the fediverse is kind of cool. i intend to talk about it a litle bit, here should be links to all of those places:
- rendering sharkey/etc emoji in Emacs buffers: https://git.marq42.xyz/mir/sharkey-el/raw/branch/main/mfm/emoji.el and elsewhere
- but isn't social media bad? well yes but
... okay that was written as a dismissal, but it's a really good point actually! The most important thing is to be at peace, in life, generally. That's my fundamental philosophy. Peace in all one does and is and makes.
if getting busywork done gives you a wholesome and genuine sense of accomplishment, great! i don't understand, never have really, but good for you. find your peace and leave me to mine.
all negative emotions are departures from the state of peace, and without peace no positive things can really be enjoyed properly.
wasn't this a rant about social media?
im still trying to find my peaceful mode of interaction with fedi. just the past few days ive been feeling really burned out and over-engaged in the flow of information. raw-dogging the global timeline waiting for something annoying to subpost about. wishing i could get back to actually creating something, anything! i retired to a friend's instance for a few days, where my alt only has a few close mutuals. it certainly was a kind of break, but what it ultimately underscored was that i can't force the vibes to flow. i came back to my main today and it is better! obviously, since i am writing /this/. all i even had to do was get out the laptop and pick something i wanted to fix. namely: this website, and some emacs stuff (for one, the =eshell/cp= function's recursive verbose mode not showing anything and locking up until it's finished). and well, it's a good opportunity while touching up the main page to expand on some things i never got around to, or info that's become out of date. speaking of... timestamped edits of pages in here? i don't want to denote i dont want to denote i dont know what org-roam even is..!!?!!!11! but seriously there may be a better way to accomplish what i am with this from-scratch elisp static org site generator monstrosity.
wasn't this a rant about social media?
i have Thoughts about the size and structure of the web, and of distributed moderation, and so on and so forth. but those don't seem to be coming out right now. at the moment, there is only the urge to fill this page with technical ramblings of the small and immediately-relevant variety.
oh here's one of those that intersects with social media:
one fedi instance is Wafrn, a tumblr-clone. i have an alt account there (@mir of course) and have been watching its progress these past few months. the UI is getting really good! i was initially a bit unimpressed with its plain-ness and vague medium-gray rounded aesthetic (that too is its own rant, for another time!) but people like @fireisgood@app.wafrn.net are helping out quite a bit. there's also personal profiles' custom css, tho i haven't spent enough time (any) with the wafrn desktop interface so can't speak to that much personally.
and because wafrn is on the fediverse, [okay i guess it's time to talk about the fediverse.]
*The Fediverse
okay technically there are countless applications of ActivityPub that encompass a vast multimedia fediverse, but really what we're talking about is distributed microblogging. making little posts that get sent all around the world to everyone else's servers and show up on a timeline. likes and boosts and bookmarks. you may be thinking of a certain bird site, that was recently renamed to an overrated letter of the alphabet. i've personally never spent any time on that site (let alone make an account there), so i shan't presume to the similarity. and let's be real, most of you found this from my fedi profile anyhow so you have at least a surface-level understanding of where we are.
why did i bother writing that.
there's this image that is really useful for describing various levels of centralization in networks, and it made the rounds on fedi recently. Mainly from Christine Lemmer-Webber's excellent article and accompanying thread comparing Bluesky's ATproto with fedi's ActivityPub (which she is a co-author of!). we'll see if the link decides to render here, I'm not having the most success with it at the moment.
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1163/1*UDQuCant9h02OfmPVc0zqw.png
basically, Bluesky is merely decentralized, whereas fedi is _distributed_.
however, i saw a take in a recent "meta" (to keep it brief for now: a drama but more necessary and stressful), wherein the poster argued that fedi too is not distributed but decentralized. that larger instances form islands that smaller ones connect to and rely on for community in both the social and technical senses.
i do not like this idea. to the extent that the poster is correct, i agree that it is a Bad Thing, but i also have hope that it's not correct.
let's backtrack a bit.
the fediverse consists of servers, which talk to each other via the Actor Model (what precisely that is isn't important but it's a fancy term and i love those). it's just servers passing objects that are posts and operations thereupon. a server has users, pung in the form @user@server.tld - I'm @mir@talk.marq42.xyz for example. different servers have different numbers of users, from "single-user instances" to huge lumbering giants like mastodon.social and misskey.io .
**let me explain why i state on the main page that "self hosting an instance is one of the better ways to experience fedi, if you do it right".
choosing an instance is pretty much choosing two things:
- who your moderators are
- what features the instance software has
of these, the moderators are far more important in the long run.
