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A friend of mine recently burned out on maintaining open-source software and communities, and had been half-joking for a while that they wanted a sassy license to the effect of “I release this code for free, take it or leave it, or go do it yourself”.

Tonight I wrote that license for and with him. Please enjoy the “Fork Off” Public License, v0.9: https://github.com/klardotsh/fork-off-public-license

(I’ll tag a v1.0 after any feedback y’all might have to clarify things or make it funnier. Forking it is also of course ok.)

—@klardotsh

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Here’s what people on the outside looking in, don’t get, Mastodon isn’t an alternative to other social media, it is its own thing entirely.

That’s what struck me about it, and why I’m still there. People on Mastodon didn’t care how many people were on it or if their favorite celebrity or journalist was here. They want to build communities with real people.

All these kinds of articles are basically stating, “This wasn’t for me, therefore these things are failures.” How absolutely ridiculous.

—@RickiTarr

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Your weekly Sunday reminder:
Religions: “we don’t pay tax because we’re not for profit corporations”
Also religions: own for profit schools, for profit hospitals, for profit aged care facilities, for profit kindergartens, for profit colleges, for profit universities as well as millions worth of real estate, which, you guessed it, generate profit.
Tax. The. Fuck. Out. Of. Churches.
#TaxTheChurches

—@BrisVegas

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Ricki Tarr (@RickiTarr@beige.party) (beige.party)
Attached: 1 image Here's what people on the outside looking in, don't get, Mastodon isn't an alternative to other social media, it is its own thing entirely. That's what struck me about it, and why I'm still there. People on Mastodon didn't care how many people were on it or if their favorite celebrity or journalist was here. They want to build communities with real people. All these kinds of articles are basically stating, "This wasn't for me, therefore these things are failures." How absolutely ridiculous.
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With this #RedditMigration, you know what people haven’t been talking about recently?

#Bluesky.

AT protocol was obviously not ready for a #RedditMigration, it’s not even ready for federation, and is years behind #ActivityPub.

Bluesky might be okay if you just want pre-Elon Twitter and to watch the old Twitter royalty do their thing. But it is not equipped to handle a variable use cases that can only happen through federation.

Each day Bluesky does not federate is a moment it’s ceding territory to #Mastodon, #Friendica, #Calckey, #Kbin, etc.

—@atomicpoet

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Cohost’s financial update is a poster child for what I and others have been saying for a long time now: the internet won’t survive without decentralization. You can’t just make the next Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr. That’s a joke. Cohost was against decentralization but they’ve now learned why centralization isn’t feasible: only massive corporations with infinite VC can afford it, and they hemorrhage that money and close eventually too.

The internet is too expensive to work this way and it won’t long term. We just got complacent while there was enough VC to go around. It’s pets dot com again. It doesn’t last.

And this isn’t even about AP/fedi, while I like fedi this is true with or without it. We have to go back to having websites. Not The(tm) website for whatever, but lots of them. If you don’t want to go to more than one? Too bad, it’s how things will be regardless. Having One website isn’t sustainable for corporations and isn’t even vaguely feasible for little guys.

You have to have lots of websites. I can run a small community for a bit of my entertainment budget for the month or donations from a handful of users who like what I’m running. You can run a mastodon instance for a small crowd for very little. You can run a website off an old laptop laying around. You cannot run a 130k user site and pay you and your friends $94k a year to run it. It’s not sustainable. I wish it was. It isn’t. Sites have to stay small, and there have to be enough of them spread out to spread out the financial load to hobbyist levels. Sorry that you can’t make a living running a site for your friends to hang out on, but it’s just how the math works out. Reddit can’t make money doing it, Twitter can’t make money doing it, Patreon can’t…they only survive on being Huge Corporations Who Can Bleed Money. You can replicate bleeding money on a small scale all you want but I wouldn’t advise it. You can however run a forum for your friends for the cost of Netflix or whatever.

—@lori

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Y’all: I have been wrestling with kbin on the fedia.io instance, but I want to take a step back and give some perspective. Kbin is new, it’s growing crazy fast, and it really wasn’t in a place to support the migration from Reddit. Despite that, @ernest has been working his tail off knocking down issues and helpings instance admins.

Reddit certainly seems to be tripling down on their position and I think kbin is shaping up to be a worthy alternative. If you like kbin (on whatever instance you use it on) and want to see it grow, may I ask that you throw some money Ernest’s way? (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin)

I want to publicly thank Ernest for kbin and for his contributions to our growing fediverse community.

/back to whatever you were doing.

—@jerry

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This week we bring you Ramy in Egypt from his music studio. NVDA helps Ramy produce music and in his work as a music instructor at a university in Cairo. We whole heartedly agree with Ramy that every blind and vision person should have access to a free screen reader!
“NVDA made my life so simple” – Ramy
Thank you Ramy for sharing how NVDA has impacted you!

https://youtu.be/ucxm2pUh1nw

(And for those using captions, you’ll be pleased to know we’ve gone back to manually created ones 🙂 )

—@NVAccess

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Remember when sighted users were forced to read #AltText because pictures wouldn’t load? I kinda wish instances on here would disable all images for a day or week to demonstrate how it can benefit so many other things in addition to accessibility. Anyway, this article explains that time when images on FB wouldn’t load https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681231/facebook-outage-image-tags-captions-ai-machine-learning-revealed

—@weirdwriter

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Btw for the love of god if you’re trying to get your friends to come to the #fediverse please just stop giving them links to the “join-x” sites and just give them an invite link from your server or a link to the register page from the one you use (or think is reasonably stable for a new user).

On Mastodon doing that means they’ll start with at least one person followed, not sure about on the #threadiverse or if either of the software even have invite codes.

I think the difficulties of federation are somewhat overblown in general, but one thing is for sure: it’s not a hoop most people really *want* to jump through first. Just give them a way to explore, and let help them figure it out themselves once they’re on.

The “join” sites are an attempt to mimic a pattern of centralized sites that just doesn’t work here. They’re unlikely to ever really work.

—@megmac