tallship

I mean.... lolz...

https://bsky.app/profile/tallship.bsky.social/post/3kmwfrves5f2v

Hey! It's public! As are your posts public too, lolz.

#tallship @psychology

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IOW - the reader doesn't have to leave their comfy Fediverse client, experience or venture into unsafe outside networks or sites with trackers and other data mining engines.

A mission statement? As a decades long FOSS and Privacy advocate, it's really not much of a question to me. My immediate answer is, "But, of course." We should strive for a UX that users will adore. Fact: I love Faceplant - I do! I don't use it, and stay in a galaxy far, far away, but I'm not gonna lie and say it's not one of the niftiest UIs in existence. Everything is smooth and just the right amount of opaque and glossy and smooth scrolling through the stream, wall, timeline, *whatev.

If we make it pretty, then that's going to win adopters from the general public. And if we gain people from the general population.... pretty kewl.

Make it functional
Make it featureful
Make it pritty (sic)

The Fediverse isn't a single, particular protocol powered network - OStatus, ActivityPub, Diaspora, Zot6, Nomad, Etc. #DeSoc is a horizontally scaling, logical network topography. It's the foundational concept that disrupts a monolithic architecture. Both are great, but when you're talking about human social intercommunications it sure sounds a heck of a lot more safe when there's one, three, or twenty seven accounts on a single Fediverse instance than twenty seven hundred or thousand user accounts. I'd argue that with that many active user accounts, you're really accommodating the deprecated, monolithic silo model.

I was successful, very recently, in encouraging a popular sharing service to completely drop the mastodon logo and stop using it. The project lead related to me that of note was the fact that all of the folks who had galleries had different #Fediverse addresses, not half of them actually mastodon addresses. All of the mastodon logos have now been replaced with the Fediverse logo. AND - THAT - IS - AWESOME

#tallship #FOSS #publishing #Socialhome

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@griff@libranet.de ,

Over the next few days, I may have to edit for clarification and erratas, but here you go. "I do not concur with you, and here's why!"

California Decriminalized marijuana when Gerald Ford was still President*. I was in high school when it went into effect and the penalty for less than 28.34g (1 Oz) was $136.00 (first offense, penalty went up steep from there, but even then, still just a fine for the misdemeanor that stays on your record forever*, and the arrest consisted of being merely cited with a regular old traffic ticket, where you promise to appear in court by signing the ticket. State and local law enforcement would of course, remove the dope from your possession as.... ahem... ahem.... evidence, lolz.

Maybe I need to stop here, and relate that even most traffic tickets in California are, arrests. Here's how it works :)

You get pulled over for something stupid, usually legit - you fucked up. The motorcycle cop (in those days, a Harley (yoz... w00t), and in the 80's mostly Kawi's (Kawasaki's). He's all jackbooted out like a pro, it's awesome, but in your Brezhnev indoctrinated mind (iow, in all of my contemporary's, minds), a very scary encounter, even though, as I can swear, Motorcycle cops were the least likely to incareratge anyone, generally going so far as to coach you on staying the fuck out of trouble.

Anway, if it's not just a warning (you're scared shitless regardless, coz in your mind, cops can (and in truth actually did) act upon you just like Eric Honeker's Stazi routinely did, and take you to the hineyhole hotel, or worse, leaving you grovelling, barfing blood curbside, assuring themselves that you had been sufficiently edjumacated.

I know that all of the GenZ pussies out there trigger on this, but you know what? having been on the receiving end of corporal police punishment several times, I can say without reservation that on the morrow, it was much better being beaten and battered than having to call mom and dad from jail coz you were doing stupid teenager shit.... As no teenager throughout history, since our ancestors were baboons.

You learn real fricken' quick. Bottom line - you don't go to jail (minors and adults - your potential for a career, or your current career, are not jeopardized). Beside the point though, right? Let's continue withe what the penalties are for your eggregious transgressions against humanity, shall we?

So... you got pulled over, your busted bitch! what does having weed look like in the late 70's?

For anything greater than an ounce in quantity, or if you were a minor - it was still a felony.

The date you mention in your post allowed for medical marijuana, and possessing the Schedule 1 drug required the proverbial "card and letter" (Doctors recommendations, not litterally a prescription) to get a pass from state and municipal law enforcement. Again... Minor? Felony. Adult w/o the recommendation? Misdemeanor for less than an Oz, and a felony if greater than that with a trip to the hineyhole hotel with a set of matching bracelets. You were also expected to talk the talk - "It's your Medicine", etc., and although everyone knew it was utter nonsense, speaking dope speak satisfied the cops and you could be on your way if you weren't driving while impaired (which is ALWAYS a DUI).

Depending upon the municipality (generally county by county), you were expected to keep your dope... er... medicine, inside the labelled container that the medical marijuana dispensary issued it in when you purchased it.

Although it's completely decriminalized, or legal, as you prefer to say, marijuana is still a felony to posess in California, depending on the quantity, i.e., an obscene amount (more than a reasonable person would consider personal use) - but you can litterally drive around with a trunkload nowadays in places like Humboldt County and law enforcement doesn't even care - a box, (100lbs) or more though? Well, that's a different story and comes under provisions designed for people with compliant and permitted grows.

And there's the fricken' rub. Marijauna is NOT legal in California - it is REGULATED!* Consider that you don't pay tax on water, brocolli, candy bars, or yummy dead cow; because it's food. The same thing goes for Cinnamon, Rosemary, Thyme, and Oregano too. Why would you pay a sales tax on Marijuana then? It's a food, just the same as everything I've just mentioned - especially the herbs. You can cook with it, sprinkle on your Rice Crispys, etc. Unless you are purchasing pre-rolled joints, there's no expectation necessarily that it isn't going to be used instead of poppy seeds when you bake your bread. But taxed it is. It's regulated, taxed, and most insidiously, it's a revenue stream for a State Government that can't even remain solvent or balance own budget (but I digress).

If you test dirty for weed in a urinalysis, different things can happen - Are you a union employee? ILWU? Teamsters, an electrician? You are subject to sanctions, which can include being suspended or losing your job - These are federal entities, and you may know someone who almost lost their livelyhood (like my ex-girlfriend, who is a union electrician that installs HVAC systems on roofs). If you work for a municipality, like, city hall, say... as a trash truck driver - in my hometown? You'll lose your job. Still, to this day.

If you somehow find yourself in a position where you cross dicks with federal law enforcement while you have a couple of joints in your top pocket... Dude! That's a fricken' felony - even though they prolly won't put you in a federal detention facility and charge you with posession of a schedule 1 drug.

Don't want to believe that? Well, I was actually there when it happened to me - it's called ZT Seizure The Coast Guard Stole my home. No food, shelter, or clothes for myself, girlfriend, or little baby - not even diapers!

I'm going to mention that, for my entire life, I only ever voted one time in favor of an initiative to legalize marijauna (because it was never legalization). And it's most certainly not the proposition that everyone nowadyas turns to in claiming that dope is legal in California now - coz it ain't. It's actually the one before that, when Obama was President, and it was going to pass, that did more for what common sense folks were after, and in all the years since NORML and other California initiatives have been battling to legalize weed the one during the mid-terms back then was the only one that promised to actually make marijuana legal.

Let's say that again - Make marijuana legal. Make WEED legal. Because it's a fricken' weed, it grows on the side of the freeway, like other weeds, it's an herb, it grows wild as a weed species just like Rosemary and Oregano - or in your garage under lights.

So why did the Obama era California proposition (Prop 19) fail, notwithstanding the fact that the Obama administration's US Atty General stated that if we did pass it, the federal government would come down on us like a hammer and crush every aspect of regulation and legalization "with the full force and effect of the federal government" (paraphrased).

Here's the timeline....

1973 - Oregon, and not California, was the very first to so-call legalize marijuana. Even Colorado followed suit long before California got around to it.

1973 - March. Berkeley Marijuana Initiative I defunds and prohibits cops from prosecuting stoners w/o the express permission of the City Council. Oakland followed suit about two years ago by defunding their police department from investigative actions with respect to psychedelic mushrooms. I heard the've basically done the same thing in Arcata a few months back, maybe including Eureka too, but moving along....

1976 - The Moscone Act, which I spoke of at the beginning of this article. If you were a kid like me, and the cops caught you with a two fingers dime bag of weed, it was almost like the flip of a coin; sometimes they would take you to jail on a felony, and sometimes they would make you pour your own bag out onto the asphalt and grind it into dust with your feet, making fun of you as you cried.

Oh, not really part of the point of my story but we most certainly cannot neglect to include CAMP:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2018/01/22/black-helicopters-the-national-guard-and-ride-of-the-valkyries-when-reagans-war-on-pot-came-to-california/

1996 - Proposition 215 creates the medical marijuana industry. When my brother started complaining one day that he needed his medicine, I snapped at him, admonishing him for being a fucking hypocrit - "Don't call it medicine bro, it's dope! You know it, and I know it. I got you stoned your very first time back in 7th grade and you got a medical marijuana card so you can get high! You're not sick, and it isn't medicine for you. If you need to speak in those terms when a cop stops you, kewl, but don't bullshit me. You're a stoner. Fess up and be truthful around me coz you calling it medicine is a lie - you don't have glaucoma, your're not on chemo, etc."

2005 - Oakland follows suit in municipal defunding/deprioritization, taking a belated queue from their neighbor, Berkely.

2009 - In a grand act of Federalism (as it should be) the US DoJ wants to defer to the states to determine their own destiny with respect to prosecuting marijuana stuffs. Obama himself shoots that down (some friend, huh?) and directs the Attorney General to take a hardline on the evil weed.

2010 - The Governator signs SB 1449 - honestly? I don't think this did squat beyond what the Moscone Act did in 1973, but okay, two decrims are better than one, right?

Also in this year, Prop 19 goes down in flames, partly coz Arnold signed SB 1449, and scary language coming from Obama's Atty General pushed the initiative into the trash can. But Prop 19 only provided for the regulation and taxation of recreational weed.... moving forward...

Okay, I gotta take a second here to convey that IANAL, and previous laws plus another milestone initiative to come conflict, or at least to me, leave things in a somewhat ambiguous state. I'll get to that when we get there, but in the meantime, I just need to say that, as a layperson who's read through most all of this at one time or another over the years, I'm not really sure how SB 1449 changes anything much, if at all, beyond what the liberties of The Moscone Act in 1976 bestowed upon us. :/

Train kept a rollin'.... (Tyler, Perry)

2011 - Dunno what happened but at the federal level, Obama must have seen the light. The DoJ decides to defer to states and not prosecute when holders and sellers are in compliance with state medical marijuana laws (Farms, distrubutors, dispensaries, and consumers,). California state still only has medical marijuana. Right after this however, California comes down with their own banhammer, jailing landlords who unknowingly rent to anyone growing buds in their home, farmers, and other growers. It's not quite as ridiculous, nor quite as horrifically terrifying, as it was pre-ford w/Reagan's xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Soon thereafter, Mendocino breaks out and comes down with its own banhammer. High Times posterchild Eddie Lepp is busted not once, not twice, but three times during this sand-shifting era, for growing fields that are 60,000 plants strong right alongside a California state highway ( inf full view of All* passersby. Woody Harrelson foots the bill, in part or in whole, for the first couple of rounds, but ultimately, Eddie receives life in Federal prison, later commuted to 10 years, which he serves (I'm a little off on the timeline, but wtf?). My Brother (who I got stoned for his first time while ditching school together in 7th grade) worked on Eddie's farms as a confidant and manager of field hands and trimmigrants for many years, BTW.

2016 - Two time California Governor Jerry Brown annoints a "Pot Czar" to set tarrifs for an upcoming explosion of industry... created by Prop 64, which creates the regulatory environment for marijuana growers; farmers are certified, inspected, and grow in compliance. You don't even realize that the marijauna culture that draws field hands and trimmigrants from all parts of the globe are employed, living in tents in the mountains and lovingly raising the buds you used to smoke But these salt of the earth families that survived the Reagan, Carter, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama years are now also being raped by counties and state government with incredible tariffs for the first few years.

Nursery's close, properties are foreclosed upon, caravans of humvees towing wood chippers wind throught the mountains of Humboldt in processions including Cal Fire, Fish & Game, Feds, and Guardsmen representatives of the U.S. Army's 40th Infantry Division, mow through, slashing and burning and turning product into pulp. County code enforcement offices in all local municipalities weaponize the use of Abatements ($10,000 per violation, per day- no one can freaking afford that) and uses their authority to bring local law enforcement to arrest growers. An abatement could mean growing tomatoes too close to a blue line, or an empty greenhouse that is covered (but unused) - you have to prove yourself innocent. That's right, it's illegal, but you have to challenge the counties in court, and then ulitmately be heard by some appelate or state or US Circuit Supreme Court.

Innocent homesteader families, that had never ever ever grown buds lost their entire lives as a result of those abatements. I'm sure that you can appreciate that off-grid families that had settled in the wilderness of Humboldt and Trinity Counties, as subsistance farmers, raising goats, sheep, and a small amount of cattle for a living that they would sell to their neighboring homesteaders, who would consume and then sell back to those good people, cords or wood that they had bucked up over the previous year. A lot of people like to pontificate about right and wrong, and how economies can be better in their little marxist fantasies, but they're so totally kewl with crushing mom & pop agrarian, subsistance homesteaders that they pretend to champion. Fucking hipocryts? or apathetic consumers in large, air conditioned, metropolitan areas wielding their votes against that which they claim to champion?

Look! If you're a homesteader, with a spouse and a couple of kids, living in the mountains, raising lambs to make a living, depending on the vegetables you grow and the cow you bought last year for your meat, income, and sustinance (and this is waaaaay more prevalant that some city slicker bitch can comprehend), just one day, of one cited violation, in an abatement letter.... literally ends your fucking existence.

And that's what has actually happened... while you jot on over to your local dispensary with the large-breasted honey showing only a little more than her breasts to you while you select from her wares at your friendly neighborhood dispensary.

Next? What happens? Well, what happened was that the weed industry dies, which it in fact did, but you had no idea whatsover - you now buy the majority of your dope from Walmart, Coca Cola, and Cox Cable companies (do you even realize this?), the distribution channel of which runs from Salinas and the lower San Joachin Valley areas like Buttonwillow to the dispensaries originating from industrial, computer controlled mega parks built inside concrete tilt-up concrete walls for the warehouses and shipping terminals that put your fucking dope on the shelves of your friendly neighborhood dispensary.

Before I finish, I want to state again that weed is a weed. It grows along the side of the freeway, in your backyards, and it's free to pick, smoke, and cook with. If you voted for Proposition 64, or worse... you didn't fucking vote at all, then this state you are living in is by virtue of your own doing.

I promised to circle back around to adress he future (now past) of what originally Nixon's drug war evolved into (CAMP, under Reagan, for example). I you actually take time to read the legislation that I've cited so far, you'll come to the unequvical conclusion that it's still a mess, not just an economic or criminal nightmare (try making Whiskey in large quantities - you'll go to federal prison coz the Jim Beam and Jack Daniels companies don't want you to compete with them. Proposition 64 legalizes the possesions for citizens over the age of 21... HUH?. That's right. And once again, IANAL, but... it may be, that if your a 19 year old, well, is it a felony to possess a couple of joints? I dunno, but Prop 64 offers no protections on its own from prosecution of having weed in your pocket, as a felony, on its own... I'm all ears, if you're fresh out of high school and of the age of consent, are you protected under the Moscone Act or SB 1449? I dunno. I thoght I'd just throw that out there, no matter that in reality, you're not gonna be prosecuted for smoking dope with your eighteen year old girlfriend in her car, but she's nevertheless going to jail for a DUI.

I truly wonder, when many folks soundboarding like you just were, if they truly understand from a ground zero PoV, what Campaign Against Marijuana Production was all about, with its jackbooted Nazi's jumping from helicopters and yes, litterally disappearing hippies to turn them into informants, while incarcerating families of homesteaders who may have been growing a mere twenty or thirty plants back in the day, litterally hoisted up into huge douglass fir trees with ropes and pullies, lowered each day to be watered, with that sustinance carried on the backs of the husbands, wives, and children living in those mountains of Humboldt? When those helicopters suddenly descended from nowhere upon these families of hill people the fear of God sent them tumbling down canyon cliffs in attempts to dissapear rather than be aprehended by virtual paratroopers rapelling from those choppers.

Around that same time, the Virginia Slims brand of cigarettes had a successful multi-million dollar marketing campaign targetted at metropolitan women entitled, "Hang in there - You've come a long way Baby".

Fast foward back to NOW - today: My brother, in all of his simplistic, singleminded selfishness, thinks that "Iss awl gud". He can go down to the local veteran owned dispensary in Murietta California and buy a bag of weed for a not too bad price anytime he wants, pay the sales tax, and be stoned again within the hour at the helm of his fricken' gamboy/plarystation/wii/nintendo/xbox (whatev it is, I'm not a gamer so I dunno). And that's fucking liberty to him, with his WWF wrestling cable TV shows, and Supermarket purchased homecooked meals that his wife is so famous for. I cringe.

To this day, when you drive up & down say, highway 299 or 36 in Humboldt, there are Dept of Fish & Game CheckPoints searching for the spoils of poachers (i.e., deer)... I and everybody else in Humboldt County calls Bullshit. It's all a clever facade to search any closed are of vehicles on the road for marijuana. "And that's the truth. Pfffph!" (in the words of Lily Tomlin, whilst rocking in a gigantic rocking chair in a onesie; and sucking on her thumb, with her legs dangling about, several feet above the ground).

In closing, and as the Universal Studios gate guard so famously said in the film, "Joe Dirt"...

"Don't church it up son! It's Dirt! Not Deertay."

Nah mon.... @griff@libranet.de , no offense, but I don't think I see things in the same way that you do at all.

#tallship #cannabis #despotism #taxation #tarrifs #you_fucking_fools_what_have_you_done?

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And now for something completely different.

> "I don’t post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006."

https://ftp.mfek.org/Reiser/Letters/%E2%84%962%20Hans%E2%86%92Fred/reiser_response.html

> "It has been an honor to be of even passing value to the users of Linux. I wish all of you well."

What was hitherto, your awareness, or understanding of these events? I'd love to here any comments on the matter and boosts are most welcome to widen the pool of available input. There's an awful lot that can be said on many facets of this.

NOTE: Mikhail Gilula is now the owner of https://keyark.com/ (KeySQL).

ALT

I'm going to offer an honorable mention here, but the fact that anyone can get a free NextCloud account with the same document feature sets and sharing capabilities as Google demands that I consider this a missed opportunity, if not a misguided community gesture by not taking the opportunity to dogfood on our own FOSS instead of a privacy disrespecting, deprecated, monolithic industrial mining silo.

I think leveraging Google Docs to gather input on how to:

> ...make open source open protocol social media easier.

and...

> We're trying to make it better.

are statements belied by the fact that we're not dogfooding by actually using #FOSS like we should be to make the point that we want to make #FOSS better, by showing just how easy it is to obviate large swaths of ABC/Google properties by simply not using them:

https://nextcloud.com/sign-up/

In this day and age, I find it somewhat antithetical and at cross purposes to our overlying mission along with the whole set of philosophies behind building and advocating for adoption of the Fediverse in the first place, if we're going to ask people to go back to the #dark_side and visit Google docs

#FOSS #Fediverse #Dogfooding #Walk_the_Walk - not just talk the talk.

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RE: https://mastodon.social/users/rabble/statuses/112006149076679316

@rabble

Muahahahaha! When you piss of the fricken' Pope!

https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/28/24085445/google-ceo-gemini-ai-diversity-scandal-employee-memo

#tallship #ABC #oops_you_broke_the_google!

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First discovered in 2002, paleontologist draw comparisons of #Dinocephalosaurus_orientalis with other aquatic species having no modern day analogs - why did the entire family of #Tanystropheidae or the genera exhibiting these morphological functionalities not continue?

Perhaps just as interesting is the convergent evolution (especially with respect to their necks) between that of Dinocephalosaurus and members of the Tanystropheus genus. A close resemblance on the surface, yet Dinocephalosaurus orientalis was strictly an aquatic species.

I've included an artists reconstructive rendition of Tanystropheus longobardicus for comparison between the two, but note that Dinocephalosaurus had four flipper-like feet of the same size, and unable to exist, or at least thrive in a terrestrial environment, where Tanystropheus exhibited larger feet in the rear - not unlike your hands being smaller than your feet.

And yes, as Yuki (@youronlyone) offers up as a contemplative inference, the whole "Dragon" and "Loch Ness Monster" corollaries are uncanny, raising questions as to why would pre-industrial societies actually have such fables, or in the case of the latter, claims of sightings, if not rooted in some previous observation by humans?

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/23/world/dragon-fossil-240-million-years-old-intl-scli-scn/index.html

Dinocephalosaurus was extant from the late #Paleozoic (late Permian period) through the early #Mesozoic (early Triassic period) eras.

#tallship #Dinocephalosaurus #Triassic #Tanystropheus #Tanystropheus_longobardicus h/t to @youronlyone for bringing the latest news on this matter to me - I'm always fascinated with things related to #marine_biology - especially #Opisthobranchia

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RE: https://c.im/users/youronlyone/statuses/111985758251416307

@youronlyone

ALT

Receive (Wax OFF)

#tallship #Bell #receiver

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ALT

Transmit (Wax ON)

#tallship #Bell #transmitter

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ALT

@mgorny

#lolwut

You've completely lost me with that assertion.

You prolly don't remember when we did #Gentoo installs from "Stage 1,2,3" tarballs, or when one of the oldest Linux Distros, "Sorcerer Linux" spawned other source based distro forks like #SourceMage, and #Lunar_Linux, yet I fail to glean what the heck your referring to when you relate these to SystemD... I mean.... Huh?

#tallship #FOSS #Slackware -current #Debian_Trixie (Testing) #Arch_Linux

http://sorcerer.silverice.org/

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Ohh fuck! He's one mean motherfucker!!!!! 🐂

https://invidious.fdn.fr/shorts/Voc8J05Nlzs?si=ylHJ0JZZwKERt94T&local=true

#tallship #bull

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@mastodonmigration @tchambers @mho

Collating reams of journalist accounts is a good thing.

The problem I have with most of the folks on that list is that it's almost misleading, in some respects. The old Twitter mentality is persistent with the perceptions of these journalists (that's our fault), and as a result, we get a tease and a link, and depending on the particular Fediverse platform or client we're using, we may or may not get a link preview.

The volume of journalist published information is minimal, much akin to what things like Lemmy and Kbin, HackerNews, or Reddit might afford us - and it's unnecessary. A list of external, 3rd party news resources is great, but I am here. Right here - In the Fediverse, with my Fediverse client (That's my reader), and a shitload of journalists who themselves have already migrated over. I have RSS, ActivityPub Follow and alert capabilities, and can appreciate journalists actually publishing their articles here, in the Fediverse, much more than elsewhere that I have to travel to, so to speak... and maybe hit a God damned paywall.

I think part of the problem here is that many of the journalists flowing into the Fediverse are indoctrinated with the old mastodon/twitter decrepit shortcomings that left them with little capability other than to publish elsewhere and link to it from here. I don't want to have to go somewhere else to read the things that interest me - and there's no need. All the tools are here. In the Fediverse. Now.

Most Fediverse platforms don't constrain the users and publishers like the old mastopub way of doing things. i.e., lack of #Markdown or other #Rich_Text capabilities and the inclusion of inline graphics or other multimedia file types in articles, or that persistent, cringy, paltry, 500 character limit that the draconian mastodon interfaces are constrained with, along with their inability to Quote-post. This is why the so-called #mastoforks have been so successful, overcoming many, if not most of those barriers, although they're still almost indistinguishable from the typical #mastopub interface.

We're building critical mass amongst journalists, and this is remarkable, yet we need to encourage greater awareness initiatives on just what the Fediverse platforms have to offer nowadays (and it's only getting better).

Those journalists that I've had the pleasure of admiring here have for the most part, leveraged things like one of the Misskey family of platforms with multiple link previews per post, and quite the rich formatting of their text to make their articles pop with life and entice the reader to visit.

Another issue? Many of these journalists and commentators publish their articles and provide links, but they resolve to paywall sites. I think we need to rethink our ability to, at the instance level for each and every individual user, block shit that links to paywalls. We already have several good browser plugins that do so.

The sooner we sufficiently inform the lions share of these journalists to the opportunities they have on Fediverse platforms that are more contemporary and capable than mastodon, the sooner they can get down to the business of focusing on the monetization of their repertoire here in the Fediverse (and keep ALL the money earned); in turn, we (the rest of us) get quality, original, unique content here, compelling even more folks from the world of the proprietary, privacy disrespecting, deprecated monolithic silos to come and co-exist here with us as fellow Fedizens.

Already, several Fediverse platforms enable the full immersion into the ecosystem here with facilities for monetization - either native to the platform or as a plugin. For example, one of the quickest ways for a journalist to take advantage of a "Substack", "Medium" or other popular monetized platform in the Fediverse is to merely create an account on one that provides these utilities - Like WordPress or Mitra or WriteFreely - create an account, plugin your donation/subscription payment info, and start publishing interesting, informative, original content :)

***One thing we as consumers of the news can do right now, is take the time to individually contact each person we can on this list of journalists and let them know these things. Point them to this article with a link, or to the actual resources that they can experiment with and deploy their unbridled and untapped resources to reach out and in turn themselves be reached.

I'll leave links below, to a couple of the Fediverse platforms I've referenced above. If you're viewing this post on a platform that is one of the Misskey family of forks, then you'll see the graphic below as well as all of those link previews for all of those resources.

Enjoy, and I hope that helps!

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

https://mitra.fediverse.observer/list

https://writefreely.org/

#tallship #Fediverse #FOSS #news_aggregation #journalism #journalists #publishing

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Okay, have just submitted a PR to a fediverse project to fix a critical security vulnerability; CVE score is like 9.9/10.

More news once administrators of this servers using this project can upgrade safely.

Update: CVE was in @pixelfed, and the advisory is published here: https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/security/advisories/GHSA-gccq-h3xj-jgvf

🚨 Pixelfed admins: please update ASAP to v0.11.11

More information will be published on Feb 25 to give admins time to update.

https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/security/advisories/GHSA-gccq-h3xj-jgvf

#pixelfed #security #release

Reprinted from the Fediverse-City Matrix room, with permission from the author (myself):

I was just participating in another discussion elsewhere on the connotations and perceptions relating to a global feed of the entire known Fediverse, as it pertains to what various platforms call it (in their selector tabs).

Lots of suggestions, and every platform uses a different nomenclature. Some use 'global', some use 'live', and there's a few others as well that try to convey that type of extremely busy feed.

But then I touched on the subject of Local feeds - not all Fediverse platforms utilize this type of concatenated feed. I related that the Hometown fork of mastopub was [at least one of] the first to incorporate this as both a feed, and a type of post that is localized to only that particular instance.

I also, because I've read his contention, included the Dev's reasoning on having such a utility as a feature - because he intended Hometown to be a Fediverse platform that could encourage a Highly localized "community".

So you can select the other various, common types of scope for a post when making a post, as well as posting something that is only viewable to other users on your local instance - thereby supporting the 'local community only' aspect that has eluded and mostly deluded users on other platforms.

Why "deluded", because having a Fediverse account in the minds of most folks coming from the deprecated, monolithic silo space is something that has been heavily promoted by Fedizens as one of the reasons why it's better to use the Fediverse instead of those impersonal deprecated silo systems.

And that's simply not true.

Take me, for example. I have several accounts and interact using them with different circles of people (I won't get into the power of recursive circles as they were implemented in gplus). So I'mma just use mastodon.social, one of the biggest monolithic-like silo instances in the Fediverse, as an example here.

People there, most often n00bs from the November Rain or later) talk about the sense of "community" they have there, when they're really only speaking of the connections they have by following and being followed by not just people on that instance, but across the entire Fediverse.

The sense of community that almost everyone in the Fediverse perceives is mostly a compilation of the follows and followers that they each have, and is unique to themselves alone.

For example, I prolly know 4 or 5 people on each instance I have an account on. My community is comprised almost entirely of the direct connections I have made with others across the Fediverse at large, and yes, people on platforms with 'local-only' feeds to see my posts, know them to be local, but so do folks on other instances watching their 'global feeds' (or home feeds where someone they follow includes a follow of my account).

So to me, in my experience, my community is comprised of those who I've made connections with and the people they are connected to, with very little traffic from the local instance I am on at any given time.

To think that you're going to have a community on mastodon.social consisting of people primarily from that instance is a bit naive, IMO, coz your default feed grows exponentially with foreign user's posts the more you connect with anyone - not just the people you follow that are local to your instance. You see something, you interact because it's interesting, pertinent, or relevant to you - you don't do that because you've discerned that you will only interact with local accounts... that just ain't natural, human tendency.

So the creator of the Hometown fork realized that one type of vehicle in the feature set to mark this kind of delineation was that of the ability to post and see in your feed, local only posts, with the overt assertion that Hometown is a fork that in part, is a platform that can facilitate the social diaspora consisting of a 'mostly local' community.

Even entire instances, named or stated as localized geographically or topically, as having publicly open registrations miss this mark in a big way - people for whatever reason, want a Fediverse account, pick a host/instance, by whatever criteria, and then inadvertently end up creating their own diaspora of social connections across the entire Fediverse anyway.

nostr, Bluesky (when it eventually fully supports other instances), Threads (yeah, I know, it's a bastard, lolz), Minds, and other, bigger instances or monoliths, don't try to capitalize on this notion of "Your instance is your community" because overwhelmingly, it just isn't the case in reality.

I'm not saying that there aren't Fediverse instances are successful in cultivating small communities consisting of connections with others on those particular instances, but the most successful of those are the instances that have actually disabled Federation on those instances, lolz.... There's lots of examples of that, which is kewl - to each their own.

But the tendency of everyone to follow the Ew! Shiny! paradigm of simply liking and following what you like irrespective of whether it's on your local instance or not is the lions share of how people interact with each other.

Your thoughts, observations?

Attached graphic attrib: A Jack Russell, happy as can be, sitting in the pilot's seat flying a Cessna, not knowing WTF he's doing.... but he's really happy! The caption reads: "I have no idea what I'm doing".

#tallship #FOSS #Fediverse #social_networks #community #local_communities #global_communities #connections #follows #followers

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Thank you Jawad!

It's good to receive feedback that helps people determine information that has value to others. It helps us focus on topics with merit.

There are a couple of additional things I'd like to address though, as briefly I can, considering I'm a rather loquacious sort ;)

I think it was @frogzone that brought up the general controversies that typically do follow #Cloudflare around. I have privacy conscious friends on both sides of that widening chasm...

In general it tends to be the developer sorts that although are cautious, reserved usually, when passing around compliments where Cloudflare is concerned, they're also the pragmatists where performance and dare I say security is concerned, and are often quite willing to turn to Cloudflare (specifically, as a #CDN).

With respect to security concerns, it is true that incorporating a CDN does provide a level of obfuscation of the IP spectrum, that is often cited as a major reason by hosting providers for the customer to incorporate/subscribe to CDN services (more often than not, Cloudflare - because they offer better kickbacks (er.... incentives) to hosting providers.

Then there's the hard core privacy concerned folks. #Last_Mile delivery performance considerations typically being much less of a compelling reason to use, let alone pay, for a CDN like Cloudflare to be injected into the website admin's #DNS. This is because, and let's be real here folks, most websites don't generate anywhere near the levels of traffic that their Nginx or Apache Servers can easily serve up, and for folks on the other side of the world from the particular website, a few milliseconds on a clear day is negligible.

Now, if you're running a very busy site, like... Etsy, or even really popular sites with thousands of requests per minute then you can really benefit by spreading your cache around the globe on super fast CDN services. Even a site that receives on average 1 request per second (60 per minute - and that's pretty respectable traffic) doesn't really benefit enough from the #caching related benefits of a CDN to mark a compelling case - the Last Mile Delivery, however, to Oslo, Norway, from a website in Melbourne, Australia... that can indeed improve perceived response by 250ms (2.5 seconds) or so.

So, just like these so-called VPN services, like NordVPN, etc., there needs to be an effort to educate the consumer as to the actual benefits expected for specific matters - some may be important considerations for the consumer, while others may just be a tech support person in a boiler room trying to reach that bonus number for the month... I've seen waaaay too many people purchase services they really didn't need or would receive much benefit from, and many support desk personnel upselling customers with things they probably shouldn't have.

Now, there's another thing I didn't mention - #Denial_of_Service attacks... Good ole #DDoS campaigns. Well, first of all, one should check with their hosting provider - whether they have the benefit of protections against such attacks, and then, weigh the added benefit of using something like Cloudflare to do the same job (are you paying for protection that you might need twice?).

I personally would probably not have included Cloudflare as part of the #HowTo. It can be added at anytime, but some folks swear by it, so it's not that I'm on the fence about Cloudflare, it's just that I look at it more from the engineering and security perspective, with an eye specifically focused on the veracity of any perceived needs by the customer. And I'm not super fond of turning all of that DNS control (and valuable #metadata) to some third party.

I realize that may have only served to raise more questions, so I'll just say that this is why you pay your trusted IT support professionals who make all of their money on labor they've billed you for, to sit down and discuss what you may or may not need, and especially, why 👍

Brenden Eich was invoked by @marathon - and I too, concur that It is only right to measure technology based on it's own merit and capability - without regard to superfluous and unrelated matters of personal politics.

When haters start fomenting hatred, disparaging everyday, average people for their informed choice of technologically capable software relevant to the task at hand, I like to remind those vile, adolescent, sniveling children that they're literally denigrating things like Brave Browser and Soapbox (the platform I'm authoring this post on), while at the same time availing themselves of the full compliment of features that #JavaScript's technology affords them - JavaScript, invented by #Brenden_Eich...

And they have my blessings to completely swear off and forgo ever using JavaScript again - but they won't, will they? Why? Because they're filthy, hateful, hypocrites consumed by their own criminal commiserations.

#tallship #FOSS #ActivityPub

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@markhurst Nice article, excellent graphic!
(by Erika Hall https://twitter.com/mulegirl/status/1332389999656927232 , via @markhurst )

ALT

Questions always follow after such, 'salty talk', or 'nautical nomenclature', or in #Star_Trek terms, #technobabble.

What's the difference between a mizzen topgallant sail and a main royal staysail? Just a few rules is all it takes, but in today's world, one need only avail themselves of the basic Marconi rig on a single masted sloop. There's a mainsail (the big triangular one aft of the mast), and a jib, or foresail. Typically, when speaking about a jib (the one forward of the mast), people will typically categorize them into about three classes:

a #Genoa (big one - low wind conditions)
a #Jenny (also called a #working_jib for most wind conditions)
a #Storm_jib - smallish, for reduced sail area in high and gale force winds.

If you're rigged to run one jib, you're a #sloop; two, and you're #cutter rigged.

tl;dr: Unlike elections, rigging is a good thing. Without standing rigging you have nothing to hold your masts up in place and they'll just snap or fall over. Without running rigging you have no way to control your sails, hoist them up, or catch the wind.

So when it comes to sailboats, it's a very good thing that they're rigged :p

#tallship #silly #rigging

About twenty five years ago, we laid out the keels for a new adventure - The Twin Brigantine project, in the parking lot of the #Los_Angeles_Maritime_Institute, next to the #Los_Angeles_Maritime_Museum, in the old ferry building that was, along with a pontoon bridge, obviated by completion of the #Vincent_Thomas_Bridge connecting the mainland to #Terminal_Island.

Up until that time, #LAMI operated and sailed the 70' gaff-rigged topsail schooner, Swift of Ipswitch (previously James Cagney's personal yacht) for it's youth sailing program. It took a few years to complete the Irving and Exy Johnson, sister Brigantine vessels built and outfitted by dozens of volunteers over the duration of the program. At some point, another gaff-rigged schooner was borrowed and enlisted, the136' Bill of Rights filling the need for accommodations of a youth sailing program that had greatly expanded over time, with many ups and downs, achievements and disappointments, but building two square rigger tall ships for and by a non-profit organization dedicated to youth educational programs for the community, a truly novel pursuit, eventually came to a close as a great success.

This photo shows the 113' brigantine Irving Johnson, on 23 March 2005, and which, after less than three years of service, she had run hard aground on a sandbar following several storms that affected local charts, leaving them partially obsolete - in short, on her way into the Channel Islands harbor, well... sadly, the pic speaks for itself.

Another year and two million dollars later to repair structural damages and flooding, the #Irving_Johnson once again joined her sister ship, #Exy_Johnson, in the pursuit of education as #school_ships, something that Irving and his wife Exy (Electa), following no less than 7 circumnavigations together, pioneered and championed in the 20th century aboard their three successive sailing ships - a #schooner, a #brigantine, and a #ketch - each named the #Yankee.

#tallship #youth_sailing #education

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This image or file is a work of a United States Coast Guard service personnel or employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image or file is in the public domain (17 U.S.C. § 101 and § 105, USCG main privacy policy)

I saw this movie a long, long, time ago - one time.

Frankenstein - The True Story, with #James_Mason, #Jane_Seymour (long before she was "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman", lolz), #Michael_Sarrazin (as the creature), #David_McCallum, #Nicola_Pagett, #Agnes_Moorehead, and #Leonard_Whiting as the titular character. An all-star cast.

I've always intended on seeing it again, because IMO it's the best rendition of #Mary_Shelley's 1818 classic I've had the pleasure of seeing. The character development alone leaves all of the other adaptations in the dust, along with a large dose of empathy for those involved.

https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=g2XYMB771bg

As a companion, I recommend the #Project_Gutenberg version of Shelley's gothic novel in prose; I personally prefer .epub but both the film and the original work by Shelley are more closely aligned than any of those old #Boris_Karloff horror genre flicks that, in turn, influenced the creation of the beloved television character, #Herman_Munster (an old film professor of mine would freak out in the lecture hall anytime someone raised their hand and referred to any motion picture as a flick, lolz).

In a major departure from Shelley's original, Mason's portrayal of the character Dr. Polidori isn't actually in the book - the real John Polidori was a friend of Shelley's who himself arguably launched the #vampire_genre with his 1819 short story, "The Vampyre", once erroneously attributed to Lord Byron. Discussions between Polidori and Mary's husband Percy Shelley are largely credited with the genesis of the Frankenstein story.

If you happen to watch, Frankenstein - The True Story, do please comment back to let me know what you thought :)

My favorite line from the movie, that I've often regularly recited over the years, is:

Beautiful Victor... Beautiful.

On rare occasion, I'm sometimes asked what I'm referencing when I say that, like, after a successful compile, or fresh OS installation :p

#tallship #English_literature #literature #science_fiction #horror_genre @youronlyone

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Don't trust those "little buddy heaters" and their cousins of having CO2 sensors and low #Oxygen cutoffs that their marketing indicates you can bank your life on.

You can fucking die.

I used a few of these for several years, when I lived completely off-grid, in the mountain wilderness far from the nearest humans.

They're really convenient and quick to heat a small area, or anything close to them, in just a few minutes, and you can pick them up at any Target, Walmart, Big 5, Tractor Supply, Etc., for $40 - $50.

Basically, you warm your environment, sitting on your cot and warming up your feet and toes before turning it off and burrowing into your subarctic bedding. You can leave the pilot going all night so all you need to do is twist and click it on on the morning, but seriously, why bother?

Sharp (and more importantly, observant) girl in the video - although there's no way to be sure, she just may have saved the lives of everyone in that fricken' tent.

https://invidious.fdn.fr/shorts/kaSwF2jru3A?si=u8a0HRKlqPxb_A8T&local=true

#tallship #asphyxiation #camping_safety #CO #Carbon_dioxide

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