@deadsuperhero@lemmy.world cover

deadsuperhero

@deadsuperhero@lemmy.world

I write articles and interview people about the Fediverse and decentralized technologies. In my spare time, I play lots of video games. I also like to make pixel art, music, and games.

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deadsuperhero ,

Honestly? I'm loving it. The biggest improvement for me was getting rid of those awful PIT menus that were ugly and sometimes hard to use. The new system is way more usable, and I'm tweaking the mappings on my controller to see what feels the most usable.

The improvement to EVA is also phenomenally good. You move a bit faster, there's more precision, and traversal between EVA and ship is much smoother. As a salvager that gets in and out to scavenge cargo holds, this is a big deal to me.

The character customizer is also really fun to use, and feels pretty intuitive to use. There's still work to be done in explaining what all of these vertices do, but I think the customization is a lot more flexible.

Some pretty nasty bugs emerged in 3.23 and 3.23.1, but it seems like the team is making pretty good progress on improvements? So, there's that.

deadsuperhero ,

One edge case that I really want to see the team nail down is crash loops. In the EPTU build of 3.23, we noticed situations where recovery effectively acted like a rewind feature, but didn't actually prevent the cause of a crash from happening.

Having to experience a handful of the same crashes during a single play session is pretty painful.

deadsuperhero OP ,

It's a different approach with different ideas. It uses open protocols, focuses on data and account portability, and incorporates peer-to-peer concepts in its architecture. The vision behind Bluesky is to build a global square with these concepts.

I definitely wish they would've extended ActivityPub and collaborated on the wider network, but I kind of understand wanting to start from scratch and not get involved with the cultural debt Mastodon brought to the network.

deadsuperhero OP ,

I can't tell whether this is serious or sarcastic 😅

As far as the "global square" part of the equation is concerned: yeah, you're right! A firehose of public statuses requires indexing to work, as a basic foundational premise.

However, there's nothing preventing someone from standing up a PDS, opting out of the firehose / big graph service, and instead leaning on federation between individual PDSes. I'm not saying it would necessarily be a common use-case, but it's definitely not impossible.

deadsuperhero OP ,

Thank you for these insights!

Yeah, aside from developer muscle, an effort like this requires deep knowledge of the existing system. Or, failing that, a commitment to learning it.

It's also not something that can be done as a side project, if it hopes to compete with the main project to the point of replacing it. Something like that requires an ungodly amount of effort and dedication. Someone would have to commit years of their life to solely working on that.

deadsuperhero OP ,

Misskey is a little bit odd, in the sense that there's constantly new forks in various stages of development. New forks emerge just as quickly as old ones die off.

It may be that the frontend and backend both being written in one language helps make the system easier to hack on. I can't say for sure. What's weird is that some of these forks go in really odd directions, like rewriting the whole backend in a different programming language.

The other thing is that, despite their proliferation, the effort is somewhat fragmented into all of these little projects. I'm not sure how viable any of these forks are in the long term.

deadsuperhero ,

It's an interesting and frustrating problem. I think there are three potential ways forward, but they're both flawed:

  1. Quasi-Centralization: a project like Mastodon or a vetted Non-Profit entity operates a high-concurrency server whose sole purpose is to cache link metadata and Images. Servers initially pull preview data from that, instead of the direct page.

  2. We find a way to do this in some zero-trust peer-to-peer way, where multiple servers compare their copies of the same data. Whatever doesn't match ends up not being used.

  3. Servers cache link metadata and previews locally with a minimal amount of requests; any boost or reshare only reflects a proxied local preview of that link. Instead of doing this on a per-view or per-user basis, it's simply per-instance.

I honestly think the third option might be the least destructive, even if it's not as efficient as it could be.

Interview with Matthias Pfefferle, Author of the WordPress-ActivityPub plugin ( wedistribute.org )

We sat down with Matthias Pfefferle to talk about his journey in developing an ActivityPub integration for WordPress, along with the challenges of implementing a protocol for a platform that everybody customizes in a wide variety of ways....

deadsuperhero OP ,

It's the WordPress competitor.

PubKit Officially Launches Closed Beta ( wedistribute.org )

PubKit is a spinoff project from Pixelfed, and is used by the project's lead developer to actually develop Pixelfed. It has some pretty great ideas about mocking up entities and data, testing data streams, and working with different server implementations to see where pieces might differ.

Talking to Manton Reece about IndieWeb, Federation, and Personal Blogging ( wedistribute.org )

We sat down and interviewed Manton Reece, the creator of Micro.Blog. Micro.Blog is an IndieWeb platform with microblogging capabilities that marries a social experience with a more traditional personal website / blogging concept. It federates via ActivityPub, and has been a part of the Fediverse since 2018.

deadsuperhero ,

Radio Free Fedi is awesome, and I highly recommend it.

deadsuperhero OP ,

Truth Social is such a freaking dumpster fire. It would be the absolute worst candidate to be used by governments. Some politicians? Sure. Actual departments? Ehhhh

deadsuperhero OP ,

Literally just saw this in my feed: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-sues-truth-social-co-founders-says-not-entitled-stock-shares-rcna146106

deadsuperhero OP ,

Gab is in kind of the same place, with the same conclusion.

"Oh no, keeping a walled garden actually increases the value of my echo chamber! Better not open anything up to dissenting views!"

deadsuperhero OP ,

Yeah, I don't have a complete answer here. I think that Terms of Service requiring standards of behavior are quite reasonable - people in Congress, for example, are required to conduct themselves to a certain standard or be ejected. Same goes for courtrooms.

There may be a "minimum threshold" for content or communities that are blocked, on the basis of materials provided (hate speech, harassment campaigns, doxxing, CSAM), but I'll readily admit that this is conjecture.

deadsuperhero OP ,

Weird, maybe you have to use an ActivityPub server to complete the lookup? I managed to get it to work with Mastodon and Akkoma, but haven't tried anything else.

Edit: alternatively, try doing a Webfinger lookup for @potus@threads.net directly?

Decentered Podcast: Interview with creator of Blacksky ( wedistribute.org )

This ended up being such a great interview. I know some people will shrug it off, because it’s Bluesky and not Mastodon, but Rudy’s a super smart dude and an amazing guest, and he shed a lot of light on building a community space for black people on an emergent platform. There’s so much good info coming from this man!

deadsuperhero ,

  1. There were a variety of price points, including $1.99 tickets for people who couldn't afford more. General Tickets were 40 bucks, but quite a few people spent more to sponsor the cheap tickets to help out. Only corporate attendees paid $250 per person.

  2. The demos were recorded and uploaded, extensive notes for each breakout session were written, and some of us did live-blogging for the entire day while attending. The general format of an unconference is pretty grassroots, conversational, and informal.

  3. It's the third event of its kind, bringing in a wide variety of people building different parts of the Fediverse, from Trust & Safety to standards bodies to developers and advocates. There's a lot of awesome things happening as people try to grapple with some of the biggest challenges the network has ever had.

deadsuperhero ,

Honestly, I think this is an extremely cynical take. It takes a lot of effort to organize and run something like this, and nobody is getting rich off of it. If anything, it's pretty meagre compensation to set off infrastructure and organizational costs.

The talks themselves are also a informed by privacy concerns: some attendees are fine with being directly cited in notes / recorded / talked about, but a lot of people just wanted to be part of conversations and do not want that.

I think some of your suggestions in your last paragraph are actually pretty good, but I also think it's a little unfair to make demands here. No aspect of running this thing is easy, and the whole "why don't they just?" attitude from the sidelines is kind of unsavory when a lot of us went out of our way to pay extra to make sure there were more than enough $1.99 "almost free" tickets.

Like, if that's not good enough for you, I'm pretty sure nothing is.

deadsuperhero ,

Let me think...

  • Flohmarkt is like Craigslist or eBay
  • Honk - Ultra-ultra minimalist
  • Vocata - a general C2S-enabled server that allows you to throw any kind of Vocabulary you want at it. Could be useful for mocking up client apps.
  • Wordforge - federated novel-writing
  • SkoHub - Some kind of federated knowledge discovery system?
  • GreatApe - an OBS-like federated video thing that you can have live audiences with.

That's just what I could find from scrounging around, I know there's more.

deadsuperhero ,

Nostr is more of a protocol / network in and of itself, as is Scuttlebutt. Both legitimate efforts in their own right, but not quite Fediverse in the traditional sense. Though, with bridging, it's getting harder to tell where one starts, and another stops.

Regardless, I would love to start a list of really esoteric Fedi software like what I have above. I know there's more, it's just harder to dig up.

deadsuperhero ,

So...it does do what it sets out to do, just not in the way you would think.

ActivityPods doesn't bring Solid to ActivityPub accounts. It brings ActivityPub protocol capabilities to Solid Pods. The reason this is significant is because Fediverse platforms historically use relational databases, whereas this is like using Google Drive and files to create a graph database. Additionally, ActivityPods is a framework for building apps on top of.

Damon, my friend and co-founder at We Distribute, is building a really killer app on top of it called Memory.

deadsuperhero ,

Basically, it's the second half of ActivityPub that's for mapping an instance to clients. Most platforms on Fedi use bespoke APIs or copy Mastodon, but C2S is kind of more fluid and lets you build custom experiences and logic that hooks into it?

What's cool about Vocata is that you can kind of just make up the vocab and activity you send out the Outbox. Vocata just shrugs and says "whatever, that's valid."

It could be brilliant for prototyping.

deadsuperhero OP ,

It's less expensive than you would think. Object Storage is actually really, really cheap in a lot of cases. I host a PeerTube instance, and while it does cost me money every month, the cost is decently offset by recurring donations, as well as the savings that Object Storage brings.

deadsuperhero OP ,

Good to know, I was wondering about that!

deadsuperhero OP ,

The Pixelfed app isn't officially published yet, but you can easily grab a beta build: https://pixelfed.org/mobile-apps

deadsuperhero OP ,

They can upload videos for Stories, I don't think videos can be uploaded elsewhere from mobile, at the moment.

deadsuperhero OP ,

Within the Pixelfed app: tap the Camera button, then the Clock. Tap +Video to add a video story.

deadsuperhero OP ,

There are a handful of decent instances, but you really have to dig to find stuff, sadly. I run Spectra Video and basically have to curate sign-ups and which servers we follow.

It helps cut down on a lot of the crap, but it takes work.

deadsuperhero ,

Jira. In the Software-as-a-Service world, it's often the tool of choice by Product teams to track issues, by breaking everything down into stories.

It's a horrible, slow, janky mess. The interface is confusing and poorly laid out, you can easily have too many options all over the place, and how its even used can vary dramatically from one company to another.

Salesforce is also trash for very similar reasons. How Sales people around the world all vouched for this thing is beyond me.

deadsuperhero ,

Holy shit, Air Force MX represent!

Yeah, this piece of garbage has it all:

  • Crusty UI that looks like Windows 95 + Web 1.0
  • All navigation is done either though typing numbers in a box, or diving into a maze of links with the density of a black hole.
  • Loses everything if you hit the back button
  • Schedule in the future, sign off in the past.
  • The yellow windows in the ugliest font imaginable. Pop-up blocker enabled? Yeah, you won't see them, and your page will refresh if you turn it on.
  • Have fun fishing for a primary JCN to pull from for all your subsequent job write-ups. Cross-reference everything!
  • You signed off a whole JCN tree on an X and need to open it up again? Better have powers.
  • Half the time, your shop writes stuff that's just wrong. They took out a part and put it back in? "L 127 Configured to Installed Position", because they didn't want to put in an install and removal job.
  • Being the DIT monitor who has to fix all the bad write-ups for QA compliance. So many people get basic details horribly wrong.

Been doing F-16 MX and using this garbage for the last few years now. I've actually gotten pretty good with it, but it doesn't excuse the fact that this is one of the worst pieces of garbage out there.

deadsuperhero ,

I mean, the real gag here is not just that it's bad and people mostly don't use it correctly, it's that your whole section can catch hell if QA finds even the smallest error. Better have multiple people on DIT to look over everything every single day!

It got to be one of those things that I hated so much, I sketched out plans for my own open source alternative. No guarantee that I'll ever actually make it, but I have loads of thoughts on how to do this better.

Meanwhile, all the F-35 guys laugh at us in ALIS, which is apparently great.

deadsuperhero OP ,

Yeah, one of the project devs threatened to ban me after I told him to get past his own ego.

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