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Requiem for a string: Charting the rise and fall of a theory of everything
String theory was supposed to explain all of physics. What went wrong?Ars Technica
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And it’s interesting to me because he presents this as a Mastodon problem.
I feel like a lot of women and minorities, especially LGBT people, kind of regard this as a normal social media experience. It’s entirely common for us to randomly find ourselves restricted on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook for simply talking about our own lives. Sometimes we get outright banned, and appeals tend to not work.
The only social media I pay for is Mastodon (I have a cloud server) and Reddit, and I nearly got banned from Reddit for talking about reclamation of terms user against LGBT people. Lesson learned: no “shop talk” on Reddit.
Even private Facebook posts are not safe. They’re safe from malicious reporting, as long as you haven’t gone too broad with your friends group, but Facebook has a lot of automated moderation that scans everything, and if it doesn’t like what you say, into Facebook jail you go.
In this light, it comes as no surprise that queer, and especially trans people, are congregating on majority LGBT instances or, in increasingly large numbers, rolling our own. I have a cloud Mastodon server which I’m paying for, but @Zoë O'Connell and I have also been experimenting with a #Friendica server running on our own home network. We are safe in our own servers: from malicious reporting, and from automated keyword auto-bans.
The worst that can happen to us is defederation, and we aren’t particularly at risk of being defederated by our own community.
And the micro-instance fediverse is a fun place, with a lot of camaraderie and, I think, quite a different and more intimate experience than even being somewhere like mastodon.social, let alone commercial social media.
To all the malicious reporters out there, all you did is encourage us to get stronger and build a fortress. Joke’s on you.
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Content warning: UK Pol, GRA reform
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The US only requires a "declaration of intent" and a pronouncement from an officiant (a license easily obtained and needn't be religiously associated). The wording of the declaration is very flexible.
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Like, fuck off?
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Then into the water and off we go. There was a bit of wading but we were wearing wetsuits and the sea is still quite warm, despite overnight temperatures dropping to about 5º. Alvor lagoon is wide, shallow and flat, so you're gonna get wet before you find enough water to float even a kayak.
Anyway, we started paddling upstream with the tide, and as the lagoon started to narrow, we approached the rail bridge that carries the Algarve Line across it.
Once under the bridge, the lagoon starts to resemble more the mouth of a river, and it sort of is at this point. Two rivers really: The Odiáxere, our target, and the Arão.
Now the Algarve is a wide flat plain, on which almost everyone actually lives, separated from the rest of Portugal by a range of smallish mountains. The reason we chose the Odiáxere instead of the Arão is that at the confluence, you turn left to get into the former and run parallel with the beach for some way. The latter heads straight inland and soon starts meeting contour lines, and we need the high tide for depth.
You can just see the confluence in the previous photo.
I keep dipping my finger in and tasting the water. Initially it was unambiguously sea water. Now it is starting to get brackish as more of it is flow from upstream, and also colder. As you can see, we are approaching our next bridge, which carries the N125 road over the stream.
I thought the reflection made this a cool picture!
After the bridge the stream runs into the town of Odiáxere. I think the stream is named after the town, not the other way round. The water is now losing a lot of its salinity and it's only about 3 metres wide now, and flanked by lots of thick bamboo. Much of the bamboo has broken off and fallen in the water. It keeps snagging our skeg.
You can't really tell, but we're actually in the village now. It's hidden from us by all that bamboo. Nobody can see us, but local dogs are keen to tell everyone that we are there, very loudly!
Eventually we can go no further. The water now is completely fresh and the stream is only a few centimetres deep. It's also utterly grown over with quite thick vegetation. I guess the salt water doesn't get up here at all often.
This is where we turned round. I had to get out and push!
Our timing was perfect. We arrived at the top of the navigable part pretty much exactly as the tide turned, and had it pushing us both ways. Retracing our steps, we arrived back at the car 15 minutes before sunset. Perfect! Here we are, almost back where we started, bathed in golden light from the setting sun. It was getting very cold though and, because I am prone to Raynaud's syndrome, I can't feel or move my fingers. Sylvia had to do a lot of the finer bits of packing the kayak away because I simply couldn't grip stuff until the car heater had warmed my fingers up for a while.
Other than being freezing bloody cold in the last 15 minutes or so (problem with The Algarve in winter. The days can be lovely but it gets cold fast as the sun goes down), I really enjoyed that. There's another big tide in 4 weeks time. Might try something similar with another stream.
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The. Comments. Section.
Zero self awareness.
Back to the future: how Mastodon is restoring the lost art of online conversation
The new social network with its interconnected ‘fediverse’ is a welcome alternative to blustering rival Twitter and Elon MuskJohn Naughton (The Guardian)
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Content warning: journalist pitch cont cw twitter / transphobia
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV8Q0WOYoag
*edit* Wow, 384 boosts!
If Mastodon Existed In The 1980s...
Somewhere in a parallel universe, Mastodon already existed in the 1980s. Programmer SuperIlu made a real Mastodon client for MS-DOS:https://github.com/SuperI...YouTube
a Claes unto himself 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 likes this.
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Quite looking forward to testing that out at the next UK general election (I have a Portuguese licence).
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So don't give up your UK address or your UK passport if you want to vote in England!
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Let's hope it stays up this time.
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But anything you're gonna write is gonna get federated to the elephant in the room, which because it's pretending to be #twitter is very much a lowest common denominator.
Should we just go ahead and do it anyway, or should users of more compositionally capable #fediverse software limit ourselves to what we know is going to render sensibly on #mastodon and its various clones?
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Some federation statistics from my #Friendica server. #Mastodon is by far and away the biggest software platform we're federating with, but interestingly, Friendica is now number 2. I'm sure it was nothing like that last week:
Platform | Instances | |
---|---|---|
Mastodon | 5309 | |
Friendica | 170 | |
Hometown | 114 | |
Akkoma | 21 | |
Pleroma | 18 | |
Lemmy | 17 | |
GoToSocial | 10 | |
Pixelfed | 7 | |
Misskey | 6 | |
Honk | 2 | |
SocialHome | 2 | |
Peertube | 1 | |
WordPress | 1 | |
WriteFreely | 1 | |
other | 30 |
Looks like Friendica is getting some of the recognition it deserves!
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Mastodon | 12685 | 7948918 |
WordPress | 1614 | 105462 |
Pleroma | 1506 | 101668 |
Peertube | 1258 | 338949 |
WriteFreely | 642 | 63401 |
GoToSocial | 611 | 620 |
Misskey | 541 | 56538 |
Friendica | 478 | 24794 |
Pixelfed | 468 | 127348 |
Akkoma | 454 | 11166 |
Microblog | 342 | 342 |
Other | 251 | 175476 |
Owncast | 203 | 203 |
Hubzilla/Red Matrix | 198 | 6934 |
Funkwhale | 165 | 9818 |
Hometown | 155 | 10858 |
ActivityPub Relay | 146 | 147 |
Mobilizon | 123 | 14666 |
Diaspora | 120 | 742855 |
BirdsiteLIVE | 107 | 77709 |
Castopod | 106 | 210 |
Honk | 82 | 85 |
Lemmy | 80 | 35484 |
BookWyrm | 76 | 12014 |
Plume | 60 | 23790 |
GNU Social/Statusnet | 49 | 2753 |
Nextcloud | 49 | 48 |
Foundkey | 33 | 1839 |
Calckey | 25 | 1334 |
Gancio | 25 | 402 |
Nomad projects (Mistpark, Osada, Roadhouse, Zap) | 14 | 400 |
SocialHome | 5 | 1468 |
Write.as | 3 | 3 |
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Μαθθίας/ξ ✔ reshared this.
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The offending piece of crap is pictured after I disassembled it. Even when working it was only as fast as an SD card. Truly dreadful.
Anyway, the friendica server is temporarily running in a data centre in Madrid (apparently it’s that easy to move Docker containers), but because the URL is fixed for all time when you create a server, the little Pi is sitting there acting as a concierge for that VPS and sending all data to it via an SSH tunnel. String and sellotape, whatever.
I have bought it a shiny proper branded SSD from Samsung that goes like shit off a Teflon coated shovel and we will likely be migrating it back this weekend.
Lesson learned: you CAN host a personal instance on an RPi on your home network, but please, for the love of god, do not buy the cheapest piece of shit SSD you can find. You will regret it if you do.
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zoe@friendica:~$ sudo du -sh mysql nginx friendica
865M mysql
160K nginx
155M friendica
zoe@friendica:~$ docker image ls
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
friendica latest 7e3551926c66 43 hours ago 652MB
yobasystems/alpine-mariadb latest 0e44a1aef456 6 weeks ago 238MB
nginx 1.15-alpine dd025cdfe837 3 years ago 16.1MB
zoe@friendica:~$
I'm guessing for anyone on Mastodon that looks hopelessly mangled but should make some sense on Friendica. Also, I have no idea why I pulled such an old Nginx image. I should fix that.
Yesterday cost me the grand total of £1.21. That'll go down because I'll bump the size down later on now it's caught up.
In fact, if you're willing to redo your iptables magic, I can do it now
Might as well put a fresh install on the new SSD if you have a spare Pi.
What I'm finding is that Friendica does not cope well with lots of followers in the same way Mastodon does, so I'm going to be limited in the follow requests I accept here.
But I will retoot interesting stuff on my Mastodon account: @Sarah, I promise!
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In 2014, the UK charity, Stonewall, had a new CEO: Ruth Hunt.
Ruth wanted to make Stonewall trans inclusive. Up until that point it hadn’t been. Part of that effort was to recruit an advisory group from the UK trans community.
I was on that group. I ended up as its vice chair.
We spent the next year and a bit creating a document called “A Vision For Change”, which detailed what we thought the areas that trans equality campaigning should focus on in Britain.
Then the Brexit referendum happened and Cameron ragequit. Theresa May came in and it was apparent there was very little government apetite for the stuff we wanted.
But May, who was there when the same Sex marriage bill went through under the earlier coalition government had had something of a damascene conversion to LGBT rights issues. Stranger things have happened (but not many!)
So she wanted something from our list that was quick, easy, and uncontroversial. Obviously we were disappointed, but she was presented with bringing Britain’s antiquated Gender Recognition Act up to date, and in line with other European countries, as something simple. We honestly thought it was. It’s an administrative change of very little significant consequence, and actually no significance at all outside the trans community.
And it would have been simple, had an eclectic collection of unpleasant, obsessive arseholes with privileged access to the UK press not decided to start a culture war over trans people at that exact moment.
A culture war which, at least in England, they basically won. In part, this war was why I emigrated to Portugal.
Here we are, seven years later, and the result of Scotland finally wanting to implement a watered down version of the “easy win” we presented to Theresa May is apparently that the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is willing to end the Union between England and Scotland over it.
So that’s my story. I am part of a small, elite cabal of LGBT people who wrote a document that is poised to destroy the last vestiges of the British Empire.
Go me! If there are any other governments you want destabilising, my bank details are available on request. I provide reasonable rates.
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Hope 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🏴 SNP
•Content warning: UK Pol
Sarah Brown likes this.
LostSettler
•Content warning: UK Pol
Their lost tax revenues will kill them. They should of thought of that before they made everyday life a hostile environment through their culture wars and austerity.
As you both point out, "off you fuck, Mr Hunt!"
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ElizaB🌱
•Content warning: UK Pol
Anne Sjoukje Schurer
•Content warning: UK Pol
Sarah Brown likes this.
Simon Carswell
•Content warning: UK Pol
Martin Vermeer FCD reshared this.
Antti Peltola
•Content warning: UK Pol
Sarah Brown likes this.
Me & Mrs. Jones 🏳️🌈 🏳️⚧️
•Content warning: UK Pol, sweary
The whole place is in some sort of cult-ish denial of reality.
We have a 'government' and 'opposition' so closely aligned that you'd be hard put to get a Rizla between them.
Scotland here I come (hopefully soon).
Sarah Brown likes this.
Simons
•Content warning: UK Pol
We are retired and have also fled the toxic rock on a one way ticket
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ZZ Bottom
•Content warning: UK Pol
Susan 🏳️🌈
•Content warning: UK Pol
But yes, off they all fuck. GTTO
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