Not buying it.

The product leadership, directors and executives who dreamed this nightmare up and believed in it enough to make it a reality are still there.

Never trust them again.

It depends on your level of expertise. It’s open source software that you download and run on hardware that you lease or own. So you need to know how to do that in order to use it. As those things go, it really isn’t difficult.

No, it’s not as easy as signing up for an account on some website. That’s the difference between third-party services (owned, operated and controlled by some random company your decide to trust) and software that YOU run, on hardware YOU control, with access that YOU decide upon, and no one who will gate it or take it away.

It’s a trade-off. Everyone must consider their wants vs needs and choose what’s most important to them.

What disappoints me is how quickly people are willing to throw up their hands and say IT’S TOO HARD without ever even trying.

Absolutely everybody here is sleeping on zulip.

You know, for kids!

If the mastodon instance never receives acknowledgement that the follow-request was approved, it’s probably not going to start fetching those messages. I’ve tried un-following and re-following; it still doesn’t work.

As I said intially, I think that qualifies the integration as only kinda-sorta working.

I did try that (following the community), but the mastodon account’s “request to follow” has been stuck in “awaiting approval” status. I run the Lemmy community that I’m trying to follow with my Mastodon account, but I don’t see how or where to approve these follow requests.

Are those requests gated by the mastodon admin perhaps?

Kinda sorta.

The specific mastadon instance I’m on (mefi.social) does show the existence of lemmy communities and users, but it doesn’t import their posts or replies. mastodon.social seems and some other larger implementations seem to work fine though. I’m not sure if this is a configuration issue or what.

Careful, that’s how you summon the ghost of old Jacob Marley.

not doing something about it 🤝 doing something about it

Well I’m so glad you asked!!

You’re looking at one in the screenshot. Firefox does this, as does Chrome and some other browsers as well.

A bookmark keyword is a tiny bit of text that you can configure your browser to treat differently when you use it in the location bar.

Typically, whatever you type into the browser location bar will either treat that text like a website you’re trying to go to (like “apnews.com” or “ www.wikipedia.org ”) or text that gets sent to a search engine (like “tasty dinner ideas” or “best white socks”). However, if the text you enter starts with a bookmark keyword you’ve set up, the browser will insert the rest of the text you entered into a website address in a specified place.

This is typically useful to speed up searching on specific websites.

So if you want to search Wikipedia for “particle physics”, you can go to the Wikipedia website and enter “particle physics” into the search box and click the search button. That would send you to a page with search results of the text you entered. If you look at the location bar, you should see a URL that looks like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=particle+physics

What we notice here is that the text you entered, “particle physics” is right there in the URL.

To turn this into a bookmark keyword, you create a bookmark to this search results page, then replace your search term with the characters “%s”, so the bookmark URL would look like so:

Then, in the “keyword” box, you can enter whatever text you want to use for this shortcut. For Wikipedia, I like using just the letter ‘w’. (You don’t need quotes around it.) Save the bookmark, and that’s it.

Now, whenever you want to search Wikipedia, all you have to do is type “w particle physics” or “w forest fires” or “w whatever” into the location bar and the browser will take you directly to the search page with those results.

You can do this with basically any website with search functionality: search engines, retail stores, news, IMDb, reference resources, whatever.

This feature also can be used for going to detail pages directly if you have a specific reference number.

So let’s say you’re at work and you have a trouble ticketing system that shows details of ongoing issues. The URL for ticket number q-rt-654321 might look like this:

https://troubletickets.mycompanyfoo.biz/ticket/q-rt-654321/view

So if you had the ticket number handy (like from an email chain), you could create a bookmark keyword to go directly to the ticket detail page:

https://troubletickets.mycompanyfoo.biz/ticket/%s/view

…and use the keyword “tt” for trouble ticket.

Now you can just type “tt q-rt-654321” into the location bar and go right to the detail page (presuming the ticket number is accurate).

And that’s it.

Somebody at work showed me keyword shortcuts ages ago and I have tons of them now.

I just wrote an email to a recruiter withdrawing my interest in pursuing a job (it’s a recruiter hired by the hiring company).

I certainly hope you plan to share this with the company for which you were applying, because the recruiter probably wouldn’t even finish reading this before binning it. The employer you were endeavoring to work for is who should be seeing this.

Not so much a vintage van as a vintage semi-trailer truck.

Cursed timeline…

Somebody show this to Trudy & Doug of Oglaf.

It was the migration from cooking demonstrations to celebrity presence content (Babsih tries every X, Babish ranks every Y).

Cooking demos keep the focus on the food; techniques, presentation, and results. Plus having an entertaining and charismatic host.

Now those videos lean on the now-recognizable host being entertaining and charismatic, and doing… whatever. And it kind of makes sense in a marketplace-y sort of way. I can watch anybody cook, but Babish has the corner on Babish content, so why not lean into that? Also I’m sure the guy gets tired of making the same content over and over again, so he’s trying to find something interesting that catches on.

I see Nat from Nats What I Reckon doing the same thing. And good on them for trying new stuff.

“don’t be a dick” is a casual and brief way of saying “we don’t tolerate anti-social behavior and will remove you if you engage in it.”

And it’s usually argumentative people with an agenda to disrupt and fracture communities who conflate rules of civility with overbearing mods who “can’t handle my truths”.

That’s a surprisingly deep list.

Red Letter Media’s final thoughts on the state of Star Wars were pretty insightful: It’s become a container with a very specific aesthetic that Disney can pile an infinite number of things into: multi-quadrant science fiction blockbusters, preschool cartoons, carnival rides, political dramas, kids adventures, whatever.

It’s since stopped being a finite thing anyone can love anymore. When something becomes everything, it loses distinctness. That distinctness, whatever it was, is what early fans originally fell in love with.

Of course, those original objects still exist, but you have to specify them. You’re an “original trilogy” fan or an Andor fan or the made-for-TV Ewok movies fan†, but saying you’re a Star Wars fan is basically meaningless now. And for people who proudly wore that mantle, through eyerolls and ridicule, that’s a genuine loss.

† Teek from Battle for Endor has a posse.

If I ever have to sit thru another debate over what a monad is, it will be too soon.