What is the deal with this balloon thing the yanks have got? Is it still there? Is it doing anything strange? Why not a satellite?
@Elk works with Friendica! This is very relevant to my interests! It presents it as a microblogging experience, but work it does.
@Elk Interestingly, I can use Mastodon features with it that I can’t use on the friendica native UI, such as changing audience mid thread.
It can’t upload pictures though.
@Elk It’s also limiting me to 500 characters, or at least displaying a countdown to 500.
This is actually very nice. Currently I’m maintaining two fediverse accounts: one Friendica, one Mastodon, because Friendica is great as an aggregator, but it makes a very poor Twitter replacement. Mastodon is much better at that.
But elk gives me the mastodon experience on my friendica account.
And I’m now wondering if I really need to maintain both.
Formerly the richest man in the world, now selling MLM schemes. Whatever.
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An interesting fediverse quirk. On Mastodon, you can change visibility midway through a comment thread.
This makes sense because Mastodon is a Twitter-like microblogging platform and each response is a post in its own right.
But this is a federal system and your toots may be going to something that isn’t Mastodon.
This, that you are reading now, is not a Mastodon post. It’s a Friendica post. Friendica is not Twitter-like; it’s Facebook-like. That means that a post includes all responses as comments on that post and not first class posts in their own right.
Which means you can’t, e.g., change the audience midway through a comment thread, even if the people you’re replying to are on Mastodon, because the idea of changing the visibility midway through a comment thread is absurd in Facebook-like parlance.
As different fediverse protocols become increasingly popular, we’re gonna have to het used to these quirks.
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@Alexandra Lanes @Sarah @Elk It's bbcode, not markdown, but on a Mastodon instance it just gets stripped.
Ooh, but when that (from mastodon) is viewed in friendica it is interpreted... fair enough
@Alexandra Lanes @Sarah @Alexandra Lanes @Elk Is it? I assumed it would be shown as the bbcode source.
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@goatsarah@masto.sarahlizzy.org @ajlanes@thegoatery.dyndns.org @elk That was my assumption but the behaviour fits with how friendica handles ActivityPub, as a sort of external gateway which converts to and from Friendica's internals.
Sent an email to our conveyancing solicitor. Got an automated reply back:
Thank you for your email, which has been safely received
It’s SMTP, guys, not a consignment of dynamite sent through bandit country.
Sarah reshared this.
They’re an admin assistant. I don’t think they’re legally trained. They just either think, or have been told, that being endlessly verbose makes them look “professional” instead of like a space alien that taught itself English from garbled police radio transmissions.
me, an American, searching for a definition of "conveyancing solicitor" that doesn't just say "a solicitor well specializes in conveyancing". I finally found one, but I was facepalming hard for a minute. I already knew that solicitors are what we call attorneys or lawyers, so I was really trying to determine what conveyance meant here. I never would have guessed residential property/real estate law.
funnily enough, if you see a sign on someone's property in the US that says "No Soliciting" it does not mean you can't practice law. We call door to door salespersons solicitors, because they "solicit" goods. Which to be honest, feels like an old timey word.
Some might be so unkind to suggest that conveyancing solicitors are those who couldn't hack the legal profession and barely scraped a pass.
But that would be a very unkind stereotype.
Might explain their apparent inability to fucking read, though.
#Friendica server now migrated from a 2 gig RPi 4 to an 8 gig early 2015 retina MacBook Pro running Ubuntu.
The MBP was headed to the skip, but it turns out it makes a pretty kick-arse #ActivityPub server.
Reuse is better than recycle.
Here it is, in my server cupboard! If you're reading this post, that dilapidated Mac in the corner served it!
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No. The wire is underneath the Mac. That's a trick of the perspective. The Mac is configured not to sleep. The lid is not closed because I think the hinge is slightly warped.
Dateline: a petrol station outside Tavira on the main road between Tavira and Faro last night. Action: I park there and, a few minutes later, an older gentleman in a jeep pulls up and I hand him a brown paper bag through my car window.
We then both drive off.
I’m sure this all looked perfectly innocent to anyone observing.
(I was selling the old autopilot unit from my boat)
Sarah reshared this.
Ordering a McRoyale Cheese meal from McDonalds’ coeliac menu, because I can. So ner.
Sarah reshared this.
Weirdest thing about Portuguese malls is their addiction to playing 70s, 80s and 90s Britpop
Discovered why my Friendica server has an occasional massive load spike for several minutes: it’s running out of physical RAM and thrashing the swap.
Machine it’s on only has 2 gigs. I have an old 2015 MacBook Pro that is in a very dilapidated state, but it works perfectly as an Ubuntu server.
Will migrate to that. It has 8 gigs of RAM. That should be plenty.
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The longer I live, the more I come to the inescapable conclusion that most "successful" captains of industry, managers, and politicians are literal psychopaths.
We are ruled by psychopaths working for psychopaths. The only way you can succeed in their hierarchy is to be a psychopath.
This is the Bad Place.
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I have to agree, although I usually call them Socipaths. Capitalism seems to have been designed by Sociopaths/Psychopaths for the benefit of sociopaths/psychopaths.
because 'success' means exploration. A normal human doesn't seek to exploit humans as mere objects. Psychopaths however, do
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Oh, Britain needs me, and other early retirees, does it? Maybe it should have thought of that before Brexit, before all the transphobia, before I got so pissed off I said “fuck it” and buggered off to Portugal with its, *checks notes* 300+ days of sunshine and subtropical beaches.
Well, Jer, old buddy, Britain may indeed need us. We, however, do not need it.
Off you fuck, now. Toodles. Mwah.
'Britain needs you': Jeremy Hunt calls for early retirees to return to work amid plans to hike retirement...
Jeremy Hunt has called for early retirees to return to work after a surge in early retirement since the pandemic.Kieran Kelly (LBC)
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this makes me joyous and sad in equal measures. You shouldn’t have had to leave, but I love seeing people thriving.
But yes, off they all fuck. GTTO
But yes, off they all fuck. GTTO
Sarah Brown likes this.
I challenge anyone to read this without thinking either of the words, "phlogiston" or "epicycles".
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
Sarah reshared this.
Hey, Liberal Democrats! People are keen to try and fix Brexit, they want standards on clean air indoors for public health, and we really, really need proper and urgent action on Climate change. What can you offer?
"We'll try and make sure that if you need a doctor, one will phone you within a week"
It's utterly, utterly tragic how far my former party has fallen. What an utter, utter lack of ambition. It's just, "The future is going to be shit and there is nothing we propose to do about it".
Liberal Democrats targeting Tory seats in election fight back
Sir Ed Davey has a plan to avoid another Lib Dem general election flop but it will be a challenge.By Jonathan Blake (BBC News)
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Probably some from column A, some from column B. There is definitely a dominant ethos of "don't scare the horses" in the Lib Dems now that the properly progressive wing of the party has tried for years (and, sadly, failed) to replace with actual radical politics.
They have got into a situation where the MPs care first, and foremost, about defending their own seats. This means never doing anything that might cause strong feelings in the people who are currently electing them, on the basis that if they don't spook the horses, they will vote for the name they did last time.
That tactic, however, goes to only one place: eventual total extinction.
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Before I left twitter, I learned that the way to tell people to "get in the fucking sea" safely was to do it in Portuguese.
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I sorry to hear that, that is so frustrating. I hope you can find a way to proceed and not need to use those words! 😢
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.
Awooooo!
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Don't unsubscribe! We are your friends!
A spoof email from Netflix. It reads, "Sarah, we've just cancelled a series you might like
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"would you have watched this series we could have commissioned? We're testing out if we can get people annoyed without even making things."
“Hi. We realised Ripley still has to go get Newt from the atmosphere processor, but we just cancelled this film. You’ll have to put up with ‘we’re not leaving’ being Ripley’s final words.”
Love the guy in the article: “why don’t customers understand the value us spying on them via their dishwasher has? The problem must be that we haven’t explained why being spied on is good for them well enough”
Like, fuck off?
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only got mine last year and managed about 4 outings. That will definitely change this year.
Sarah Brown likes this.
The comments section of this is the most unintentionally hilarious thing I’ve read in ages. It’s full of people talking about how their lives are so much more interesting than those of people who do silly things like post on social media.
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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Repost, as the first one seemed to get weirdly corrupted.
8km evening walk in the forest at Barão de São João.
Probably not what most people think of when they picture the Algarve!
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According to this UK government site, under the new Tory "suppress the people who don't vote for us" rules, you can use an EU issued driving licence as valid photo ID.
Quite looking forward to testing that out at the next UK general election (I have a Portuguese licence).
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Yet without having British or Irish nationality you are not allowed to vote for government in England, and neither are UK citizens who've are not registeredin any constituency.
So don't give up your UK address or your UK passport if you want to vote in England!
So don't give up your UK address or your UK passport if you want to vote in England!
If I've got this right, it should display on Mastodon as behind a CW.
Once again, thanks to the talents of @Zoe O'Connell, our #friendica server is back running on our own little Pi, with a brand new and not totally shite this time SSD.
Let's hope it stays up this time.
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So a little problem with the Fediverse. Some platforms, such as #Friendica, which I cannot stop going on about, allow very rich content. Not just going over 500 characters, but tables, quoting of other posts, properly threaded replies, rich text, etc etc.
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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I also wonder whether there are different social norms between the platforms or whether that's kind of gone by the wayside since everyone expects their content to be federated freely anyway. (Does friendica have content warnings?)
mostly I think it’d be good to push it, to get people to appreciate fediverse is more than just Mstdn, and help nudge new client apps in right direction too. But nothing too ridiculous, to keep it as open as possible
State of the fediverse
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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Huh, didn't know until just now you can do tables in #Friendica. Cool.
| 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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@Lorraine Lee @Sarah Brown Unfortunately, another beautiful thing that Mastodon portrays terribly
Thanks to Herculean effort from @Zoe O'Connell, our little #friendica server has dealt with the backlog of my post about GRA reform going viral (Friendica is REALLY bad at that) and then the cheap PoS SSD I bought failing half way through.
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.
I need to prep for a mooting competition tonight. Saturday evening is the next time I have some free time...
Depends how long I'm willing to pay for it. (Turns out I couldn't use the free tier, I think I must have already used it up)
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.
OK. All I need to do from this end is clone the SD card onto the new SSD, and then resize the filesystem. Let me know when and I'm all yours.
In fact, if you're willing to redo your iptables magic, I can do it now
The existing SD card knows nothing about Friendica or anything else, including permanent iptables rules. All it's had is a sudo apt-get install tshark for some initial troubleshooting.
Might as well put a fresh install on the new SSD if you have a spare Pi.
Don't knock gaffer tape solutions. They're holding the best parts of the internet together.
Hi! Had lots of follow requests on the back of my post about my work in Stonewall back in the day.
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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@escapadesrpg @moh_kohn @MissScott01 a federated state where one state has a population of 56m and the others of between 2 and 5.5m is not balanced. Dividing by the old kingdoms can help address that without drawing completely arbitrary lines on a map and winding everyone up
This is my Friendica server. Left to right, the boxes are: Power over Ethernet splitter, Raspberry Pi 4b (2 gig) in official case, 256 gig SATA SSD in a USB3 to SATA enclosure.
That’s it. That’s what this post you’re reading federated from.
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So a fun little update. The SSD in the picture was a cheap piece of junk, no faster than an SD card. It failed at about half past ten last night. @Zoe O'Connell was able to recover the data and we’re back in business, but lesson learned: do not buy no-name Chinese SSDs.
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Some interesting thoughts here. Hashtag search and similar features are more or less useless on small instances, but there are other things to massively recommend them, and you can get around the hashtag problem on a #Friendica instance by following an RSS of the hashtag on a large #Mastodon instance.
And Friendica practically runs on thin air (mine is running on a 2 gig Raspberry Pi with a 256 gig SSD in my TV cabinet).
Setting it up was far harder than it needs to be though. If the work to make this stuff easy to install for someone moderately technically competent was done, then it could utterly revolutionise social media.
I’m honestly a little bit in love with Friendica. You guys on Mastodon may have a slick UI, but you don’t know what you’re missing!
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You can’t migrate using the Mastodon migrate feature, but you can import your follows. For now, I’m using both.
Some mastodon clients don’t work with it at all. Some like Metatext do, but present it as though it’s mastodon. The web interface on a phone looks like this.
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Ok, so yesterday I tried to submit a bunch of photos. I'd turned the file size limit up on my #Friendica instance but it was creaking. When I got it to accept, the files were too large to federate.
This is a test with some of the same photos, but much smaller files. Hoping this one will federate properly. Facebook and Twitter marmalise your files when you upload them. Friendica doesn't.
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Yep. I made a pixelfed account and a photo "post" is just an ActivityPub "Note" object containing an attachment with some image metadata and a url.
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I said pretty much the same on mine. Except to add how angry I still was, and always will be, at having my rights torn from me.
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
Have defederated these.
OMG! You can import RSS feeds into Friendica!
I think I’m in love 🥰
Sarah reshared this.
Never mind, I figured it out. It turns out LibDem Voice's RSS feed is defective somehow.
Genius!
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Hey @Zoe O'Connell , check this out!
I’m a frickin genius.Context: my kid is mildly allergic to citric acid and citric fruit. Brings out eczema. And citric acid is in SO many things. And it’s painful checking ingredients lists for it.
This morning I wondered: can my phone OCR the ingredients list and check it?
My first thought was to make a little web app. But there doesn’t seem to be a OCR in web browsers yet.
But I KNOW my phone can get text from images.
Then…
Apple Shortcuts!!!
CHECK THIS OUT!!!
I was wondering that for foreign incredible lists in particular, but there are a lot of ways glúten can be listed.
They really need an allergy QR code system. The EU could implement something, but it would take years.
The big boys are getting involved now.
Wildebeest - A cloudflare based Fediverse server
cross-posted from: lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/3045Now this is interesting. A Fediverse platform developed by Cloudflare that inherently runs on Cloudflare without needing dedicated infrastructure.The code is open source yet the platform itself is inherently proprietary. It's going to be very interesting how this unfolds given how unpopular Cloudflare is with many Fediverse admins
GitHub - cloudflare/wildebeest
Contribute to cloudflare/wildebeest development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
openridephl
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •It's still hovering somewhere, and the more excitable right-wing congresscritters are trying to convince folks to take random pot-shots at them.
Because that'll totally work...