Not ideologically pure.
The score was amazing!
I’d rank it up there with the first one - less quirky, but more of a wild ride. My partner preferred the sequel, though she loves both.
I really struggle to understand how anyone could like the original and not like the sequel, unless they only like the old one out of a sense of nostalgia but they’ve actually grown to have their taste change since.
This is something I really loved actually. I never knew where the plot was going to go because there were so many different dynamics going on. At the end everything was tied together, but having so many things in motion made it unpredictable and fun to watch. To me, at least.
I’m sure I’ve seen better comedies, but I really can’t remember when.
I guess it might be relatively low for the sequel to a cult classic made by a famous director and with a star spangled cast. A lot of directors probably wouldn’t limit themselves when they know they don’t have to.
Exactly. Nothing about the original screams blockbuster, and nothing about the new one (except maybe some of the casting) does either. It’s just a really fun and, in my opinion, overall great movie. There’s nothing $50 million could have done to improve upon it. And it is absolutely worth seeing in a cinema.
The only redeeming feature about this is that it only looks about as awful as any other social media.
Which is not very redeeming at all, of course.
The comments on the post also aren’t from Mozilla.social. It’s not like they would have been happy to see Mozilla as a successful actor on the Fediverse either.
The trolls in the comment section at least hints at the fact that creating a more positive and constructive online space proved more difficult than they imagined.
I was curious, and joined the queue for the closed beta a long time ago. Never heard back. They explored something new in closed channels, decided not to go for it, backed out. I don’t really think they need to justify the decision.
Running a social media is a huge effort, and there’s a lot of trolls out there actively targeting Mozilla. I imagine it’s just more trouble than it’s worth.
The Commission is basically two completely different things. Actually it’s probably more than two things, but the way we often talk about it, it plays two key roles.
One is that of a bureaucratic body that runs the union, delegates funds, oversees the implementation of EU legislation, submits observations to cases before the CJEU, posts content to @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu, and that kind of jazz. This is where there’s a huge number of employees, and it’s where a lot of EU funds are spent. We probably wouldn’t be talking here if it wasn’t for the Next Generation Internet programme, which is a part of Horizon Europe, which is seen as a scientific research initiative. So the Fediverse has a pretty direct relationship to things going on in the bureaucracy that I assume is positioned under the Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth.
This is, however, largely bureaucratic. Doesn’t mean it’s not important, but it’s not where the juicy political decisions are made.
The other role is that of a executive body. In the separation of powers in the EU,
In its executive role, budget and staff might matter less. What matters is the political deals you can strike. Resources might help you craft better proposals that the Council and Parliament then needs to accept before it can be signed off to law, but the relationship to resources here is not that obvious.
Then again, another bureaucratic role of the Commission is when power has been delegated to it to decide on a specific area, for example how to regulate a specific type of products. This is bureaucratic as hell, but it also gives direct decision-making power to the Commission to just decide pretty much as they please within a limited competence. So bureaucrats could absolutely mean power as well, albeit maybe not a very sexy type of power.
It’s not an obvious exercise. How “important” is migration and home affairs compared to the internal market? The internal market is certainly at the core of the competences of the EU, but maybe it’s in the less established areas that more interesting developments are happening. Furthermore, they might suddenly become extremely relevant. Nobody predicted how important DG SANTE would become in 2020, for example.
One indicator of importance might be staff size. I struggle to find a good and up to date figure right now, so I’ll make do with a pretty bad and outdated one from 2020, showing the size of the staff under each Commissioner at that point in time. Johannes Hahn runs the largest operation as the DG of budget and administration. Budget is unquestionably important. Administration as well, but it might produce more staff than power.
The Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth comes in second place. The Commissioner for International Partnerships comes third.
So these positions run the largest operations. Linking that to power is probably somewhat misguided - it would indicate that all three of these relatively anonymous positions were more important than von der Leyen. Entering a position with a lot of staff might even decrease your power, as you are forced into a role that might have more to do with management and less to do with politics; furthermore, if the field is already well-developed in the EU, it might not be where central developments are happening going forwards.
A better indicator could be to go through the Directorate-Generals under the control of the different Commissioners. The Commissioner of the Internal Market, for example, is also responsible for for the Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space. That might be important these days.
In the traditional competences of the EU, the DG for for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries would be considered very important. These days, and especially on this platform, people might be more interested in the DG for Communications Networks, Content and Technology.
Wherever Union competences are weak and/or anonymous, there’s greater room to innovate and to surprise us by striking some crazy deal. In politicized issues that we intuitively care about, the Commissioner’s power will also be relatively weaker as they are kept under strict control. So there’s an inherent tension: The fact that a Commissioner is widely considered as being important might actually make them less relevant by making it harder for them to pursue an agenda. They might end up just striking smallest common denominator compromises with all involved actors, and have little to say themselves for the outcomes as such.
So that’s a messy non-answer, and I guess nobody is any wiser. But it’s difficult, in my opinion, to give a very clearly defined answer which positions are important and which are not.
The official story is that Meta is worried about being sued by people suddenly seeing their content pushed to some random website without their consent if it’s enabled by default, so they won’t risk enabling it by default. At least not before the fediverse is huge enough that everything you post going everywhere on the internet is the expected behaviour.
Fair enough really. I wouldn’t want to be sued for that either, and they obviously cannot expect Congress to understand… anything.
They define decentralisation as an even distribution of users? Or did I get that wrong skimming the paper?
This seems arbitrary. Mastodon is a decentralised network, no matter how big Mastodon.social is. Lemmy is equally decentralised, even though there’s a dominant actor.
The other hubs in the network don’t revolve around mastodon.social/lemmy.world. they connect to each other bilaterally - if the central hubs disappeared over night it wouldn’t affect them all that much.
I think the notion that decentralised networks can’t have hubs of varying sizes is plain wrong, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what decentralized means.
Very cool!
Do you be have any idea how tolling scraping these data is for the servers?
If this is something you want to keep working on, maybe it could be combined with a sort of Threadiverse fund raiser: we collectively gather funds to cover the cost of scraping (plus some for supporting the threadiverse, ideally), and once we reach the target you release the map based on the newest data and money is distributed proportionally to the different instances.
Maybe it’s a stupid idea, or maybe it would add too much pressure into the equation. But I think it could be fun! :)
I’m amazed at how fast this place has grown since the first time I saw a Lemmy instance (way before Reddit API drama), or since the first time I snooked around Mastodon (before Twitter exodus) for that matter. So I guess I’m inherently optimistic by the fact that where newer users might see little activity as a bad sign, I see a little activity as a huge improvement on what the status quo was not so long ago.
On a technical side, open source projects also tend not to benefit from growing too fast. It seems to me Fediverse platforms currently have a healthy activity level for the stage of completion they are in. Lemmy certainly grew faster than it could handle for a while, and arguably Mastodon suffered from the same.
The main reason I’m hopeful about the social web is, however, that it makes no sense any more to create a new platform that does not support it. No matter what kind of social networking site you’re making, proprietary or open, you’re going to want to make it ActivityPub enabled, simply because it gives you a user base right off the bat.
And furthermore, it encourages the development of new platforms, precisely because you don’t need to establish yourself with a whole bunch of users. According to fedidb my platform of choice, PieFed, has 124 active users right now. It would not have been a very interesting corner of the old web.
I don’t think the established user base here is going anywere, and I think future developments will feed into the ecosystem. So I’m pretty hopeful. But it is going to take time before all sorts of niche communities have made themselves a federated home.
Bluesky and Threads will fight it out over microblogging, while Mastodon will stick around as a smaller less corporate alternative. A year from now people on both platforms can probably follow my Mastodon handle anyway, so I don’t really care all that much.
Not considering the costs of hosting infrastructure for downloads, developing Fediverse integration in software is an extremely complicated task, and retrofitting it into existing software is no joke.
A more realistic starting point is probably to follow them on Mastodon, ( @Retromags@mstdn.plus ) interacting with their posts and trying to spread them, and to try to build up a fediverse presence for them. Then eventually, if they find that they get the majority of their interactions through the fediverse, they might consider merging their comment sections.
I think alternative social media needs to be decentralized. There’s just no other way it can be sustainable. Cohost was centralized - of course it couldn’t stand a chance. Never mind all the other issues, which are obviously equally important.
For me, the fact that we are having this conversation on the social web is solid evidence pointing in the opposite direction of your concerns. I counted contributors from eight different websites and at least three different software platforms only in this comment section of twelve comments.
Alternative social media platforms have never looked so healthy!
I gave in to peer pressure and finally got Twitter right before shit completely hit the fan, even though I was already uncomfortable with it. I already had a Mastodon user, but not under my real name.
Then, during the exodus, I created a Mastodon user for academic use. This was a few months before defending my PhD in social sciences.
For a while, I was posting the same content on both platforms. On Twitter I am followed by a lot of people in my field, and many of them are still active. On Mastodon, there’s like… two active people specifically in my field.
Still, whenever I post anything both places, I have gotten more interactions on Mastodon than on Twitter. On Twitter a couple of people see it and boost, and they can be somewhat central in the field. But then it kind of deflates. On Mastodon, I get boosts from the ones there in the field, people in adjacent fields (for example the #rstats crowd), interested people from civil society, commentators, a real variety of people. Hell, the other day I was boosted by a folk singer I’ve been a fan of for years but that I didn’t even know was on there.
Meanwhile, I occasionally check the temperature on Bluesky, and I bridge my posts there. Many in my field signed up while it was invite only. Some of them posted one or two posts back then. I haven’t seen any actively since, and nobody from my field has followed my bridged account - but one R stats person has.
I guess they must be on Twitter still, if they are anywhere.
Anyway, point is, my field indeed failed to migrate. But I still achieve more by posting on Mastodon than on Twitter.
“to me, this seems to be fascism”
…so in effect, he should be all for it? I see no problem here.
There seems to be another side to this story as well. I’m not quite invested enough to dig into it, but it might not be such an awful loss.
I can’t say I ever really understood what Newsmast is up to, but Channel.org looks pretty nifty. It seems like a good way for organisations consisting of several independent people to get together and present all their federated content in one public channel.