Article by Mike Masnick

Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool — stay tuned). A few days prior to that happening, Bluesky hit 13 million users and continues to grow. It’s still relatively small, but it has now done way more with a smaller team and less money than Twitter did at a similar point in its evolution.

I’m excited with where things are trending with Bluesky for a few reasons, but I wanted to actually talk about something else. Just before I joined the board, I had met up with a group of supporters of “decentralized social media,” who more leaned towards ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads over Bluesky. Even though I wasn’t officially representing Bluesky, they knew I was a fan of Bluesky and asked me how I viewed the overall decentralized social media landscape.

inspired by comments in this thread

Technically, anyone with the knowledge and interest can spin up a single-user ActivityPub server and go about their business, but generally these servers aren't being developed with that usage in mind. In other words, they can be overkill for individuals in terms of features or resource use.

That's where single-user software comes into play. Explicitly developed for individuals, or in some cases very small groups, to use, this software is lighter on resources and more focused in its features for individuals.

As to why you might want this: it enables you to benefit from many of the benefits of ActivityPub, connecting and engaging with others & building your own curated feeds, without some of the drawbacks of multi-user servers such as keeping up with federation/defederation decisions that may affect what you can interact with & follow.

So on to a couple lists, in no particular order:

"Microblogging" but with relaxed character limits:

1. GoToSocial
2. Hollo
3. Ktistec
4. Seppo - Note: more specialized/limited compared to above.
5. Takahe - More experimental compared to others above

Other

1. GoBlog - Simple blogging
2. Betula - Bookmark management & sharing.
3. Postmarks - Same idea as Betula, but some differences like ActivityPub commenting possible.

I'm sure there's way more, but these were a few that stuck out to me. Let me know any others you're into that I may have overlooked!

What did you get up to, and what are you getting into here in the End of the Week?

I've seen the idea of organically growing communities indirectly and directly mentioned in various threads when people discuss which communities they'd like to see on instances, and in a different way in response to community creation announcements. Despite this, and some inconsistent efforts on my own part, I've not seen too many others appear to be trying to put this in action.

I think any of the open-ended chat/conversation/general communities are a good place to start with this, but I've found it tricky to work out what to post to them. I suspect that may be somewhat similar for others, but being in the boat with'em, I'm not sure how to help.

Regardless, I think these communities make more sense for people to find those that share their interests to then start their own communities vs. starting communities before knowing if anyone else is interested.

What do you think, and what do you think would help people feel comfortable posting in these broader communities?

As RSS fans here may know, you can grab RSS feeds of communities and even your profile on Lemmy instances if you like. You can also do this with profiles on Mastodon, and I imagine other ActivityPub microblogging services.

However, you may not have known that public Bluesky profiles are much the same. By public, I mean their posts can be viewed without signing in to Bsky. I'm not sure but I'd think those limiting their visibility may not (or should not) permit pulling a RSS feed of their posts.

All you do is copy the account's Bsky handle, e.g. [username].bsky.social (or custom domains, should work the same I think) to your RSS reader of choice, and you should have a feed of their posts.

It's a nice way to get feeds for news sites that don't directly offer them and that have moved to Bsky but not Mastodon or other ActivityPub microblogging services. It's also great if you're simply not into microblogging in general and/or don't want to make another social media account and download another app.

Hope this helps!

Any of you that celebrate Halloween already up to anything? Movie marathons/rewatches, books/short story reading/rereading, playing/replaying games, or whatever else?

Also, for those wanting to share spooky vibes, you might check out the following communities:
!spooky_memes@lemmy.world
!witchymemes@lemmy.world

Archive link.

Cloud apps like Google Docs and Trello are popular because they enable real-time collaboration with colleagues, and they make it easy for us to access our work from all of our devices. However, by centralizing data storage on servers, cloud apps also take away ownership and agency from users. If a service shuts down, the software stops functioning, and data created with that software is lost.

In this article we propose “local-first software”: a set of principles for software that enables both collaboration and ownership for users. Local-first ideals include the ability to work offline and collaborate across multiple devices, while also improving the security, privacy, long-term preservation, and user control of data.

Gradually we've been seeing the tv and movies or shows and movies communities pick up activity, which is good, and the multiple games communities each seem to be doing okay too.

Entertainment

However, there remains kind of an awkward spot where there's not exactly a general entertainment community (outside of Beehaw, that is) from what I can tell. There is an existing community, !entertainment@lemm.ee, though that someone could try to pick up and make active.

This could serve as a catchall for some of the more business-oriented news and some of the fluff celebrity chatter, depending on how one wants to go with it. Worth noting for celebrity chatter there is also !popculturechat@sh.itjust.works though.

Music

In a similar vein, while there's a variety of music communities, there's only a few generic ones, with the largest outside of Beehaw and Hexbear being the largely undefined Music community on Lemmy World. The lack of definition, that is, no sidebar guidance on what the community may be used for, makes it unclear what the community's expectations/preferences for posts are.

As with entertainment, this could be where more music business news could find its home, alongside some band chatter. Although as with entertainment, there's a music-themed community for the chatter to be found at !popheads@poptalk.scrubbles.tech for those interested.

Sports

Likewise with sports, there's a ton of different sports communities, but only two large generic communities to be found on Beehaw and Hexbear (supposing Lemmyverse is accurate). Before any of the more specific sports communities can gain more activity, I think it'd help to have a generic sports community to help people get oriented and find likeminded folks to form whatever specific communities they'd like.

Much like the first two, this could be for sports news and chatter...But unlike the first two, I can't find any generic fluff sports star/team chat communities.

Ideas on How and Where to Organize

In each of these cases regarding broader communities, I think following a similar organizational approach to Beehaw could be a good idea, but they would be better suited to instances more openly federated and not at as much risk of defederation. A few Lemmy instances that come to mind for this are Lemmee, ShitJustWorks, Lemmy Zip, and perhaps Reddthat?

I'm not sure where Mbin instances are in terms of federation smoothness and stability, otherwise I might suggest some of them. On a different note, if there were more Piefed instances I might suggest them, but last I checked the flagship seems to still be the largest and isn't open for community creation.

In short: there's good opportunities for broad, generic topic communities for entertainment, music, and sports on more widely federated instances. At the same time, even where these communities may exist on some widely federated instances, opportunity remains for more clearly defined variations of these communities to encourage posting with less uncertainty.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20265433

Canadian National Railway said on Friday that labor union Unifor has filed a notice of dispute to the Canadian Minister of Labor, just three days after initiating negotiations.

Also known as "conciliation", the notice of dispute can be sent by either party to the Canadian Minister of Labor during a negotiation and typically results in the appointment of a conciliation officer to assist the parties in reaching an agreement.

On a brutal day for the frail and aging Pope Francis, the king of Belgium, its prime minister and the rector of the Catholic university that invited him here all ripped into the institution he heads for a spectrum of sins: for covering up cases of clergy sex abuse and being far behind the times on embracing women and the LGBTQ+ community in the church.

And that was all before Francis met with the people most harmed by the Catholic Church in Belgium — the men and women who were raped and molested by priests as children. Seventeen abuse survivors spent two hours with Francis on Friday evening, telling him of their trauma, shame and pain and demanding reparations from the church.