Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

I've said many times before that we don't actually need to worry about 'marketing' things like Mastodon or Matrix, we just need to make it good, and then people will organically and sustainably discover it and stick around. That we don't need to play the Silicon Valley game of "making a big splash and growing massively" because that only benefits startups, not community networks, we have different goals and costs.

And the situation with Bluesky is a really good example of this in action. Look at the amount of people on here who were using Bluesky, and with the latest events went "actually this sucks, huh, I guess I'm going back to fedi".

*That* is what I'm talking about. Notice how quickly people realized the problems with Bluesky. And how quickly they returned to fedi! *This* is how you grow a community network sustainably. You don't need or want to be the 'hot new thing' that's popular for a month and then drops off. You just need to be the reliable rock in a stormy ocean and people will slowly accumulate over the years and rarely or never leave.

Focus on making fedi better and better. Don't waste your energy and goodwill trying to play a corporation's game on a shoestring budget.

(And one of the most important ways right now to make fedi better is to improve moderation tooling and actually listen to marginalized folks.)

The 'easy' answer to this question is that one of my medications (due to anemia) is epo, the stuff that's also used by eg. cyclists as doping. So clearly that's the explanation, right?

Except I've been using that for almost two years by this point, and I wasn't able to pull myself up before during those two years...

So I am apparently somehow suddenly able to pull myself up by just my arms, on a pull-up bar, almost effortlessly.

I was only barely able to do this before my kidney disease treatment, and haven't been able to do it at all since. But now it's effortless. I have barely done any exercise in that time.

What?

One of the many ways in which I think "healthy community moderation" is not really being taken seriously by anyone: the canonical way to design a "you are banned" screen is to simply tell people they are banned without any meaningful information, explanation, option for appeal, nothing.

An actually well-considered ban screen might look something more like: "You have been banned from <thing> for <reason>. You can click this link to learn more about why we do not accept this sort of behaviour in our community, where you will also find a guide on different, healthier ways to deal with situations like this. Once you feel that you've understood the problem and can commit to doing better in the future, this (link) is where you can find the appeal instructions and the conditions for approval."

But I have literally never seen a single social platform, game, or anything else with a screen that even comes close to that.

My kingdom for a cool new programming language that doesn't have a flat dependency space and actually supports conflicting versions of transitive dependencies

This is extremely cool: https://www.keacher.com/xmas24/

It's a PCB-based 'christmas card' with lights, except it has no battery and pulls energy from radio waves in the air, and you can both power and control it by eg. holding it next to your phone.

From what I understand, the control of the lights doesn't use any actual data connection or pairing, instead the page encodes a modulated signal directly on 2.4GHz by opening a websocket and sending / not sending data in patterns, that the card then extracts and reads!