Thanks - it’s interesting to hear what brings people to different platforms.

It sounds like there’s a lot of potential in Hubzilla for front-end developers seeking to make it a friendlier experience - from what everyone here is saying the back-end seems pretty solid.

I interpreted TheLugal as considering the old Facebook vibes as a bad thing - but each to their own!

As you’re using Friendica - Is the old school Facebook aesthetic part of what makes Friendica appeal to you? Did you move there directly from Facebook back in the day?

And if you have been around for a while, what has the recent growth of ActivityPub felt like from your corner of the Internet?

Friendica has been around since 2010 - it is very cool to me that the content we post here might reach users of a platform that was created almost a decade before ActivityPub was specified.

It’s total propaganda, but viewing it now, I see it as a picture of the story Americans tell. Their shitty ideas of progress are highlighted - pollution, cars, use and abuse of the land.

In the shadow of all this, hidden in the dark on the corner of the painting that they’re all moving towards, is genocide, murder, killing of buffalos, and the eradication of wildlife.

“American Progress” sounds like a dark joke - like a greasy canteen pizza being labeleld “American vegetable”.

Of course, this was not the intention of the painter, and generations of white Americans have looked at this painting and completely ignored the story that is really being told. But it’s all there, laid bare, and there’s no use pretending they weren’t aware of what they were doing.

And for that, at least it has some value. It’s like gathering evidence of war crimes from the offenders bragging about their atrocities. Anyone who proudly hung this on their wall you know what they knew, and you know where they stood.

That said, what a shitty piece of work. It’s a crime against good taste depicting a crime against humanity.

“Go see our movie!”

“No, not like THAT!!”

Ugh.

In case you’re European, and genuinely wonder.

Having children leave the house is a re-defining moment, just like establishing a family in the first place. It’s scary, but it comes with all kinds of possibilities as well.

It sounds like you did a good job on reinventing yourself as a parent, of course trusting your judgment that your kid is indeed wonderful. But the fact that you love him enough that it keeps you going probably counts as further evidence that you’re not doing so bad.

You’ll manage to reinvent yourself again. And if you can’t do it in your marriage, there’s no shame in doing it outside it.

There’s still a bunch of kindness around. There’s good food to be eaten and culture to be consumed. There’s drinks to be had and friends to be made. Dances to learn and skills to master.

There’s a lot of things to be hopeful about, aside from the whole everything going to shit thing. And if you can brighten up people’s lives by doing it, you might even contribute to the world going slightly less to shit.

I think it’s time to recalibrate and focus more on the closer things. Doesn’t mean one should ignore the world, but we’re not fixing it by stressing out, doom-scrolling, and posting about it online either. We tried.

This is supported in PieFed by default, in case you’re interested in checking out other Lemmy-compatible software.

My filters kept me sane through American election season.

Yeah, it’s the same in mbin. It’s pretty common for spam bots here to create their own magazines to post in, for some reason. It’s a bit weird, because generally nobody will see their posts at all. I guess it might have to do with SEO?

Anyway, I try to weed them out by sorting by new and local now and then, but other than that they’re hard to spot. Reports are much appreciated.

Likewise the heroic nerds of the Threadiverse coined the term months before Threads was even announced, and they would be hard pressed to give it up to some scumbag billionaire.

It’s an epic culture war being fought between two largerly agreeing parties.

Out of curiosity, what made you change your mind and give it a chance? Any breaking point on Reddit’s side, or just boredom or a sense of adventure?

In regular migration studies there’s always talk of puah and pull factores; reasons for wanting to leave where you are, and reasons for wanting to go to the destination. While I personally like it here, I guess we are currently depending more on push factors than pull factors to attract people from Reddit.

It’s what happens when the idiots calculating your indicators of economic prosperity care only about aggregate levels of production, but don’t give a shit how many are homeless.

And now, the billionaires who were the only ones doing well already are in charge of things. My only hope is that they might finally be eaten, French revolution style.

A red flag for me, from an outside perspective, was how the #MastodonforHarris campaign was dealt with.

A completely grassroots organization led by ordinary Americans who care about democracy get together and collect hundreds of thousands for the campaign. Some are relatively well-connected and attempt to reach out. And, as far as I could see, the campaign couldn’t even be arsed to issue an official “thank you”.

If this is how far removed the campaign was from ordinary Americans, who in the world had any access? Who would feel like their voice is being heard, if fundraising half a million is not even enough to be recognized with a thank you from some low-ranking representative?

I’m not American, and I have no idea what the situation is like on the ground over there. I kind of hoped/assumed they put in their effort being available to steel workers in Pennsylvania rather than nerds on Mastodon. But seeing how it all went down I guess they were equally far removed from everyone.

Sanity will be in non-compliance.

Don’t comply with anything. Involve yourself in governance locally if you can. Work with your district or state. Disobey anything going against your principles.

If you cannot get involved, see what you can do as a private citizen. Who could you hide in your anttic, figuratively speaking (hopefully).

The US is not such a strong federal state. You make it real by believing in it.

Stop believing in it. It is dead.

I see quite a bit boosted on Mastodon, but I’m not sure where they are all posting from. On Pixelfed I follow photographers, so I see photography.

If youwant to see more art, the first step is to follow artists. Try to search for hashtags related to art forms you’re interred in on a large Mastodon instance, and follow relevant users wherever you want to follow them from. Pixelfed might be good if you’re not interested in text posts, but make sure you display boosts. Lemmy is not good as most content is invisible.

Once you follow some, for example @[email protected], you’ll see what they boost from around the Fediverse. Artists generally have a decent overview over their sphere of interest, so once the ball starts rolling you’ll see content from all over.

I filled my feed up quite nicely with independent musicians very quickly after listening to RadioFreeFedi a little while and following a couple of artists. Their boosts creates a nice little window into the indie music scene.

Always happy to see Friendica users around - it seems to integrate impressively with huge parts of the Fediverse.

I remember reading about it in the early days of the project, and not giving it a shot because there’s just no way any of my social graph would come with me there. Checking in now and then through the years it always seemed like an odd corner of the Internet. It’s really cool to me that I suddenly find myself seamlessly interacting with its users, both anonymously here and with my full name on Mastodon.

Sadly not entirely accurate for Lemmy, as it does not display content from other platforms (except comments or posts from mbin, piefed, etc) unless a Lemmy community is explicitly tagged. You cannot follow mastodon or Pixelfed user from Lemmy in any meanjngful way.

Ah, yeah, that’s messed up.

I’m really happy Mastodon takes their time todevelop new features instead of rushing into things. Makes me hopeful they’ll get it right.

It’s tricky with guppe though, as it allows spammers a vector into instances they have no business being federated with. The #mastodonforharris hashtag has been taken over by users abusing the mutual aid group, and whenever there are apam attacks on mastodon this is how they reach the entire network rather than individual servers.

So it does confront a fundamental problem with how Mastodon works. But as long as they’re there, I guess it makes sense to use them for legitimate uses as well.

I’m not sure what to make of compatibility between Mastodon groups and Lemmy communities. On the one hand, it would obviously be a good thing if the technology would talk as much as possible. On the other, the microblog format does not look so good in Lemmy unless the author is knowingly making and effort to create a thread rather than a post, starting with a title and all that.

Compatibility between the two by default could end up flooding both services with content that looks out of place, and lowering the user experience rather than improving it. It would also subject one service to the technical constraints/decisions of the other.

I think it might make more sense to keep them somehow separate, and leave it to the different fediverse software to implement it however it would like. The priority of the Mastodon developers, in my opinion, should be to create something that works as well as possible in their ecosystem.

Then again, I could absolutely be wrong.