Sundar @digital_carver@social.cleverlibre.org

The Amateur Science website on this list (amasci.com - called "Science Hobbyist here) was one of my first introductions to how amazing the Web can be, back in the early 00's.
As an inquisitive electronics student that was butting my head against the usual explanations and coming up short, this was a godsend.

Markor is a lovely text editor, shows off what the best of FOSS can be like. It's slightly fancier than a more basic notes app, but loads just as fast, and has enough configuration you can make it what you want it to be.
I've had problems trying to store notes on the SD card, but I'm not sure if that's a Markor issue or an issue with the sync app whose folder I was trying to save into (and it's more fundamentally a problem with Android's dumb handling of SD card permissions anyway).
The dev is active and responsive on GitHub too, which gives me good hopes for the future of the app as well.

@gdroid@mastodon.technology #net_gsantner_markor #fdroid_app_comments

> what is right and wrong in politics is determined only by the power that is able to be leveraged by other people

Not sure I understand this part @Demosthenes . On superficial reading it sounds like "Might is what makes right in practice" - but I think you're saying something more naunced than that?

Started thinking about this when I came across a political (Indian) post and was tempted to boost it. I generally avoid political stuff, but found myself thinking "this is *obviously* the correct side in this issue though, I can't imagine this annoying any right-thinking person". I realized I only knew the "correct" side, and had never heard a single argument from someone on the "wrong" side before coming to the conclusion.

#political #rationality
Politics was so easy when I was a teenager. Some things were obviously right, some things were obviously wrong, and anyone who disagreed with those positions were either idiots who had been misled, or had bad intent themselves.

With experience and wider understanding, things get a lot more difficult. Now if something looks like "obviously the right answer", and I can't figure out why anyone would oppose it unless they were stupid or malicious - then in reality it's more likely that I haven't understood the opposing position very well, that the issue had more facets than I understood, that there *was* no simple easy satisfying answer that's practically feasible.

They don't say "Ignorance is bliss" for nothing!

The traces of the Great Indian Mastodon Influx of 2019 (GIMI'19) are interesting to look through. In trying to find #Indian folks to follow here, I time and again come across people who came to Mastodon around Nov 2019 (when the Twitter political censorship issues surfaced), stayed around for a month or so, and then left (presumably back to where they came from, having made a symbolic gesture against the censorship).

But even that one month has left an impression here, lots of interesting links to follow, clever #desi jokes, good discussions, it feels like an archaeological discovery of an interesting and intellectual civilization - though of course this was barely a year ago.

It would be loads better if they'd stuck around - I feel a twinge of sadness every time I think "wow this is a cool account to follow", and then see the last post was somewhere in November 2019 - but I'm glad that the GIMI'19 happened at all. It left behind a good bulk of interesting content, and when I do find a live account that someone still uses, it feels like finding buried treasure!

I tried googling (and duckducking) for this, but couldn't find anything - most Mastodon guides seem to be 75% explaining instances and how they work, and just the last 25% on some few basics of how to actually do things.

And if I remove the @ part or put it somewhere not at the beginning of the toot, does it still count as a part of the same conversation? Fedilab shows those replies as less indented compared to those that do have @<username> at the beginning. What is that supposed to represent?

I can't figure out how replies work on mastodon. If I reply to someone and leave the @<username> part as is, does that still appear on the timeline for ppl who follow me but don't follow the other person?