Nougat

Who’s not interested in whose opinion now?

That you’ve employed a slippery slope analogy far too widely?

I have also hired exterminators and taken antibiotics.

You shall not think of living things in hierarchical order (x is better than y)

Having to choose between my child and my dog would be a horrible choice to have to make, but I know exactly how I would make it.

Office space isn’t worth nearly as much if people are working remotely. Much less demand.

You seem like someone who might be interested in !OriginalDocuments. link

There are three Balkis, and the Balkiest of them has no legs.

Confidently … correct?

172.16.0.0/16 represent

More options is better.

Remind me again how things can be deleted from the internet?

I used “microblogging” earlier as a stand-in for “Twitter-like,” and I shamelessly pulled that terminology from the kbin interface. It’s accurate, but I don’t know that the term is sufficient to gain popular traction - and I certainly do not pretend to be the person to dictate what the terminology ought to be.

Now that I think about it, the core of social media of all types is “someone posts a thing” (whether that thing is a link to something else or original text content), and other people comment on it. YouTube, Xitter, Reddit, slashdot, fark, etc etc. The display format, post and comment organization, tagging options - those are all ancillary.

Federation via ActivityPub introduces a wholly new aspect to social media by separating the client application from the content accessed therethrough. I, from kbin.social, can see and interact with content posted by someone originating from mastodon.social. Content is one thing, and client application another.

People do have familiarity with that kind of separation in at least one other internet functionality: email. People generally already understand that their web interface to their email provider allows them to send and receive email both within and without that provider, and that their mobile app is just a different way to access that same content. But SMTP email is old. Since then, the aim of content providers on the internet has been to capture and contain users, using existing protocols, which causes people to consider the provider and the content to be the same thing - because in so many cases, it is.

ActivityPub is a new(ish) protocol. Functionally, it is much more like email than it is like an internet forum of any kind. Extending this comparison, SMTP email is one-to-one (yes, there can be multiple recipients, but they are all themselves “ones”); ActivityPub is one-to-many. Yes, this is similar to traditional walled-garden forums, which are also one-to-many, but those walled-gardens restrict the “many” to “those who have accounts inside our garden.” Perhaps ActivityPub is more accurately described as one-to-very many or one-to-all.

It probably seems that I am avoiding your clear and plain question. Maybe I am, but I also think it’s important to consider the details of these as-yet-unnamed things in order to arrive at an appropriate and effective way to market them. Federated social media is a public forum in a way that previous internet forums have not been since Usenet. “Forumnet” seems like it could be workable. It’s definitely more descriptive than “fediverse” (a name I have never been very pleased by).

While it gets closer, that continues to avoid your specific question. I will need to put a good deal more thought to this, and must now direct my attention elsewhere. Watch this space.

… without mentioning Twitter.

That seems like a pretty arbitrary restriction. At this point, a basic knowledge of “what Twitter is like” is a pretty general-knowledge thing.

The article refers to ActivityPub-based “microblogging” by assuming that Mastodon is the only client application available for that purpose. It is not. Mastodon is certainly the most popular client application for that purpose, but it doesn’t have to be. Other client applications exist, and a better or more popular client application could be created.

When the point of the article is to get people to comprehend that federated social media is not a “walled garden” –

People are using open, free Mastodon, but in their minds, they are still in a walled garden.

maintaining the notion that a single client application is the only way to read or create a certain kind of content is a big part of the very problem the article describes.

And the author seems to be aware of this:

Often, I hear about people trying to explain the idea behind Mastodon to someone, who is not on the Fediverse, they often explain it with e-mail. However, nowadays, people don’t even experience this “choice of service” even with e-mail anymore. They get their e-mail when signing up with google and that’s it.

GMail is not the only way to send and receive SMTP email. It’s certainly a very popular way to do so, but you wouldn’t describe a concern over people being blind to their choices of email providers (or, indeed, their ability to host their own email server) as

The current [GMail]-signup is only removing the confusion of users on first glance, because it either hides the server-choice altogether, or leaves them with a choice that is impossible to make at this point of their [GMail]-journey.

If the author, or anyone else, wants people to have a better understanding of the nature of federated social media, describing it wrong is not a path to that goal.

I said no such thing.

Here’s another way: stop referring to everything “Twitter-like” as Mastodon. Stop referring to everything “Reddit-like” as Lemmy. Those are both client platforms through which one can access ActivityPub content.

Conflating the platform with the provider with the protocol with the content is what’s confusing people.

At first blush, this article seems to say that there’s a solid hypothesis for which the math works consistently, and they know what they want to do in order to test that hypothesis. It’s just a matter of designing and performing experiments.

But then, I read this:

[Co-author] Weller-Davies added: “A delicate interplay must exist if quantum particles such as atoms are able to bend classical spacetime. There must be a fundamental trade-off between the wave nature of atoms, and how large the random fluctuations in spacetime need to be.”

I know atoms aren’t “particles,” and I’m pretty damned sure they’re also not quanta.

Worth it for me. I spend more time in this basement office than anywhere else, by a longshot. I don’t have to wonder. I don’t have to wait while results from a test kit get back. I don’t have to worry about “Eh, I’ll get another test kit … later.” This is how I knew I needed to replace my first active radon fan with a new one: the alarm went off. The detector I have has been clicking along for many years; I have definitely saved money and worry in the long term.

Just get a plug in one that’s always on. This is the one you want. They used to be the only company that made such a thing; since I bought mine (a 3rd gen) a bunch of years ago, the nonsense companies have also started making them.

Building codes where I am, outside of Chicago, have required all new homes to have passive radon venting installed during construction for at least twenty years. This is a length of PVC pipe that runs from just inside the sump pit in the basement (lowest point) all the way through the house and up out the roof. The sump pit also has a sealed plastic cover bolted on.

It’s then elementary to buy a radon fan and install it in that PVC pipe in the attic, making it an active system. You want to have less than 4pCi/l (picocuries per liter) radiation. My basement office used to be like 23pCi/l. After installing a fan (and then later replacing it when the first one stopped doing its job), it’s at 1.6pCi/l.

Most of the radon tests out there are “single use,” where you set the test down, wait for some period of time, send it off to be analyzed. These are like US$20 or US$30. One company makes a plug-in detector that runs all the time, and alarms when it’s over 4pCi/l. It’s about US$130, and worth every penny if you have a finished basement and anyone spends time in it.

Edit: A quick look at Amazon shows that the garbage companies are now making always on radon detectors. This is new since I bought mine like five or six years ago. You want a SafetySiren brand, and the newest model is now US$180 on Amazon.