Fun fact: public Bluesky profiles also offer RSS feeds
As RSS fans here may know, you can grab RSS feeds of communities and even your profile on Lemmy instances if you like. You can also do this with profiles on Mastodon, and I imagine other ActivityPub microblogging services.
However, you may not have known that public Bluesky profiles are much the same. By public, I mean their posts can be viewed without signing in to Bsky. I'm not sure but I'd think those limiting their visibility may not (or should not) permit pulling a RSS feed of their posts.
All you do is copy the account's Bsky handle, e.g. [username].bsky.social (or custom domains, should work the same I think) to your RSS reader of choice, and you should have a feed of their posts.
It's a nice way to get feeds for news sites that don't directly offer them and that have moved to Bsky but not Mastodon or other ActivityPub microblogging services. It's also great if you're simply not into microblogging in general and/or don't want to make another social media account and download another app.
Hope this helps!
how many more steps are being forgotten or overlooked? how much complexity do we take for granted with each tech we use? if we really dig down to fundamental tech, to say even linguistic literacy, then so, so much
remembering some tech hurdles
when tech involved, it's easy to forget the tech hoops one goes through for their systems.
the social media hurdles:
- knowing about email 1.1. having made an email
- knowing about social media 2.1 finding the social media site or app
- signing up to social media (proving non-machine at times)
- verifying registration in email
- sometimes selecting categories to pick relevant sources to add/follow/subscribe 5.1 sometimes letting it read your contacts so it can help you find those sources and not having that phase you at all
- finally getting to a feed/timeline of desired info, sometimes littered with irrelevance, often with ads 6.1 maybe set up profile avatar/banner/bio if really aiming to be social
- fussing with the foolish systems to surface what was chosen (or at least similar to it)
- enjoy when the systems surface what you've chosen (or similar to it)
- rue the days the systems insist on shoveling you garbage instead
the rss hurdles:
- knowing what rss is 1.1 knowing about rss readers
- finding reader apps still maintained
- finding sites that still provide supported rss feeds 3.1 finding where they hide their rss feeds because some like to hide them like they're ashamed of them
- copy feed link to reader app
- get only chosen feeds in reader app 5.1 curse the badly made feeds that include advert articles 5.2 create filter rules to toss the trash from badly made feeds
- enjoy chosen feeds with filters in reader app
- rue the days sites kill their RSS feeds
Nah, I get that normal people wouldn't, but I can dream. It's so much better than making Yet Another Account. Plus I know in set up we're talkin' people pulling the feed into a reader, but also for content creators making sites, loads of sitebuilding software already has RSS baked in, so it's not even that big an ask from them.
If there's another more convenient no-sign-up method of keeping up with sites and stuff online, I'd love to know, 'cause I know many aren't about to use RSS.
Hmm, if so, it wasn't clear in the documentation I read. I was of the impression it was still passing posts through the relay to enable others' discovery & interaction.
But apparently what they actually meant was, “users of Mastodon instances rarely explore outward”? The instances would auto-federate, but in practice, the “crawlers” (the users) aren’t leaving their bubbles often enough to create a critical mass of interconnectedness across the Fediverse?
It's more along the lines of, as Mastodon's been one of the more popular ActivityPub platforms for awhile longer, there's a longer history of federation faffery, i.e. instance admins/people not getting along leading to defederations leading to a somewhat more fragmented network. Lemmy's only grown in adoption more recently and hasn't had as much time for that faffery to crop up as much, and has a different style and audience to it anyway, so it may be less prone to that, time will tell.
Regardless, your conclusion is basically on point for many folks. Federation stuff is no better to them than the erratic moderation/management of larger platforms that's driving them elsewhere. Of course problem is, moderation/management's not really something tech can solve (as Bsky's already run into with its attempts at enabling third-party moderation).
They're supposed to be able to, true, but I've not come across any examples of that in action yet. If you know of any I'd be interested in seeing them, as I've been trying to keep up with AuthTransfer's developments.
It can be, yeah. However, similar may be said of responsible social media setup.
Relay (backend albeit rumored to be expensive)
Not even rumored, so much as explicitly expected.
The federation architecture allows anyone to host a Relay, though it’s a fairly resource-demanding service. In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers, and then a long tail of partial-network providers.
I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there’s only some high-profile defed exceptions.
That's...Not how Lemmy works either. In fact, and someone may correct me if I'm mistaken here, your hell is sort of how it works as I understand it. Instances don't have any built-in crawlers to seek out others running on ActivityPub with the same software, e.g. Lemmy or Mastodon or the like. That's genuinely been one of the biggest stumbling blocks with the whole protocol, as discovery is largely a manual affair. The only crawlers we have are the people using the service and following remote people or communities or channels from other instances to let the one we're on see them.
One of the basic reasons for this that I've read is that it's related to handling scaling, as each instance trying to handle all of the data of all the people on each other instance right away would bog down the servers and probably crash them. It also arguably works out, to a degree, that there's a good chance not everyone on each instance is of interest to each other anyway, so you may not want or need each server to know about every other server's people/channels/communities/etc.
But I'm going to stop before I get too much further into the weeds of all this. The irony is that the simplest solution to discovery issues with all of this presently is to invite those you want to have a similar experience to you, or want to connect to with the fewest jumps, to the same instance as you to mitigate any of those issues. Does that tend to undermine many of the benefits of it all? In a lot of ways, yeah, but that's where many ActivityPub platforms are at currently, at least the more popular ones as I understand them.
I'm still on the fence about that...I think it'd make more sense for many to drop social media and opt for their own site with RSS feeds. A lot of social media for some is little more than a noisier RSS reader. Sometimes even literally with those with auto-playing videos. 😬
I think a better title & question would be, "Why is Mastodon struggling to thrive?"
It's surviving no problem, but it's not thriving for a multitude of reasons. Some are pretty well covered across comments here & in the linked discussion, and are more or less reiterations of prior discussions on the matter.
Ultimately I think as much as many of those reasons are correct, the biggest reason is the same as ever: network effects. All the jank and technical details could be endured and adjusted to if there was sufficient value to be had in doing so, i.e. following accounts of interest/entertainment, connecting with friends, etc. That's proven to varying degrees by those that have stuck with Mastodon. In turn, however, it's also clear by how many bounce off that for many there's still insufficient value to be found across Mastodon instances to justify dealing with all the rough edges.
If Mastodon had enough broadly appealing/interesting people/accounts across its instances, people might deal with the various technical and cultural rough spots the same way they deal with similar on other social networks they may complain about yet won't leave. There still aren't enough of those sorts on there for many though, so Mastodon simply survives but doesn't thrive.
Yes but no. Due to architectural differences, federation under AuthTransfer protocol is simply different compared to ActivityPub. In its own terms it is federated as individuals' data is stored in personal data servers (PDSs) connected to a relay, which currently is only the Bluesky relay, that roughly speaking connects them to other personal data servers.
You can technically operate your own personal data server apart from those operated by Bluesky, but I think it's fair to say the vast majority on there don't. It's not clear yet, apart from fully holding your own data, how useful it is to operate your own given you only have one relay to use anyway at the moment.
So even in its own terms Bluesky really isn't federated in much of a meaningful sense yet. The problems are twofold: a major part of their pitch is making federation Just Work™, keeping the underlying tech out of mind to mitigate confusion, but you can't have your cake and eat it too here. Eventually, if you're really committed to meaningful federation, you have to teach people about the value of operating their own personal data servers, at minimum, otherwise what was the point in separating it out in the architecture?
Problem is, that goes against their pitch to their audience and spoils the appeal. It's telling a good joke only to kill it by explaining to the one person that went, "I don't get it."
Secondly, they've already upfront said that relays may be cost prohibitive for many people to operate, resulting in only a few ever being spun up. If that remains the case and is true, then even if a few were spun up, that's not any more federated or distributed than the rather consolidated web we see now. How much of a difference would it make if the social web was running on AuthTransfer and the major relays were owned and run by Meta/Facebook, Twitter/X, and Google?
Congrats you have your own data in a personal data server...But are you really the one running it, or did you just opt into the PDS entryway offered by Facebook/Twitter/Google/etc. because sorry, what's that about a server?
A variation on the game on the internet would arguably be avoiding sharing clickbait, wannabe viral posts, e.g. LinkedInLunatics' absurd posts promoting a business or work expectations, and other variations of attention grabbing nonsense, i.e. mis/disinformation.
Not sharing attention bait at all, and not giving it further attention, is a way to successfully play this form of the game. However, by its very nature, many often can't help but occasionally share content of this form, wittingly or not, and in turn are frequently losing this game.
Unilulalezooing is truly an art.
It's the spooooky time of year!
Any of you that celebrate Halloween already up to anything? Movie marathons/rewatches, books/short story reading/rereading, playing/replaying games, or whatever else?
Also, for those wanting to share spooky vibes, you might check out the following communities: [email protected] [email protected]
Sharing clickbait, "viral" or wannabe viral posts, and the like is the real internet equivalent of losing the game
sorry
for your loss
:.|:;
The list of games with timestamps courtesy of the video description, for any interested:
- [0:38] Annalynn
- [2:24] Let's Build a Zoo
- [4:18] Super Kiwi 64
- [5:52] Nuclear Blaze
- [7:24] Retro Mystery Club
- [9:12] Unsighted
- [11:32] UnderHero
- [13:44] Potato Flowers in Full Bloom
- [15:58] PowerSlave Exhumed
- [18:36] Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore
Found myself revisiting this article the other day, sort of on accident, as I was trying to look up software that was somewhere between server and local in its functionality. The ideas laid out still appeal to me as someone that likes to handle my own data more, but doesn't necessarily like to fuss with server software & configuration (if I can help it).
A new generation of collaborative software that allows users to retain ownership of their data.
> Cloud apps like Google Docs and Trello are popular because they enable real-time collaboration with colleagues, and they make it easy for us to access our work from all of our devices. However, by centralizing data storage on servers, cloud apps also take away ownership and agency from users. If a service shuts down, the software stops functioning, and data created with that software is lost. > > In this article we propose “local-first software”: a set of principles for software that enables both collaboration and ownership for users. Local-first ideals include the ability to work offline and collaborate across multiple devices, while also improving the security, privacy, long-term preservation, and user control of data.
As of writing this comment, it's the first/most recent post on there of her with her hair dyed pink. It's a carousel post, so whoever screenshotted this did so after flipping through a few of the other photos.
Thinking about entertainment communities and other broader focus communities
Gradually we've been seeing the tv and movies or shows and movies communities pick up activity, which is good, and the multiple games communities each seem to be doing okay too.
Entertainment
However, there remains kind of an awkward spot where there's not exactly a general entertainment community (outside of Beehaw, that is) from what I can tell. There is an existing community, [email protected], though that someone could try to pick up and make active.
This could serve as a catchall for some of the more business-oriented news and some of the fluff celebrity chatter, depending on how one wants to go with it. Worth noting for celebrity chatter there is also [email protected] though.
Music
In a similar vein, while there's a variety of music communities, there's only a few generic ones, with the largest outside of Beehaw and Hexbear being the largely undefined Music community on Lemmy World. The lack of definition, that is, no sidebar guidance on what the community may be used for, makes it unclear what the community's expectations/preferences for posts are.
As with entertainment, this could be where more music business news could find its home, alongside some band chatter. Although as with entertainment, there's a music-themed community for the chatter to be found at [email protected] for those interested.
Sports
Likewise with sports, there's a ton of different sports communities, but only two large generic communities to be found on Beehaw and Hexbear (supposing Lemmyverse is accurate). Before any of the more specific sports communities can gain more activity, I think it'd help to have a generic sports community to help people get oriented and find likeminded folks to form whatever specific communities they'd like.
Much like the first two, this could be for sports news and chatter...But unlike the first two, I can't find any generic fluff sports star/team chat communities.
Ideas on How and Where to Organize
In each of these cases regarding broader communities, I think following a similar organizational approach to Beehaw could be a good idea, but they would be better suited to instances more openly federated and not at as much risk of defederation. A few Lemmy instances that come to mind for this are Lemmee, ShitJustWorks, Lemmy Zip, and perhaps Reddthat?
I'm not sure where Mbin instances are in terms of federation smoothness and stability, otherwise I might suggest some of them. On a different note, if there were more Piefed instances I might suggest them, but last I checked the flagship seems to still be the largest and isn't open for community creation.
---
In short: there's good opportunities for broad, generic topic communities for entertainment, music, and sports on more widely federated instances. At the same time, even where these communities may exist on some widely federated instances, opportunity remains for more clearly defined variations of these communities to encourage posting with less uncertainty.
Unifor files a notice of dispute against Canadian National Railway
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20265433
> Canadian National Railway said on Friday that labor union Unifor has filed a notice of dispute to the Canadian Minister of Labor, just three days after initiating negotiations. > > Also known as "conciliation", the notice of dispute can be sent by either party to the Canadian Minister of Labor during a negotiation and typically results in the appointment of a conciliation officer to assist the parties in reaching an agreement.
Prime Minister Alexander De Croo's speech was one of the most pointed ever directed at the pope during a foreign trip.
> On a brutal day for the frail and aging Pope Francis, the king of Belgium, its prime minister and the rector of the Catholic university that invited him here all ripped into the institution he heads for a spectrum of sins: for covering up cases of clergy sex abuse and being far behind the times on embracing women and the LGBTQ+ community in the church. > > And that was all before Francis met with the people most harmed by the Catholic Church in Belgium — the men and women who were raped and molested by priests as children. Seventeen abuse survivors spent two hours with Francis on Friday evening, telling him of their trauma, shame and pain and demanding reparations from the church.
For months a huge iceberg blocked the path of hundreds of penguin chicks but somehow they survived.
> In May a huge iceberg broke off from an Antarctic ice shelf, drifted, and came to a stop - right in front of “maybe the world’s unluckiest” penguins. > > Like a door shutting, the iceberg's huge walls sealed off the Halley Bay colony from the sea. > > It seemed to spell the end for hundreds of newly-hatched fluffy chicks whose mothers, out hunting for food, may no longer have been able to reach them. > > Then, a few weeks ago, the iceberg shifted and got on the move again.
Some bittersweet news, with an important reminder of how much more precarious life is for creatures living on the Earth's poles due to the changing climate.
Two weeks ago the world did not know the capybara from Hoo Zoo in Telford existed.
> A young capybara's escape from a zoo a fortnight ago gripped animal lovers across the globe. > > Cinnamon's Friday 13th flit from Hoo Zoo and Dinosaur World in Shropshire has inspired memes, merchandise, and a song, which staff have on repeat.
Four more US health workers show symptoms after contact with Missouri bird flu patient
> Four additional healthcare workers in Missouri who came in contact with a hospitalized bird flu patient developed mild respiratory symptoms but the virus was not confirmed in any of them, U.S. health officials said on Friday. > > The report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brings to six the number of healthcare workers who cared for the Missouri patient and developed respiratory symptoms. > > Unlike previous U.S. bird flu cases this year, the Missouri patient, who was hospitalized on Aug. 22, had no known contact with infected animals. Scientists are watching closely for signs that the virus has begun to spread more easily in people.
Unifor files a notice of dispute against Canadian National Railway
> Canadian National Railway said on Friday that labor union Unifor has filed a notice of dispute to the Canadian Minister of Labor, just three days after initiating negotiations. > > Also known as "conciliation", the notice of dispute can be sent by either party to the Canadian Minister of Labor during a negotiation and typically results in the appointment of a conciliation officer to assist the parties in reaching an agreement.
JPMorgan disclosed that the CFPB could punish the lender for its role in Zelle, the giant peer-to-peer digital payments network.
> Buried in a roughly 200-page quarterly filing from JPMorgan Chase last month were eight words that underscore how contentious the bank’s relationship with the government has become. > > The lender disclosed that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could punish JPMorgan for its role in Zelle, the giant peer-to-peer digital payments network. The bank is accused of failing to kick criminal accounts off its platform and failing to compensate some scam victims, according to people who declined to be identified speaking about an ongoing investigation. > > In response, JPMorgan issued a thinly veiled threat: “The firm is evaluating next steps, including litigation.”
Title is original from site.
Arguably a better title:
Why JPMorgan Chase is prepared to sue the U.S. government over regulation
The web’s collective memory is stored in the servers of the Internet Archive. Legal battles threaten to wipe it all away.
Note: article may be paywalled if you've read all your free articles from Wired for now. Archive link in that event.
> [...] Against the back wall, where one might find confessionals in a different kind of church, there’s a tower of humming black servers. These servers hold around 10 percent of the Internet Archive’s vast digital holdings, which includes 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts. Tiny lights on each server blink on and off each time someone opens an old webpage or checks out a book or otherwise uses the Archive’s services. The constant, arrhythmic flickers make for a hypnotic light show. Nobody looks more delighted about this display than Kahle. > > It is no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive—and that, as the world’s knowledge repositories increasingly go online, archiving as we know it would not be as functional. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that functions as an unparalleled record of the internet. Zoomed out, the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical-preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic regard the Internet Archive inspires is earned—without it, the world would lose its best public resource on internet history.
Note: article may be paywalled if you've read all your free articles from Wired for now. Archive link in that event.
Workers have been sharing videos alleging the precarious working conditions that have allowed the Chinese ecommerce giant to target unstoppable growth.
> In a video uploaded to the Chinese social media platform Bilibili in October, a Shein warehouse worker in southern China with black-rimmed glasses tells the camera he picked 650 clothing items during his last shift—a feat he claims to have accomplished, in part, by not taking a single bathroom break. The worker says the sacrifice would help him reach his goal of earning 10,000 RMB (nearly $1,500 at the time) a month at his job picking and packing customer orders for Shein, the global fast-fashion juggernaut valued last year at $66 billion. > > In a separate Bilibili video posted a few days later, a different Shein staffer says that he is “sweating profusely after picking goods all night,” but he’s grateful, at least, that his team leader is friendly. In a third clip shared to the short-form video platform Kuaishou in November, another Shein worker with long hair pulled back into a low ponytail tells the camera she is having trouble lifting her left hand after completing an 11-and-a-half hour shift at a Shein warehouse. “My first time working in logistics, there won’t be a second time,” reads the caption.
Note: title is drawn from the article, and I'd argue is rather exaggerated given the contents. A better title might be, "A Look Into Shein's Reliance on Gig Workers". Just realized this may be behind paywall for some, archive link in the event of that.
How Russia’s RT went from a cable news clone to covert operator - NPR
> RT was long known to be government-funded and a source of Russian propaganda. But it claimed to be independent. It hired American journalists, and featured some big names like former CNN host Larry King. The channel’s aesthetic was sleek, modern, and cable news-like. But over the years, as American relations with Russia cooled, skepticism of RT grew. > > Now, the U.S. government has accused RT and its parent company, Rossiya Segodnya, of going beyond propaganda, as part of the Kremlin’s efforts to destabilize democracies and erode international support for Ukraine.
The artificial sensor detects distant objects through ‘tele-perception.’
> Researchers have designed a robotic “artificial skin” that is as unique as the team’s animal inspiration—the platypus. Created by collaborators between China’s Tsinghua University and the Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, the dual-sensory system can interpret information not just from direct physical touch, but also through detecting electrostatic changes in the air around it.
Although I'm sharing the Popular Science article for easier reading, I'd recommend checking out the journal article it cites, as it gets into the details of the research. Best of all? Journal article's open access, so from what I can tell by checking between browsers, it's not paywalled!
“League of Legends” is caught in the middle of a dispute between Hollywood’s actors union and an audio company that provides voiceover services for the blockbuster online multiplayer game.
> “League of Legends” is caught in the middle of a dispute between Hollywood’s actors union and an audio company that provides voiceover services for the blockbuster online multiplayer game. > > The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists called a strike against “League of Legends” on Tuesday, arguing that Formosa Interactive attempted to get around the ongoing video game strike by hiring non-union actors to work on an unrelated title.
Meta could strike deals for “really important” work.
> Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says there are complex copyright questions around scraping data to train AI models, but he suggests the individual work of most creators isn’t valuable enough for it to matter. [...] > [...] > Zuckerberg said Meta’s future AI content strategy would likely echo its blunt response to proposed laws that would add a fee for links to news stories. The company has typically responded to these rules by blocking news outlets in countries like Australia and Canada. “Look, we’re a big company,” he said. “We pay for content when it’s valuable to people. We’re just not going to pay for content when it’s not valuable to people. I think that you’ll probably see a similar dynamic with AI.”
X/Twitter releases its first transparency report since Elon Musk's takeover
Social media platform X published its first transparency report on Wednesday. The report is the first since the company was purchased by Elon Musk two years ago.
> The report, which details content moderation practices, shows the company has removed millions of posts and accounts from the site in the first half of the year. > > X, formerly Twitter, suspended nearly 5.3 million accounts in that time, compared with the 1.6 million accounts the company reported suspending in the first half of 2022. The social media company also “removed or labeled” more than 10.6 million posts for violating platform rules — about 5 million of which it categorized as violating its “hateful conduct” policy. > [...] > When Musk was trying to buy Twitter in 2022, he said he was doing so because it wasn’t living up to its potential as a “platform for free speech.” Since acquiring the company that October, Musk has fired much of its staff and made other changes, leading to a steady exodus of celebrities, public figures, organizations and ordinary people from the platform.