Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • Tangential advice: Many people use YouTube (and formerly Twitch until they nixed it) as a place to store videos. As in the only copy of a video is hosted there.

    If your videos are precious to you (or you think they’re going to be), make arrangements for them to be at least stored elsewhere, if not hosted. That’s not going to be cheap what with hardware prices going through the roof, personally or third-party, but it is necessary because no host is both trustworthy and permanent.

    Actually not even self-storage is as trustworthy and permanent as we’d like, but it’s still better than any alternative for data retention.

    Also, donate to your chosen Fediverse host(s) if you can.


  • Where are their communications? Who visits a government website without needing to?

    To me it makes sense that they should cover as much ground as possible and have accounts on all major platforms as well as making announcements on TV and radio.

    And in order to do so they should have their own accounts on there in order that their message gets across directly without having to go through a third party that has an account on there.

    Now, when that site starts espousing “free speech” of the sort that only they like, then it might be a good idea to not use that particular platform any more, because that brings in the third party interference that wasn’t there in the first place, even if the site was technically third party.

    But hey whatever, now let’s make, say, the BBC the mouthpiece of the government - it’s not like the Tories didn’t try really hard to do that when they were in power - and have everyone report on that. Far better.





  • Surely you’re not saying they shouldn’t have had a Twitter presence?

    Or is this more of a “they should have left when Elon took over” kind of thing? In which case, they probably thought that the majority of people who follow(ed) them on there wouldn’t have left immediately - not least because there weren’t any good alternatives* at the time - so it would have made sense to maintain a presence, which I think is what’s actually going on.

    * Yes, Mastodon existed, but you’ve got to think about the average person here. There’s a reason the first people on there were academics and tech folks.




  • “Mbin” literally stands for “magazine bin” though. The use of “magazine” is a gun pun carried over from kbin. Kbin was named after the karabiner rifle, which, somewhat ironically, doesn’t use magazines, but it’s still a gun thing.

    The true format-agnostic platform would be named something like “gbin” because ActivityPub calls communities/magazines “groups”. That could be a throwback to Usenet, but it’s a fairly generic term.

    … although that being an anagram of “bing” might raise a few eyebrows at Microsoft legal.




  • The Fediverse is also a sewer of both overt and covert Antisemitism

    Is this a problem unique to the Fediverse, or is this a case that it’s more rampant here? Or does it only seem like it?

    My feeds are fairly well curated, or perhaps you might say “blinkered”, so I don’t see a lot of it. Or maybe I don’t see what’s right in front of me, which is why I ask, since you definitely see it better than I can.

    (This is not an attempt at a bad faith argument; I’m firmly anti-anti-Semitism, and I’m not saying it’s not there. Frankly, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t any. Anywhere there’s people, their prejudices generally follow.)


  • Me: “Oh no, that wtf means it’s gonna be a LiveLeak site isn’t it?”

    platform for general use

    Me: “Ah, so maybe not so bad then.”

    Every topic is welcome.

    Me: “… and yet…”

    Seriously though, I’m all for the Fediverse in all its many forms, and without people like you it wouldn’t exist. Thank you.




  • It’s a lot easier to complain than it is to make the world a better place. And before you think that that’s a complete agreement with your reasoning, note that 1) Your comment is also an easy complaint and 2) Does this mean that people who can’t produce quality content shouldn’t be allowed to complain when there’s a lack of it?

    The big irony here is that OP actually went to the effort of creating content, even if it was “only” a complaint.


  • I can only speak to the topics I followed on another account, but it provided plenty of reading for those topics. Whether it covered all possible posts and whether it works well for all topics, I couldn’t say.

    It does kind of rely on people tagging things properly, which people might not do if they’re on a Mastodon instance specific to that topic. But then, they ought to know that those posts wouldn’t Federate well, and indeed, might not want them to.


  • Mastodon is microblogging. As others have said, it’s similar to Twitter. Lemmy is a link aggregator with a comments/conversation section per link, like Slashdot, Digg or Reddit.

    I think the thing that people forget to do with Mastodon is to follow hashtags. The feature wasn’t there early on but it’s been there for probably a year or more now. Then you block or mute the accounts you don’t want to see that post under those tags.

    It’s a useful substitute for following accounts when you have no idea which accounts to follow. You can then curate and actually follow accounts whose content outside those hashtags also catches your eye.

    On the link aggregators there are the groups which don’t exist on Mastodon, but that’s what hashtags are for, right? Marking the topic.

    The only hard part about it for me is feeling bad about blocking innocent accounts.

    Also worth mentioning is that Mbin instances exist, and that software is basically both Lemmy and Mastodon rolled into one site. The posts aren’t fully integrated though. You have to click something to view the microblog side of things and click something to go back.


  • Minecraft Bedrock is written in and compiled from C++ and is completely closed-source.

    The original Java version is technically also closed-source, but Java bytecode is relatively easy to decompile to a high level and Mojang (and surprisingly, even Microsoft*) tend to look the other way when people do that.

    It seems like this was written for the Java version, but I’m not completely sure whether it’s simply a protocol conversion, in which case, the protocols are already well known, and converting it to work with Bedrock might not be too difficult.

    Yes, there are open-source alternatives, but nowhere near as many people play those as play Minecraft, which is probably why that was the target platform and not one of the others.

    *For now.