FailForward @FailForward@social.cleverlibre.org
Exploring, failing, backtracking, just to identify the only viable path forward. And then scarred, stumbling forward into the future. Learning.
Boring and steady. Knowing little and questioning a lot. Mostly harmless.
***
This is an experimental scrapbook space. A collection of stuff I want to keep in a form somewhere on the spectrum between a blog and a shoe-box full of scraps, cut-outs, quotes, links and reading notes and sometimes my own silly thoughts about them.
Perhaps it might be of marginal interest to others too, but I don't care that much.
Joined Jan 2021
@borrof Do you happen to know who's the original author?
@mangeurdenuage
@borrof
Very inspiring :-) Thanks.
@mangeurdenuage
@NEETzsche
We tested with other people sending stuff like rich text, images, etc in different ways. From friendica to masto, to pleroma, to qoto, etc. The outcome is that indeed qoto behaves well, on other platforms and client combinations things get screwed up in various and rather unexpected ways. What pisses me off mostly is that vanilla Mastodon strips a link elements. So when I create a link with link text in markdown, plain Mastodon users never get to see the link, just the text. That sucks infinitely.
@freemo
@freemo Thanks. The whole thing is a mess. With several people I had a conversation in the last 2 weeks where we jointly explored how things get screwed up/rendered differently on different platforms. Basically when you write something, it's completely uncertain how the receiving party will get it.
@matt I am not sure this renders well on your instance...
Also, I consistently want quote-tooting on #Mastodon.
@hellquist Spooky fantasy there. Reminds me of the book Nightfall by Asimov and Silverberg. Those were not planets, but stars. Good and intriguing story.
FailForward
boosted
Eventually Mitch McConnel did find his political spine and declared that Trump did it and that he was responsible. Then in a swift Mitch move he presented his spine as a token of his loyalty to Trump and the party and pleaded not guilty. #impeachment #MitchMcConnell #Trump #trump
FailForward
boosted
I wrote a thing for my friends not on the Fediverse.
imakethingswork.com/blog/socia…
Social Media Alternatives
imakethingswork.com/blog/socia…
Social Media Alternatives
@WinstonSmith1984@mastodon.online
Also follow here https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/6942
This is a front end issue, not server side. Check also the client you use, maybe it's possible to open the instance timeline. Look for things like "follow domain". FediLab has such.
@ercanbrack
@WinstonSmith1984@mastodon.online
Hmmm, it might not be completely easy. I live on qoto.org instance, we have such a feature there, but it's custom. Pleroma had it to AFAIK. If everything else fails, open your browser and go explore the timeline there. Each instance exposes its local timeline there.
@ercanbrack
FailForward
boosted
Tradition of removing shoes in home. Green: shoes removed; Blue: shoes not removed.
https://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/176735487615/world-map-of-tradition-of-removing-shoes-in-home
@jwildeboer
Well, what you describe is clearly irresponsible. I totally agree.
@jwildeboer
Well, depending on what is really going on there it might be a good, or a bad thing. I am hearing that cross-country skiing and ski-alpinism is experiencing a boom in some Central European countries. I'd put that into a positive bracket, those are individual and socially well distanced sports, so I think we should support that. Outdoor skating in NLD is probably not a bad choice either (although I fully understand the nuances of the whole Elfstedentocht debate).
# Not everything is bleak, there are simple joys out there
This morning I walked the dog and listened to radio, as I often do. There was this lady in the news fragment on Deutschlandfunk Kultur giving a "bad rapport" (Zeugnis) to Western countries on Corona. In a call-in she enumerated all the bad stuff which (allegedly) went wrong. And I listen in disbelief: all those are just imperfections to me, but all in all we are doing well, dear lady!
The other day, I spoke a friend who tried to convince me that social networks are all bad and he's quitting Facebook. I tried to point out that there's a lot of good stuff happening thanks to social nets too, it's just the small stuff we do not read in the news about, but which is often way more important than the "big" failings of our societies. Again, imperfections all around, but all in all I try to see a positive vector of development in the long-run.
Another friend expects European Union to go down the drain soon, especially because of the economic issues. I repeatedly fail to convince him that of course things are not perfect, but in general there's more robustness and positive developments than all teh negative.
Maybe I am just a naive, overly optimistic bloke somewhere. Dunno. But I can tell you what cheers me up on Saturday morning. Reading the society & lifestyle column in The Guardian, especially the Blind Date section (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/feb/13/blind-date-steph-will). It's so nice to see people opening up about what is positive and good about each other. This is perhaps silly habit of mine, I am well beyond "blind dating" age and stage of life (but who knows!), what I like is to get a weekly dose of positive humanity from there. People genuinely try hard to be good to each other and find joy in each other's presence. **_Not everything is bleak out there! Actually, to the contrary!_**
@WinstonSmith1984@mastodon.online
You don't have to be on more instances. Just crawl the social graph. Click on users, explore their posts, click on responses and so on. And follow, follow. Also open instance timelines and Check what's going on. If interesting, follow. In a couple of weeks you'll cover many interesting instances and that way will expand the federated timeline for your instance too. Of course there are isolated islands which you won't reach and need to explicitly go there, but these are typically instances where you anyway probably don't want to be anyway as there's a reason they are unreachable. Most are actively blocking them.
@ercanbrack
@cos
Guys, that's not future, that's past. This little fellow in 00's was running full Debian or Ubuntu versions like a breeze: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus#/media/File%3ASharp_Zaurus_SL-C1000_--_open_1280x960.jpg
The problem was not the system, it was the crappy UX - every water tap on a screen is an annoyance. That needs fixing. So the gadget rests in peace in a drawer. I hope this time, with your iteration of tech it will work out better.
@sridhar
FailForward
boosted
@kattascha Reaction to a toot https://qoto.org/web/statuses/105716541289609969
Thanks again for your inspiring thoughts.
I am not going to argue with you, I'd rather like to share a thought which I think is relevant for your toot-thread and which intrigues me since a couple of years. First a brief summary of your position:
> Wenn man nicht mit Leuten reden wollte, deren Anhängerschaft einen mit dem Tod bedroht, sah das quasi nach Diskursverweigerung aus.
> Menschen haben ernsthaft diskutiert, ob man quasi schon moralisch verloren hat, weil man sich den „Argumenten“ der AfD nicht stellt. Wahnsinn.
Yours is a perfectly understandable position. But I am not sure whether it's a constructive one. By not engaging and being absent, we let them win by default whatever screwed up game they constructed. I am not sure whether that is a good thing. Certainly it lets them collect some electoral points this way too. And just to clarify, I think morals have nothing to do with this. I care about pragmatic steps here.
> Denkt ruhig mal daran, wenn es darum geht, ob Verschwörungsideologen ein Podium gegeben werden sollte.
So here's a story. In Czecho-slovakian space there is this guy Fedor Gal (https://www.memoryofnations.eu/en/gal-fedor-1945) you probably never heard about, but who's quite a famous person in your neighbouring country. A Jew born in Konzentrazionslager/ghetto Theresienstadt in 1945, later a dissident against communism, scientist, sociologist, one of the leaders of the '89 revolution in Czechoslovakia, later a politician and by every means still a very active public person. This guy is hated by all neonazis of both countries, in 90's he became an anti-symbol for the extreme right and for many he still remains such, even though it's 25+ years since he left active politics.
Now this person's motto is this: **_"We have to keep dialogue open across the fences"_** and he lives up to it. He engages the right wing scene a lot. From public persecution of neo-nazi attacks on Roma minority, through active support to oppressed people and so on. Up to a point, that he patiently went into an e-mail exchange with an active neo-nazi, sustained it for several years and in the end published a book of their conversations with that guy - who still was at that point and probably still remains a skin-head/neo-nazi!. Fedor Gal even went on a tour with that person and engaged on stage in discussions with him for everybody to see. Long story short, the neo-nazi guy got so scared and ashamed that soon he stopped with it and quit.
So what is the point of this story? This person, Fedor Gal does not believe in disengagement with people who actively wish him harm and actually tried to do so many times. He well understands that giving right-extreme scene a platform is a bad thing. At the same time, he's a fighter and will not back off from a conflict. In a way, he's out there to take these extremists down. He clearly recognised that at the core of these people's beliefs is **dehumanisation** of others - extreme _us vs. them_ distinction. He also recognised that **you cannot win by letting yourself to be drawn into their game of us vs. them**. It's their turf, their game, they will win it. His strategy of engagement of these people and groups is based on **putting in contrast his (your) humanity and decency against their brutality and lack of empathy**. People are not emotionally blind. If you show them this contrast, they get it on the emotional level (as far as they are capable of empathy), even if intellectually they have qualms about the persona of Fedor Gal. He's not fighting to convince the right wing guys to stop thinking the BS they do. They are probably lost to us. My understanding is that he's fighting to save the silent majority not to be drawn closer to them and do their bidding, or voting for them. And that is a fight worth fighting. At least if I want to think about myself as an upright and decent human being. For this to work, one needs to let the strategy work again and again over longer periods of time, maybe decades. I consider this to be a very brave way of living.
I also believe that we shall keep dialogue open across the fences. And I try hard to find at least a fraction of Fedor's courage in my life, even though unlike him, I do not actively seek those confrontations, I have more important stuff to do in this stage of my life. But I encourage you and people who listen to you to find the courage to re-engage too.
(from a guy once beaten up by skin-heads in daylight and plain sight on one of the most busy streets of a town somewhere)
Exploring, failing, backtracking, just to identify the only viable path forward. And then scarred, stumbling forward into the future. Learning.
Boring and steady. Knowing little and questioning a lot. Mostly harmless.
***
This is an experimental scrapbook space. A collection of stuff I want to keep in a form somewhere on the spectrum between a blog and a shoe-box full of scraps, cut-outs, quotes, links and reading notes and sometimes my own silly thoughts about them.
Perhaps it might be of marginal interest to others too, but I don't care that much.
Joined Jan 2021
