There’s nothing wrong with graphs whose y axies don’t start at zero. They can be used to misdirect people, but if you’re capable of actually seeing the numbers in the axes and doing a little bit of thought, they tell you exactly what one that starts at zero does.

Plus, the opaque spike is shown on the secondary y axis, which does start at 0. It’s the translucent layer that’s mapped to the primary axis.

I don’t want to. I just want to have them in my home feed.

Fair enough. I’m glad there’s something out there that meets your need, then.

I like the “antennas” feature a lot

For the uninitiated, Firefish’s antennae are saved searches, where you can specify lists of keywords and users and come back to them over and over again. It’s similar to Mastodon’s hashtag follow feature, only more flexible. Though, IIRC, it doesn’t add the search results to your home feed; it keeps them separate, and undiluted.

From an administrator’s point of view, Firefish’s Recommended timeline is super cool, and is similar to Akkoma’s ‘bubble’ feature. It lets you specify a list of other federated servers to display posts from, creating a kind of “super-local” timeline. It’s the kind of thing I’d love to see in Lemmy and kbin.

Firefish is definitely a bit of an unfortunate rebranding. Though ‘Calckey’ wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire, as a name, either. But at the end of the day, we really need to learn to recontextualize fediverse plataforms as software that runs a service, not the service itself. They’re website engines that power social websites, not a social brand in and of themselves, kind of like how WordPress is a quasi-static website suite that is used for a huge number of blogs and quais-static websites.

No one shares something from, say, the TechCrunch website, or Time website, and goes “Hey, Iook what I found on WordPress!”

Can confirm. I find Firefish (formerly Calckey) a much nicer, much more refined, and much more expressive piece of kit.

I’ve liked Akkoma, too. And there’s something really comforting about Friendica, with its “Facebook as it should have been” interface.

“I have what I want, and I don’t care about what others want” isn’t the argument you think it is.

If a Threads user is following you, they need most of this information. It’s literally how the Fediverse works. The only thing that isn’t is your IP address, and that’s something that I’m not sure they’d even get. That might be your host’s IP address.

Remember, the Fediverse isn’t a bunch of iframes looking at 3rd party websites. It works by mirroring remote content. A follow is literally a request to ingest posts from a user.

It would be nice if servers could be tuned to prioritize locally hosted communities over remote ones. There’s a real opportunity for each community on the same topic to have distinct flavours and cultures, but so long as they all appear to be the same damn thing and appear with the same frequency in the content stream, it’s never going to happen. It’s not like people really look at the remote server domain.

It’s really nice that the Local feed exists, but when people just bulk subscribe to 8 different communities with the same name, stick to their subscription list, and then treat them all as the same place, that just kills a lot of potential for heterogeneity.

I see very few memes and far too much political content

Where are you even looking? My timeline is flooded with memes all the damn time. They’re practically drowning out any posts of value at this point.

He wasn’t happy to add quote toots, though. There’s a whole Mastodon mythology built up around quotes.

Then the Elon account boom ended, and suddenly he was happy to do it.

Hes happy to do whatever gives him positive attention.

Local isn’t a good measure here, though. The BBC local stream is literally just going to be posts by BBC employees.

The global stream isn’t a great measure, either, frankly, as journalists primarily want to yet their posts seen, not see a huge field of noise. Those who are doing digging for social media stories maybe want a wider cut of things, but they can still do that through their replies, and through global. Search just isn’t going to be as effective as on generalist servers.

But then, search isn’t super effective on Mastodon, anyway, and all the big generalist servers are running Mastodon.

There’s nothing preventing them from using secondary accounts on .social for research, though.

It also does away with some of the really awkward practices news organizations engage in wrt social media. The number of @JournalistNameCBC handles out there is kind of super cringy, and seems to point to journos having company-specific/company-mandated social media accounts, but without any actual company support for them.

Something like this makes having a company-mandated social media account something they’re assigned, just like an email address, rather than something they’re personally responsible for.

Still, my guess is that they’ll figure out a way around the EU’s objections to Threads

I think it’s more likely that they’ll hope demand is high enough that the EU is forced to let them in.

I think it makes entry into the EU easier, but they’re receiving headwinds on two fronts there. There’s no need for them to implement federation if they can’t overcome the other regulatory hurdles first.

I really love ART: Another RawTherapee. I find it’s UI flows better for me for some reason.

I also picked up Affinity Photo during one of their big sales for the stuff that ART doesn’t do, and it’s been a really good one-two punch.

We can’t effectively block corporate injections, unfortunately. The admins of large hub instances are just of the opinion that bigger is better, and that more is more. They’ve been excited by the prospect of, I don’t know, legitimacy or something, for a while now.

The result is going to be the network… not fracturing, per-se, but significantly restructuring itself. Big instances will get sucked into Big Social’s halo, and be like the suburbs to Meta’s or Tumblr’s metropolitan centres. Smaller instances will end up as the exurbs. Content will flow quickly between metro and suburban spaces, and trickle across suburban spaces between the metro and exurban spaces. And which Fedivesre site you choose to use will end up mattering even more than it does now.

Right now, there’s speculative reason to believe that Meta’s offering up incentives to big instance admins. Those incentives will ultimately result in Meta owning them by proxy. They’ll be client kingdoms, to mix metaphors, working on Meta’s behalf, but getting relatively little in return for it.

I think Reddit moderators probably have a good idea about how they’ll ultimately end up feeling.

could it even be narrower than ‘corporate social media’?

Yes and no. Yes, in that for many people it’s “Fuck Facebook in particular” because of just how absolutely invasive Meta has been, and how it has specifically turned brainwashing users into a business model.

No in the sense that corporate social media will all inevitably try to do the same thing, sooner or later, because social media that’s actually usable for users’ interests just isn’t profitable. The enshitification process demands that we be manipulated into being more reactive, more hostile, and more open to the influence and exploitation.

But he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Either that, or he’s knowingly spouting bullshit in bad faith.

So I guess he could just be a liar. But I doubt that’s what you mean.

But that’s the thing. For a lot of people here, the goals are fundamentally misaligned. Much of this space was made by, and is populated by, people who explicitly and specifically walked away from corporate social media.

We’re here exactly because we don’t want them.

Obviously, that’s not everybody, but so many of us have actually learned the lessons of the last 15 months.

Join request forms do a good job at doing what they’re designed to do.