Emperor

Emperor OP , 19 hours ago

"And I stand by my answer, Goddammit!"

Emperor , 5 days ago

Good second half too:

That search/SEO is broken seems to be part of the game plan here.

It's probably like Russia burning Moscow against Napoleon and a hell of a privilege Google enjoy with their monopoly.

I've seen people opt for chatGPT/AI precisely because it's clean, simple and spam free, because it isn't Google Search.

And as @caseynewton said ... the web is now in managed decline.

For those of us who like it, it's up to us to build what we need for ourselves. Big tech has moved on

That's why we are all here.

It's interesting to think that Big Tech might just move on from the Web, leaving it to us ordinary humans to go back to the way we were doing it in Web 1.0 just with fancier tools at our disposal. I quite like the idea.

Emperor OP , 6 days ago

Now you can make those emails much less boring.

Emperor OP , 6 days ago

Where can I subscribe to your newsletter?

Emperor OP , 6 days ago

They're the dregs left after we quit.

Emperor OP , 5 days ago

Not necessarily superior but we clearly took the best with us when we left. 🤔

Emperor OP , 5 days ago

Then this is your lucky day.

Emperor , 6 days ago

Start !neilgaiman

Block !harrypotter

Emperor , 6 days ago

Interestingly, on Gaiman and attribution, he came out with a graphic novel, The Books of Magic, with a main character very similar to Harry Potter. This was 7 years prior to Rowlings publishing the first book. His response to that similarity was equally charitable, chalking it to creators tapping into the same unconscious material.

Before either you had Luke Kirby in 2000AD. While it's debatable whether Rowling would have been reading Vertigo comic books, Gaiman wrote for 2000AD.

Emperor , 9 days ago

With a hammer.

Emperor , 18 days ago

Keelhaul the offenders, oh Black Pharaoh¡

Emperor , 19 days ago

This seems to be sleazy conmen faking interactions with women to convince wannabe pick-up artists to pay for their app. It's like some new circle of Hell.

Emperor , 19 days ago

If you are an open-minded cis dude who respects women and sees them as equal human beings you’ll have no problem finding anyone.

It's not always that simple. For example, I cared for my Dad 24/7 which involved a convoluted pill regime (and a series of alarms throughout the day). My social life took a real hit. There are also mental and physical health issues, as well as financial aspects.

All that said, anyone thinking this is the solution deserves to be scammed because it is hardly informed consent.

Emperor , 19 days ago

Really the only trick they missed was turning it into a pyramid scheme but that might sneak in if you use the app a lot, although imagine the "success rate" on this is abysmal and a lot of users will drop out quickly.

Emperor , 18 days ago

My point was that cishet men may have it hard to find someone because they are not catching up with progressive and emancipatory values.

It's worse than that - things seem to be regressing, with a widening political divide between men and women, especially noticeable in the younger adults.

It definitely feels like the modest progress that was made is now being eroded away

Emperor , 17 days ago

And being antifeminist doesn’t even benefit them that much.

The only people benefitting are those peddling the lies to disgruntled young men, partly as a grift and partly as misdirection from the real sources of their issues.

But at the same time I don’t see how much people who are not cis men can do so much to really help them.

And it shouldn't be your job to fix young men but I am as stumped as you and I worry about people like my nephew who is early teens.

There's !mensliberation but I don't know if that's not just preaching to the converted.

Emperor , 18 days ago

It feels like there's an opportunity for shenanigans here.

Emperor , 21 days ago

It's why I prefer the Misskey forks to Mastodon. I hope that, as Fediverse services mature, we'll see more of them take that approach, and/or use customisable algorithms like Bluesky.

Emperor OP , 22 days ago

Ben F orgers

Freudian slip or someone in the company sending a message?

Emperor OP , 21 days ago

Or his assistants hate him.

Emperor OP , 21 days ago

You had it right first time.

Emperor OP , 22 days ago

"I'm not a lawyer, I just pretend to be one when dad asks"

Emperor OP , 24 days ago

That's what I was thinking. It would make it really way for Threads users to try out the various corners of the Fediverse and they are still with Meta because of a demonstrated liking for convenience.

Then you introduce easy account migration so we can offer them greater privacy without losing out of access to their Threads account.

The Fediverse would need to make sure their servers are up to the task of on-boarding all the new users we'd be poaching.

Emperor , 25 days ago

I'll always go for APub.

Emperor OP , 29 days ago

He did the math.

Emperor OP , 29 days ago

As a Brit, I find a lot of American units confusing but that makes my head hurt more than usual.

Emperor , 25 days ago

This seems a lot more achievable - joint fundraising is just guaranteed to go wrong but an ActivityPub Oversight Committee focused on what the whole ecosystem would need to work seamlessly together seems a good thing.

Emperor , 24 days ago

It could see where issues lie and direct attention to solving them. If it raised it's own funds it could create bounties to crack specific issues.

So I just posted this and it seems like a single ActivityPub login is doable through the API, no-one has implemented it. That seems like a good target.

Emperor , 1 month ago

This is where I thought it was going and, the ideas needn't be incompatible. If you went local (down to say a zip code/postcode) the individual resources required would be minimal. I wonder if people would be able to contribute a smidge of storage/bandwidth like they do with things like SETI. The local instance/mesh would essentially know your location and sign you up to the right one.

I think something like Nostr would work, as each user would be a node (some allowing broadcast and networking), so moving house or even going on holiday wouldn't be an issue.

Emperor , 1 month ago

A federated Nextdoor or local Facebook group seems a great idea as it is clearly popular. My only issue is with dividing Home and Nearby by distance. That works well in ideal cases but can get weird in others.

So I live on the coast at the mouth of a big river. If I look up events near me they are done as the crow flies and it can offer up locations on the other side of the estuary. However, to get their by land involves a long U shaped journey through a tunnel, so what appears to be 5 minutes away is 30+ and of little interest to me.

Another example might be city vs country. In the city 5 miles would drag in a large population, in the country it might not even get you to the next village.

A better solution might be postcodes/zip codes (or equivalent) - they're usually designed to encompass similar population numbers, so change in size depending on population density. The data is also freely available (it is on OpenStreetMap, for example) and it should be easy enough to crunch through the data and create a database that defines the adjacent areas for a specific postcode (looking them over, it tends to be 5 or 6).

Other than that, I think the main issue would be getting enough people involved as a quiet feed would kill it dead.

Emperor , 1 month ago

Oh indeed, there are ways and means of doing it, it just doesn't tend to get done that way because examples like mine are figuratively and literally, edge cases.

It can't really address the other point, in that you may have to allow for population density.

Emperor , 1 month ago

I suppose the right thing to do about the latter would be to give both users and owners control over search and area sizes.

It would make defining the extent of any one instance confusing and any level.of confusion is a filter (it's one of the barriers to widespread adoption of the Fediverse). If you go with something well understood, like postcodes, it would be clear to people what the area covered is.

The quiet feed point is my biggest concern to be honest. It worked out for Lemmy and Mastodon, but it took revolts from their privately owned counterparts to get them to the place they are now.

Perhaps we need to await the enshittification of NextDoor...

Emperor , 1 month ago

That's the point of postcodes, they tend to based on population density and, unlike electoral wards, they remain pretty fixed. If you look at the postcode areas for Liverpool (or Manchester) you'll see the size is small in the city centre, larger as you get to the suburbs by the Green Belt and then they expand out into rural areas. If you go north you can see more rural areas with towns, like PR and LA.

The sizes also reflect the range of someone's interest - in the countryside you could travel 20+ miles to go shopping, in a town it may only be a few miles.

There are currently 160 countries using postal code systems, some of which follow administrative boundaries too and such boundaries could be used in places that don't have them. Essentially, all the work has been done here (often by the Victorians as they found an expanding postal system was unviable without it) and they are well-understood, so I don't see any need to reinvent the wheel or make things unnecessarily clunky.

They also have other advantages as they may contain a code that identifies a larger area (UK: counties/cities; France: departments; Australia: states) or you can group codes manually, which could give an option for a larger area sort (Home, Nearby and Region).

Emperor , 1 month ago

Oh, they will have different systems but postal codes are widespread and where they aren't you can find other alternatives - when a country hits a certain level it needs bureaucratic divisions to ensure everything can be parcelled up and administration devolved. These tend to run on population density as it means that no one area is overwhelmed.

If you rolled out to North America, Europe and Australia/New Zealand (and probably most former British Empire countries as this became a problem in the 19th Century) you could then get good coverage using postal codes and then look at how the other countries do it.

Emperor , 1 month ago

Yeah, it's weird that they talk about federated webrings, without actually suggesting federated webrings. I discuss it in passing here (and early in passing), calling it FedRing. It definitely seems doable as kind of plug-in to other services that is also a federated service - so you could jump from the sidebar in a Lemmy community or instance to a Mastodon account or channel.

Emperor , 1 month ago

We can bring back the cozy vibes of the old web neighborhoods. Not by regressing to a bygone era, but by building the web one-and-a-half that should have been; a Web of the People.

Weirdly, a while back I wrote:

It is increasingly clear to me that a lot of directions Web 1.0 was evolving in were diverted or just killed off by Big Tech’s landgrab which built walled gardens. I see the Fediverse as a return to the idea of blogs (micro and macro), forums, etc but in a more natural progression to interoperability. This still isn’t perfect and there may be other early web ideas, like webrings, that improve discoverablity.

It's a pity they don't really talk about federated webrings and largely ignore the opportunities for webrings in the wider Fediverse instead focusing on Matrix and Discord.

And I was thinking we needed Web 2.0b, they are suggesting an early "fork" Web 1.5.

Emperor , 1 month ago

As you are on here, the best place to start might be lemmy.world on Matrix. Or to jump straight to retro gaming, there are a few listed on matrixrooms.info.

Emperor , 1 month ago

1,022 give or take a few as we don't have Photon, yet, but it's in the to-do list.

Emperor , 1 month ago

Me too.

Emperor OP , 1 month ago

According to the rules, it makes them the fool.