Thank you. ❤️ I know, and I’m doing my best. It’s just my first real experience of dealing with any of this as an adult, and I don’t think I’ve ugly cried harder in my life.

I’m about to fly East next week, to bury my grandfather. I think it will be good for me, but it hurts to let go of someone that so many of my happy memories stemmed from.

It’s also a horrifying thought to me that this is the logical conclusion of “growing old with someone”. One of you is going to go first, and it’s going to be the worst pain the other person has ever felt.

I’m a trainwreck right now.

My grandfather suddenly passed away after a prolonged battle with cancer, multiple strokes, and COVID. It was brutal, he was in so much pain for months. What really hurts is that he was a wonderful person, a source of great joy and insight, and most definitely the person who got me into computers at a young age. My youngest coherent memories are of him, and the loss is exceedingly painful.

My stepfather pointed a loaded gun at my autistic little brother and basically kicked him to the street. My little brother has had his fair share of problems with holding down any kind of job, and can barely take care of himself. He was kicked out of a shelter for a messy living space, and living out of a tent next to a YMCA.

My mom was living in fear for a while, as my stepdad increasingly became more paranoid and violent, to the point that she was no longer allowed to talk to us on the phone if he came home. She managed to give him the slip and take the kids with her to go take care of the grandfather on the other side of the country…but, she’s in for a messy divorce.

These three things have kind of converged, and a lot of it is starting to resolve finally, but it’s been a massive strain on my mental health and my marriage. I’m barely taking care of myself most of the time, and trying to live with anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation…and all of the fun side effects of trying to treat those things with therapy and medication.

I’m so tired. I’m barely eating. I have six months left in a maintenance squadron before I get out of the military, and all I want to do is scream.

Unfortunately, even if instance admins were to unanimously defederate, Meta—or any social media corporation—could create white-label instances to take their place, and we might be none the wiser of their control of them.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this idea, but they would have to justify the business case to their shareholders. As of right now, the idea of a whitelabel personal silo is a limited value proposition to people not already invested in the Fediverse. If it’s whitelabel, what will Meta do? Start a new company? Inevitably, people would figure it out, and go with something else.

It’s true that we can always choose to defederate from them. What’s to worry about is their meddling with the ActivityPub standard using their incomparably vast resources, and them making their own extensions to the standard in efforts to suck users back into the Borg. Things like that.

I said this a little further up in the conversation, but if Meta produces some horrendous, awful version of ActivityPub that only benefits them, what’s stopping the rest of us from forking the protocol or adopting a different one? If we never switch to their version of doing things, and there’s feature breakage between us and Meta, who actually loses here?

Thank you for your response, I appreciate your insights!

I think if there were really serious problems with a future version of ActivityPub, we could feasibly do one of two things:

1. Maintain a fork of the protocol - this has actually already happened once, with an implementation standard called Litepub.
2. Move over to a different protocol, such as Zot.

The second route is probably much harder, but there’s no real reason why a zombified Meta version of the protocol would do much of anything to anybody running vanilla ActivityPub at this time. You’d probably have some feature incompatibilities and breakage, but…if you’re not going to federate with them anyway, what can they actually do?

My uBlock Origin extension is blocking “threads.net” on his site. Perhaps he’s got some skin in the game.

That’s a post embed.

Thanks, now I know not to take you seriously.

It’s all good, I don’t even take myself seriously most of the time. Most of what I have to say is dumb shit anyway.

Real talk, though: I legitimately think that Threads is incapable of actually extinguishing a federated network powered by open standards. Yeah, the infighting might fragment us, and the influx of millions of activities and interactions might overwhelm servers that connect with it. To some extent, they can propose protocol extensions and features and even make an ecosystem push with tooling.

But, so long as servers are federating via an open protocol, no entity can truly snuff out the network in its entirety. An actual EEE move would not actually work here: if they ever made such an attempt, we’d just defederate them.

My article is not a point about how we all need to shut up and start worshipping Meta, but that the things we ought to be most concerned about are in fact the things we’ve always neglected: actual user control over data, the ability for people to decide for themselves on what to connect to, and dealing with the technical requirements of hundreds of millions of people worth of traffic. And that’s just to start! If we want to reach the masses, we have to prepare for these things.

Thanks, fixed. Posting was a little broken earlier, and I made some incorrect assumptions about manually entering in metadata for the link (Kbin lets you upload the thumbnail manually).

I don’t think it was intentional, the dev seemed to be struggling with health-related problems and possibly burnout. But yeah, definitely a depressing moment for an otherwise really cool project.

Getting major NPR vibes from this one!

This one is S-tier!

Thanks for the feedback, I added a big quote from Radio Free Fedi to call more attention to that effort.

Fair point, I should probably clear that up. Static site generators typically work through a process that builds pages for you on the fly, based on what’s in the folder. However, for it to be available on the Internet, you’d still need a server to run the program, so that you can generate those pages.

You’d probably want to host it on an actual server, if you want people to be able to access it when your laptop isn’t on. The documentation seems pretty good, though, it should walk you through the steps: https://simonrepp.com/faircamp/manual/installation.html

Architecturally speaking, Nostr is really cool, and has some great ideas. I think their approach is way better than what we have with instances, but discovery seems to be a fair bit worse, and most of the landscape seems to just be right-wing crypto bros. I’ve also heard from some people developing for Nostr that it’s “easy to learn, but messy”, in terms that you’re basically always trying to figure out compliance with various NIPs, rather than just following a particular protocol standard.

I think the Fediverse would absolutely benefit from a system that didn’t tie user accounts to instances, and made use of a similar relay system.

The main thing is that their frontend was built for whatever APIs their own platform supported. You can theoretically adjust the code to use the Mastodon API instead, but it can actually be kind of a tedious process to change everything over.

It’s probably easier to mod an existing frontend to look and act the way they want, or write a new one from scratch.

The other thing is, it’s still a really new instance, and kind of started as a community experiment. While it looks like it could be a big next step for Pebble, they’re probably more interested in testing the waters before doing any serious committed development on it.

Okay. I’m glad that the situation is looking better, and it’s probably more on the Ubuntu people than the Gnome people, but it’s still an incredibly shitty experience.

The one that really irks me now is that Nautilus in Ubuntu doesn’t show thumbnails for PNG images in the file selection dialog. It’s such an ass-backwards change that I’m legitimately shocked.

Yeah, I get that it’s not that new, especially since it’s a rebranded fork. But, as a fediverse project with its own brand and design sensibilities, it’s relatively new, especially compared to Mastodon.

Unfortunately, I’ve used the Antennas for like two months, and they’re janky. The “non-retroactive data fill” point that you make is only partially true, and seems to mostly apply to filters pertaining to a collection of users, or a collection of servers as a data source. It’s a confusing UX papercut. Worse yet, my Fediverse Devs antenna example has been around for two months, and barely produces anything most of the time.

I don’t believe that an “official branded app” is strictly necessary. What I meant was more in line with “Firefish could really use apps developed for its features specifically.” Sadly, Misskey compatible apps continues to be a wasteland compared to the plethora of Mastodon ones.

The whole “the flagship instance is a sandbox test instance” is kind of a sometimes-true sometimes-not situation. It’s definitely less stable now than it was two months ago, but that kind of messaging and expectations management didn’t seem to really happen until sometime after the CalcKey migration.

And yeah, proper group / community federation with Lemmy is a huge deal! I’m looking forward to what Pixelfed is doing with Groups, as they look somewhat similar, and aim to maximize compatibility while providing good management tools.

Wow, thanks for the great in-depth feedback! 🤩

Yeah, there’s definitely other areas I could’ve delved into, like Public Clips or MFM or pagebuilding. These in-depth reviews are challenging, due to trying to strike a balance between features and actually getting something published. Most articles of this nature takes me weeks, sometimes even a month or more.

The UI definitely has a learning curve, too, but as a veteran Fedi user, it suited me just fine. I’ve dealt with far, far worse 😂

The instability really bums me out. I’d like to think that things are slowly improving, but the lack of transparency (and frankly useless error messages) make it really hard to triage where the problem is and forge a path forward. The lead dev has also been sick recently, and suddenly is not very active online.

Finally, I think Firefish takes part in a long tradition of Misskey forks, where a half dozen systems all branch off of each other. It’s a shame that more of them don’t collaborate on the same platform, leaving many devs to cherry-pick across forks. I wonder sometimes whether this hurts development more than it helps.

What’s weird is that the site is still up and works fine. My guess is that maybe the developer lost interest, or was busy with other things.