. Disingenuous that I of all people answered them, but at least correct. This is not the case for all points whores.)
I picked lemmy.world because my mastodon account is on mastodon.world and the admin has been good there. And because browsing and subscribing to communities off-instance is a huge PITA.
Now? A bit troublesome. Soon enough, as the tooling improves? Trivial.
You don’t even need to spin up a Lemmy instance specifically. There’s some very small script-driven ActivityPub servers already showing up that can be used for this kind of activity with ease if you’ve got a minor amount of technical chops. Give it a few months and someone will have turnkeyed an ActivityPub harassment engine.
For small transaction (under 1000RMB/~US$140) there are zero transaction fees. For small businesses (doing under 10,000RMB/mo. in transactions) there are zero transaction fees as well. After that 10,000RMB limit is reached the transaction fees cap out at about 2% (they start smaller and ramp up as transactions increase).
If fraud happens when I buy something (like a business sends fake goods, or doesn’t deliver anything, etc.) the Ali Network (or Tencent for WeChat) steps in and reverses the transaction. I lose nothing. In addition if a business was egregious in its fraud, or has a history of doing it, the Ali Network (or Tencent) can and will remove that business’ ability to, well, do business. A cancer is excised.
What’s the recourse for bad transactions on Bitcoin again?
Donating via Bitcoin is the dumbest single way to donate. It’s slow, it’s expensive (robbing the people you’re donating to of cash!), it’s unreliable, and it’s prone to abuse.
I need a little help here. I run into an unexpected occurrence, one that leaves me still wondering how it came about. I logged into my Lemmy account to disable 2FA because from my engagements, it’s not functional (if it is, kindly help me). I was required to provide a token when I couldn’t even obtain the codes then I run...
I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason....
If you take sides in something as fucking inane as “Windows vs. Mac” or “iPhone vs. Android” to the point of hurting your supposed friends, that’s not a human thing. That’s an asshole thing. Don’t be an asshole. Or stop claiming to be a friend. (Or a human, for that matter.)
The only ‘vs.’ argument that is proper to argue about is Emacs vs. Vim. (The correct side in that debate is 无.)
No it isn’t. It can run Android as a task, though. Kind of like how Windows 10 and 11 can run Linux as a task. Or Linux can run Windows as a task. Or …
About that, yes. Not in-depth and not each day, obviously, but I have quite a sizable crowd I deal with on a regular basis. Comes from having a lot of former students I keep in touch with.
There’s some misinformation floating around regarding Lemmy not having a karma system. While many have discovered otherwise, this is for those who may not have....
In some of the music communities I’m in the content creators are already telling their userbase to go follow them on threads. They’re all talking about some kind of beef between Elon and Mark and the possibility of a boxing match… Mark was right to call the people he’s leaching off of fucking idiots.
Sometimes I even meet software developers who don’t fully understanding those topics.
“Even” software developers? That’s kind of a weird thing to say. Programming as a discipline is far broader and deeper than most people realize (and that includes software developers!). Knowledge in one limited specialty does not translate automatically into knowledge in a different specialty and, indeed, can actively interfere with another domain without intensive retraining. (For a concrete example of this, just look at the abominations made in “embedded”^1^ programming by people coming at it from writing Yet Another CRUD-backed Web App.)
So it’s absolutely possible for someone who’s a real whiz with making web app front ends to have a very hazy grasp of security and privacy. It’s a peripherally-related discipline at best.
^1^ “Scare quotes” used because I don’t view what amounts to a PC running Linux in a funky form factor as meaningfully “embedded”.
I could (and probably have worked!) my entire professional life in domains you’ve never once caught a glimpse of using kit you wouldn’t recognize. To me it’s trivially obvious how to, say, debug an SPI bus timing problem where you might not even know what an SPI bus is without looking it up in Wikipedia first.
(I guarantee you that within 3m of you there are orders of magnitude more SPI connections than any form of encrypted connections.)
Now the only reason I know what end-to-end encryption is and why it’s important is because I took a short break in my mainline career and worked on PKI for about six years. (I then ragequit commodity software and went back to actual software engineering, but that’s a different story.) Had I not had that experience I could likely have made some guesses as to what E2EE entailed, but I certainly wouldn’t have understood immediately why this was a critical feature.
Really, software is a FAR LARGER domain than you think. Hell, it’s far larger than I think, probably, and I think it’s ten times larger than you think. 😉
I’m saying that since we rely on software every day, there are a few concepts that every person should understand on a basic level.
Loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong before anything software-related I’d put knowledge of fundamental statistics in the queue for things people deal with on a daily basis that they should understand at a basic level. It’s one of the most critical skills a person can have in modern life and it’s one that almost nobody (including almost all programmers) has any kind of understanding of. If they did have a better understanding of it, to quote the Great Sage Equalling Heaven:
That knowledge would help them make better decisions and probably the world would be better if most people had it.
😉
And that’s just the beginning of the list. I’d also put basic psychology, basic marketing, basic civics even ahead of any degree of software knowledge. Knowing marketing, for example, wouldn’t cause someone to be fooled to the point of saying something like this:
But they should know what cryptocurrencies and AI are, since those technologies are slowly becoming a part of our lives.
But gentle snark aside:
But I think something went wrong in our society if people don’t understand very important concepts that impact our daily lives and which are mostly decades old.
Try tens of thousands of years old. You make it sound like the problem is technology. The problem is the same as it’s always been: people. A better understanding of people, of their motivations, of the tricks they use to further those motivations, etc. is what makes you better able to manage life and society. Understanding the tricks of marketers and advertisers (even before those were words in human language!) is what makes you understand things like “hype cycles” and “if you haven’t paid, you’re not the customer”. You’re focusing on a single channel of abuse. There are MILLIONS of channels of abuse. Learning why people find said channels and how/why they exploit them is a far more valuable skill.
Oh, and statistics. You need that too. You have NO idea just how bad we are at those and just how important that knowledge is for spotting grifters, liars, and other scum.
Let me preface by saying, I would love to hear counter points and am fully open to the fact that I could be wrong and totally out of touch. I just want to have some dialogue around something that’s been bothering me in the fediverse....
Uh … I was in circles that used words like “norms” and “normals” and, yes, “normies” before the Internet was a “thing”. SF fandom of the '70s was easily as nerdy and toxic as are any of today’s Internet circle jerks.
Sorry, Kiddies^1^, but very little of what you do is new. Sometimes the techniques are new (because technology happened) but humans have been human for, well, as long as humans have existed.
^1^ If you’re finding this word offensive, you might want to take a long, hard look at how you use words like the one that triggered this thread before the inevitable downvoting.
Is anyone else seeing swear words censored in comments?
I’ll be scrolling through lemmy world and occasionally I’ll see comments where a word in them has been replaced with removed. Usually from context it’s early a swear word, normal stuff not slurs....
What is the fediverse equivalent to TikTok?
Obviously Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. are federated decentralized equivalent to their centralized counterparts, but what is the counterpart in the fediverse to TikTok? It is a dominant app for millions of people, and as far as I can tell the closest thing is Peertube, but isn’t that more of a YouTube equivalent? Does it...
Indian Music Goes Metal (Nooran Sisters x SOAD) (www.youtube.com)
Why are Mastodon's trending hashtags so ... dull? (lemm.ee)
As a new user, I’m enjoying Mastodon’s vibe so far but the one thing that is a letdown is the trending hashtags. I’ve been checking them regularly over the past couple of weeks and it seems like they’re pretty much always like this....
YSK: Many price drops aren't what they seem... (news.ufl.edu)
Why YSK: Online platforms, particularly some very prominent offenders, may artificially spike prices before creating “discounts”. Whether this is intentional or the result of third party sellers fighting amongst themselves, I cannot say. Either way, don’t blindly purchase something because of a deal (camelcamelcamel is...
Amogh Symphony (www.youtube.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/1375343...
at least one lemmy.world admin accepted an off the record meeting with meta, and they won't tell you about it.
Don’t belive me? Ask them....
Are any of your friends on the fediverse too? If not, have you tried to get them to join?
I’ve been telling a lot of people about it, but everyone’s a skeptic. I’ve heard a lot of people saying that they’re just going to wait to see which Reddit clone comes out on top before switching. Most of them haven’t heard of the other parts of the fediverse like mastodon. I’d like to leave fb/instagram, but like...
How would you feel about awards on lemmy?
Fact is, the Lemmy ecosystem needs money to handle the growing server reqirements as more people migrate as well as the development cost of new features (I know Lemmy is OSS but the devs should still get some compensation for their effort)....
What the hell just happened?
I need a little help here. I run into an unexpected occurrence, one that leaves me still wondering how it came about. I logged into my Lemmy account to disable 2FA because from my engagements, it’s not functional (if it is, kindly help me). I was required to provide a token when I couldn’t even obtain the codes then I run...
Is having an Android really a deal-breaker for some people?
I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason....
YSK: Lemmy DOES have a karma system (i.imgur.com)
There’s some misinformation floating around regarding Lemmy not having a karma system. While many have discovered otherwise, this is for those who may not have....
This might help explain the spectacular launch of Threads (lemmy.world)
Automatically creating a shadow account for everyone on Instagram?...
why can't we have federated identity ?
Why can’t we have federated identity to login into fediverse instead of creating login for each instance?
I think the average person just simply doesn't care about their privacy.
In some of the music communities I’m in the content creators are already telling their userbase to go follow them on threads. They’re all talking about some kind of beef between Elon and Mark and the possibility of a boxing match… Mark was right to call the people he’s leaching off of fucking idiots.
Rant: I hate the term “normie”. (kbin.social)
Let me preface by saying, I would love to hear counter points and am fully open to the fact that I could be wrong and totally out of touch. I just want to have some dialogue around something that’s been bothering me in the fediverse....