Image by hvprint from Pixabay

The holy grail of decentralized social media is something called portability or, sometimes, nomadic identity. The idea is that at any moment, you can migrade your everything to another server / instance. Posts, attachments, relationships.

We're not there yet but some Fediverse platforms are a little closer to there than others. This isn't a guide. It's me talking about some comparable experiences.

Mastodon as the baseline

Federated blogging has been around for a while. I first got interested in it when the only option was Diaspora. In practice, my options to join were ... host my own. That wasn't something I was in a position to do at the time. When I became aware of Mastodon, I hopped right into it. One of the advantages was that there were servers you could join.

That's probably more history than is really needed here so I'll leave that where it is.

When you migrate an account from one Mastodon server to another, you must first sign up on the new server. Then, on the old server, you tell it to migrate you to the new one. From the new one, you tell it to migrate from the old one.

If everything goes right, your followers get ported over to the new server. Anyone who goes to the old account still sees the old account but they get a banner telling them that you've moved to the new one.

Nothing else is done at all. In fact, while your followers (mostly) migrated to the new server, you are not following anyone on the new account. You have to export your followers on the old server and import them on the new one. Your posts aren't gone — they're still out there on the old account — but they sure as hell didn't come with you.

This is a stressful and traumatic experience for everyone. You can find guides out there and there are third party utilities that may allow you to sort of import your posts from the old server to the new one.

It's not good.

How Sharkey is different

I'm a big fan of Sharkey. It's a fork of Misskey and I feel like it's mostly better software than Mastodon. Even if you're not interested in federated microblogging, it's a pretty good platform for building small communities with.

The process to migrate one account to another starts pretty similarly, though. You go to the old account, you tell it to forward to the new one. You go to the new account and tell it to receive the forwarding from the old one. Your followers (mostly) get redirected to the new account.

Your follows don't come and your posts don't come either. Just like Mastodon, you can import your old followers list. However! That's not the end of the story. You have the option to import your posts. It comes with the post attachments too.

Even if you're coming from Mastodon, you can bring your posts along with you. I did this previously when I moved my memes account from a Vanilla Mastodon server to a Sharkey server. But now I've done it from a Sharkey server to another Sharkey server.

It would be nice if it wasn't necessary to do additional exports and imports in order to finish the job ... but you can finish the job on Sharkey.

You can't even get half-way there when you're doing a Mastodon-to-Mastodon migration.

Should social media be ephemeral?

I'm not going to wax long on this point. It shouldn't be the platform's decision whether social media is ephemeral. It should be the account owner's decision. In some ways, Mastodon supports that. You can set up posts to automatically delete if you want to.

You can't choose not to have your posts disappear into the ether when your instance goes down.

That shouldn't be John Mastodon's decision to make. It should be yours.

Sharkey (and others) give you that decision back.

It's time that Mastodon caught up.

Buy my stuff please!

#Fediverse #Mastodon #Technology

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

The idea that anyone wanted an even thinner phone is absurd. Sometimes people don't know they want something else until you give them a new option. Thinner phones solve a problem that does not exist.

What we want is:

• Ergonomically-sized phones — you can have your increasingly absurdly sized phablets but you can't keep driving screen sizes in this direction where no one can use a normal smartphone with one hand.
• Reasonable interfaces — I will come back to this.
• Either good battery performance over the total reasonable life of the device OR user swappable batteries — I'm talking swap 'em out like a TF card or AAs. Not “find the nearest person who has a kit from iFixit”!

Our current devices aren't suited to how we want to use them. The new use cases implied by the absurdity shoved down our throats is something no reasonable person would want or ask for.

And our existing interfaces at these current, bloated screen sizes are really really bad. Basic functionality is hidden behind edge swipes. What those swipes do is poorly communicated to users. (Fortunately, the apps I use with this type of functionality helpfully offer the user the ability to undo whatever was just done but that's my sole concession on this point.) Scrolling a long article requires tediously moving every inch of that article by your view port manually. Many buttons require the fingertip of a child in order to consistently activate them accurately. I could write an essay about how bad autocorrect is in the Year of Our Lady 2025. At one point, I had a “conspiracy theory” that autocorrect was this bad because companies were trying to force us into using voice controls. However, the voice controls are as bad as autocorrect.

We don't need or want thinner phones. We need hardware that's made for human hands and human needs. At this point, even having operating systems which are reasonably good would be a huge improvement.

#Technology

Image by Paul Brennan from Pixabay

On the Fediverse, the microblogs (Mastodon, its forks, Misskey, its forks, etc.) lack a group functionality. Since tagged posts generally only federate to servers who already receive posts from the originating server, a lot can be missed. Groups offer a bypass. If I follow ActuallyAutistic, it doesn't matter whether anyone on my server follows your server or not. When you @ ActuallyAutistic, I'll see your post.

While they weren't the only group host, a.gup.pe was the main one that people were using to host groups. This had issues because the software that a.gup.pe ran on didn't play well with non-Mastodon microblogs. Sometimes it would work with non-microblog platforms on the Fediverse but it was kind of spotty.

a.gup.pe, the flagship instance for Guppe, went down recently because the policy for .pe domains allows others to buy the domains out from under the owners during a window leading up to the domain expiration.

This serves as a primer about Group functionality. It also covers serious issues with our current options.

Service / software details

Gup.pe functionality

Even if you were already an a.gup.pe user, I think you should read this bit because it's got some background you may not be fully aware of.

• To create a new group, you just did @ followed by the group name you wanted to create followed by @a.gup.pe.
• Once created, it existed and anyone could message it.
• Description, icon, etc. are generic.
• The only option to moderate messages or users for the group would be to:
  • Address individual behaviors with the mods / admins of servers with offending users
  • Ask the maintainers of a.gup.pe to block the servers who refuse to moderate their users
• It's not feasible to limit boosts to people who already follow the account.

The simplicity of the service was a benefit in a way but it also has drawbacks.

FediGroups

FediGroups works with “Mastodon, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, Catodon, Friendica”, putting it ahead of the functionality for gup.pe on that alone.

In order to create a group in FediGroups, you have to request one. This adds a speed bump to the process compared to a.gup.pe but offers several nice features. You get a lot more options including:

• The person who requests creation of the group gets to set its owner
• Display name can be different than handle
• Profile text can be set
• Option to only boost from Followers
• New followers must get approval from the Group Owner
• Boosts don't show in public feeds but only to followers of the account
• Option to keep your group out of the official directory

There's a few big caveats, though.

1. FediGroups has what amounts to a ToS. Most of that ToS is good. However, the part that isn't good is really not good. It prohibits “adult NSFW content.”
   • The way it's written, it may be allowable to have a group for, say, writing or reading which gets some posts about erotica or spicy romance. However, that's unclear. Even if that was made clear, I am against onerous restrictions on adult material.
   • That would be fair enough if the software was open source so FediGroups.social was merely the flagship. They could host or not host whatever they liked and someone else host a version which didn't place onerous restrictions on adult materials. Since it isn't currently open source, this is concerning to me and something potential group owners should be aware of.
2. It's not ideal to have only a single group owner.
   • In IT, this is often (and somewhat grimly) referred to as the “one bus problem.” I think they would be responsive to requests to reassign ownership if it became necessary but I consider this a significant oversight as currently implemented.

There are some other things I could talk about but those might be feature requests rather than caveats or complaints. Since I'm already thinking about it, it would be nice to have these features:

1. An option to hold new followers' boosts until a mod has approved them
2. An option to prohibit or temporarily prohibit a followers boosts

ovo.st

ovo.st has been around for a few years. It hadn't seen much adoption. Due to some limitations in FediGroups, some people are using it instead of FediGroups. While it's a little more rudimentary, it's very similar to gup.pe's functionality.

The status account for ovo hasn't posted in nearly three years. The software itself got an update ~8 months ago. It's hosted on a Fediverse server in Hong Kong.

This means using it as a straight-up replacement for a.gup.pe with relation to adult material may cause some issues for the community and possibly even for the developer.

Newsmast

Newsmast offers something it calls channels. They appear to have a fairly robust system but I can't evaluate it properly without going through their waitlist. Since they prohibit adult content too, I'm not strongly motivated to go through the extra hoops just to write up a full evaluation of their setup.

Backups

I've heard some chatter that we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. Instead, we should have duplicate groups across services. I don't think that's a good idea. Have HogansHeroes hosted on Service A and TheAvengers hosted on Service B? Absolutely. You'll get no complaints from me about doing that. However, as soon as we're putting 3GoodThings on Service A, Service B, Service C, and a hypothetical service D, we get the very fragmentation we're trying to avoid with group services in the first place. People won't remember to include all of the variant accounts and eventually one of the accounts will fall off entirely but new folks will miss the consensus group.

Conclusion

With the future of Guppe up in the air, we're left in an uncertain situation. Those who create adult material and those who like to see adult material don't have a clear path forward.

Because it's the most robust of the platforms, I hope that FediGroups makes their software open source. This would allow others to contribute functionality and potentially allow a solution to the problem adults face with our groups situation on the Fediverse today.

#Fediverse #Mastodon #TechTips #Technology #Groups #AdultContent

One of those common rules of etiquette is not to speak ill of the dead. I'm not sure how serious it is. More or less serious than the prohibition of discussion of religion or politics in polite company? It may depend on who the dead person is. I've observed that a lot of politeness rules surrounding political figures tend to be a little fungible if the figure is someone you despise.

This hasn't always been a rule this way, though.

Damnatio memoriae is a relatively modern term for an ancient practice of destroying the physical records of a person's existence. It's not so much that you can't speak ill of the dead but that some people, by this measure, deserve to have all memory of their existence purged from existence.

I don't think I agree with either sentiment. Maybe a funeral is the wrong place to discuss all the terrible things that the deceased did in their lives. It could be hurtful to speak ill of the dead around their closest relatives.

But what if you're one of the ones who were harmed by those deeds?

The dead are dead. Does it serve the living to silence those who have been harmed by the dead?

Erasing terrible people from history would be a problem. There's nothing to be gained from removing their names from history.

While I might not tell the relatives of James Dobson to his face what an evil man he was, I have no reason to hold my tongue here.

James Dobson told parents that they should physically abuse children as young as 15 months old. That's 1 year and three months old.

I can only guess how many infants were abused by parents who never would have dreamed of abusing their children, all for the stern advice of James Dobson. This isn't giving a pass to the parents who abused their children only because of James Dobson's advice. If you abused your child for any reason, you're guilty of a heinous crime. There are, however, at least some people who never would have done such a thing were it not for the advice of Dobson and others.

There are still more who used Dobson's commands as a shield against consequences for the abuse they levied on the children in their family. There are children who were abused not because their parents heard the advice of James Dobson but because they heard James's teachings parroted by someone else. The knock-on effects of his hateful actions will echo through history.

Damned be his memory. Not forgotten. Damned.

This isn't all he did. He also opposed queer rights. He opposed bodily autonomy. He preached a hateful vision of god and pulled people away from a more tender understanding of their relationship with their god and replaced it with a hate filled idol crafted by men like James Dobson.

The child abuse is more than enough, though.

Damned be his memory.

#Essay #ChristianNationalism #ChristianFascism

Image by anne773 from Pixabay

If you get far enough into it with the LLM crowd (the ones who insist on calling what they're doing “artificial intelligence” as if they're talking about Data or Hal), they'll tell you it doesn't matter if we burn the planet achieving “AGI.” Why? Because it will give us the solutions to the environmental disaster we're in right now. It'll give us the solutions to our political differences. It'll solve world hunger, pollution, homelessness, poverty, and all our other ills.

Let's say we give birth to this AGI. Let's say that it has human like or human exceeding intelligence. Let's say it agrees to work with us on what we want it to do and what it asks for in return is something we're willing to give.

What makes them think that the answers it give us won't start with “you should have done the things you already knew how to do instead of burning everything into the ground making me”?

We know that it's easier to prevent carbon and greenhouse gases from going into the atmosphere than it is to get them out once we're there. We know that allowing the temperature of the planet to rise out of control is going to have negative consequences that it will be exponentially more difficult to solve than they were to create. We know that our use of disposable plastics is choking us and every other being on the planet with a danger as significant as any other forever chemical.

We know that we're going to disagree with others on politics and that the solutions aren't going to come from removing or curtailing the right to participate in democracy.

We know that the solution to homelessness is complex but the firm foundation of any solution to homelessness is providing good housing to every human as an inalienable right.

We have several solid ideas about how to solve poverty and we should probably try several of them. Including UBI (which has largely been successful when tried). If we're going to keep capitalism (and I'm not saying we should), we should ensure that the most wealthy among us pay their fair share so the support systems that everyone else needs will be there.

I'm not saying we already have all the answers.

I really question why these “AI” evangelists think that AGI would give us answers that are so much better than the ones we already have. If it was possible and they did build real AI, who's to say we'll have the strength to follow its advice when we won't even follow our own advice now because they don't like the answers?

#Essay #Technology #LLM #AI

Unfortunately, the way these changes were handled are a huge problem.

Where the problems start: Shrinkwrap licenses

In order to continue using the site, I had to click “continue” which would “acknowledge that you understand and agree to these updates.”

This is set up in such a way that almost guarantees that people won't read the updates. The ethical alternative for this dark pattern would be:

• Advise people of the upcoming change
• Offer them the option to accept the new terms early
• Offer them the option to deny the new terms now and continue using the site under the existing terms until September 15th (with them being prompted to accept the new terms later)

That was the first unethical thing I ran into. I wish it was the last.

Massive textual rewrites

When making changes to a ToS or other policy, it's not enough to provide a summary that says “you should look at this part because we made changes.” It behooves the company to keep things organized in at least roughly the same way as the document was organized previously. This allows a user / customer / etc. to make a cogent, side-by-side comparison between the old policy and the new policy. There are other ways to handle this in order to have the same effect but keeping the same organization is the least technically challenging solution to implement.

Almost every single thing about the ToS, Privacy and Copyright policies, and Community Guidelines have been changed so radically textually that it is essentially impossible for a regular person to compare the terms, policies, or guidelines to see what has actually changed. You can only read the new one and decide, almost entirely without context, whether you can put up with the new terms, policies, and guidelines.

To demonstrate just how thoroughly the documents have changed, I'm sharing a snippet of a screenshot from KDiff3 comparing the top section of the Copyright Policy. KDiff3 is a technical tool that allows you to compare the changes between two sets of text. The yellow text highlights sections that are comparable but have changes between the two documents. Text highlighted blue or green is completely different between the documents (apart from the sections with black text and no highlights).

While this is a very brief snippet, this is typical of each of the changed documents. There's a bit at the top which is comparable. There are a few clips where extremely brief text is the same. All of the rest of it is radically different.

So. I don't know what has changed. Not really.

What do the new terms say

The thing I think most of you need to be aware of is the age verification information. What applies to you will depend on your jurisdiction. They have a variety of methods for verifying that you are old enough to access adult material. As adult content oriented sites have already said, any and all means currently in use or seriously proposed to prove the adultness of adult content consumers are extremely bad.

The adult content industry is currently pushing the certification of devices as being owned and operated by adults. I think this proposal is just as bad as the policies and laws they propose but that's neither here nor there.

You won't win the battle on this one by arguing with Bluesky about it. You need to get off your ass and fight your government about it. Wherever you're at, there are nanny state people out there trying to curtail your access to the internet in the name of protecting children. Those nanny state people don't have a reasonable definition of porn. They don't have an interest in protecting children. They want to remove your rights and freedom to access any material they disagree with. They must be fought.

Privacy policy

Every privacy policy I've read from any major site is completely and utterly unconscionable. Bluesky is no exception. Their privacy policy isn't as bad as, say, People Grove. If you've never read a privacy policy before, you'll find it shocking. It's all about the ways that you don't have privacy while using the Bluesky service.

As I understand it, they say they don't sell your data at present and they don't use it to target ads to you. My brain slides off most ads but I'm pretty sure I've never seen an ad on Bluesky so this seems like a reasonable statement to make.

Bluesky includes this statement in their privacy policy:

“Do Not Track”. Do Not Track (“DNT”) is a privacy preference that users can set in certain web browsers. Please note that we currently do not respond to or honor DNT signals or similar mechanisms transmitted by web browsers, as there is no consistent industry standard for compliance.

Translating this to plain language, they are saying “most companies aren't honoring this signal so we won't honor it either.” That is unacceptable.

Conclusion

It's not enough that the terms, policies, and guidelines your company implement are ethical and respect the rights and needs of your customers. The way you communicate and ask for agreement must also be ethical.

Bluesky dropped the ball here. I expect better.

#Bluesky #Bsky #Technology #Essay

Image by joffi from Pixabay

My main operating system is Linux. I use Mac and Windows. I complain about all of my operating systems. Occasionally, when I'm complaining about Windows, I get people telling me I should switch to Linux. This isn't quite as funny as you might think.

When I complain about Linux, I'm often told I should switch distributions.

To be clear, this impulse is anti-social behavior. I've been using Linux seriously for more than 25 years. If you're guilty of responding to people's tech gripes with something that amounts to “change every single thing about everything you do radically, overnight because I said so,” you need to cut that shit out immediately.

There is no Linux which is a drop-in replacement for Windows or Mac. People will have questions ... maybe even about every single thing they do. And, if they ask a search engine, the bulk of the answers they get will be as many as 20 years out of date. It will almost certainly involve reading some tech writing insulting and disparaging things to someone who had the same question umpteen years ago. That's hugely demoralizing and leaves you with the impression that everyone in the 'Linux community' is a gigantic asshole.

In contrast, switching from one shell to another shouldn't be that big of a deal. I've used ksh and didn't like it but I got on alright. I've used zsh and I was mostly annoyed that it wasn't my choice. It seems fine. Mostly, I've used bash because that's the default shell in Debian (not my first distribution but almost my first) and Ubuntu (where I'm at right now for reasons I won't get into ... but I don't recommend it to anyone).

The topic of fish has come up several times over the past few days. I've been exploring tmux and Zellij lately so I'm open to new possibilities. I did my due diligence before installing it. And then I was pretty shocked when I went to use it that it was immediately hugely useful without really having to learn anything else. (I actually can say the same about Zellij, by the way, but I'm still using tmux as my main terminal multiplexer at the moment.)

It's slightly inconvenient to launch fish each time I start a new terminal. I went about figuring out how to change my default shell. I ran into How to Change Your Default Shell on Linux with chsh and started reading through it while working on another task.

Generally, I take a dim view of articles or answers that take the long way around. I learned soooo much reading that. I can't complain about how Dave McKay built the article. In the off chance you see this, thanks, Dave!

I haven't actually changed my default shell yet but it's not because of your article.

Sometimes, I just want to get something done. For that, I could have skipped ahead. I was interested in the things I ended up learning along the way. This wasn't like one of those times where you go to read through a recipe and you have to scroll by twenty photo documented pages of unrelated or mostly unrelated stuff to get to the heart of the recipe. Dave builds on concepts the reader (in this case, me) likely needs to know before making the decision to switch shells.

It's good stuff. We need more documentation like this.

Image by Mayur Ankushe from Pixabay

Yesterday, I finished the first draft on a novella I wrote to kick off a mainstream SF adventure series. I've been struggling to make a different idea work for a few months and finally gave up on the idea (or at least set it aside indefinitely). I had no idea what I was going to write instead and I was months behind where I'd wanted to be with a mainstream pen.

And then a fateful Saturday morning, I went to bed after feeding my cats, and I dreamed. Just a snippet of a character in a vague setting.

When I got up, I spent the day brainstorming other characters and a world. All growing from one incredibly brief snippet.

I've mentioned before that ideas are the easy part. Even here, that's true. I dreamed a fragment. Growing that fragment into a book and then a series? That has been and will be work.

It's not that I couldn't write anything without this idea, either. I did lots of other writing while I was struggling to find one for what became this project. I published at least two books in that period while I struggled to find the in. Each of the things I worked on in parallel had their own ideas or impulses they began with.

The ones I haven't finished yet are something you can't read because I haven't done the work needed to finish them.

The idea still isn't the most important thing. But it is pretty important.

#Personal #Writing #Ideas #CreativeProcess #Essay

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

If you use a streaming service to listen to music, you might already be familiar with having lyrics play on the screen as the music goes.

If not, you may not be aware that there's a way to do that locally with your library of music. I'm using LRCGet to download the LRC files. I can use the resulting LRC files either on my computer through LRCGet or on my music player. Your mileage may vary on how many music players support it. This isn't an ad for the concept or the software.

Just like some songs aren't “synchronized” when you're streaming (so you just get the lyrics without the automatic scrolling), some aren't synched in LRC's library either.

I've been going through and creating the synchronization for a few songs in my library every day or so. Thanks to that, I have a very specific version of So Long, Marianne stuck in my head from a few days ago.

#Technology #Music #Personal

Background

I have a long-running issue with the carpal tunnel on my left wrist. Since I use my left hand for mousing and most shift key use, this is kind of a problem. (I did learn to use the right shift for left keystrokes but it's still a problem particularly in key combos which would be difficult or impossible to integrate right shift in. Also, some software doesn't like the right shift key. Particularly in key combos. Folks really have no idea what weird little quirks their lives run on until something runs afoul of one of them.)

Anyway, I got an Ikkegol USB Triple Foot Switch Pedal and ran into some problems programming it. I knew it could only be programmed from Windows which is a bit of a problem for an assistive device but I'll keep the snark to myself for the duration of this article. 😰

Program the footswitch

Caveats

For the kinds of things covered by the existing documentation, I didn't run into any significant issues. This only covers the parts that I struggled with: Binding the left shift key to a switch and binding a mouse clicker to a switch.

I used the FootSwitch software as it seemed like the option that was appropriate for my model of footswitch. Also it sounds like it may have fewer limitations than the ElfKey software. However, I didn't use ElfKey primarily because it didn't sound like it would work with my device. I don't know how similar the software is or whether the steps I discuss here will help with ElfKey.

Programming mouse clicks

Inside the software, click the field for the pedal you want to modify.

In Function, choose the Mouse tab.

Check the box for whichever mouse button you want to assign.

Click the Save to key button near the bottom middle of the screen.

You can repeat these steps on additional pedals.

As long as Continuous trigger is set, you'll be able to use the pedals for things like dragging windows by simply leaving your foot on the pedal while you move the window (or icon or whatever else you want to drag).

Programming shift(s)

This part was the part I had the most difficulty with and I nearly gave up, assuming that it was impossible to do. I'm happy to announce that it's possible and even easy ... once you know how to do it.

Select the pedal you want to assign a Shift to. Unless you have a specific reason to use the Right shift, I recommend using the Left shift. Click the Clear button near the bottom of the screen.

Check the box for the shift (or other meta key) you want to apply.

If you want to press-to-hold the assigned key, make sure your action settings are set to Continuous trigger.

Click the Save to key button near the bottom middle of the screen.

Conclusion

This document isn't a review of the device(s) in play.

Something that I discovered in this journey is that these types of devices are used by people who don't need it for accessibility reasons. Outside of this context, I often talk about how accommodations make the world a better place for people who aren't disabled. The reason this device is so easy to get a hold of may well be because of streamers.

What I will say is that it's unfortunate that it was necessary for me specifically to create this document. I need this device for accessibility reasons. Others asked how to do the shift function particularly and, in the FAQ, the developer ignored that question and answered something unrelated.

I provide this document in the hopes that others who need this type of device will be able to use these instructions to access necessary functionality.

#Technology #Accessibility