Astronomer & video game data scientist with repressed anger

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • I like the “antennas” feature a lot

    For the uninitiated, Firefish’s antennae are saved searches, where you can specify lists of keywords and users and come back to them over and over again. It’s similar to Mastodon’s hashtag follow feature, only more flexible. Though, IIRC, it doesn’t add the search results to your home feed; it keeps them separate, and undiluted.

    From an administrator’s point of view, Firefish’s Recommended timeline is super cool, and is similar to Akkoma’s ‘bubble’ feature. It lets you specify a list of other federated servers to display posts from, creating a kind of “super-local” timeline. It’s the kind of thing I’d love to see in Lemmy and kbin.


  • Firefish is definitely a bit of an unfortunate rebranding. Though ‘Calckey’ wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire, as a name, either. But at the end of the day, we really need to learn to recontextualize fediverse plataforms as software that runs a service, not the service itself. They’re website engines that power social websites, not a social brand in and of themselves, kind of like how WordPress is a quasi-static website suite that is used for a huge number of blogs and quais-static websites.

    No one shares something from, say, the TechCrunch website, or Time website, and goes “Hey, Iook what I found on WordPress!”



  • Here’s the thing, though: Whenever you have a position like “Person for Group”, that Group is being singled out for a reason.

    And that reason is lack of representation.

    To put it another way, so have a Minister for Women is a tacit acknowledgement that the others operate as if men are the default person. All of the other ministers are Ministers for Men.



  • If a Threads user is following you, they need most of this information. It’s literally how the Fediverse works. The only thing that isn’t is your IP address, and that’s something that I’m not sure they’d even get. That might be your host’s IP address.

    Remember, the Fediverse isn’t a bunch of iframes looking at 3rd party websites. It works by mirroring remote content. A follow is literally a request to ingest posts from a user.


  • It would be nice if servers could be tuned to prioritize locally hosted communities over remote ones. There’s a real opportunity for each community on the same topic to have distinct flavours and cultures, but so long as they all appear to be the same damn thing and appear with the same frequency in the content stream, it’s never going to happen. It’s not like people really look at the remote server domain.

    It’s really nice that the Local feed exists, but when people just bulk subscribe to 8 different communities with the same name, stick to their subscription list, and then treat them all as the same place, that just kills a lot of potential for heterogeneity.




  • Local isn’t a good measure here, though. The BBC local stream is literally just going to be posts by BBC employees.

    The global stream isn’t a great measure, either, frankly, as journalists primarily want to yet their posts seen, not see a huge field of noise. Those who are doing digging for social media stories maybe want a wider cut of things, but they can still do that through their replies, and through global. Search just isn’t going to be as effective as on generalist servers.

    But then, search isn’t super effective on Mastodon, anyway, and all the big generalist servers are running Mastodon.

    There’s nothing preventing them from using secondary accounts on .social for research, though.






  • I’m not sure how lemmy or kbin handle instance-hosted media links – whether they import the media and redirect the link, or whether they point to the original media object – but otherwise, yes.

    There are ways to access other websites directly from within a given website – iframes and the like – but that’s not what happens here. Each website is independent of each other, and all text is locally hosted in your instance’s database.

    There are also (limited) copies of user profiles all over the place – if you click on my username, for instance, you’ll be taken to lemmy.world/u/Kichae@kbin.social. That’s a local lemmy.world user address, even though I’m not on lemmy.world. I can’t login to that account – it’s either credentialless, or has randomized credentials – but it exists. And by going there, you get to see what lemmy.world knows about my activity across the fediverse. Without ever leaving lemmy.world.