I am a Software Engineer from Seattle

  • 3 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • This is likely an unpopular opinion, but the extent to which current solutions are decentralized actually makes it difficult to gain critical mass. When watching others (previous Twitter and Reddit users that are not very tech savvy) try and use Mastodon or Lemmy, it’s very clear the idea of federation still is pretty foreign, despite having used it in email for a long time.

    I think OP has a very valid point: providing a better experience through the illusion of centralization could be beneficial to transition users to the Fediverse.

    And this actually doesn’t destroy the whole purpose of federation to begin with:

    It’s clear with Apollo, RiF, Tweetbot, and every other “third party” social media client that the actual interface is often fungible and there’s enough demand-- when the social network is large enough-- to support multiple, high quality clients.

    Reddit isn’t dying because of the interface itself, despite the app and new website being terrible user experiences. They’re running into challenges because they are upsetting the user base by exerting control over the content. Yes, you now must consume Reddit through the official interface, but it’s not the interface itself.

    But federation is not about the interface, it’s about distributing the content in a way that results in a network that has no single authority over it. Regardless whether one particular UI or app does something unpopular, your content is all safe on your server and federated to others, and you can simply switch.

    There’s obviously still challenges if “mastodon.com” provided a “centralized” UI and literally everyone gravitated towards it (it makes it harder for the critical mass of users to migrate later), but they don’t actually ever have control. In this scenario they may have more mindshare, but federation makes the network (and its most important asset: the content) resilient as a whole.






  • I’ve had these for a little while (but the version A ones, where I had to solder the cap myself). I never had drift issues with the old sticks, but these new ones have virtually no deadzone and are more sensitive. At first it took a little while to get used to but it’s definitely more natural now.

    One funny thing is I was playing Grounded with someone and I had absolutely no issues walking on some of the thin branches in the game. The other person (with a normal Steam Deck) kept falling off because he couldn’t properly control the fine input on the regular sticks with their deadzone.

    They’re not perfect (they actually max out before the stick is fully pushed to the outside, weirdly), but I definitely don’t regret installing them


  • I started my own as well (I also run my own Mastodon server) in a Kubernetes cluster. It took maybe 30 minutes to get everything up and running in my home lab setup.

    If you’ve never used Docker before and wanted to give it a shot, there will be a learning curve, but it’s honestly very rewarding and depending on whether it’s relevant to you, it’s a good professional skill to have as well