palordrolap

I can only speak to the topics I followed on another account, but it provided plenty of reading for those topics. Whether it covered all possible posts and whether it works well for all topics, I couldn’t say.

It does kind of rely on people tagging things properly, which people might not do if they’re on a Mastodon instance specific to that topic. But then, they ought to know that those posts wouldn’t Federate well, and indeed, might not want them to.

Mastodon is microblogging. As others have said, it’s similar to Twitter. Lemmy is a link aggregator with a comments/conversation section per link, like Slashdot, Digg or Reddit.

I think the thing that people forget to do with Mastodon is to follow hashtags. The feature wasn’t there early on but it’s been there for probably a year or more now. Then you block or mute the accounts you don’t want to see that post under those tags.

It’s a useful substitute for following accounts when you have no idea which accounts to follow. You can then curate and actually follow accounts whose content outside those hashtags also catches your eye.

On the link aggregators there are the groups which don’t exist on Mastodon, but that’s what hashtags are for, right? Marking the topic.

The only hard part about it for me is feeling bad about blocking innocent accounts.

Also worth mentioning is that Mbin instances exist, and that software is basically both Lemmy and Mastodon rolled into one site. The posts aren’t fully integrated though. You have to click something to view the microblog side of things and click something to go back.

I’ve seen that picture online before, and pointed out (in whatever forum I was on) that it looks a lot like a cricket sweater, which doesn’t fit with his image at all, and I doubt he’s ever worn, let alone owned one.

At the time, someone suggested that it might have been a “portrait in search of a head” (my paraphrase) and Trump commissioned the artist to put his face on it. I reckon the artist might have been hoping to sell to someone like Shane Warne, but Donny bought it instead.

Unfortunately, modern Labour are centrist, much like the US Democrats, so we see rather a lot of surprisingly right-leaning decisions from what ought to be a left-leaning party. “Liberal” isn’t a completely accurate term for them these days.

We also have a third party called “Liberal Democrats” who were positioned in that centrist position until Labour moved right and stole it from them. Now they still try to sit between, pleasing hardly anyone.

When there was a left-leaning leader running the Labour party a few years ago, much panic ensued among the rich and powerful, and dirty tricks and smear campaigns were undertaken to get him as far out of the way as possible.

It probably didn’t help that he didn’t particularly want to be PM, but he was the only man who would do it.

Edit: Reworded for accuracy.

“Of course, I know this through third parties, and not because I ever had dinner with any foreign operatives myself.”, he added, making a poor attempt at hiding several glaring nervous tics.

(This is a joke, but it’s probably not far from the truth.)

North Korea believes that the south was stolen by Western/US imperialism, and that it is Western influence that keeps it separate from unification under the Kim family. A whole “We’re not the separatists. They are.” kind of deal.

With the West currently being on the side of Ukraine’s independence, the North Korean troops are probably being told that this is a fight against that imperialism, especially with Russia being former and now current enemy of the West.

One side-effect of Trump’s pending plan to end that war will undoubtedly be sending some disillusioned, surviving Koreans back home, waiting any day for the reunification with their southern brothers.

I mean, there is an element of truth to all this. If we take our eye off that particular ball, so to speak, South Korea ends up reunifying with the North in a way they very much won’t like.

Minecraft Bedrock is written in and compiled from C++ and is completely closed-source.

The original Java version is technically also closed-source, but Java bytecode is relatively easy to decompile to a high level and Mojang (and surprisingly, even Microsoft*) tend to look the other way when people do that.

It seems like this was written for the Java version, but I’m not completely sure whether it’s simply a protocol conversion, in which case, the protocols are already well known, and converting it to work with Bedrock might not be too difficult.

Yes, there are open-source alternatives, but nowhere near as many people play those as play Minecraft, which is probably why that was the target platform and not one of the others.

*For now.

And Ukrainians probably don’t want to be equated with Russians either.

I guess 80% doesn’t qualify for the adjective “largely”.

And a people largely indistinguishable from their own.

Edit: Note to self: Subtly pointing out that Trump wouldn’t want to invade Mexico because he’s a racist is not the way to go in the Fediverse because people will think you’re the racist.

Negotiation? That’s a funny way to spell capitulation.

Sometimes you want a change and so you have no bibimbap instead of no solyanka.

Centrist government says: We’ve done the lefty thing. Leaving that in place is a righty thing, so no. Balance

Trump is not known for measured responses. If he feels like he needs to retaliate for something, expect the simplest, clumsiest, most damaging response.

For example, why do you think he jumped straight to the idea of tariffs? If you imagine a tariff as a wall, then it’s exactly the same as “build a wall and make [the other side] pay for it”.

As such, you’ve got to have him believe you’re being nice, even if you’re not, because if he thinks for one moment you’re not genuine, he’ll lash out like the spoiled child he is.

Large corporations tend to put profit over morality and the legal machinery to even try to bring them back into line moves slowly (and expensively) when they do so.

If your Mastodon posts are visible from Threads, Threads may “accidentally” determine that that content was posted by one of their own accounts covered by their own Terms of Service and so choose to do something with it that the Mastodon user did not agree to.

Now consider that Meta, Threads’ parent company has put things in both its Facebook and Instagram Terms of Service that say they can do whatever they like with content posted on their platforms, including feed it to any “AI” as they see fit.

And what about responses to Threads posts from the Fediverse? What rights do Meta have to those? I’m sure you can imagine what Meta thinks, or might allow themselves to think, in that regard.

Presumably you can now understand why some Mastodon instances (and other Fediverse places) don’t want anything to do with Meta or their products and wish to protect their users from that abuse.

You might argue that it will happen anyway, but in their view, any protection is better than none.

And the great thing about the Fediverse is that you’re welcome to find, or even run, an instance that leaves itself open to such “interoperability”.

Depends what those reasons are. Conspicuously bad-mouthing the Chinese government in a way that can be traced back to your real world identity might get you banned from China, but nowhere else, for example.

If it’s something to do with drugs, illegal shipping of goods, a criminal record or visa shenanigans, any country would reserve their right to send you packing. That doesn’t mean that would happen, but it might be in your interests to contact your country’s New Zealand embassy, (or one of their consulates if there’s one nearer to you), be really, really pleasant with whoever you talk to, and put your question to them, and ask if you can get their response in writing… and then stay the heck out of trouble until you try to go there.

It could save you a couple of long, unnecessary journeys and a heap of expense.

None of this guarantees you still won’t be sent home even if the embassy gives you the all-clear in writing, by the way. But if you get a firm “no” from the embassy, you’ll know not to go.

You know when you’re sitting on a train in a station next to another and if the other train starts to move, you might think your train is the one that’s moving? Something similar is happening here, but more vertically. gloop gloop gloop

In retrospect it was probably a mistake to let Russia get away with occupying Crimea back in 2014. The rest of the world opted for the quiet life and hoped it would stop there. Unfortunately it only emboldened certain individuals within Russia to start meddling again, thinking that everyone else had gone soft.

Well we’d certainly let our guard down, no mistake there. Gone soft is an entirely different matter. As they’re now finding out.

White, rich guy from apartheid South Africa accuses country of tyranny after it locks up a person white supremacists look up to.

Hmm. Hmmmm.

For those interested in getting into listening to internet radio, see also: https://dir.xiph.org (Icecast network) and https://directory.shoutcast.com (Shoutcast network), both of which have been around for ~25 years at this point if the domain registry is anything to go by. Definitely in their current forms for over a decade.

Caveat: Lots of commercial content and stations, which is, of course, antithetical to Fediverse ideology. Still worth a look if you can’t (yet) find what you want in the Fediverse.

(There’s also http://radio.garden which has a very pretty interface but has multiple negative points: in-browser only, needs a lot of JavaScript access to station-associated domains on a per-station basis, is HTTP(no S)-only and may not work for stations outside your own country.)