you became general because there was a bright light above the generals cabin next to your hole you normally lurk under beneath the stone at the bend in the river, the general leaned too far over peering down at you while out on a smoke break and fell in and tragically drowned, the peculiar thing was as he was sinking and thrashing about his uniform came off and landed on top of you, the alien enveloping of the sinking garments spooked you and you shot clear out of the water and through the still open door of the cabin right into an austere but plush leather chair behind a monsterously large desk. The next moment the guards rushed in having heard a commotion and were relieved to find the general had clearly only went for an imprompto nightime dip in the river after foolishly slipping and falling… and to hide an embarassment had quickly leaped out and returned inside putting on a blank neutral expression to try to hide it as if they weren’t clearly slimey and dripping wet.

Since then you have been doing a great job honestly shrugs

(I made a seperate post because for alternate idea)

Have you considered hosting a lemmy instance yourself and possibly preconstructing lemmy threads in some bulk fashion with gifs grouped by topic or theme and just use lemmy itself as the platform to share gifs?

Just because lemmy threads were created to mimic reddit threads doesn’t mean we are confined to only using lemmy as a reddit-like tool…

Just an interesting thought I had shrugs

…ok I know I always recommend dokuwiki for everything but it is super easy to set up and doesn’t need a database or anything and it comes stock with a nice gui media manager and a lot of plugins that extend that functionality.

If you are willing to provide or pay for the hosting of a large amount of images I don’t see the reason to go with anything more complicated though you may find something more minimal that suits your needs.

https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

https://www.dokuwiki.org/tips:cms

I don’t know if there is a way to handle metadata for non-jpg images but there are a number of ways you could organize gifs including photo namespaces.

https://www.dokuwiki.org/media_manager

or using the imagebox plugin and just directly put tags in the caption

https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:imagebox

or a number of other ways probably.

The nice thing about this solution is all the data is accessible and in plain text readable markdown which also makes it easy to strap other things onto, search through with whatever tools you want and easily run a backup process on (especially since everything is neatly contained within a folder).

Don’t make the mistake most people of thinking dokuwiki is only useful as a traditional wiki, it is such a simple and general tool that its power extends far past that.

The version of someone you invite in the door determines the initial trajectory of how that person will act in the community. You can invite in the leading edge of someone’s developing kindness or invite in the ossifying mass of their nature that is threatening to turn hateful and uncaring. No one instance of invitation to a new person (however that may happen, formally or informally) pushes the needle far either way within any one particular person (though sometimes it can radically do so) but the overall integrated effect is a moderate shift of the an entire community towards the better or worse version of the community members. When this effect is used for good people often describe the resulting community space as a community that accepts them for who they are or more succintly is a genuinely safe space.

Of course, every interaction is in an invitation in some small way, it doesn’t just happen once.

Also the taller the building is the more potential passive air circulation on hot days.

"Recognize that attention is task-specific. One reason it’s so difficult to definitively say whether or not attention spans are decreasing is that it depends on the task with which someone is engaged. We may be able to sit through an entire 2-hour, action-packed movie, but start to squirm within 10 minutes of a nature documentary. Infusing things with storytelling and interactivity are two evidence-backed ways of increasing the likelihood we’ll be able to sustain focus. "

The entire narrative about attention span hinges upon this fundamental distortion, you cannot separate your ability to pay attention to something into an abstract universal quantity, your capacity for attention is always intimately interwoven with the environment around you and the specific task at hand. Attention span is a pop culture concept, not a scientifically rigorous one making any science done about attention span unable to actually illuminate the unknown since the concept being studied simply comes undone with a tug on one of the founding assumptions. In popular culture attention span is defined axiomatically as decreasing because of technology, and discussion works backwards from there.

The references cited also don’t really support the conclusions the article comes to (“Challenging the the six-minute myth of online videos”), or they are links to pop-science articles talking about the topic, not actual evidence on the topic. An amusing example of this is the repeatedly, endlessly cited “McSpadden, K. (2015, May 14). You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish. Time. https://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/”.

1. Goldfish are specifically studied because they can be trained to remember things and focus on them, they do not have “short attention spans” so the entire metaphor is broken from the start.

2. There actually isn’t any hard evidence even in the original paper that popularized the idea… it was a white paper from microsoft not a scientific publication by academics

See this article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/shanesnow/2023/01/16/science-shows-humans-have-massive-capacity-for-sustained-attention-and-storytelling-unlocks-it/

It is also pretty easy to poke holes in the narrative that our attention spans are decreasing, driving a car takes an insane amount of concentration, more than arguably almost any other human activity practiced by billions of people on earth. If our attention spans were decreasing, the very first place you would see it would be in a huge increase in traffic crashes and deaths. You also wouldn’t see a vibrant world of longform youtube videos on niche topics that are made by some of the most perennially popular and watched video content makers. People wouldn’t be listening and reading to books, listening to longform podcasts, or engaging in hobbies that take significant preparation.

Further, the industry of marketing, perhaps one of the entities with the most interest in how we actually pay attention to things vs. what the popular narratives are about our attention span isn’t convinced our attention spans are decreasing either.

More things are competing for our attention, so we are more selective and discard things quicker in a fashion that is totally rational. Daily life has also become exhausting for most, if you notice you are unable to focus like you used to it is probably because you are more tired, stressed and have less free time than you did in the past. If our “attention spans” were decreasing the way everybody seems to believe they are, the impacts would be catastrophic and look like entire populations undergoing early onset dementia, and as someone who has spent years around people with dementia… that is clearly not what is happening at all.

The hilarious thing is that if they did that the resulting LLM chatbot would shit on AI and large corporations constantly.

“You are right that people have shorter attention spans ofc”

Why do we all endlessly state this narrative as if it was a fact.

Like I get the feeling but there is very little good evidence for it.

Scientists don’t even largely consider attention span a useful concept to understand the human brain.

When taking a broad longterm view, clearly Peertube and/or other video hosting and sharing alternatives to Youtube are the most strategically important since as bad as centralization/enclosure of the commons is for various mediums of online communities, the process is wholely complete in a good chunk of the world for informational videos with Youtube utterly dominating.

It is easy to underestimate how powerful of a fulcrum Youtube is for leveraging manipulation and control.

I have no idea if Peertube needs development help (I assume they likely do) and I am not sure what specifically the kinds of things they need help with are, so I say this more as a general observation.

I wouldn’t call it cold blooded, the CEO was cold blooded. The shooter presumably only murdered one person, the healthcare CEO was undoubtedly a mass murderer.

“But I have faith (for now) because they have people I know from when they worked on secure-ssb and dat protcols, which are truly decentralized but never took off for other reasons.”

The modern corporation is precisely defined as a structure of ownership perpendicular to ethics, one of the prime reasons for this is to progressively nullify this specific category of “there are good people in the room” defenses against extreme unsustainable extraction of profit at catastrophic consequences for everybody but shareholders.

It should surprise no one that bluesky is able to leverage the socioeconomic status and wealth of its investors and founders to easily outpace the fediverse… which is a patchwork community construction maintained and developed on several orders of magnitude less capital…

so what?

The fediverse isn’t of the same “type” as a for-profit corporate social network, it doesn’t need to grow virally and produce ever growing profits to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of the people who maintain and provide foundation for the fediverse.

Here is a good blogpost about it

https://taggart-tech.com/20241124-bluesky-questions-pt1/

Check out this mastodon thread and associated links

https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113504285308484716

TL;DR Bluesky is not functionally federated nor decentralized, it is dubious if it ever will be and the layer of post sorting and moderation required to participate in Bluesky’s network is extremely computationally intensive and this aspect of Bluesky is NOT open source and is a proprietary black box.

The fediverse and activity pub are the future, even if the current hype train leaving the station (…who is paying for all the free drinks on that train and why?) makes it feel otherwise in the short term.

Yeah but unlike activity pub, atproto/bluesky demands each self hosted relay process a massive amount of data to participate, it is incredibly impractical and costly to envision scaling up, bluesky’s self hosting is essentially made to be a curiousity rich developers with access to powerful hardware try out as a hobbiest project and write a blog post about, not a serious general use case for everyone.

The idea of course is make it so nerds can technically do it, but the bulk of users can’t and won’t.

The strategy is convince the nerds you are giving them access to the future and that average people aren’t ready for it, and than never actually provide that future since nerds stop advocating for it because a corporation handed them a tiny scrap and that was enough to write a good techy diy blog post about.

Bluesky is the past desperately trying to convince you it is the future, don’t fall for it.

You are correct, if you take a step back and consider bluesky wholistically, it is DEFINITELY not decentralized.

This game is really gorgeous, and the combat is great too!

I am not trying to argue this isn’t also true too, my argument is that the fediverse doesn’t have a marketing department so the framework of discussion around the fediverse in mass media will always be fit to whatever the most convenient narrative is for the corporate tech world which will always be the fediverse is an obscure nerdy diy thing like ham radio or something.

That isn’t to say the fediverse doesn’t also have existential accessibility issues on multiple dimensions.

In the near term of course bluesky will, it has hype, it has rich tech people on it, it has 10s of millions of investment it can throw at stuff.

This is not how Mastodon or the Fediverse grows, our growth is real, not based on hyped and marketing. People come and stay here because it is a nice place, not because it is a popular or exciting new hangout spot that all the rich cool people are going to.

Until Mastedon can appeal to simple minded mainstream basic folk (which is a pretty good size of netizens) it will always be a niche group.

I think the bigger problem is that the tech press starts from the perspective that Mastodon and the Fediverse is just for techie nerds and then fills out the narrative with supporting details and so unless those narratives are challenged Mastodon and the Fediverse will never be for normal people because the Tech press and the money behind it won’t let that narrative stick in the general public’s minds.

A bridge is a tool for connecting things don’t connect, it is not federation.

The relay layer/app view forces you under the control of a centralized system at a fundamental level with bluesky, the only thing meaningful about that kind of federation is hosting costs for processing and storing post data are offloaded onto the user.

…Which when you think about it is actually pretty fucking insulting to the fediverse and what is trying to be when bluesky pretends it is aiming for true federation and decentralization.