Texas-based writer and admin of the https://hol.ogra.ph/ Firefish instance

Feel free to follow me on Firefish @gil@hol.ogra.ph or check out my Substack!

(he/they)

  • 13 Posts
  • 49 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • I personally disagree with the sentiment that going child-free is the solution to ecological catastrophe. Any individual’s decision to have children, or not, hardly compares to the systemic issues within agriculture and natural resource management which are causing it.

    I thought beehaw was supposed to be the “nice” instance. You and others have done a wonderful job proving that otherwise today.

    Well, the original comment in this thread which upset you came from your own instance. From where I’m sitting, that comment has been pretty much the only not-really-nice interaction you’ve had all day on here. Don’t really see where this strawman is coming from.





  • Gil (he/they)@beehaw.orgtoChat@beehaw.orgWhooosh!
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    1 year ago

    It’s crazy to think that when I joined, Beehaw had <2k users, and now it has about 6 times that. So many server upgrades happened in just one weekend, many new moderators (a dream team, one might say), and many new servers to federate with as well.

    Love being part of this ❤️



  • I agree - my main reason for sharing with this post in particular is because the tie-in it has with Beehaw’s recent decision to, at least temporarily, defederate with .world and sh.itjust.works; I just found the framing about decentralization, esp. the fact that the Fediverse is not a monolithic entity mandating a uniformly aligned approach, useful.

    On the whole, I do think either ActivityPub’s protocol spec would need some kind of privacy revision, seeing as it’s already been a Problem where microblogging admins have had to block access by servers dedicated to mirroring Mastodon posts which don’t delete their copies after posts are deleted by the user, or the software itself, Lemmy in our case, will have to make adjustments to its implementation of federation like you said. Of course, I’m mostly just conjecturing here and I don’t actually know what either of these might look like 😅

    The main part of this which I problematize are the people who are sticking their necks out for Meta and suggesting instances shouldn’t be quick to defederate because this is, supposedly, a good opportunity to bring federated social media into the mainstream. Yet, in my opinion, they’re not making enough of the fact that, even with their open-source contributions, Meta’s software manufactures discord and bigotry on a massive scale. Letting them federate with an instance opens floodgates on that and for the stealing and selling of Fediverse participants’ data.



  • It doesn’t feel empty to me, personally (just thought I’d be clear that this is only my opinion) but it is definitely somewhat slower than Reddit or some of the other Lemmy and Kbin instances that are out there. IMO, I think a lot of people coming to Beehaw who’re acculturated to Big Social or Big Social-ish experiences are inevitably disappointed with the amount of content because it’s not a massive stream of content being funneled into your feed anymore.

    But I’ve been on the Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.) for about four years now and gotten used to the slower flow, that going to Reddit or some other Lemmy instances or Twitter now feels like I’m drowning or being inundated/overwhelmed with content which flows faster than I can give a due-diligence response to. Either I could say nothing, just vote, write a one-off low-effort response, get in a heated debate, or try to take the time to write something more thoughtful (and then by the time I was done with that, the moment would already have past or I’d get some smart-ass reply that would end the engagement for me). Plus there are some concessions involved in getting all that content delivered to you.

    Some people like that but it’s just not really for me anymore, it doesn’t feel healthy. I like being able to slow down and actually talk to people, and I like that I can trust I’ll see them again later. I like that I can post something and no matter whether it’s popular or not, someone will engage, even if it takes time.

    On the other part, I don’t really understand how no downvotes is a “weird” decision; it’s definitely not uncommon considering some of the subreddits I participated in on Reddit did the same thing. But in any event, Beehaw does have some posts/comments around explaining the reason for certain choices.






  • My personal opinion is that federation doesn’t have to take any particular form, and the shape of the fediverse - or, rather, your particular fediverse or your pocket of federated space - depends on how communities decide to federate, informed by various factors including software implementation, community culture and values, moderation policies, etc. It could look like a lot of different things, and there’s not really any “correct” policy with respect to federation; it’s all subjective and values-based.

    Now, as a manner of my preference, I do like envisioning the fediverse as a ball-and-stick model. I don’t really like the idea of having ‘main’ or ‘central’ instances where everyone congregates, with smaller communities left on the fringe. To me, the kind of fediverse (or section of it) that I would most like to participate in is one where people are scattered across a diverse variety of instances - a wide range of stances on how they wish to federate: instances who federate with nobody and exist as isolated nodes, instances who federate with everybody and act like bridges or hubs, instances who federate with certain instances based on similar interests or values, constellations of instances which only touch in certain parts, etc. Each of varying size and user composition.

    A lot of Mastodon, Calckey, Pleroma, etc. instances and a couple of Lemmy instances have already gotten to work on creating instances which are closely related to particular regions or locales. There’s pnw.zone for the US Pacific Northwest, I follow the founder of alaskan.social (for Alaskans, obviously), mastodon.com.pl for Poland, calckey.nz for New Zealand, mastodon.ph for Filipinos, lemmy.pt for Portugal and Portuguese speakers, baraza.africa (Lemmy) for Africans and the African diaspora, etc. etc. On that aspect of your post, I’m highly supportive, and I think you should definitely give it a shot and seek out like-minded people in and around Tucson.

    The fediverse may not/probably won’t fully embrace the form of a locally-focused web (I know for some, local politics suck and they seek the internet as an escape from that), but something like that can and should exist in parallel with the interest-based and general purpose instances which already exist, and I would like to see things be further enmeshed through that.