🎓 Dr. Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@social.cleverlibre.org

@Geothinker @freemo

I am not very active. I used to do public service for bike rides, marathons, etc. Was Montgomery County ARES Emergency Coordinator for a year a decade or so ago. Never got into HF despite my Extra license.

Following the advice fro newcomers from @freemo on making connections here I'm going to list a bunch of hashtags that interest me so they are searchable. Please boost this post or repeat its instructions so others know to do the same.
Add #introductions to the post.

#wilding
#nature
#IrishLanguage
#gaeilge
#renewables
#drascombe
#sailing
#oldgaffers
#trees
#landscapephotography
#macrophotography
#drawing

@lavenderlens

Agreed. The back story is long and crazy. But in short the LGBTQ and others in the community at the time were being mass banned simply for following bad actors, even when they didnt boost, promote, or in any way show sympathetic leaning towards those bad actors.

The reason they were following them was to watch their account for violent threats and then disseminate that throughout their community for safety. But many instance admins didnt care and blocked/banned anyway.

As a result the LGBTQ community in masse migrated here for their safety.

We added a feature for them called subscribe. It lets you follow a person without them knowing you are following them. BUT it only lets you access the posts that person gives you permission to view (basically public posts, you cant see follower-only posts on a subscription). We did this so members of our community could follow these bad actors without alerting them and putting themselves at risk of violence or retaliation.

People again twisted this feature into being privacy violating despite the fact that it honors the privacy rules set by the poster.

Needless to say a lot of people were very mad that their blocking and banning abuses were coming back to bite them in the ass and ultimately distorted and lied the truth about QOTO and our feature to try to make it sound like something evil when it wasnt... those lies persist to this day.

@trinsec @War_Kittens

Okay let's talk about Lojban! No, this first post won't be in Lojban itself (but you gain enormous bonus points if you translate it).

Lojban is a natural, spoken language (like English, French, Swahili, Toki Pona, or Esperanto). It's also a constructed language or "conlang" (like Toki Pona or Esperanto). It's very easy to learn!

- la karda: a great tutorial: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la_karda
- a lojban dictionary: https://la-lojban.github.io/sutysisku/en/index.html

Toki Pona is fairly popular on the fediverse because it's such a cute language, and is in many ways the polar opposite of Lojban. Where Toki Pona is a fuzzy conlang, Lojban is a very crisp one. While spoken, it's also:

- Syntactically unambiguous! The "roles" in a sentence are always clear and parse cleanly. There's no such thing as "Time flies like an arrow" where you aren't sure if it's about the movement of time resembling a fired arrow or these creatures called time flies, who really love arrows.
- A predicate language. You can translate it into something like a problem solver and easily do analysis on statements, Good Ol' Fashioned Artificial Intelligence style

What it *DOESN'T* give you, and this is frequently misunderstood by various community members, is meaning disambiguity. The language tries fairly hard to reduce confusion there, but there are certain problems in language which are *inescapable*... the world changes, vocabulary drifts, two agents have different conceptions of things based on their experiences.

I AM NOT GOOD AT LOJBAN! But I really like it. It takes me a long time to interact via Lojban.

@cadey is probably one of our more prolific Lojban speakers. Who else speaks it? Let's use Lojban as much as possible in this thread!