The year is 2182. Operating systems are more advanced than ever before - but people are still playing retro adventure games in ScummVM.
Meanwhile, the leading artists of the day lean over their holotablets, carefully crafting pixel art that maintains the original 90's aesthetic on screen resolutions with 80 trillion pixels.
@kaniini Kaniini, I respect your point of view, and appreciate you speaking so openly and candidly about what's bothering you. I can't imagine it's easy.
Your departure would be a huge loss, however. Your investigations into LitePub / OCAP / Bearcaps are enormously valuable, and you've always struck me as someone who really cares about trying to resolve the security problems of federated communication systems.
If there's anybody that makes this place better, it's you. Whether it's your research or your blog posts or your rants about things that are broken, I've always appreciated what you've had to say. I've learned a lot of things over the last few years because of you.
Work has been done to migrate everything over to their organization's infrastructure. Some fixes and optimizations are being made to speed the site up a bit, and the publication will continue to publish across the fediverse.
Soon, the project will open up for collaboration with additional writers, which will allow me to step back from writing every article and instead serve as a dedicated editor for the time being.
In the meantime, if you'd like to hang out and chat, we now have a dedicated community on the Feneas Matrix server: +wedistribute:feneas.org
Due to the extreme emergency mode my life is going into, I can no longer afford to host or maintain VidCommons.org. In case you don't recall, VC is a PeerTube instance serving as a library of Public Domain and Creative Commons media for the fediverse, kind of like what Open Audio is for Funkwhale.
If anyone is interested in transferring ownership to continue running the project, please let me know in short order! Otherwise, the instance will be discontinued at the end of next week.
This is not a drill. My roommate, Yaide Oumar, was picked up today by federal agents right in my fucking apartment.
I want to vomit. This is horrible.
Oumar is a great human being. He's a black Muslim from Chad, works in the restaurant industry, and is just about the nicest, chillest guy I've ever met. In the entire time I've known him, he's been nothing but supportive.
This whole situation sucks. I'm beside myself. I'm so worried about him.
The good news is that I'm learning a lot. Making music is really fun, but audio production requires attention to certain details that I've only just started picking up on.
One reality is that I should keep recordings of multiple takes. It's kind of hard to sing while listening to a monitor as a song is playing - there can be slight delay, which forces the singer to compensate. While everything is....on beat, and mostly at the correct pitch, small deformations can reveal themselves based on how the singer sang the take.
I've been unemployed for the last few months, recovering from intense burnout. I'm in the process of looking for jobs, but realistically, I'm very close to being broke.
I'm trying my best to live lean and come up with some kind of income...but to be honest, I need help. I've got only 400 bucks to my name right now, and bills are going to cause major damage.
I'm trying to work my way up to $1210 to cover rent after the next month. While I don't at all expect that kind of money to just be handed to me, I'm not confident that I'm going to be able to get a job in time to cover it.
My biggest costs right now are servers. I'm running We Distribute and VidCommons entirely out of pocket with no donations. This probably is why neither have been updated very frequently in recent months, but if they're to continue operation, I need at least 80 bucks to cover it. If I can't, both of those projects will be on ice for a while, with their sites taken down.
If anyone would like to help me financially during this trying time, here's some links for donations. I hate having to do this, but I'm trying to survive.
The cool thing is that PT instance admins can subscribe to the whole instance, and their local catalog will get populated with all available channels and videos. So, in a way it's a means of syndication, and could be useful for bootstrapping an instance with something to watch.
Like, let's ignore the fact that it's a communications platform masquerading as a public square owned by a for-profit corporation trying to figure out how to make more money.
The real cancer is in the notions of "engagement" as a thing that can be sold for revenue.
"This ONE paradigm on social media instantly made the whole internet bad!"
Like, oh no, some engineer made an amplifier for messages that anybody could use. Now that bad people use it too, it's bad for everybody! The Internet is ruined! Time to go outside. Article title: "The Man Who Bui…
> As #Usenet has few technologically or legally enforced hierarchies, just about the only ones that formed were social. People acquired power through persuasion (both publicly and privately), public debate, force of will (often via aggressive flames), garnering authority and respect by spending much time and effort contributing to the community (by being a maintainer of a FAQ, for example)
> The cabal was created in an effort to facilitate reliable propagation of new Usenet posts. While in the 1970s and 1980s many news servers only operated during night time to save on the cost of long distance communication, servers of the backbone cabal were available 24 hours a day. The administrators of these servers gained sufficient influence in the otherwise anarchic Usenet community to be able to push through controversial changes, for instance the Great Renaming of Usenet newsgroups during 1987.
Airman in the United States Air Force! Used to work in tech; former companies include Sentry, BackerKit, and of course, Diaspora. I still love my friends on the fediverse a lot, which is why I'm still here.<br/><br/>The primary writing force behind We Distribute (blog@wedistribute.org). I really like the idea of intellectual and creative commons, and like to couple my Free Software advocacy with decentralization. Virtually everything I put out is under some kind of libre / permissive license.<br/><br …