Well I am planning to build a rocket and go to the moon but alas the hardware is still a couple years out :( no fear, it will be soon though!
You can run your own relay, in that sense the "body" of bluesky is when considered in the abstract potentially decentralized... but when you consider the "brain" of bluesky nodes and the layer of moderation and post/commenting is still locked into a centralized system it is a bit like arguing borg drones have free will because they are physically individual beings.
Or it is like arguing an ant isn't existentially dependent upon the structure of the ant colony to survive since each ant posesses an individual body with its own six legs.
At a fundamental level the intended meaning of "federate" is that disparate communities and softwares can "connect" seamlessly, a bridge by definition is a tool used to connect things that are not connected or seamless.
A federated landscape of interconnected trails is the structural antithesis to a landscape of bridges each laboriously muscled out of the headache inducing process of connecting two disparate systems with a third system specific to that bridge and that bridge only that must be endlessly revised and rebuilt to keep everything from collapsing in a heap.
A bridge, by definition, is a composite of parts that are existentially vital to the sucessful conveyance of what passes over them, it only takes one section failing to break the entire bridge and it only takes one troll to block everything. A bridge, again by its very definition, is the most brittle architecture as every bridge is ultimately only a temporarily open door that must be continously be maintained and eventually rebuilt at the expense of great effort.
Some recommendations for lefty mastodon instances, all are vaguely tech themed, but that comes with the territory. That being said none of these instances feel like weird places to not be a techy person, the conversations and interactions on these instances occupy as diverse a range as anywhere else.
Your lemmy instance lemmy.world is under the umbrella of https://fedihosting.foundation/ which oversees both lemmy.world and the mastodon instance mastodon.world
Can or should it be tied to my lemmy.world instance somehow?
Please do whatever helps you express your identity/identities of your self best! You can always link between accounts in the public account bios.
I will offer you a suggestion though, if you already made the account Pretzilla@lemmy.world why not make Pretzilla@mastodon.world, link between them and perhaps indicate if you use one or the other account more. You might as well, people will still recognize you immediately on your mastodon account but you might find it nice to be able to interact with the fediverse through the perspective of mastodon/microblogging.
Then make another account on a different mastodon instance that looks cool too, go wild, do whatever fits your fancy, the consequences to making an account and never using it are small enough that except in edge cases (you took up a slot on a server with a limited number of registrations or something) nobody is going to care!
p.s. Notice all of these mastodon instances have thoughtful moderation policies that place an emphasis on protecting and centering vulnerable voices over valuing the "right" of socio-economically advantaged groups to spread hate speech in public. All these instances have links to the mastodon accounts of the humans who moderate those instances so you can get an idea of the human element of the moderation. How cool is that? Each place has its own slight spin on being a healthy community and you can find the place that is perfect for you!
It would be an abdicaton of the duties of the people in charge of running the business of bluesky to not create leverage points where serious monetization can occur.
Like seriously... that is called Not Doing Your Job and usually leads to getting replaced by someone who will.
I feel like it is too easy to get stuck in the weeds discussing arcane details of a massively complex system such as ActivityPub and bluesky and the virtues and faults of those details while ignoring the much more easy to predict and understand truth that decentralization is fundamentally at odds with monetization or consolidated control.
Investors in bluesky coughed up the money for the same reason any sane person invests large sums of money...to get more money.
yes, see this thread
https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113487613965056474
"#BlueSky isn't decentralised or federated. The outage yesterday is the obvious proof. It may look decentralised and they definitely love to outsource traffic and storage costs by claiming that running your own PDS (Personal Data Server) is somehow something federated, but that's all smoke and mirrors. You have to go deep on [1] to find "networking through Relays instead of server-to-server" as their current implementation choice. THEY run the relays. No one else."
There are a million ways open platforms can be undermined, especially when serious money stands to be gained from it. See basically all of human history as exhibit A...
Of course it is, why would people throw millions at investing in a product and then decentralize it to the point that there weren't any bottlenecks to apply pressure and extract a profit back out of it? It makes no sense and would be a ridiculous business strategy.
What is a good business strategy is associating your product with visions of decentralization while never truly intending to get there in practice.
One is a product with investors selling itself on promises of decentralization (bluesky), the other is a genuine community tool (mastodon) that actually provides decentralization.
wtf kind of lame criticism of mastodon is this...there are constantly cute pictures of pets being posted on mastodon... and like anywhere else with humans these posts are very popular on mastodon.
I would say these posts are MORE popular on mastodon because without an algorithm cute animal photos are going to stick out as popular even more.
This is all nonsense anyways, Bluesky is considered "cooler" by techy types with a childlike awareness of history, politics and power because the tech is cooler when considered in the abstract.
Coincidently none of these technical details have the capacity to make bluesky a truly open and free place otherwise those investors would sue bluesky for purposefully and willfully not pursuing profit for shareholders. This won't stop certain types from pointing at pictures in the sand and reciting idle words thrown to the wind by the people in charge for now.
Bluesky exists as a legal instrument of profit, all else about bluesky is malleable and changeable and will eventually be bulldozed or undermined in the pursuit of profit for shareholders.
edit 2 this is a real human, and I was grumpy and while it was satisfying to point fingers it just makes me into the asshole so I removed that, but my broader point still stands
In the end I don’t think internet users in rich powerful countries are the users most likely to benefit and invest their time into in the fediverse. They might be the ones with the most free time, money and privilege around computers which makes being on the leading edge of niche technologies far easier, but I don’t think using the fediverse vs commercial social media is thattt crucial of a difference for most (add a million qualifiers here except if you are black, queer, trans etc… I am talking in relative terms here) livimg inside the borders of colonial powers like the US, France, Germany etc..
Speaking as a hetero white dude who grew up with a decent amount of privilege the fediverse isn’t for the countless versions of me living within the borders of colonial powers…
It might have been programmers living within the borders of colonial powers that did most of the labor to create the fediverse, and most of the early users might have come from within colonial powers but I think it is important to recognize that the gift that the fediverse represents to the world is the capacity to empower people living outside the borders of colonial powers to own and run their own social networks instead of having some random Facebook employee who doesn’t have the time or basic knowledge of a country to make major decisions about what news accounts to moderate as dangerous spam and what to allow.
From a 30,000 foot view, speaking in broad terms and specific values and priorities, what do you think are the best strategies for flipping the script on the fediverse being mostly a tool used by people within the borders of colonial powers to one used by without and within?
I wonder about the capacities of fediverse software being useful as a compliment to HOT open street mapping type initiatives in the wake of disasters and just in general?
(Are server costs just generally cheaper/easier in colonial countries to run or is it purely a money and time thing? I don’t really know)
cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/12374907
I recently came up with a Steam Deck keybindings layout for Cataclysm DDA after someone asked me about it and it gave me the push I needed to actually sit down and do it the way I wanted to. I think there are some really cool implications for accessibility here as well as this is a pretty damn fast way of inputting keys once you get used to it, and investing the time is worth it since the control scheme laid out here immediately has plug-and-play compatibility with not only a ton of games but also a ton of powerful software tools.
::: spoiler post text contained below
Cataclysm DDA, Vim & WASD
edit: I recommend increasing the transparency of the popup steam menus by a large amount in practice, I kept them fairly opaque to make the video demonstration easier to follow
Vim Ring
From this perspective, the Vim hjkl keys (along with the diagonals y,u,n and b because this is CDDA and we need those diagonals) provide us with a clear idea we can ground our Steam Deck mapping in, and unlike a Vimmer with a qwerty keyboard, we can unfold the keys into the navigational ring (up down left right) Vimmer's imagine in their head to understand Vim qwerty controls.
Not only does this provide an easy way to remember our first choice in dividing the qwerty keyboard into Steam Deck mappings, because this first mapping is based on a conceptual perspective projected onto the qwerty keyboard made literal in the form of a navigational ring, it means that the control scheme has plugin and play compatibility with a dizzying array of software and games that all are part of Vim's ~40 year? tradition and evolution of keyboard controls. Once you memorize the Vim Ring on your Steam Deck you will be able to use it for the rest of your life on joysticks and touchpads, and you can rest assured that other people will be developing vim hjkl based controls for software and games for the rest of your life.
WASD Ring
WASD is probably one of the most well known "conceptual projections" onto the qwerty keyboard right?
It might seem a bittt confusing at first that z and x are the diagonals, but if you remember that this navigational ring is based on WASD, than s has to be down, and thus it becomes intuitive that z and x would be the downward diagonals. The letters q and e are almost without fail where left-lean, right-lean controls are for tactical shooters (for leaning out of cover to shoot) but even to someone unfamiliar with these control schemes, q and e are pretty intuitive.
Center Column
Notice here, that between the Vim and WASD rings is 2x6 column of unbound letters on the keyboard, those being c v, f g, and r t. The natural place for these letters which are frequently used by games and software is the four Steam Deck back buttons L5, R5, L4, R4 and the bumpers R1 and L1. True, vim prioritizes the horizontal home row, but given the accessibility of the other homerow keys in the VIM and WASD rings I don't think this is a serious flaw especially because it is easy to visualize how this column maps to your Steam Deck.
Number Ring
Now for our last navigational ring. This ring was inspired by reading about players admitting to making the extremely chaotic-neutral choice of using the number row rather than the numberpad for navigation lol. Importantly, the number row keys not the numberpad keys are used here so that in conjunction with shift this ring can be used to activate the alt number row commands !@#$%^&*().
Caboose Board
The Caboose Board is where the rest of the letters and punctuation keys go. I call this a "board" not a "ring" because more keys can be fit onto steam's menu system by making two rows then making a ring, which provides a natural place for extensibility for additional critical keys needed only for a specific game or program.
*** Controller Face Buttons, and Left & Right Triggers. At this point all the letters from the qwerty keyboard are mapped onto the onboard Steam Deck controls. We just need to tidy up and map a few remaining keys outside of the main 3 rows of the keyboard and make some quality of life mappings for important controls in Cataclysm DDA.
Notice that up until this step, other than starting from the assumption that mouse control is unneeded for this mapping, I haven't made any keyboard mappings that are only memorable or salient in the context of Cataclysm DDA. Only after this point am I actually assigning keys to the facebuttons of the Steam Deck based on the specific requirements of Cataclysm DDA. Think about how much easier this makes it to create and memorize the muscle memory of mappings for the next complicated game you want to tackle creating Steam Deck bindings for, if it is a roguelike or other game/software that can be played without a mouse than at least 85% of these mappings don't need to be changed. If mouse control is needed, it is easy to imagine slotting the number ring into a toggleable alternate menu that shares the same control binding. Or the caboose.
These final mappings are pretty intuitive to anybody who has used a gamepad a lot (especially xbox controller). Escape is mapped to the menu face button, tab to the view face button, backspace maps to the x facebutton of course and thus its counterpart, spacebar, naturally slots into the b facebutton, enter should go nowhere else than right trigger and shift on the left trigger allows the shift key to easily be held like it is intended to be on a qwerty keyboard.
Some final quality of life tweaks for CDDA, a single press of the y facebutton activates the / key to bring up the advanced inventory management screen (absolutely amazingly powerful utility in CDDA) and a double press of the y facebutton activates they ? key to bring up list of commands with plain english search. A single press of the a facebutton is mapped to " which brings up the movement toggle (run, walk, crouch, prone). A double press brings up the mutations menu with [ (a somewhat tenous mapping to remember I concede, this is a draft tho). For now I have the thumbstick buttons mapped to + and -.
A Final Note On Menus
It is important to adjust the in menu sensitivity especially for navigational rings like the Vim Ring, WASD Ring and Number Ring. Typically for a ring assigned to a joystick one might want to set menu button activation to continous (with these repeat turbo settings) and tweak sensitivity so it is easy to reach the menu buttons on the far edges of the menu without it being uncomfortable or resulting in accidental activations of other keys.
link to video demonstration on Peertube instance
Steam Deck controller config available by renaming Cataclysm DDA in your steam library (added as a non-steam game) to Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and then searching under community layouts for "Cataclysm DDA full keyboard mapping".
edit: I recommend increasing the transparency of the popup steam menus by a large amount in practice, I kept them fairly opaque to make the video demonstration easier to follow
Here is my setup!
The Vim hjkl keys (along with the diagonals y u n b because this is CDDA and we need those diagonals) provide us with a clear idea we can ground the Steam Deck mapping in, and unlike a Vimmer with a qwerty keyboard, we can unfold the keys into the navigational ring (up down left right) Vimmer's imagine in their head to understand Vim qwerty controls.
Not only does this provide an easy way to remember our first choice in dividing the qwerty keyboard into Steam Deck mappings, it also means that the control scheme has plug and play compatibility with a dizzying array of software and games that all are part of Vim's ~40 year tradition and evolution of keyboard controls. Once you memorize the Vim Ring on your Steam Deck you will be able to use it for the rest of your life on joysticks and touchpads, and you can rest assured that other people will be developing vim hjkl based controls for software and games for the rest of your life.
WASD is probably one of the most well known "conceptual projections" onto the qwerty keyboard right?
It might seem a bittt confusing at first that z and x are the diagonals, but if you remember that this navigational ring is based on WASD, than s has to be down, and thus it becomes intuitive that z and x would be the downward diagonals. The letters q and e are almost without fail where left-lean, right-lean controls are for tactical shooters (for leaning out of cover to shoot) but even to someone unfamiliar with these control schemes, q and e are pretty intuitive.
Notice here, that between the Vim and WASD rings is 2x3 column of unbound letters on the keyboard, those being c v, f g, and r t. The natural place for these letters which are frequently used by games and software is the four Steam Deck back buttons L5, R5, L4, R4 and the bumpers R1 and L1. True, vim prioritizes the horizontal home row, but given the accessibility of the other homerow keys in the VIM and WASD rings I don't think this is a serious flaw especially because it is easy to visualize how this column maps to your Steam Deck.
Now for our last navigational ring. This ring was inspired by reading about players admitting to making the extremely chaotic-neutral choice of using the number row rather than the numberpad for navigation lol. We could just recreate the numberpad in a menu, but we already have two rings, and if anything nudging the numberpad into a ring shape makes activation from a touchpad or a joystick much more intuitive, it also expresses directly the meaning of the numberpad in terms of navigation while allowing quick access to each number for rapid input. Importantly, the number row keys not the numberpad keys are used here so that in conjunction with shift this ring can be used to activate the alt number row commands !@#$%^&*().
The Caboose Board is where the rest of the letters and punctuation keys go. I call this a "board" not a "ring" because more keys can be fit onto steam's menu system by making two rows then making a ring, which provides a natural place for extensibility for additional critical keys needed only for a specific game or program that won't mess up carefully arranged rings.
At this point all the letters from the qwerty keyboard are mapped onto the onboard Steam Deck controls. We just need to tidy up and map a few remaining keys outside of the main 3 rows of the keyboard and make some quality of life mappings for important controls in Cataclysm DDA.
Up until this step, other than starting from the assumption that mouse control is unneeded for this mapping, I haven't made any keyboard mappings that are only memorable or salient in the context of Cataclysm DDA. Only after this point am I actually assigning keys to the facebuttons of the Steam Deck based on the specific requirements of Cataclysm DDA. Think about how much easier this makes it to create and memorize the muscle memory of mappings for the next complicated game you want to tackle creating Steam Deck bindings for, if it is a roguelike or other game/software that can be played without a mouse than at least 85% of these mappings don't need to be changed. If mouse control is needed, it is easy to imagine slotting the number ring into a toggleable alternate menu that shares the same control binding. Or the caboose.
These final mappings are intended to be intuitive to someone who has used a gamepad a lot (especially xbox controller). Escape is mapped to the menu face button, tab to the view face button, backspace maps to the x facebutton, spacebar to the b facebutton, enter to the right trigger and shift to the left trigger allowing the shift key to easily be held like it is intended to be on a qwerty keyboard.
Some final quality of life tweaks for CDDA, a single press of the y facebutton activates the / key to bring up the advanced inventory management screen (absolutely amazingly powerful utility in CDDA) and a double press of the y facebutton activates they ? key to bring up list of commands with plain english search. A single press of the a facebutton is mapped to " which brings up the movement toggle (run, walk, crouch, prone). A double press brings up the mutations menu with [ (a somewhat tenous mapping to remember I concede, this is a draft tho). For now I have the thumbstick buttons mapped to + and -.
It is important to adjust the in menu sensitivity especially for navigational rings like the Vim Ring, WASD Ring and Number Ring. Typically for a ring assigned to a joystick one might want to set menu button activation to continous (with these repeat turbo settings) and tweak sensitivity so it is easy to reach the menu buttons on the far edges of the menu without it being uncomfortable or resulting in accidental activations of other keys.
Main Assembly's workshop has some seriously good stuff, like someone modeled a realistic, working Nissan gtr skyline!
The build is set up with race track rock hard suspension, but it feels really fun to drive and you can absolutely powerslide and oversteer like you would expect.
https://youtu.be/UP6RI42DgQw
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2363306440&searchtext=
This Rock Crawler is a surprisingly faithful recreation of a real life rock crawler and honestly I would believe I was playing an offroading sand crawler game if you just had me drive it with no context what game I was playing.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2381297215&searchtext=