Huh, is the cloud really just someone else’s computer?

And yes, I’ve managed to cut out Microsoft of my personal life entirely. I mean what would I need them for? I’ll click on a Teams invitation… But I don’t really rely on that, or send them out myself. Other than that I have enough other operating systems, storage devices, Office suites…

Yes, I heard we’re way better at diagnosing adult ADHD these days. People just had to somehow cope on their own, two decades ago. They didn’t get a diagnose, let alone medication, back then…

(It’s just scientific progress, though. And attention to detail, like how things affect different groups of people differently (ie. different symptoms for men/women). I don’t see how it’s “Not the Onion”?!)

Sure. You write numbers with the most significant digit to the left, and least significant one to the right. That’s kind of how we all write all numbers, so it should be the same with dates 😉 Though we have all kinds of crazy people and they’ll say it’s “dreiviertel fünf” and nobody has any clue what time that’s supposed to be… I’d argue it should not be that weird, though 😅

Sorry, not an answer to the question, but 2024-08-30 is an ISO 8601 date format. Endorsed in Europe (part of our norms) and everyone should write dates like that because it’s the most clever way. US would be something like 08/30/2024 or Aug 30, 2024.

Aren’t the rules fixed since 2022? As far as I know the way it works is, legislation / the EU comes up with rules. It’s the companies job to make their products abide by law. And then it’s down to lawyers / jurists to determine if they comply by law? I don’t see how they as a company need to wait for the European Commission to do something… Seems the commission sent them a notice a year ago, how their lawyers don’t think the fee models conforms to law. But that’d be Apple’s job to fix. Or have their legal team come up with something?!

Yes. I’m not very educated on the Worpress side of things… Kinda necessary, though, to keep compatibility with the Fediverse AND the No-AI people in my opinion. I mean the Fediverse is kind of the place for people to go if they don’t want algorithms and bots to dominate the place?!

I mean if no single software fits your bill, maybe go for a combination of them? Post your blog posts in a Ghost installation, your podcasts in Castopod and have your community on a NodeBB forum? The Fediverse kinda includes the idea it’s all one big network anyway. So you don’t have to squeeze everything on a single server and one CMS.

Other than that: Wordpress is open-source. You could also wait for the enshittification to happen. We’re fairly sure someone is going to fork it and maybe they’ll provide a seemless migration. So if you’re patient enough, you might be able to stick with your current setup. Just that you Wordpress will some day have a different name and developer community. These things happen all the time. I’ll just switch from Firefox to LibreWolf once I’m unhappy with Mozilla’s decisions. Solves the user-facing part of the issues, and there’s almost no effort involved.

Yes, surely. I mean we’re a bit in a different situation in a digital place. Votes are way easier here (than in real life) and we can easily automate it into bigger processes.

For example I could envision something like a jury to make judiciary decisions. Not sure if that counts as direct democracy… But we don’t have to ask everyone about every moderation decision. Maybe just grant everyone the ability to report stuff and then the software goes ahead and samples 15 random people from the community (who arent part of the drama) and makes them decide. I believe that could help with fatigue. And speeds it up, we can just set the software to take people who are online right now, and discard and replace them if they don’t get at it asap.

Or make it not entirely direct, but at least do away with the hierarchies in a representative democracy. Instead of appointing moderators, we’d form a web of trust. I’m completely free to delegate power to arbitrary people and if my web of trusted people arrive at a score of 30 it’s spam, it is spam for me. And someone else could have a different perspective on the network. That’d help with all the coordination as well, because I can just not care, and the platform automatically delegates the power. And once I do care, I’m free to vote and that spares other people the effort to do the same. That’d at least make it direct in a way that we’re all moderators and users at the same time.

Of course democracy is a trade-off. And there’s a million edge cases, and we need some other things which go along with it. Accountability and transparency. We’d need an appeal process, for example with my first example if the jury doesn’t do a good job.

I’m probably not at a 100% perfect solution with these ideas. But I’m fairly sure we’d be able to do way more in a software-driven platform than the analogies we can take from countries and their approach at decision making. Especially regarding hierarchies within the system. However, things also clash. Transparency might be opposed to privacy. We have a lot more abuse on the internet than in the real world and it’s maybe not just easier to do votes here, but also easier to manipulate them, than what we’d take inspiration from in the offline world.

2. PieFed did a public poll to form a roadmap for 2025. I think it turned out very well. PeerTube also does that. The open-source tool that looks like GOG’s website is called Fider

I love it as well. Though, from a software developers perspective, it rarely goes all the way. There’s just so many technical decisions to be made, limitations, vague requirements, contradictions. Sometimes users think they want something but they really need the opposite of it… And they always want wildly different things and more often than not it’s not healthy for the projects to approach it that way. They’d instead do it in order as mandated by the technical design, have more pressing issues and all of that is buried beneath layers of technical complexity. So the users hardly know what’s appropriate to do. I believe that’s why we often gravitate to the “benevolent dictator” model in Free Software. Or why some regular (paid) software projects fail or exceed budged and time planning.
It should be that way, though. If software is meant for users, the developers should probably listen to them, so I love what these projects do, to at least augment their development process with some participation and guidance by the target audience. And some people are really good at it. (Edit: And we might have elements of a meritocracy as well, and people need programming skills to participate in some ways… So, I think we might not be able to do more than try to make it as democratic as possible. At least as far as we’re talking about the development process itself.)

I think the most obvious one is moderation. What gets deleted, who gets kicked out. Then for example community rules, what’s the topic and rules of discussion. Every user/member could have a say in that. Maybe we could do some more structural and organizational decisions.

It gets a bit tricky with technology. Ideally we could do things like democratically decide to have a voice chat (if that’s what people want) and somehow 3 months later the platform has a voice chat… But it’s not that easy, software development doesn’t work this way.

Uh, I’d love someone to have a try at full-blown direct democracy. Most aspects being controlled (and ideally owned) by the very same people who use the platform. Not sure if that’s good or feasible, though.

And what I always love is to see design principles that foster a nice, amicable atmosphere. Some online communities, games etc have aspects of that. It’s somewhat more rare on modern social media. I sometimes wish hanging out on the internet was a bit less about politics, trolling and memes, getting agitated amongst random anonymous people. And a bit more like an evening at the Irish Pub with friends. Or getting to know new friends there.
We do things like that. I just think good platform design still has potential to achieve way more than we currently do.

I’d expect at least the authors who do talks about the Fediverse to be here: Cory Doctorow… Marc-Uwe Kling… There are some webcomic authors as well. And we have some journalists. Heise Online comes to mind, they have their own Peertube instance. Then some other known activists, bloggers… And some people share drawings, fanart etc, not sure if that counts.

Edit: I forgot George Takei, and several other people.
Here’s some list of noteworthy accounts including some celebrities: https://joinfediverse.wiki/Notable_Fediverse_accounts

I think PieFed can currently only handle a very specific chunk of Mastodon toots which somehow fit into our concept of communities. It can’t attach toots anywhere if there isn’t some group connection. To my knowledge neither do we do user following in a way it’d show up in your subscription feed. You can however go to a user’s profile page and click the bell icon and you’ll get notifications for their posts. That’s probably not going to help here, since your posts aren’t there in the first place.

I’d be nice, though to fully support Mastodon. And the developers are aware of that.

• Step 1: Outsource security to a dead email inbox
• Step 2: Blame other people
• Step 3: Profit?

Hehe. I feel a bit “offended” by the …“stopped coding once they saw AI could do it.” Because that’s not my reality. I do a lot of computer hobby stuff, tinkering, electronics… And for me it does shit. Doing the maths for sensor values failed, can’t ever do memory allocation the way it’s done on microcontrollers. Fails with slightly complex regular software projects… I mean it can do some quick and dirty webdesign and code some rudimentary apps and games if you’re into that… Whatever people can do after they read a beginners coding book and a bit of copy-pasta. And it helps look up documentation. But I see zero reason to quit my hobbies with what AI can do as of today 😉

Doesn’t sound good, though. I mean a grandpa will consume a lot of media after he can’t get up and walk around any more. But that’s not how it’s supposed to be at 30yo. It is somehow modern society, though. Social interactions get displaced by para-social relations, like to a favorite streamer or influencer and you’d take part in their world. Combined with resignation we get people like incels. I’m about 10 years older and I still have a lot of friends who do stuff. Go running or whatever. Or they have kids and that takes up their time. I can see however, how things like social media steer attention away from human elements of life.

And what do they do now instead of memes and share stuff on social media? Did they detach and turn to useful hobbies like woodworking, or did they switch to consume only and they’re still on social media?

Well known in the industry how you don’t assess programmers by lines of code. You kind of want them to be efficient and clean. Spend their day thinking and design clever solutions… Not pump out lots of unmaintainable low quality stuff. And have a million lines of that by tomorrow. But yeah, guess every aspect of this aligns well. You should be using Linux by now. Or at least do the switch in the near future.

Sure. Working on manifesting the robot apocalypse, total surveillance states with dystopian predictive policing etc …probably a risky bet. Don’t need a PhD to arrive at that conclusion.

The far-right sure loves their identity politics. Shitting on “wokeness” for years but they’re big time into the same game. Just that they’re not concerned with repressed people or minorities and their recognition. They like white males.

Not really a ‘not the onion’ article though, for people who know how fascism operates.

Interestingly enough, even the simpler things like removing the censoring of certain countries’ videos still look super wonky. I mean removing that mosaic is something I figure quite some people would be interested in. Yet technology doesn’t seem advanced enough to do it properly. And I’ve had a look at what people do with the video generators, and they’ve made quite some advancements. Pulling off clothes kinda works now. But it’s still fairly limited in all other aspects. They do a short clip of one specific thing. And seems they’re limited to one movement type and you’d need the next customized model for the next thing that happens. And then also make sure the people in the video look alike… Do 20 tries until those 5sec look somewhat realistic… And those clips don’t line up well. Fluids don’t seem to work, I have no clue whether they have some control over facial expressions or whatever is important when “acting” like realistic humans… I bet we’re still a bit away from it generating a video of “the act” from start to finish… I’d also predict this is a good use-case for generative AI, though. I mean why not? And it’ll lead to all kinds of issues, like the ability to generate videos of celebrities, other not-okay things… But all the human-made 30s clips aren’t really high quality to begin with either. So it shouldn’t be too hard for AI to get a foot in the door of the porn market.

But if there’s really 2-3 min videos out there like you said, I’d like to see them. Just for research purposes… Because all I’ve seen is longer videos with one thing repeating but nothing really happens. Or people stitching together clips, but they’ll be doing a million cuts to entirely different camera angles or narration to hide how all the clips aren’t really consistent.

Hmm. Seems pillow-avif doesn’t build. Maybe there’s an extra step involved like apt install libavif-dev

Maybe your Python 3.14 is too new, there’s some bugreport open with pillow-avif and wheels for Python 3.14