ElectroVagrant

Article by Mike Masnick

Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool — stay tuned). A few days prior to that happening, Bluesky hit 13 million users and continues to grow. It’s still relatively small, but it has now done way more with a smaller team and less money than Twitter did at a similar point in its evolution.

I’m excited with where things are trending with Bluesky for a few reasons, but I wanted to actually talk about something else. Just before I joined the board, I had met up with a group of supporters of “decentralized social media,” who more leaned towards ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads over Bluesky. Even though I wasn’t officially representing Bluesky, they knew I was a fan of Bluesky and asked me how I viewed the overall decentralized social media landscape.

Technically, anyone with the knowledge and interest can spin up a single-user ActivityPub server and go about their business, but generally these servers aren't being developed with that usage in mind. In other words, they can be overkill for individuals in terms of features or resource use.

That's where single-user software comes into play. Explicitly developed for individuals, or in some cases very small groups, to use, this software is lighter on resources and more focused in its features for individuals.

As to why you might want this: it enables you to benefit from many of the benefits of ActivityPub, connecting and engaging with others & building your own curated feeds, without some of the drawbacks of multi-user servers such as keeping up with federation/defederation decisions that may affect what you can interact with & follow.

So on to a couple lists, in no particular order:

"Microblogging" but with relaxed character limits:

1. GoToSocial
2. Hollo
3. Ktistec
4. Seppo - Note: more specialized/limited compared to above.
5. Takahe - More experimental compared to others above

Other

1. GoBlog - Simple blogging
2. Betula - Bookmark management & sharing.
3. Postmarks - Same idea as Betula, but some differences like ActivityPub commenting possible.

I'm sure there's way more, but these were a few that stuck out to me. Let me know any others you're into that I may have overlooked!

I've seen the idea of organically growing communities indirectly and directly mentioned in various threads when people discuss which communities they'd like to see on instances, and in a different way in response to community creation announcements. Despite this, and some inconsistent efforts on my own part, I've not seen too many others appear to be trying to put this in action.

I think any of the open-ended chat/conversation/general communities are a good place to start with this, but I've found it tricky to work out what to post to them. I suspect that may be somewhat similar for others, but being in the boat with'em, I'm not sure how to help.

Regardless, I think these communities make more sense for people to find those that share their interests to then start their own communities vs. starting communities before knowing if anyone else is interested.

What do you think, and what do you think would help people feel comfortable posting in these broader communities?

As RSS fans here may know, you can grab RSS feeds of communities and even your profile on Lemmy instances if you like. You can also do this with profiles on Mastodon, and I imagine other ActivityPub microblogging services.

However, you may not have known that public Bluesky profiles are much the same. By public, I mean their posts can be viewed without signing in to Bsky. I'm not sure but I'd think those limiting their visibility may not (or should not) permit pulling a RSS feed of their posts.

All you do is copy the account's Bsky handle, e.g. [username].bsky.social (or custom domains, should work the same I think) to your RSS reader of choice, and you should have a feed of their posts.

It's a nice way to get feeds for news sites that don't directly offer them and that have moved to Bsky but not Mastodon or other ActivityPub microblogging services. It's also great if you're simply not into microblogging in general and/or don't want to make another social media account and download another app.

Hope this helps!

Gradually we've been seeing the tv and movies or shows and movies communities pick up activity, which is good, and the multiple games communities each seem to be doing okay too.

Entertainment

However, there remains kind of an awkward spot where there's not exactly a general entertainment community (outside of Beehaw, that is) from what I can tell. There is an existing community, !entertainment@lemm.ee, though that someone could try to pick up and make active.

This could serve as a catchall for some of the more business-oriented news and some of the fluff celebrity chatter, depending on how one wants to go with it. Worth noting for celebrity chatter there is also !popculturechat@sh.itjust.works though.

Music

In a similar vein, while there's a variety of music communities, there's only a few generic ones, with the largest outside of Beehaw and Hexbear being the largely undefined Music community on Lemmy World. The lack of definition, that is, no sidebar guidance on what the community may be used for, makes it unclear what the community's expectations/preferences for posts are.

As with entertainment, this could be where more music business news could find its home, alongside some band chatter. Although as with entertainment, there's a music-themed community for the chatter to be found at !popheads@poptalk.scrubbles.tech for those interested.

Sports

Likewise with sports, there's a ton of different sports communities, but only two large generic communities to be found on Beehaw and Hexbear (supposing Lemmyverse is accurate). Before any of the more specific sports communities can gain more activity, I think it'd help to have a generic sports community to help people get oriented and find likeminded folks to form whatever specific communities they'd like.

Much like the first two, this could be for sports news and chatter...But unlike the first two, I can't find any generic fluff sports star/team chat communities.

Ideas on How and Where to Organize

In each of these cases regarding broader communities, I think following a similar organizational approach to Beehaw could be a good idea, but they would be better suited to instances more openly federated and not at as much risk of defederation. A few Lemmy instances that come to mind for this are Lemmee, ShitJustWorks, Lemmy Zip, and perhaps Reddthat?

I'm not sure where Mbin instances are in terms of federation smoothness and stability, otherwise I might suggest some of them. On a different note, if there were more Piefed instances I might suggest them, but last I checked the flagship seems to still be the largest and isn't open for community creation.

In short: there's good opportunities for broad, generic topic communities for entertainment, music, and sports on more widely federated instances. At the same time, even where these communities may exist on some widely federated instances, opportunity remains for more clearly defined variations of these communities to encourage posting with less uncertainty.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20265433

Canadian National Railway said on Friday that labor union Unifor has filed a notice of dispute to the Canadian Minister of Labor, just three days after initiating negotiations.

Also known as "conciliation", the notice of dispute can be sent by either party to the Canadian Minister of Labor during a negotiation and typically results in the appointment of a conciliation officer to assist the parties in reaching an agreement.

In May a huge iceberg broke off from an Antarctic ice shelf, drifted, and came to a stop - right in front of “maybe the world’s unluckiest” penguins.

Like a door shutting, the iceberg's huge walls sealed off the Halley Bay colony from the sea.

It seemed to spell the end for hundreds of newly-hatched fluffy chicks whose mothers, out hunting for food, may no longer have been able to reach them.

Then, a few weeks ago, the iceberg shifted and got on the move again.

Some bittersweet news, with an important reminder of how much more precarious life is for creatures living on the Earth's poles due to the changing climate.

Buried in a roughly 200-page quarterly filing from JPMorgan Chase last month were eight words that underscore how contentious the bank’s relationship with the government has become.

The lender disclosed that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could punish JPMorgan for its role in Zelle, the giant peer-to-peer digital payments network. The bank is accused of failing to kick criminal accounts off its platform and failing to compensate some scam victims, according to people who declined to be identified speaking about an ongoing investigation.

In response, JPMorgan issued a thinly veiled threat: “The firm is evaluating next steps, including litigation.”

Title is original from site.

Note: article may be paywalled if you've read all your free articles from Wired for now. Archive link in that event.

[...] Against the back wall, where one might find confessionals in a different kind of church, there’s a tower of humming black servers. These servers hold around 10 percent of the Internet Archive’s vast digital holdings, which includes 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts. Tiny lights on each server blink on and off each time someone opens an old webpage or checks out a book or otherwise uses the Archive’s services. The constant, arrhythmic flickers make for a hypnotic light show. Nobody looks more delighted about this display than Kahle.

It is no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive—and that, as the world’s knowledge repositories increasingly go online, archiving as we know it would not be as functional. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that functions as an unparalleled record of the internet. Zoomed out, the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical-preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic regard the Internet Archive inspires is earned—without it, the world would lose its best public resource on internet history.

Note: article may be paywalled if you've read all your free articles from Wired for now. Archive link in that event.

RT was long known to be government-funded and a source of Russian propaganda. But it claimed to be independent. It hired American journalists, and featured some big names like former CNN host Larry King. The channel’s aesthetic was sleek, modern, and cable news-like. But over the years, as American relations with Russia cooled, skepticism of RT grew.

Now, the U.S. government has accused RT and its parent company, Rossiya Segodnya, of going beyond propaganda, as part of the Kremlin’s efforts to destabilize democracies and erode international support for Ukraine.

“League of Legends” is caught in the middle of a dispute between Hollywood’s actors union and an audio company that provides voiceover services for the blockbuster online multiplayer game.

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