aasatru

joined 6 months ago
[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 5 points 3 hours ago

I see quite a bit boosted on Mastodon, but I'm not sure where they are all posting from. On Pixelfed I follow photographers, so I see photography.

If youwant to see more art, the first step is to follow artists. Try to search for hashtags related to art forms you're interred in on a large Mastodon instance, and follow relevant users wherever you want to follow them from. Pixelfed might be good if you're not interested in text posts, but make sure you display boosts. Lemmy is not good as most content is invisible.

Once you follow some, for example @davidrevoy@framapiaf.org, you'll see what they boost from around the Fediverse. Artists generally have a decent overview over their sphere of interest, so once the ball starts rolling you'll see content from all over.

I filled my feed up quite nicely with independent musicians very quickly after listening to RadioFreeFedi a little while and following a couple of artists. Their boosts creates a nice little window into the indie music scene.

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 4 points 3 hours ago

Always happy to see Friendica users around - it seems to integrate impressively with huge parts of the Fediverse.

I remember reading about it in the early days of the project, and not giving it a shot because there's just no way any of my social graph would come with me there. Checking in now and then through the years it always seemed like an odd corner of the Internet. It's really cool to me that I suddenly find myself seamlessly interacting with its users, both anonymously here and with my full name on Mastodon.

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 8 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Sadly not entirely accurate for Lemmy, as it does not display content from other platforms (except comments or posts from mbin, piefed, etc) unless a Lemmy community is explicitly tagged. You cannot follow mastodon or Pixelfed user from Lemmy in any meanjngful way.

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 2 points 3 days ago

One of the few new Ameircan Fords you'll sometimes see on the roads in Europe is the electric Mustang. It's kinda hilariously out of place - next to smaller European cars it looks more like they attempted to design a monster truck than a sports car.

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 15 points 3 days ago

Based on experience from American car manufacturing since the 1980s, even worse things will happen if we do buy their cars.

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 3 points 3 days ago

Ah, yeah, that's messed up.

I'm really happy Mastodon takes their time todevelop new features instead of rushing into things. Makes me hopeful they'll get it right.

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

It's tricky with guppe though, as it allows spammers a vector into instances they have no business being federated with. The #mastodonforharris hashtag has been taken over by users abusing the mutual aid group, and whenever there are apam attacks on mastodon this is how they reach the entire network rather than individual servers.

So it does confront a fundamental problem with how Mastodon works. But as long as they're there, I guess it makes sense to use them for legitimate uses as well.

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I'm not sure what to make of compatibility between Mastodon groups and Lemmy communities. On the one hand, it would obviously be a good thing if the technology would talk as much as possible. On the other, the microblog format does not look so good in Lemmy unless the author is knowingly making and effort to create a thread rather than a post, starting with a title and all that.

Compatibility between the two by default could end up flooding both services with content that looks out of place, and lowering the user experience rather than improving it. It would also subject one service to the technical constraints/decisions of the other.

I think it might make more sense to keep them somehow separate, and leave it to the different fediverse software to implement it however it would like. The priority of the Mastodon developers, in my opinion, should be to create something that works as well as possible in their ecosystem.

Then again, I could absolutely be wrong.

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

They're not stupid, but they're not particularly clever either. They're just mediocre people pumped up by our adveseries to believe they can be something important and special.

Of course, Geert Wilders believes he's brilliant. Just like Trump. They are never going to accept to themselves that their reason for being there is that their grandiose thoughts about themselves are only matched by their mediocracy, which is the exact set of traits that makes them so easy to take advantage of.

I agree it's dangerous to dismiss them as stupid, but it would be a mistake to assume they're particularly clever. They're just dangerously mediocre.

[–] aasatru@kbin.earth 27 points 5 days ago (3 children)

The far right are a bunch of crooks and Russian agents. It's not that they think we can progress as a society without spending money on research. It's that they're being paid to make sure western society collapses.

Wilders, Le Pen, Farage, whatever the knobheads in the AfD are called. They've all been found to receive funding from Russia. It's not that they're dumb enough to think this is a good idea, they're just evil enough to profit from it.

 

BEUC [the European Consumer Organisation] and 22 of its member organisations from 17 countries have filed a complaint on 12 September 2024 to the European Commission and the network of consumer protection Authorities (CPC-Network) to denounce several deceptive practices by leading video game companies (Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Mojang Studios, Roblox Corporation, Supercell and Ubisoft) marketing popular games (such as Fortnite, EA Sports FC 24, Minecraft, Clash of Clans and others) and affecting millions of European consumers.

The Norwegian Consumer Council's @finnmyrstad posted a thread about it on Mastodon:

2/ 🕹 According to our analysis, these companies are using misleading tactics that do not comply with the EU rules on unfair commercial practices. In particular we identified that:

🎰 Gamers cannot see the real cost of digital items, leading to overspending.

💵 Companies’ claims that gamers prefer in-game premium currencies are wrong.

⚖ Consumers are often denied their rights when using premium in-game currencies.

🚸 Children are vulnerable to these manipulative tactics.

 

Dear houseplant community,

Like the beginning of any good letter, I should probably have written you sooner.

Anyway, a friend of mine had this beautiful plant that she neglected for months, completely drying it out. At the end there were just a few leaves hanging half a meter from the plant itself, completely dried out.

I cut off a piece, gave it roots, potted it, and it went wild! Explosive growth, every new leaf bigger than the last. It was unlike anything I've ever seen.

A few months later, it had had enough. Leaves started curling up and withering. Growth halted. I thought maybe I had forgotten to give it water, but that wasn't it. Moving it to a sunnier spot didn't help either. Now it's almost completely dead, and I miss what we once had.

So, a couple of questions:

  1. Does anyone have any idea what went wrong? Did I water it too much? Too little?
  2. What can I do? Can it be saved? Does it need plant nutrition? A bigger pot? I'm afraid of doing anything, as it seems so fragile one bad move would surely be the end of it.

Thank you so much in advance!

Yours truly, Aa

@plants@a.gup.pe

 

If a social media account is spreading Russian disinformation - does sharing content from the account give it legitimacy?

No, says Carl-Oskar Bohlin, Minister for Civil Defence. But at the authority the minister is responsible for, the answer sounds different.

— In any case, you spread something that a foreign power might intend to spread to make us worried, says Mikael Östlund, press officer at the authority.

It was a year ago that Carl-Oskar Bohlin shared a tweet from the American influencer Lauren Southern, known for her far-right advocacy. The original video warned of how AI is used in influence operations, something the minister forwarded to his around 45,000 followers. "The ability and height of the impact operations risk increasing avalanche-like with disruptive technology shifts," wrote Carl-Oskar Bohlin on X.

Now, an American indictment against two Russian government employees shows that the production company Tenet media, where Lauren Southern is employed, must have been secretly financed by the Russian news agency RT. A total of just over SEK 100 million is said to have been transferred from the Russian state employees to the American company. In turn, influencers would push specific issues—such as questioning support for Ukraine—to their millions of followers. On YouTube alone, the videos have received more than 16 million views.

In light of the American indictment, Carl-Oskar Bohlin has been criticized for not checking his sources better. But the Minister of Civil Defense lets the tweet stay on X.

"For the simple reason that it is difficult to misunderstand." writes Bohlin to DN.

"One should of course refrain from spreading harmful narratives from foreign powers. However, it is a somewhat strange indictment that my warning about deepfakes and doctored videos would in itself constitute Russian disinformation. With such a threshold, it will be difficult to talk about or warn about the phenomenon at all," continues the minister.

Carl-Oskar Bohlin is responsible for the agency for psychological defence, MPF. Countering misdirection and misinformation, including rumor spreading and propaganda, is one of the agency's main missions.

In case you wonder, mr. Bohlin is from the conservative party (Moderaterna).

 

Makes me feel a bit better about my general political anxiousness.

 

Tom Waits is not afraid of going dark places with his song writing, but it hardly gets darker than this.

It's been spinning in my head a lot lately, for obvious reasons.

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