🥳

I don’t have one particular highlight, I just love being here. Good admins, good people, good discussions, people are pretty chill. What’s not to like?

sh.it.heads 4 lyfe, yo!

Ugh, yep. Right around the time the agora system was getting fleshed out, too, so things just naturally took a bit longer.

Related - “What’s a Beehaw?” - newer sh.it.heads, probably.

Godspeed, f.ukwad.

(Hmm…not as cute as sh.it.head. I still kinda like it, though. Excellent domain name choice in general.)

The Dude, as per usual, abides.

Thank you again for all you do.

Does anyone else feel strangely old reading this comment, despite the fact that sh.itjust.works has only been around for less than a year?

“I was there, when the wall came down and the hexbears came”

(Obligatory “sh.it.heads for life”; “up with sh.it.heads, down with shitheads”; and so on)

Nope. sh.it.heads (or sh.itheads, if you’re swine)

Non-alcoholic gin and tonics are the shit. If you’re legit looking for non-alcoholic drinks and like G&Ts give it a try.

I wonder…

Suppose you had a company that, at it’s core, was closer a vps provider than anything else. People who want to host videos on the service pay a fee. The hosts can solicit money via the usual means (patreon, personally working with advertisers, merch, whatever), but part of the service agreement is that the hosting service itself cannot place their own ads. You also have some backup system in place where after x amount of time, videos get archived to some outside service (Internet Archive, some peer-to-peer mechanism - no idea what the options are). This is to at least try to mitigate storage limitations and other problems with retaining a large back catalogue.

All of this is said from a position of deep ignorance - but could something like this work? My stumbling block is anyone running a company is eventually going to need/want an additional revenue stream and ads are an obvious first stop. For this to exist it would pretty much take an activist owner not budging and ruling with an iron fist. That, and would such a service be able to offer hobbyist hosts a fair price, given this is where a lot of people start?

Going off a vague memory at this point, but didn’t you moderate/create a community somewhere called FoxNews that was news about foxes?

Recall when people were going at you this was brought up (“This fuckin’ guy, he moderates FoxNews! Of course eye roll” kinda thing), though that may have been someone else. Apologies if misattributing.

Two thrusts to this: re: your community, haven’t followed it too closely, but from what I did see it’s mostly just shitting on tankies. That’s fine I guess, though my thought was more sifting through the garbage and sharing posts of decent quality/worth seeing despite defederation or the larger tenor of the instance.

Re: you specifically - also haven’t followed too closely (have reverted to lurking more in fewer communities - bad Cracks!), but maybe the binary I mentioned is a little too stark. From what I have seen, you’re opinionated, maybe contrarian for its own sake sometimes, but apply it evenly. I saw you getting in people’s faces over at EH too, and it looks like you don’t care which side of any given divide you piss off - gotta respect that.

And moderating FoxNews? Obvious but legitimately hilarious bait, and I have to tip my hat. Edit: Though you might not anymore?

It was such a weird, neat device that did not get the adoption it deserved. The idea of local proximity chat seemed sooo cool to little me.

Learned about it, missed my opportunity to get one, and regretted it.

Edit: You know what? You’re right - this was a poor response to your comment. I blame too much Agora and too little coffee. Will come back to this if I think of a better response more in line with the level you’re addressing (more general and philosophical sense).

I do think curation is not necessarily censorship, and is itself a form of free expression when looking at all means a person can express themselves in a given society. [End of edit, slightly less but still kinda dumb comments remain below]

I apologize - this was more of a general statement. “You’re free to build, or you’re free to complain, both are valid”. *Edit: And taking the recent hub-bub as a case in point re: the Fediverse stuff. Bleh, been a bit too meta recently.

My issue was with curation not being free expression. This only holds for me if there are absolutely no other alternatives to express your ideas.

Edit: Cracks had Agora on the brain and applied it where it wasn’t necessary.

Why are you signing up at Beehaw? What is it about this community that makes you want to join it? What do you want to contribute to this community?

There is also a request to read at least one of three posts that detail the moderation/general philosophy of the instance to a) evaluate it’s a place you actually want to participate in, and b) inform your answers.

Basically, go to beehaw.org and read some of the content you see there, learn a little bit about how they approach things, then make your case.

I know goat pushes some buttons (whether just due to being contrarian but earnest or actively trolling - I’m still kind of on the fence about that beyond ‘they’re kind of a dick’), but I’ve said this would be an interesting concept before, so it’s neat to see it in practice.

Will reserve judgement until I see what’s being curated, though.

-to Zombocom, obv.

This is exactly it.

Defederation, to my mind (and someone feel free to correct me) is about minimizing a given server’s exposure to other servers that, by one definition or another, are problematic. Bots made out of the control of the people maintaining the server, servers with a large concentration of trolls, or other factors that either create risk for an instance owner or a shitty experience for the users as a net group they support.

For anyone crying out “Censorship! Hive minds and safe spaces for soy bois!” - these other instances don’t just disappear. You can still reach them, still read them, still make an account there, still capture RSS feeds, etc. etc. As a user, you have plenty of ways to see and interact with whatever instance you choose, even if one instance is defederated from another.

Both explodingheads* and lemmygrad, in my opinion, are appropriate candidates for defederation with the above in mind. Both far-right and far-left politically focused communities with loose moderation are prone to brigading and, given laws around hate speech in Canada, create legal risks for sh.itjust.works (yes, lemmygrad too, calls for or support of genocide against racial or religious minorities are hate speech no matter what your rationale is). Cutting off direct interaction between these instances is a protection to our admin’s resources and level of liability.

But if you, personally, want to engage with these communities, there’s literally nothing stopping you, you just can’t do it from here. Stop expecting that one specific instance will spoon-feed you everything you want, every time - that’s how we got to where we are with mainstream social media. Where splinters exist, figure out ways around them.

*mentioned though I think we’re still federated with EH? What’s the hold up?

Fuck a lemming, sh.it.heads for life!

I would personally support defederation from Meta-owned ActivityPub services, for what it is worth.

Getting an error when trying to write my comment, don’t know why, thus the link.