Kudos for honourably backtracking and being reasonable. Mistakes are made, what matters is how they're dealt with.

I see quite a bit boosted on Mastodon, but I'm not sure where they are all posting from. On Pixelfed I follow photographers, so I see photography.

If youwant to see more art, the first step is to follow artists. Try to search for hashtags related to art forms you're interred in on a large Mastodon instance, and follow relevant users wherever you want to follow them from. Pixelfed might be good if you're not interested in text posts, but make sure you display boosts. Lemmy is not good as most content is invisible.

Once you follow some, for example @davidrevoy@framapiaf.org, you'll see what they boost from around the Fediverse. Artists generally have a decent overview over their sphere of interest, so once the ball starts rolling you'll see content from all over.

I filled my feed up quite nicely with independent musicians very quickly after listening to RadioFreeFedi a little while and following a couple of artists. Their boosts creates a nice little window into the indie music scene.

Always happy to see Friendica users around - it seems to integrate impressively with huge parts of the Fediverse.

I remember reading about it in the early days of the project, and not giving it a shot because there's just no way any of my social graph would come with me there. Checking in now and then through the years it always seemed like an odd corner of the Internet. It's really cool to me that I suddenly find myself seamlessly interacting with its users, both anonymously here and with my full name on Mastodon.

Sadly not entirely accurate for Lemmy, as it does not display content from other platforms (except comments or posts from mbin, piefed, etc) unless a Lemmy community is explicitly tagged. You cannot follow mastodon or Pixelfed user from Lemmy in any meanjngful way.

What a cool freaking flag.

Time to show these fascists what a couple of hillbillies can do!

One of the few new Ameircan Fords you'll sometimes see on the roads in Europe is the electric Mustang. It's kinda hilariously out of place - next to smaller European cars it looks more like they attempted to design a monster truck than a sports car.

Based on experience from American car manufacturing since the 1980s, even worse things will happen if we do buy their cars.

Ah, yeah, that's messed up.

I'm really happy Mastodon takes their time todevelop new features instead of rushing into things. Makes me hopeful they'll get it right.

It's tricky with guppe though, as it allows spammers a vector into instances they have no business being federated with. The #mastodonforharris hashtag has been taken over by users abusing the mutual aid group, and whenever there are apam attacks on mastodon this is how they reach the entire network rather than individual servers.

So it does confront a fundamental problem with how Mastodon works. But as long as they're there, I guess it makes sense to use them for legitimate uses as well.

I'm not sure what to make of compatibility between Mastodon groups and Lemmy communities. On the one hand, it would obviously be a good thing if the technology would talk as much as possible. On the other, the microblog format does not look so good in Lemmy unless the author is knowingly making and effort to create a thread rather than a post, starting with a title and all that.

Compatibility between the two by default could end up flooding both services with content that looks out of place, and lowering the user experience rather than improving it. It would also subject one service to the technical constraints/decisions of the other.

I think it might make more sense to keep them somehow separate, and leave it to the different fediverse software to implement it however it would like. The priority of the Mastodon developers, in my opinion, should be to create something that works as well as possible in their ecosystem.

Then again, I could absolutely be wrong.

They're not stupid, but they're not particularly clever either. They're just mediocre people pumped up by our adveseries to believe they can be something important and special.

Of course, Geert Wilders believes he's brilliant. Just like Trump. They are never going to accept to themselves that their reason for being there is that their grandiose thoughts about themselves are only matched by their mediocracy, which is the exact set of traits that makes them so easy to take advantage of.

I agree it's dangerous to dismiss them as stupid, but it would be a mistake to assume they're particularly clever. They're just dangerously mediocre.

The far right are a bunch of crooks and Russian agents. It's not that they think we can progress as a society without spending money on research. It's that they're being paid to make sure western society collapses.

Wilders, Le Pen, Farage, whatever the knobheads in the AfD are called. They've all been found to receive funding from Russia. It's not that they're dumb enough to think this is a good idea, they're just evil enough to profit from it.

I wasn't aware of this - good to know.

What's great about using it (while it lasts) is that it boosts content to a lot of instances across the fediverse, so you don't need to be incredibly well connected in order to have reach. Otherwise, if you post microblog posts from Mbin, you risk yelling into a very tiny void.

It'll be interesting to see how native group support in Mastodon is going to play out.

I think it's likely we will see big platforms (newspapers etc) want to federate their content directly using activitypub. It sounds like a messy task, but if you can specialize in offering clutter-free activitypub support for existing platforms I'm sure there's money to be made.

Steps are being taken in the right direction. The US has also been making progress, which I'm sure will continue if America doesn't give up on itself next month.

That said, it's not nearly enough. As long as the focus is on innovation and growth rather than sustainability, and consumers don't really give a fuck, it's going to be difficult to see any change.

But I'm very happy with my Fairphone, and my next laptop will no doubt be a framework. Baby steps.

One good option is to look for relevant groups in a.gup.pe - such as !technology@a.gup.pe. These groups are geared towards Microblog content, and give good reach on sites like Mastodon.

You can add pretty much anything before a.gup.pe, but some groups have many followers on Mastodon and some have none.

Lemmy and Mbin treat Microblog content very differently. Mbin is more similar to Mastodon in this regard, Lemmy tries to force-fit everything into the thread format. It's not very intuitive for new users - sorry about that! :)

And you keep herr/frau, so technically it would be Frau Professorin Doctor Jones.

Generally when opening an email you condense it, and simply refer to the person as "Sehr geehrte Frau Professorin Jones" - Very honoured ms. professor Jones. They're very humble.

I get that this is surprising to many, but it's possible to have news stories covering women without instinctively turning it into a discussion about their appearances.

I find it weird that nobody mentioned this. If you don't have back problems and you're tired of shoe horns breaking, in addition to reconsidering your technique, get a short metal one.