Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

Great #seekseek news! I've finally fixed my datasheet scraper (and refactored basically the whole thing), so it's actually performant again: https://metrics.cryto.net/d/M6VEBtLnz/scraper?orgId=1

And so it's now steadily adding new datasheets to the search engine again :) https://seekseek.org/

I don't think I've posted this here before, so:

Avoid books published by #Packt. They are an untrustworthy publisher.

Several years ago, they e-mailed me to ask me to do a technical review of a Hyper-V book. I know nothing about Hyper-V whatsoever. The offered compensation was "two books from their technical library".

Most likely they scatter-mailed anyone their Github scraper turned up, hoping that someone would agree to review. Because I *did* have a HyperVM-related repository, which is completely unrelated to Hyper-V, but would definitely match a 'hyperv' string match.

Even leaving aside the shitty ethics of not paying their reviewers properly, this also means that the average Reddit/HN-posted blogpost will have had more actual technical review than a Packt book. ​

@joepie91 My deal was slightly better, THREE books from their library; don’t even remember the subject matter anymore. I wrote a 500 word reply saying hell no and never heard anything.

Too many people are used to centralised social media and websites in general.

Mastodon is like email in the technical sense, but it's more like Minecraft. You can join a server, but you don't have a right to be there. You're asked to follow the rules. If you piss off the admin you'll probably get banned because they don't want you there. Getting banned from one server doesn't mean you can't join another.

That's the Internet. Welcome. Be gay. Have fun.

As #activitypub and the #fediverse is more than just Mastodon, please tell me what other things you're doing? I'd really like to get more involved with the wider #federated universe but have no idea what's out there.

Please Boost so I can hear from everyone!

GoToSocial is getting a ton of attention lately. So I just wanna reiterate that if you're using GtS, you're using alpha software that has many features not yet implemented, and is chocka with bugs. We're quite proud of how the alpha development phase is going so far, but we make no guarantees whatsoever about stability, data loss, performance, etc etc. You use alpha software at your own risk.

There are many things you can do in Mastodon (and mastodon clients) which will 404 on GtS because they're simply not implemented yet. We are aware of what these are, and they're documented both in the roadmap document and in the faq in the docs. We're currently revising the roadmap document for the next year, so we'll have an updated version to share soon (tm).

Opening issues about features that we've yet to implement will not get them finished any faster: if anything, it will be slower because we then have to deal with answering issues. It is especially unwelcome to comment 'where is x feature' on an unrelated PR / issue. The cake is in the oven and it's not ready to eat yet, so stop asking if you can stick your fingers in it.

The team managing PRs and development and admin and planning and triage and releases and offering help in the help channels is 4 people, only one of whom (tobi) currently works full time on the project. While we're very open to PRs, feedback, and collaboration, we are also essentially just weirdos who like to be left alone to tinker with code, cuddle cats and dogs, and listen to music. This is home grown, open source software which started as a hobby project. Not a big company with support staff. Please be mindful of this when you're asking for support!

If you want to recommend GoToSocial to people, thank you, your enthusiasm is very appreciated! But please accompany your recommendation with the provisos I mentioned here, so that people's expectations are set appropriately. We don't want anyone to come to the software expecting miracles and ending up disappointed.

Phew, thank you for reading ❤️!