He/Him

Sneaking all around the fediverse.

Also at [email protected] [email protected]

  • 588 Posts
  • 372 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • Some truly heartbreaking shit going on.

    In Uganda, the National Malaria Control Program has suspended spraying insecticide into village homes and ceased shipments of bed nets for distribution to pregnant women and young children, said Dr. Jimmy Opigo, the program’s director.

    Medical supplies, including drugs to stop hemorrhages in pregnant women and rehydration salts that treat life-threatening diarrhea in toddlers, cannot reach villages in Zambia because the trucking companies transporting them were paid through a suspended supply project of the United States Agency for International Development, U.S.A.I.D.

    Dozens of clinical trials in South Asia, Africa and Latin America have been suspended. Thousands of people enrolled in the studies have drugs, vaccines and medical devices in their bodies but no longer have access to continuing treatment or to the researchers who were supervising their care.








  • So far so good! Some very unscientific observations from spending an absurd amount of time scrolling local on pixelfed.social:

    The people coming from Instagram and TikTok seem way less grumpy than the microbloggers. People are having a lot of fun and not complaining about much. It’s kind of a trip seeing happy, joyful people on the Fediverse to be honest. Everything in the world suuuuuuuucks right now, so it’s felt like a bit of a refuge. Sometimes I’ll accidentally bounce over to the global feed and oh man is the change in tone jarring.

    People don’t seem to have a problem with servers like the Twitter migrants did. Folks are still talking about it a lot on Mastodon though. I’ve literally not seen a single post about Pixelfed being “too complicated” to succeed, whereas it was (and is) pretty common to see “this place is great and all, but…” posts in the microblogging neighbourhood. Not sure why this is but it might be because the people coming to Pixelfed are generally younger than Mastodon users. This is just a guess, but I’d estimate the average age of Mastodon users is maybe mid-40s. Most of the people pouring into Pixelfed appear to be in their mid-to-late-20s. Perhaps those folks are just more accustomed to servers through Discord and gaming? Though people are generally captioning photos and not writing out lists of things they’re unhappy about and they could also just be unaware of servers altogether…

    Pixelfed is easily the most diverse “corner” of the Fediverse now. Fedi is very white but a large number coming over now aren’t. Pixelfed.social has probably gone from being 75% men to 75% women in the last few weeks. Diversity is the best possible thing for the social web.

    I’ve seen a bunch of people on Instagram promoting Feb 1st as “Global Switch Day” so hopefully it’ll keep blowing up.



  • Do you post MBFC links on articles from outlets they classify as “unbiased” too, or just the “biased” ones?

    I post links if I’m unfamiliar with a source and look them up, regardless of their conclusions. Sometimes I’ll do research on a news source if they don’t have an MBFC entry and share that as well. I assume there are others who are like, “cool story but… who the fuck is this?” I hope it spares them the extra steps.

    If some people don’t like that, I don’t care. I count MBFC downvotes as upvotes. It helps people I’m overjoyed to help and pisses off people that I’m pretty okay with pissing off. I’m not letting a bunch of greasy misinfo ghouls call the shots.

    A couple minutes of research shows that (although their contributors are all over the world) their legal entity People’s Dispatch Ltd. is registered in New York.

    First, registering and operating are two different things. Human beings are not just bound by the laws of the country their corporation is registered in.

    But… so what? If the information we have shows something that’s problematic then new information becomes available that addresses our concerns… that’s fine. That’s how shit’s supposed to work. MBFC is an information source, not the information source.

    As others have pointed out many times before, the entirely flawed premise behind MBFC is that centrism correlates with credibility and/or factualness…

    etc etc etc

    Look, I’ve met my quota on debating weird MBFC conspiracy theorists. The reality is there are a lot of people who don’t know what they’re talking about posting links to webpages they haven’t read. I’m not interested in someone’s poorly thought out take on how they say the Guardian is quadruple Mein Kampf, or whatever. If you have links to peer-reviewed research that support those conclusions, I’d be happy to see them. You don’t, though, because every bit of academic work on MBFC says those people are dead wrong.









  • Yes, there needs to be a Pixelfed-global feed. It was planned at one point. Right now, the Pixelfed servers are islands separated by an ocean of Mastodon posts. It’s a problem.

    Because there’s no value in limiting what the users can do on it. Because it’s very easy to bypass, but in a very shitty way, which people are already doing all the time.

    I already told you the value. When I’m on Pixelfed, I only want to see photos. If it was like you’re proposing, I’d stop using it and encourage someone to make the thing that currently exists. If I’m on loops, I don’t want a bunch of long- or short-form text. At all. Including other things is removing value.

    You should use Friendica! It’s exactly what you want. We can all have what we want.


  • PixelFed adopted the very annoying features of Instagram that require photos, but no one cares and they just post photos of text, and with the federation of other platforms like Mastodon, that’s just going to happen. It also lacks the ability to follow hashtags, so it’s actually worse than IG in some ways.

    The purpose of Pixelfed is photo-sharing. When I’m using Pixelfed I don’t want to see everything, I just want photos. It is insanely rare for people on Pixelfed to post images of text. In fact, the global feed is mostly useless on Pixelfed because you’re inundated with Mastodon users “quoting” by posting images of text. But they just announced that they’re soon including a setting to allow text posts, allowing the Pixelfed app to be used as a Mastodon client.

    You can follow hash tags on Pixelfed.

    I don’t see why everything has to be everything. Mastodon is for micro-blogging. If you’re posting 20,000 word essays, you’re not really micro-blogging. These all seem like reasonable choices for their intended purposes, not like mistakes at all. It might just be a mistake for you to choose those when what you want is Friendica.