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 5 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • 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.


  • Large corporations tend to put profit over morality and the legal machinery to even try to bring them back into line moves slowly (and expensively) when they do so.

    If your Mastodon posts are visible from Threads, Threads may “accidentally” determine that that content was posted by one of their own accounts covered by their own Terms of Service and so choose to do something with it that the Mastodon user did not agree to.

    Now consider that Meta, Threads’ parent company has put things in both its Facebook and Instagram Terms of Service that say they can do whatever they like with content posted on their platforms, including feed it to any “AI” as they see fit.

    And what about responses to Threads posts from the Fediverse? What rights do Meta have to those? I’m sure you can imagine what Meta thinks, or might allow themselves to think, in that regard.

    Presumably you can now understand why some Mastodon instances (and other Fediverse places) don’t want anything to do with Meta or their products and wish to protect their users from that abuse.

    You might argue that it will happen anyway, but in their view, any protection is better than none.

    And the great thing about the Fediverse is that you’re welcome to find, or even run, an instance that leaves itself open to such “interoperability”.


  • Well, it is pronounced “blow high” (or something pretty close). And to continue the fun facts, English used to have the word “haye” which is related to the Swedish word, but we stopped using it in favour of “shark”. Since it sounds like a greeting (as does “high” for that matter) as well as a common feedstock for animals (hay), we’d probably use the alternative “hayefish”, with or without the ‘e’, if we hadn’t dropped it altogether.


  • Yeah, Usenet was where it was at back at the turn of the millennium. Then again, I had access through a university. Access wasn’t free outside of places like that.

    ISPs were spotty on coverage because even at that time, they needed at least a terabyte of storage to dedicate to it, and still not be able to cover everything that was on there. Of course, they might’ve got away with less if they decided not to carry the binaries newsgroups…

    The way it worked was a lot like how Fediverse federation works now, or similarly, filesharing. It was possible to be reading a thread of messages and the older ones wouldn’t be available on your local/ISP news server because their space had been recycled for newer data.

    If you were lucky, your attempt to access that message might cause your host to grab it on a future request to upstream hosts or peers, but some Usenet messages are completely lost to time because everyone purged them.

    Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.


  • For those interested in getting into listening to internet radio, see also: https://dir.xiph.org (Icecast network) and https://directory.shoutcast.com (Shoutcast network), both of which have been around for ~25 years at this point if the domain registry is anything to go by. Definitely in their current forms for over a decade.

    Caveat: Lots of commercial content and stations, which is, of course, antithetical to Fediverse ideology. Still worth a look if you can’t (yet) find what you want in the Fediverse.

    (There’s also http://radio.garden which has a very pretty interface but has multiple negative points: in-browser only, needs a lot of JavaScript access to station-associated domains on a per-station basis, is HTTP(no S)-only and may not work for stations outside your own country.)