I guess the upside of dedicated communities like this is not having to explicitly tell people “If you don’t fall into this specific group, go die in a fire, I don’t want your input.” Which, as far as I know, is the most polite way you can phrase that.
It also supports community migration, where the old content (that the PieFed instance knows about) remains available but the community is now local to that instance instead of elsewhere.
What’s the quality like of the people who are still on Twitter in 2025? Does the fediverse want them? (These are real questions, I have no idea if there’s still any decent people on Twitter.)
That document seems to use communities in the normal English sense and spaces in the “collection of Matrix rooms” sense. I would say spaces are what they’re called and a community is just an informal group of like-minded people who can be better-organized using spaces.
I already knew about massive Pokémon, they were famously included in Sword/Shield.
the old URLs (with the subdomain blog) will no longer work…
if you’re trying to open an old URL, just swap “blog” with “news” in the subdomain.
This seems pretty fixable, doesn’t it? Once the old blog shuts down, can’t you just redirect the subdomain so that the old links redirect to your current blog and everything is fine?
*pushes up glasses, engages nasal voice* Technically, the Beach Boys had an Electro-Theremin, which produces a similar sound but with less hand-waving. The Electro-Theremin used a pitch slider and a volume knob to control its output.
Here we go, I found lemmy.zip admin Demigodrick’s Mastodon.
marcusclaxton
Hey what’s going on with lemmy.zip? I’m getting host errors when I try to connect. I’m new to the whole fediverse thing so just trying to figure out what’s up?
Demigodrick
hey, currently a substantial server error - I’m looking to restore a backup ASAP but need the time to do it, so hopefully later on today
https://mastodon.zip/@Demigodrick/114313339395366563
This was posted about an hour ago at time of this comment.
The last post in !announcements@lemmy.zip was for a scheduled downtime yesterday while they did server maintenance and possibly updated their Lemmy version. Did they ever come back up after that, or have they been down since then?
It really whips the Lemmy’s ass.
As long as we’re talking Virtual Boy, I’ll plug my QoL patches for Virtual Boy games.
Most of the patches are for adding save support, which covers the following games:
In some cases, this amounts to saving your high scores, since a lot of VB games are very arcade-style and don’t really merit saving progression. However, for a few (Bound High, Golf, Jack Bros., Mario Clash and Space Squash), your gameplay progress is saved. These games are greatly improved by the addition of save support.
There’s a couple of other patches which aren’t save-related:
For Bound High!, there’s a debug patch which unlocks all of the dummied-out debug features left behind in the game. While they are cross-compatible, I don’t recommend using this in conjunction with the save patch because entering the debug codes to have all stages completed will also overwrite your save data. I suggest patching two different ROMs, so you have a debug ROM without saving, and a retail ROM with saving.
For Hyper Fighting, there’s a bug fix patch to correct the brightness setting.
Their’s
Everyone else took all the good critiques of this article, so here’s mine.
We’re still bullish on the fediverse, and on Bluesky, if it manages to become a truly federated platform.
Bluesky appears to have reached their goal as far as federation. Users can self-host a personal data server (PDS) which federates with Bluesky. If you want an analogy from somebody extremely unqualified to offer it, it’s sort of like bringing a bucket of water to a swimming pool. You can’t go swimming in the bucket, but you can pour it into Bluesky’s pool and swim in there. If the pool closes down or implements segregation and if somebody else opens a swimming pool, you can take your bucket to their pool instead. However, if nobody else wants to open another swimming pool, your bucket is useless. In this analogy, buckets are only useful to very slightly fill somebody else’s swimming pool and for no other purpose. It’s a very good analogy.
Bryan Newbold, the protocol engineer at Bluesky, said the following about PDSes and federation:
Overall, I think federation isn’t the best term for Bluesky to emphasize going forward, though I also don’t think it was misleading or factually incorrect to use it to date. An early version of what became atproto actually was peer-to-peer, with data and signing keys on end devices (mobile phones). When that architecture was abandoned and PDS instances were introduced, “federation” was the clearest term to describe the new architecture.
i.e. In Bluesky’s terminology, federation is not a future goal they’re hoping to achieve, it’s what they’re already doing right now.
The (ActivityPub) fediverse is different, because … damn, I really screwed myself with this swimming pool thing … it’s like a bunch of boats in the ocean. There’s one-person dinghies and giant cruise ships, all with different owners. You can bring your own boat, or you can hitch a ride with a friend or a generous stranger. If you want to hang out in a different boat from the one you arrived in, that’s fine too. Ultimately, we all float on the same ocean which we all have to share. Crucially, nobody is in charge of the water. There’s rules on the boats, but the ocean is just the ocean. If your boat crashes into an iceberg and sinks, the ocean will still be there. You might lose some of your stuff, but there’s plenty of other boats to pick you up.
The failure state in both cases is better than nothing. With Bluesky, you lose the swimming pool, but keep the bucket. With ActivityPub, you lose the boat, but keep the ocean. If Bluesky dies, ideally you can take your federated identity with you to an alternative service that exists in the future, but you no longer have access to Bluesky, because it’s gone. When a Lemmy instance dies, you pretty much have to start over: register a new account, subscribe to all your communities again, etc. But the whole fediverse is still there: all the communities you were subscribed to, the people you followed, all your old comments, they’re still out there floating on the ocean.
More snow.
Maybe this is a me problem, but especially on the threadiverse side (Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed), how much are we really in tight-knit communities based on our servers? I’m from Fedia, but I don’t really interact with Fedia people any more than I do anybody else, or even bother to take notice of where other people are from, unless they say something especially goofy. Communities in the “subreddit” sense are more likely to feel tight-knit than servers
I definitely get how allowing people to skip choosing a server is good for some types of potential fediverse users, I just don’t think Gmail works as an analogy for that. When Gmail was in its invite-only era, people weren’t paralyzed by choices of providers, they specifically wanted the one that was the best, and that was Gmail.
The difference there is that Gmail was offering something (for free) that nobody else was at the time: the linear, conversation-based display of back-and-forth emails which we’re all used to now, and a whole gigabyte of storage. Everybody already had an email address when Gmail arrived on the scene, but Gmail was, from a pure usability perspective, better than the rest. People wanted access to that.
For an invite-only Fediverse server to be especially attractive, it needs to have some reason why access to that server specifically is more desirable than going to any of the tens (hundreds?) of alternative servers that offer literally exactly the same thing. Unless they start adding features the others can’t provide (which is close to impossible in an open-source project), what’s the benefit?
I think the question at that point is “How often is there a completely new way to use the Internet socially, either inside or outside of the federated space?”
I don’t think it happens very often. Blogs, messsage boards and dating sites in the '90s; microblogs, photo and video sharing in the '00s; short form video sharing in the '10s if that counts as a separate thing. There’s only like seven types of social network in the three decades or so they’ve existed.
UX means “user experience”. It is distinct from the UI. OP is basically saying the process of signing up to federated social media is too complicated for the average user, not because of the way it looks and how you interact with it (the UI) but because of it’s not as easy to understand the concepts behind how Lemmy works.
Maybe they’re just leaning into the Mastodon theming by talking like cavemen.
Or Windex.