juergen_hubert

Some thoughts:

If we want to grow the #Fediverse - and as I have stated repeatedly, I believe we do need to grow the Fediverse in order to overcome the hellscape that is late-stage Capitalist corporate social media - then there are two main things we need to do:

1. Make sure that the #Fediverse is a place where people want to stay. I can't really speak for the developers and admins who put in all the hard work to make all this possible, but for us users this means be active here and be excellent to each other. This is the "easy" part.

2. Do #outreach. Here is where things gets tricky - in order to encourage people to migrate to the Fediverse, we need to reach them while they are. Which means "elsewhere" - and in most cases, this includes the very corporate social media we are trying to escape from.

Thus, I think there is a case to be made for some courageous souls to maintain a presence on #TikTok , #Facebook, #YouTube et. al. - if only to encourage people to move here. Yet if all they do there is flog the Fediverse, they will be swiftly ignored and flogged. Nobody likes a spammer, after all.

So the best idea I have come up with was to have a two-tiered approach. For example, someone could produce video content on #Peertube and the like - and then post a portion of that content on YouTube or TikTok (perhaps with a delay of a few weeks) while linking back to their Fediverse account where they can access everything, the same way Patreon allows creators to share some of their material with everyone while keeping some for exclusive subscribers. This way, users might be encouraged to join the Fediverse just so that they can be notified and comment on everything those creators do.

What are your ideas and thoughts for Fediverse outreach?
#FediHelp

Question: Now that #Meta is leaning even more into #fascism than they used to, are there any good #Fediverse equivalents of #Facebook groups?

I know of #lemmy (which strives to emulate the Reddit experience), but what others are out there?

#FediHelp

As more and more social media platforms and their owners outright ally themselves with the fascists, I get really tired with the attitude:

"#Mastodon and the #Fediverse are fine as they are and don't need to grow!"

We need to grow and replace the others as much as possible. Considering how much the fascists now use social media to make the world a worse place, the very future of human civilization might depend on it!

#fascism #antifascism #SocialMedia

Peaking of which, how are the #Fediverse alternatives to #Reddit doing these days?

https://slate.com/technology/2024/12/reddit-wall-street-boom-ai.html

I just had a Thought. Obviously, we can't simply pass a law banning #X specifically from operating in the #EuropeanUnion . It would set a terrible precedent, likely wouldn't pass the courts, and wouldn't be very effective since X could just rebrand itself or something.

But we could introduce, say, the "Social Media Transparency Act" which would require all social media systems operating in the European Union to either use a strict timeline, or publish the precise algorithm they use to show content to their users. And if there are any variables specific to the user, their profile, their region and so forth, then users must be able to request the values of these parameters as they apply to them at any time.

And if any social media companies in the European unions do not comply... well then we can fine and/or ban them!

Does this sound like a plan?

#SocialMedia #Fediverse

Question: What are good #Android-based tools which can easily remove a large number of pages from a PDF in order to create an excerpt?

This is the true promise of the #Fediverse : Everyone has the right to freedom of speech, but no one has the right to a captive audience.

Which is as it should be. Yet what other social media system can say the same?

The recent downtime of the #InternetArchive reminded me

(a) How vital the site is for my own work. Fortunately, I save pretty much all old books I need for my work to my hard drive, so I am not totally lost without it - but still, most of the links to the individual folk tales I am translating go to online archives, and the Internet Archive is the most important among them.

(b) How storing all this vital cultural heritage stuff at one single site is a terrible idea. Today, the Internet Archive might be taken down by hackers. Tomorrow, the site might commit suicide by lawyers. And in a possible future, a fascist US government might take the site down out of sheer spite.

While there are a fair number of other, more specialized digital libraries out there, too many public domain works are only available at the Internet Archives. And another huge percentage is stored only at the Internet Archive and Google Books, which is not a lot better.

We need a more distributed archive system where all these works can stored on multiple servers around the world - yet where users can search through all of them with comparable ease. Only in this way will our digital cultural heritage be truly safe.

Perhaps a #Fediverse - based approach could work? Something like #Bookwyrm , but with actual data storage?

What do you think?

There is a lot of disdain here on #Mastodon and the #Fediverse for those who have chosen to stay on #X / #Twitter and other social media platforms. And I think that this is not helpful.

I mean, sure, in the case of governments, political leaders, and major news organizations, disdain away. But many activists and small-time business owners depend on having a large reach and good networking for their activities, and this reach might simply not be feasible on the Fediverse - especially if their primary focus is on a demographic underrepresented around here (as the Fediverse skews heavily towards white Europeans and North Americans).

Hating on these people accomplishes nothing useful - and worse, it contributes to the Fediverse's well-deserved reputation for snobbery, which has driven a lot of people away.

So instead try empathy. Understand why such people make the choice to stay on other social media platforms, despite their problems. And instead of berating them for it, emphasize that these platforms will almost certainly get worse over time, due to the Enshittification cycle that all tech businesses touched by Silicon Valley venture capitalists must inevitably go through.

Suggest that developing a Fediverse presence is a useful "Plan B" for their social media efforts - and that among social media platforms, the Fediverse alone has the potential to develop into something better over time.

A surprisingly large part of my research of old German folk tales is trying to identify the places mentioned in these details. They are often not mentioned on Google Maps, although Open Street Maps frequently provides better results.

But a particularly useful resource has been Arcanum Maps, which uses old survey maps from the 19th century or earlier as Google Maps layers - and these often do have period names for locations that have vanished from modern maps. This has been especially important for Silesia and other regions where German place names were common, but which now only use Polish names.

If you are interested in historic maps, then check this site out!

#cartography #history
https://maps.arcanum.com/

We got lucky on our birdwatching trip to the coast.

#wildlife #photography

One of my compulsive habits is visiting local little free libraries and taking any #travel books or books about #history in the hopes of reading them one day and using them as inspiration for #ttrpg #worldbuiling .

But the main tangible result is that I have run out of bookshelf space. Again. 😭

https://bookrastinating.com/user/juergen_hubert