I wouldnt really know, I do know it was discussed between me and him at one point when he was encouraging me to move over to being a pleorma dev and move our instance as well. It was one of the main features absent from pleorma that caused me to reject the option of moving and mentioned once it was implemented I could consider it.
Didnt @alex add this feature or did he just talk about it and not actually do it?
@FailForward took a quick read, all good advice. a bit busy right now for a fgull response though, I have bookmarked this. But the feature request sounds sound as does most of what you said.
@freemo First of all, congratulations to running an interesting space. There's some serious dedication behind this and It shows.
* re timelines: yes, this added flexibility of filtering or just managing whole instances is something I already discovered. Feature request: it seems to be somewhat difficult to just randomly browse a timeline of an instance. It would help if one could use the search bar to display the full timeline of an instance. Right now I discovered that to browse an instance timeline one has to find a toot from that instance and use the "..." context menu. Alternatively, one can put an instance into favourite domains, then open its timeline, and then remove it when it turns out to be mostly uninteresting
* re the idea with the instances catalogue: yes, that sounds useful. Over the last couple of days, I was doing that using https://instances.social/. A more integrated UX would help, although I am not sure how many users it would attract.
> What sort of interactions are you talking about and what sort of managing would you envision needing to do?
Just personal psycho-hygiene 🙂 . It's too easy to get down a rabbit hole and lose oneself in endless back-and-forths. I've been there so much in the past that I suspect, I am somewhat beyond that. I rather go for a walk with a friend and we can at least argue properly and aloud. So when I see that everything important was already said in a conversation here and we are getting into an agree-to-disagree territory, it's more useful to just back off, then to continue pushing into a brick wall. Easier done in flesh, one needs to be more conscious when doing it here. It's alright as is, but it can turn into a humongous waste of time for everybody if not kept in check.
> What sort of images are we talking about here.
Everything. Memes, cats, dogs, anime, whatever it's called today. It's the same stuff then it used to be 25 years ago, it's just that I moved on, only to re-discover it now. Back then it was propagated via chain e-mails with endless Cc lists, today it's apparently Twitter/Facebook (neither of which I ever used - so it's probably telling what sort of odd person I am 😃 ).
* re: hashtags
Yeah, I know what's the point, but I always found tags anywhere overwhelming. Either one develops a taxonomy and system to it beforehands, or it's rather useless - either you find only a subset of what you need, or too much. I gave up on it like 15 years ago and instead use full text search. That's why I am doing this mini-blogging even for music and stuff. My comments around stuff are often just SEO phrases making sure my full text search in a year or two from now will discover what I am just recording. I am a simple guy, you see 😉 .
@trinsec Marathon's embeded video gives me same error as trinsec is seeing.. this is interesting since marathon himself doesnt get the error and he is on QOTO with us, im not sure why it would work for just him off hand... id be curious to try this with other instances or to even see if users at other instances can see that video embedded from qoto.
marathon are you using the default QOTO web theme or one of the other custom ones maybe? Not sure that would matter but only difference i could think of off hand.
I'm going to be reluctant to start calling them Nazi's just yet, though they are certainly fascist in their behaviors long before Biden. But if they do turn out to go full on Nazi with the fascism then yea, I wont be **that** surprised either.
I am reluctant to engage in anything that resembles a conspiracy without hard evidence, so I will take a wait and see approach.
What worried me however is aside from Bidens history of prejudice, lying, and horrific civil liberties record (re: started his career on on the basis of a pro-segregation effort, contributed to the drone murders of us citizens without due process, and all that jazz) I am very concerned with how he may take advantage of the situation and may very well devolve into a fascist state.
I was already worried about this when he said some really scary things in his DNC acceptance speech such as requiring citizens to carry around vaccination cards and such.
Couple that with the fact that recent events seem to very closesly mirror the Reichstag fire false flag opperation and tactics that allowed the Nazis to gain politicial control (and other regimes where it transitioned semi-democratically to dictatorship), well its scary.
The Capitol Hill riots, for example, appear to be a great example, while it wasnt exactly a false flag, it does seem that it was intentionally provoked or at the very least taken advantage of politicially. We have countless reports of police acting in unusual ways that would have provoked the events of the day. For example one police officer was actively restraining individuals from the crowd before they started breaking through the barricades and with plenty of room so as to make it visible to everyone present was actively beating the individual on the ground even after they were restrained with a second officer coming up to join in. You hear the crowd screaming in protest to the beatings as they get ever more aggressive in their chants. All this right before the crowd storms through the barricade. Plus we have countless other reports of police even actively removing barricades and letting people in to take selfies.
combine this with the fact that the vast majority were not violent, most just waddled around taking selfies with only a very small percentage exhibiting any violence against a person, and yet it is being made out to be a mass mob riotous and full of violence as if it represented the majority
Add on top of that the countless arrests of members of the Trump administration and even attempts now with an impeachment to arrest trump himself, which may start spreading out to other republicans not associated with Trump.
All of this seems to follow the playbook of the reichstag fire a bit too close for my liking. I am hoping I am wrong and for the moment I am going to form the conclusion it is not intention and just the normal media bias we see and no real conspiracy is at play. but its fishy enough I intend to keep an eye on it and if it develops much beyond its current state I will presume some pretty fucked up shit is going down.
# 3 weeks of Mastodon@QOTO
So it's 3 weeks since I joined Mastodon@QOTO. My motivation was a low threshold scrapbook place were I can throw whatever I want to remember and/or share with friends.
After these couple of weeks, I can say this:
* works - kind of. Feels a bit weird, probably because I never did this kind of stuff in public before
* obviously what I am doing is not very standard (more than 200 chars), but within the design envelope of Mastodon and QOTO (kudos for all the customisations, I like it!)
* probably what I am doing would be better called mini-blogging (more than Twitter, less than a blog). When called this way, I took a look at services which do that (e.g., Tumblr) and the usage pattern fits
* timelines are somewhat distracting, but I'll try to use this in a somewhat introvert mode anyway
* interactions are not a bad part of the experience, but need to be managed - can be easily distracting
* lots of strange stuff fly around, but can be filtered out when needed
* the images people post are a throwback into 90's when we were sending this via e-mail (I still have a couple of GBs in my mailbox archive just funny pics and powerpoint slidedecks full of one-off jokes). Since I left this subculture, I never thought it still clogs the Intertubes elsewhere. Still fun, but I could do without.
* tooling: Tusky proved useful, `toot` is good too, web interface a bit overwhelming and distracting
* still need to work out how to deal with hashtags - probably will ignore
@ArturoGoosnargh Does going my algorithmic trading algo count?
@FailForward probably what I am doing would be better called mini-blogging (more than Twitter, less than a blog). When called this way, I took a look at services which do that (e.g., Tumblr) and the usage pattern fits
Thats actually what im doing. In fact i have a widget on my main blog that has my mastodon account on the sidebar with my 10 most recent posts and it says "Microblog" there. I originally started this as a way to keep my blog active even when i dont have time to write full articles. However, of course, it turned into a space I love to interact in instead. I personally have come more to love the fact that we have people who can have really huge fundamental ideological differences (which may include you and me) but can still have respectful caring conversations and shake hands and have a drink after. Thats the real value of QOTO to me now that I've been doing this a while.
> timelines are somewhat distracting, but I’ll try to use this in a somewhat introvert mode anyway
They are, but luckily I added a lot of unique tools other instances dont have to get around that.
For starters you can of course (and I personally do) kill the federated timeline all together, its mostly noise.
But more importantly what you can do is create a custom timeline instead of using the local or home and pick and choose what you want in it, and in that regard QOTO has some real special features you wont find elsewhere. For example you can add the local timeline of another instance as a timeline in your own feed or integrate it into a custom timeline with other local feeds. This lets you interact with themed servers or other instances you might otherwise have considered joining but without needing multiple accounts and with all the feature benefits we have here.
You can also filter by hashtag in both a white-list or black-list mode or even add individual sets of users to timelines.. and even add keyword filtering (not hashtags but actual words)...
some of this is in vanilla mastodon, a lot of it isnt and it makes timeline management way more powerful IMO.
> interactions are not a bad part of the experience, but need to be managed - can be easily distracting
What sort of interactions are you talking about and what sort of managing would you envision needing to do?
> lots of strange stuff fly around, but can be filtered out when needed
Yes part of that is us being an instance that federates with almost all other instances, it means you see a lot of the low-quality or offensive stuff too. Its a trade off, you get the freedom to see the content you want without someone dictating it to you, but that means its on you to filter out the content and put in that work.
The good part is mastodon makes this much easier than something like twitter due to the nature of instances. There are only a few instances that deal in anything too offensive or that might need filtering (for example porn), and since an account can block whole instances it is a great way to empower users. You just personally block by instance the half dozen or so servers that deal in porn or nudity and you've got a clean federated feed.
With that said I've been thinking a lot about how to make this easier for users since I feel some of the advantage of a more moderated instance is lost and puts more work and burden on the user, but i also dont want to take away their freedom to see what they want. I have been considering finding a way to add curated lists of servers, i guess you can call them blocklists but id rather think of them as cataloging.. basically there would be some sort of shared public list of all servers with porn, another list for ones with lolicon, another list for servers that are LGBT+ oriented, another for conservative oriented servers, another for liberal ones.. what have you... then users can just pick and choose which lists they want to either blacklist or white list or even pull those lists into timelines like i mentioned earlier. This way the user doesnt have to put in the effort searching for all this on their own.
> the images people post are a throwback into 90’s when we were sending this via e-mail (I still have a couple of GBs in my mailbox archive just funny pics and powerpoint slidedecks full of one-off jokes). Since I left this subculture, I never thought it still clogs the Intertubes elsewhere. Still fun, but I could do without.
What sort of images are we talking about here. I cant really imagine what this may mean that is specific to the 90s... Some sort of memes or something?
> tooling: Tusky proved useful, toot is good too, web interface a bit overwhelming and distracting
The problem is that Tusky doesnt provide most of the unique features mastodon has, so its a trade off. I use tusky but find it far too limiting and I really dont like post on my phone anyway, too slow to type and too annoying to correct.
As for the web being too overwhelming, have you perhaps tried the Simple UI, it cuts it all down to a single timeline and might be what your after? There are also alternative front ends that you might find useful in this regard as they simplify a lot of the frontend. For example there is a front end that makes mastodon look identical to twitter, almost like a clone, but still mastodon/QOTO
> still need to work out how to deal with hashtags - probably will ignore
Hash tags are mostly special in mastodon/QOTO because of their searchability. Typically you can only search for toots you have been tagged in or wrote yourself, which really limits the searches ability to find topics your interested in (this was done as a safety feature in vanilla mastodon since some people are very anti-search). Hash tags where the answer to that, hash tags are a way of a user saying "this can be publicly searchable by this hashtag", so it is the only effective way to use the search to find new content you werent already exposed to. In that sense it has real usefulness and probably best they arent ignored.
They also help not just for your searches but for others, remember that. so tagging your posts with hash tags really helps if you want your posts to be discoverable by others who are searching for a particular topic.
@mathlover ohhh yea it was the 20th yea I thought you meant long before, my fault
@mathlover really do you have a source on these pictures?
@dv8 bonus points for knowing that phrase!
@freemo It's masks, all the way down!
Jeffrey Phillips Freeman
Innovator & Entrepreneur in Machine Learning, Evolutionary Computing & Big Data. Avid SCUBA diver, Open-source developer, HAM radio operator, astrophotographer, and anything nerdy.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, PA, USA, currently living in Utrecht, Netherlands, USA, and Thailand. Was also living in Israel, but left.
Pronouns: Sir / Mister
(Above pronouns are not intended to mock, i will respect any persons pronouns and only wish pronouns to show respect be used with me as well. These are called neopronouns, see an example of the word "frog" used as a neopronoun here: http://tinyurl.com/44hhej89 )
A proud member of the Penobscot Native American tribe, as well as a Mayflower passenger descendant. I sometimes post about my genealogical history.
My stance on various issues:
Education: Free to PhD, tax paid
Abortion: Protected, tax paid, limited time-frame
Welfare: Yes, no one should starve
UBI: No, use welfare
Racism: is real
Guns: Shall not be infringed
LGBT+/minorities: Support
Pronouns: Will respect
Trump: Moron, evil
Biden: Senile, racist
Police: ACAB
Drugs: Fully legal, no prescriptions needed
GPG/PGP Fingerprint: 8B23 64CD 2403 6DCB 7531 01D0 052D DA8E 0506 CBCE