Let me guess, they’ve “summoned” the ambassador to an important meeting in a 9th floor hotel room with an ample balcony and no awnings.

… without mentioning Twitter.

That seems like a pretty arbitrary restriction. At this point, a basic knowledge of “what Twitter is like” is a pretty general-knowledge thing.

The color codes and symbols aren’t at all propagandist.

The article refers to ActivityPub-based “microblogging” by assuming that Mastodon is the only client application available for that purpose. It is not. Mastodon is certainly the most popular client application for that purpose, but it doesn’t have to be. Other client applications exist, and a better or more popular client application could be created.

When the point of the article is to get people to comprehend that federated social media is not a “walled garden” –

People are using open, free Mastodon, but in their minds, they are still in a walled garden.

maintaining the notion that a single client application is the only way to read or create a certain kind of content is a big part of the very problem the article describes.

And the author seems to be aware of this:

Often, I hear about people trying to explain the idea behind Mastodon to someone, who is not on the Fediverse, they often explain it with e-mail. However, nowadays, people don’t even experience this “choice of service” even with e-mail anymore. They get their e-mail when signing up with google and that’s it.

GMail is not the only way to send and receive SMTP email. It’s certainly a very popular way to do so, but you wouldn’t describe a concern over people being blind to their choices of email providers (or, indeed, their ability to host their own email server) as

The current [GMail]-signup is only removing the confusion of users on first glance, because it either hides the server-choice altogether, or leaves them with a choice that is impossible to make at this point of their [GMail]-journey.

If the author, or anyone else, wants people to have a better understanding of the nature of federated social media, describing it wrong is not a path to that goal.

I said no such thing.

Here’s another way: stop referring to everything “Twitter-like” as Mastodon. Stop referring to everything “Reddit-like” as Lemmy. Those are both client platforms through which one can access ActivityPub content.

Conflating the platform with the provider with the protocol with the content is what’s confusing people.

And if someone was caught taking bribes to vote a certain way about that, it would be Bill Gates gate-gate bill-gate.

What about the individual??

Flat effect no ambition misery? Or creative powerhouse and visionary?

Personal experience: I spent my entire youth and a large portion of my adulthood being amazingly preoccupied with sex, and with a fair amount of aggression towards everyone and everything.

Between testiulcar cancer, many consistent years of antidepressants, and just being old, I am finally feeling relief from those. I don’t claim to be a “creative powerhouse and visionary” by any stretch, but I am far from having a flat affect, I’m no more or less ambitious than I was before, and I am decidedly less miserable.

In hindsight, I can see that libido and aggression have always been an obstacle to my reaching my potential. Having built some bad habits over decades, they still are. None of us get to accomplish everything we want, so I’m trying not to fret about it too much.

Overall, as an individual whose life experience has changed from one extreme to the other - whether hormones have anything to do with it or not - I much prefer the current stage in my life to the former.

Copied from Wikipedia.

ℵ₀ Guys

Until you get to the hypothetical ideal burger, from the restaurant Infinte Guys.

I was going to ask if they were called Six Guys.

It’s one of the things that really took off during lockdown. That, online grocery ordering, and curbside pickup are the three things that make life so much better for me.

Dave’s not here.

Looks a lot like my Aussiedoodle when he was little. It’s definitely a doodle of some kind.

Jraphics Interchange Format.

Peak helium.

255.255.0.0/16

255.255.255.0/24

They all need to register as foreign agents now, right? Right??