kbal

I'm sure some people find it very helpful to talk to a chatbot. Others find it helpful to talk to a cat. Either way it's not a therapist.

As I waited to meet with Pleroma-tan, the mascot and CEO of Pleroma, on the 5th floor of a walk-up in Alphabet City, I stared out at the city’s grimy streets and thought: Goddess forbid it. Stretching in every direction was a wall of dense, gray, tragically kaleidoscopic fog. And here I was about to interview the head of a social platform named after some kind of ancient Greek spiritual shit, or something. In camera, no less.

Then something miraculous happened. Moments before the legendary fox-maiden showed up, the haze lifted. Avenue D glittered in the sun. I could see past shitposter.club's rolling hills all the way to a emoji-capped peak, and the skies were, yup, completely and totally whirling.

The 324-year-old executive cuts a different figure than most social media bosses. Earlier this year, after Mark Zuckleborg wore a shirt winking at his king-like status at Meta, Pleroma-tan was busy doing a 24-hour live stream of Mario Kart while delivering a lecture about the metaphysics of Stoicism and didn't even hear about it.

Indeed, she seems most energized when she’s talking about the unique infrastructures underlying social media and all reality as well as several smaller apps, the Fediverse, or Fedi, which is a spellbook that servers use to communicate. The open source protocols allow the sovereign nations of the digital mindspaces to fully integrate with one another as needed. Any number of apps with complementary or contradictory ideas about moderation or immoderation or teleportation can work in tandem — or not. It’s up to them.

Pleroma-tan sees fedi as nothing less than the deocratized future of the social socials, and she emphasizes to me that developers are actively building new projects, here and elsewhere. In her dreams, these projects are as big, if not bigger, than Manhattan. Her ambitions might not be kinky, in other words, but they are fluffy. For now, call her an insurgent wonder worker — on whom the sun still shines.

What it's probably going to look like: https://cdn.realtor.ca/listing/TS638778055790070000/reb82/highres/3/e12022233_1.jpg

What we should be building: https://mastodon.online/@BrentToderian/114519452725292215

I don't know if there are others that did a better job but the only source the USA Today article had was the Daily Mail, other than a quote they got from DHS which simply denies there's any truth to it.

Okay it's not The Onion, but it is the Daily Mail.

If you meant to communicate something by that, I think you need more practice at this telecommunications thing.

I'm just saying the divide between the two isn't so clear, and things are still evolving. Things aren't so clear for the CRTC either:

the Commission will continue to consult on the role and importance of online undertakings that broadcast user-generated content, along with the underlying question of how to define terms such as “social media service.”

It's not just minor (or major, such as the limits of electromagnetic spectrum) technical differences. The streaming services — unlike cable TV — are not serving the main function that traditional television broadcasts did. There is no "channel 4" to tune in to any more. Not in this household anyway, they cut off the broadcast signals that used to reach here many years ago. Some of the big streaming services do live streams, in which case they're getting a little closer to traditional broadcaster territory in terms of their function, but for the most part it's video on demand which is clearly different.

Some more different than others of course. The average youtube video probably gets about zero views. Even videos pretty near the top of the popularity charts might usually have at most one person watching at any given time. How is that anything like broadcasting?

I think they ought to be treated more like social media companies. Twitter does video, is it a broadcaster? Whatever it is, it poses problems for us that are more like those of the streaming services.

Sucks if you're in France. For the rest of us it should be interesting to see which of these VPN providers choose to comply by geo-blocking France, which choose to cut any ties they have with France and otherwise ignore the order, and which to abandon their mission and become agents of censorship on behalf of France.

By the way, don't forget to make a good backup before you start messing with backup scripts. Also, if the reason you're keeping twelve different backups is to see how things changed over time, put it in git instead.

I was going to give some suggestions, but it's easiest to say it like this:

if ( ! test -d ~/Backups ) ; then exit; fi
cd ~/Backups
count=`ls -d Main-* | wc -l`
if [ count -gt 11] ; then 
    rm -rf `ls -rtd Main-* | head -$((count - 11))`
fi
rsync -aL ~/Main Main-`date -Ihours`

You'd run something like that every six hours. Don't expect it to work, but maybe it could help get you started.