@tallship@thenexusofprivacy thing is though there are also many existing alternatives to Mastodon already on the Fediverse, so why fork it? GoToSocial looks interesting and they don't have a central instance, you host your own even on a Pi.
Okay it's one of those, "What's peculiar here?" kinda things.
Consider the source itself. And I certainly don't mean code of any sort. 'Why' would 'They' cite Wikipedia, as good a resource as anyone might think it to be?
Why not cite yourself? Instead of citing someone else - who will merely turn right around and cite you as the ultimate source reference?
Okay it's one of those, "What's peculiar here?" kinda things.
Consider the source itself. And I certainly don't mean code of any sort. 'Why' would 'They' cite Wikipedia, as good a resource as anyone might think it to be?
Why not cite yourself? Instead of citing someone else - who will merely turn right around and cite you as the ultimate source reference?
This is an example of a marketplace listing in Flohmarkt.
What "I" did here...
- Went to the "All" tab over at Flen's Market - Much like PeerTube, there's a Home, Local, and All tab, the latter of which includes items from other instances that you've manually federated with within the radius you've specified from your location. - Next, there's a choice to make if you're interested in an item. You can register for a local account (I don't see any reason to do that unless you want to post a listing on that particular server), or you can remotely add yourself (like I did). Since the remote features don't quite seamlessly work with Mitra, I tried this from a masto server - no joy. I tried it from another masto server (a masto fork) - no problem this time, even on an older version of masto. That was humorous to me, as I've a bit of disdain for mastopub servers and found it amusing that even some of the instances running the very latest version of masto won't work, while older one's based on forks do; but I've got a twisted sense of humor. - So next, you can engage with the seller directly from your local instance on most Fediverse platforms (support is added for various additional Fediverse platforms all the time). In this case, (visible because I chose the "All" tab), the particular item was from yet another #Fohmarkt server elsewhere - this is a very nice feature, like #DeSoc #eBay!!! - From there, once you boost the item in the listing, others can see it in their streams, boost it further, make arrangements directly with the seller, etc. Kinda Kewl.
This is different from how most other attempts to deliver a marketplace into the #Fediverse. Usually, what I've seen is someone trying to integrate the functionality local to a platform, which networks (via ActivityPub federation) only with other like platforms. That's not a Fediverse solution - that's a platform solution and leaves everyone else on the fediverse not running that particular platform disenfranchised.
For example, using the Epicyon server platform as an example, it is first to be understood that this particular server platform is designed for very small numbers of user accounts per each instance. You also have to manually contact the admin of remote Epicyon servers yourself (or be contacted by them), then mutually agree to federate each other's marketplaces separately and distinct from any wider federation configurations your server has. Considering the inconveniences with locating other Epicyon instances that may or may not have enabled and made use of their marketplaces and establishing a mutual publishing agreement, coupled with the likelihood that each of your instances between 1 and 10 users, posting an item in the marketplace has a pretty high probability of being more effort than its worth - especially since it dosn't federate with any other Fediverse platforms.
Others follow a similar design, but also generally operate like normal #ActivityPub federation using a blacklist method, as well as being able to accommodate potentially hundreds, or even thousands of users per each instance (yeah, I know, semi-monolithic); so even if those marketplaces didn't already automatically federate across the Fediverse with all instances of other like server platforms, it's still a huge improvement over the previously discussed smolweb platform's model.
But they're still not Fediverse wide...
This is where Flohmarkt really starts to shine - it's fully Federating (Still a WIP wrt some platforms - see the wiki for particulars) across the entire #ActivityPub portion of the Fediverse.
You can check for the latest particulars on Flohmarkt's current Federation status if you're interested in your particular Fediverse platform and level of interoperation with Flohmarkt instances.
I do have some criticisms of the particular functionality in federating that the developers have chosen to incorporate, however. Basically, The server admin still needs to manually federate item listings between the local instance and other remote Flohmarkt servers. It doesn't need to be this way however, but one must concede that after going over the documentation and seeing that the concern's of the dev team are over unchecked spam, phishing, poor quality ads, etc., I find it to be a very reasonable concern, although I'm still not comfortable with how the Dev team has hard-coded this conditional into the server's capability, when a slightly different approach might afford self-hosters much greater flexibility and incintive for adoption; namely:
- Make the current model the default - Enable other configurations for federating between other Flohmarkt servers (and eventually, other platform marketplaces) via either simple configuration files, runtime arguments, or via a GUI in an admin control panel, including that of an uninhibited fully blacklist model of sharing listings between Flohmarkt servers.
I generally tend to think that hard-wired, opinionated configuration choices are a less than ideal (usually bad idea) than acknowledging issues surrounding such decisions and then choosing a default while affording server admins (or users themselves) of being able to manage the options for themselves. This is one of those cases where I feel it could make a huge difference in the viabilty and adoption potential for this, "Strictly Federating Marketplace" Fediverse platform.
The other (very minor) criticism I have for Flohmarkt is the pin & string radius solution as it is currently implemented:
- It's determined by the server admin, instance wide - It's determined by the server location, or some other arbitrarily decided locale
The radius is a great idea, but I think the following would go a long way towards improving the utility of this feature set:
- The server admin decides whether to enable user-level radius configs or server level, as is the case at this time. - Local users determine, and have control over whether an established is applied to either their entire user profile's repertoire of items listed, or on a per item basis. - If he user chooses a per item radius, each listing could have a different radius established. - The local users have location radius specifications that can be based on different criteria, such as pinning a location on a map of their choice, by country (the free IP2Location databases can accommodate this behavior). - The user's particular radius settings for each listing must be preserved and observed by all federating remote Flohmarkt server instances (but not by individual remote user shares/boosts, which should remain unrestricted).
This Radius feature is extremely powerful and I think that every effort of the development team to exploit the potential of this feature set should be a major consideration. Eventually, Flohmarkt servers will federate with other server platform types, exchanging listings between say, Flohmarkt servers and Friendica servers, etc.. but the awesome power unleashed through following and boosting capabilities that are already fully available to remote users to share with others holds the potential at this very time to make Flohmarkt item listings ubiquitous across the entire Fediverse, ... And that is really kewl :)
Well, I'd rather tease your interest and see you go checkout more for yourself rather than feed you everything you wanna know about a really kewl #social_commerce communications tool - you really should experience how kewl it is for yourself.
I couldn't locate a #Matrix support room for Flohmarkt like most contemporary software products maintain in the FOSS world, but the more traditional irc chan #flohmarkt at #LiberaChat is readily available, and of course, there's the issue tracker at the Codeberg repo I previously linked to above.
What are your thoughts and impressions on this novel approach to embedding the marketplace commerce structure into potentially everyone's social streams in the form of both a dedicated platform and as passive feeds via the intervention of other #Fedizens who share and boost individual items and listings in Flohmarkt?
This is an example of a marketplace listing in Flohmarkt.
What "I" did here...
- Went to the "All" tab over at Flen's Market - Much like PeerTube, there's a Home, Local, and All tab, the latter of which includes items from other instances that you've manually federated with within the radius you've specified from your location. - Next, there's a choice to make if you're interested in an item. You can register for a local account (I don't see any reason to do that unless you want to post a listing...
Going back to Konversation for GUI stuffs. DCC file send/receive is kinda important to me. For everything else, including a lot of Matrix usage, WeeChat is still the Kewlist :p
Honorable mention goes to Halloy, which I think looks really good, supports tiling, and says it supports DCC Send - I don't mind manipulating config files by hand, and I might check it out with a FlatPak, but if I'm sufficiently impressed it looks like I'll have to build the .deb and SlackBuild myself, ... Well? Somebody's got to! Right?
Going back to Konversation for GUI stuffs. DCC file send/receive is kinda important to me. For everything else, including a lot of Matrix usage, WeeChat is still the Kewlist :p
Thanks Evan, there's a bit to digest there, some of which I agree with, and some of which I don't, between what both you and the OtherEvan had to offer.
It's good to get this stuff right out in the open, especially as the Fediverse is currently undergoing yet another paradigmatic shifts, perhaps an evolutionary step, but certainly, a complete game changer from much of the perspective offered in the Evan <==> Evan Essays ;)
Thanks Evan, there's a bit to digest there, some of which I agree with, and some of which I don't, between what both you and the OtherEvan had to offer.
It's good to get this stuff right out in the open, especially as the Fediverse is currently undergoing yet another paradigmatic shifts, perhaps an evolutionary step, but certainly, a complete game changer from much of the perspective offered in the Evan <==> Evan Essays ;)
Okay I thought I'd share this recent post here on the #Fediverse. To give it some context, it's an answer to a common question, often a misunderstanding (even by many knowledgeable folks) as to just how we got here.
There's a lot of apples and oranges here. And everyone had a lot of good points made, but your question is simple, and has a very simple answer. I'll endeavor to address that directly, but do need to tend to some of what has already been said.
## Scroll down to the tl;dr for the succinct answer of your question
Ethernet, ARCNET, Token Ring, Thick net (RG-59), Thin net (RG-58 A/U), and UTP (Cat 3, Cat 5, and Cat 6 unshielded twisted pair, Etc.) really have zero bearing on your question insofar as IP is concerned. All of these specifications relate to the definition of technologies that, although are indeed addressed in the OSI model which is indeed very much in use to this day,but are outside the scope of Internet Protocol. I'll come back to this in a minute.
It's quite common to say TCP/IP, but really, it's just IP. For example, we have TCP ports and we have UDP ports in firewalling. i.e., TCP is Transmission Control Protocol and handles the delivery of data in the form of packets. IP handles the routing itself so those messages can arrive to and from the end points. Uniform Data Protocol is another delivery system that does not guarantee arrival but operates on a best effort basis, while TCP is much chattier as it guarantees delivery and retransmission of missed packets - UDP is pretty efficient but in the case of say, a phone call, a packet here and there won't be missed by the human ear.
That's a very simplistic high level-view that will only stand up to the most basic of scrutiny, but this isn't a class on internetworking ;) If you just want to be able to understand conceptually, my definition will suffice.
Networking (LAN) topologies like Token Ring, ARCNET, and Ethernet aren't anywhere in the IP stack, but figure prominently in the OSI stack. I'm not going to go into the details of how these work, or the physical connection methods used like Vampire Taps, Thin net, or twisted pair with RJ-45 terminators, but their relationship will become obvious in a moment.
The OSI model unfolds like so, remember this little mnemonic to keep it straight so you always know:
> People Don't Need To See Paula Abdul
Okay, touched on already, but not really treated, is the description of that little memory aid.
> Physical, Data Link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, and Application layers (From bottom to top).
The physical and Data Link layers cover things like the cabling methods described above,and you're probably familiar with MAC Addresses (medium access control) on NICs (network interface controller). These correlate to the first two layers of the OSI stack, namely, the Physical (obvious - you can touch it), and the Data Link layer - how each host's NIC and switches on each LAN segment talk to each other and decide which packets are designated for whom (People Don't).
In software engineering, we're concerned mostly with the Session, Presentation, and Application layers (See Paula Abdul). Detailed explanation of these top three layers is outside the scope of this discussion.
The Beauty of the OSI model is that each layer on one host (or program) talks to exclusively with the same layer of the program or hardware on the other host it is communicating with - or so it believes it is, because, as should be obvious, is has to pass its information down the stack to the next layer below itself, and then when it arrives at the other host, it passes that information back up the stack until it reaches the very top (Abdul) of the stack - the application.
Not all communication involves all of the stacks. At the LAN (Local Area Network) level, we're mostly concerned with the Physical and Data Link layers - we're just trying to get some packet that we aren't concerned about the contents of from one box to another. But that packet probably includes information that goes all the way up the stack.
For instance, NIC #1 has the MAC: 00:b0:d0:63:c2:26 and NIC #2 has a MAC of 00:00:5e:c0:53:af. There's communication between these two NICs over the Ethernet on this LAN segment. One says I have a packet for 00:00:5e:c0:53:af and then two answers and says, "Hey that's me!" Nobody else has that address on the LAN, so they don't answer and stop listening for the payload.
Now for Internet Protocol (IP) and TCP/UDP (Transmission Control Protocol and User Datagram Protocol):
IP corresponds to Layer 3 (Need) - the Network Layer of the **OSI Model.
TCP and UDP correspond to Layer 4 (To) - the Transport Layer of the OSI model.
That covers the entire OSI model and how TCP/IP correspond to it - almost. You're not getting off that easy today.
There's actually a bit of conflation and overlapping there. Just like in real life, it's never that cut and dried. For that, we have the following excellent explanation and drill down thanks to Julia Evans:
- Layer 2 (Don't) corresponds to Ethernet. - Layer 3 (Need) corresponds to IP. - Layer 4 (To) corresponds to TCP or UDP (or ICMP etc) - Layer 7 (Abdul) corresponds to whatever is inside the TCP or UDP packet (for example a DNS query)
You may wish to give her page a gander for just a bit more of a deeper dive.
Now let's talk about what might be a bit of a misconception on the part of some, or at least, a bit of a foggy conflation between that of the specification of the OSI model and a Company called Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN) a government contractor tasked with developing the IP stack networking code.
The TCP/IP you know and depend upon today wasn't written by them, and to suggest that it was the OSI model that was scrapped instead of BBN's product is a bit of a misunderstanding. As you can see from above, the OSI model is very much alive and well, and factors into your everyday life, encompasses software development and communications, device manufacturing and engineering, as well as routing and delivery of information.
This next part is rather opinionated, and the way that many of us choose to remember our history of UNIX, the ARPANET, the NSFnet, and the Internet:
The IP stack you know and use everyday was fathered by Bill Joy, who arrived at UC Berkeley in (IIRC) 1974), created vi because ed just wasn't cutting it when he wanted a full screen editor to write Berkeley UNIX (BSD), including TCP/IP, and co-founded Sun Microsystems (SunOS / Solaris):
> Bill Joy just didn’t feel like this (the BBN code) was as efficient as he could do if he did it himself. And so Joy just rewrote it. Here the stuff was delivered to him, he said, “That’s a bunch of junk,” and he redid it. There was no debate at all. He just unilaterally redid it.
Because UNIX was hitherto an AT&T product, and because government contracting has always been rife with interminable vacillating and pontificating, BBN never actually managed to produce code for the the IP stack that could really be relied upon. In short, it kinda sucked. Bad.
So! You've decided to scroll down and skip all of the other stuff to get the straight dope on the answer to your question. Here it is:
> What were the major things that caused TCP/IP to become the internet standard protocol?
The ARPANET (and where I worked, what was to become specifically the MILNET portion of that) had a mandate to replace NCP (Network Control Protocol) with IP (Internet Protocol). We did a dry run and literally over two thirds of the Internet (ARPANET) at that time disappeared, because people are lazy, software has bugs, you name it. There were lots of reasons. But that only lasted the better part of a day for the most part.
At that time the ARPANET really only consisted of Universities, big Defense contractors and U.S. Military facilities. Now, if you'll do a bit of digging around, you'll discover that there was really no such thing as NCP - that is, for the most part, what the film industry refers to as a retcon, meaning that we, as an industry, retroactively went back and came up with a way to explain away replacing a protocol that didn't really exist - a backstory, if you will. Sure, there was NCP, it was mostly a kludge of heterogeneous management and communications programs that varied from system to system, site to site, with several commonalities and inconsistencies that were hobbled together with bailing twine, coat hangers, and duct tape (for lack of a better metaphor).
So we really, really, needed something as uniform and ubiquitous as the promise that Internet Protocol would deliver. Because Bill Joy and others had done so much work at UC Berkeley, we actually had 4.1BSD (4.1a) to work with on our DEC machinery. As a junior member of my division, in both age and experience, I was given the task of, let's say throwing the switch on some of our machines, so to speak, when we cut over from the NCP spaghetti and henceforth embraced TCP/IP no matter what, on Flag Day - 01 January 1983.
So you see,the adoption of Internet Protocol was not a de facto occurrence - it was de jure, a government mandate to occur at a specific time on a specific day.
It literally had nothing to do with popularity or some kind of organic adoption, the erroneously described, so-called demise of the OSI model, or any physical network topology.
### DARPA said 01 January 1983 and that's it, and that was it - Flag Day.
Sure, it took a few days for several facilities to come up (anyone not running IP was summarily and unceremoniously cut off from the ARPANET).
And one also needs to consider that it wasn't every machine - we only had some machines that were Internet hosts. We still had a lot of mainframes and mini computers, etc., that were interconnected within our facilities in a hodgepodge or some other fashion. Nowadays we have a tendency to be somewhat incredulous if every device doesn't directly connect over IP to the Internet in some way. That wasn't the case back then - you passed traffic internally, sometimes by unmounting tapes from one machine and mounting them on another.
There was a lot of hand wringing, stress, boatloads of frustration, and concern by people over keeping their jobs all over the world. But that's why and when it happened. Six months later in the UNIX portions of networks we had much greater stability with the release of 4.2BSD, but it wouldn't really be until a few years later Net2 was released that things settled down with the virtually flawless networking stability that we enjoy today.
Okay I thought I'd share this recent post here on the #Fediverse. To give it some context, it's an answer to a common question, often a misunderstanding (even by many knowledgeable folks) as to just how we got here.
There's a lot of apples and oranges here. And everyone had a lot of good points made, but your question is simple, and has a very simple answer. I'll endeavor to address that directly, but do need to tend to some of what...
I call it despotic overreach via subjugation through state sponsored industrial surveillance systems.... It has nothing to do with capitalism but rather, that thing that Thomas Jefferson gave us... you know, the thing.
Been to a grocery store lately? You've been complaining for decades now, that they artificially inflate the prices of items so that they can offer you steep discounts on a rotating list of them - If, and only if, you consent to being a "club member". Personally, I've consented many a times; Rite-Aid, Albertson's, Wallgreens, CVS,Von's, and many others, as Brittney Spears, Charles Manson, Joseph Stalin, and even John Rambo, another obvious #nom_de_guerre to combat what would follow as spam but worse, industrial surveillance and privacy mining (of course, you also need to use a fake phone number and a /dev/null email addy).
Have you tried to buy things at Jack in the Box or 7/11 or Mcdonald's lately? ... They have an app for that. Why do you suppose that is? They could just as easily and more efficiently deliver their content via PWS/webapps through your regular browser experience (they don't want to be counter-measured with uBlock Origin or integrated anti-tracking measures on the more sensible web browsers).
They're working really hard to deliver you to evil. I walked into a Smart & Final the other day and saw an unbelievable price for a 30 pack of Natural Light Beer - you had to use a "digital coupon" (just like you do at 7/11 to pay the regular, competitive price for an item). I asked the cashier where in their weekly rag the "digital coupon" was located, and she informed me that one needs to install an app to be eligible for the discount. Fuck that noise. Homey don't play dat.
When you install an app, it's a whole different ballpark of invasiveness, intrusions, data farming, and privacy mining, it's like it's your first day in #Pelican_Bay and you announce that you're going to drop the soap as you shower.
So the next time someone says, "Thank you for shopping at Walmart!", or synonymously, "Go Fuck Yourself", just smile, and offer, "Yes, there's an app for that".
What follows below in the #boost I've shared, that so inspired me to address this issue, is not a simple inconvenience - it's a new beginning :p In #Communist_Red_China, you do everything on your #WeChat app - you submit your elementary school homework, you buy stuffs at the local market, you inform on yourself and your friends to their state equivalent of the #Stazi, and you tell them exactly where to come and arrest, perhaps even disappear you. #Falun_Gong? Healthy? awesome! Now your a live organ donor too - you can thank #Meg_Whitman for that one.
I call it despotic overreach via subjugation through state sponsored industrial surveillance systems.... It has nothing to do with capitalism but rather, that thing that Thomas Jefferson gave us... you know, the thing.
Been to a grocery store lately? You've been complaining for decades now, that they artificially inflate the prices of items so that they can offer you steep discounts on a rotating list of them - If, and only if, you consent to being a "club member"....
I had a classmate that used to bring his to class every night. Just slung his satchel w/the keyboard over his shoulder and carried this in his arms up the elevator and down the hall to class.
It's a Pronto Series 16, running at a blazing fast 8Mhz, and that's a 5.6 MByte removable hard disk there too. Pronto Computers was located in Torrance (my hometown) just down the street from Epson and Ashton Tate (dBase II, III)
Heck I can't even remember the guy's name, but he worked in some local aerospace company and fancied himself an ubergeek; if this box is any indication he sure was, lolz.
So what's so special about this machine? Well, if you ask any 50 people about an IBM compatible computer that ran on an intel 80186 CPU they'll prolly all tell you there was never any such beast - but there was, and this was it (I recall it was fast as fuck, so they prolly pioneered manufacturing production machines that were ahead of their time, while IBM and the clone manufacturers decided to skip a generation and take their time working on a platform that leveraged the 80286.).
The hard disk was light years ahead of its time too - portable Zip Drives (100MBytes) didn't appear on the scene for another ten years, but this was an actual miniature hot swappable Syquest HDD spinning at I believe, the standard of 3600 RPMs.... I can't be sure though, but it was nice listening to that quiet buzz saw sound just singing along.
We were in a Pascal class together, so he would show up, insert a disk, boot to UCSD P-System and off he would go. The rest of us would too, but we had those noisy 5&1/4" floppy disks that made all those cute noises in our IBM 5150 PCs(4.77MHz 8080 CPUs), lolz.... Well, we did have a few XT's w/HDDs, some VT-52 like terminals for the PDP-11, and some 3270 terminals too connected to a mainframe at the main campus in Sandy Eggo.
His #Pronto was a screamer for sure, and I'd only ever seen an amberchrome monitor for mini computers at work, which were much larger. The graphics (Yah, we actually called them graphics at the time) were superior to what we could do w/o an expensive #Princeton_Graphics#CGA card and matching .51mm dot pitch color monitor too.
I had lots of minis, super-minis, and a few mainframes at work, but in the personal computer world there was literally nothing that could perform like this 8MHz 186... nothing. It was a screamer!
But alas, after him spending close to five grand, the IBM 3270 PC/AT was soon to be released, relegating that guys 186 hot rod to the annals of forgotten songs and unsung heroes. The new #AT_Class machines kinda trickled in though, so if you wanted one of those you got to the computer lab early. They also supported HD Floppies w/1.2MB storage - a vast improvement over that of the earlier, so-called Double Density 360KB floppies, although there were some issues moving data between those two formats that required a few tricks - like loading an earlier command.com (kinda like sourcing another shell once you ssh into a box)... Okay I'm rambling.
I kinda liked that guy, and kinda didn't. Most of the other students didn't care for him too much. He was arrogant and one of those, "Mine's better than yours" sort of person, but he was competent, friendly with me, generally speaking, for a guy who was wound real tight, and I could tell he didn't get any pussy, so I kinda felt sorry for him too.
I should mention that there technically were a couple of other manufacturers out there during that era shipping 80186 computers, but I've never seen any of them and don't know anything about them.
Well, that's about it for that era, I just thought that I'd share that little bit of computer history with everyone. I hope you enjoyed reading about this truly innovative machine and it's brief time on the market.
I had a classmate that used to bring his to class every night. Just slung his satchel w/the keyboard over his shoulder and carried this in his arms up the elevator and down the hall to class.
It's a Pronto Series 16, running at a blazing fast 8Mhz, and that's a 5.6 MByte removable hard disk there too. Pronto Computers was located in Torrance (my hometown) just down the street from Epson and Ashton Tate (dBase II, III)
> "It has been an honor to be of even passing value to the users of Linux. I wish all of you well."
What was hitherto, your awareness, or understanding of these events? I'd love to here any comments on the matter and boosts are most welcome to widen the pool of available input. There's an awful lot that can be said on many facets of this.
NOTE:Mikhail Gilula is now the owner of https://keyark.com/ (KeySQL).
I'm going to offer an honorable mention here, but the fact that anyone can get a free NextCloud account with the same document feature sets and sharing capabilities as Google demands that I consider this a missed opportunity, if not a misguided community gesture by not taking the opportunity to dogfood on our own FOSS instead of a privacy disrespecting, deprecated, monolithic industrial mining silo.
I think leveraging Google Docs to gather input on how to:
> ...make open source open protocol social media easier.
and...
> We're trying to make it better.
are statements belied by the fact that we're not dogfooding by actually using #FOSS like we should be to make the point that we want to make #FOSS better, by showing just how easy it is to obviate large swaths of ABC/Google properties by simply not using them:
In this day and age, I find it somewhat antithetical and at cross purposes to our overlying mission along with the whole set of philosophies behind building and advocating for adoption of the Fediverse in the first place, if we're going to ask people to go back to the #dark_side and visit Google docs
I'm going to offer an honorable mention here, but the fact that anyone can get a free NextCloud account with the same document feature sets and sharing capabilities as Google demands that I consider this a missed opportunity, if not a misguided community gesture by not taking the opportunity to dogfood on our own FOSS instead of a privacy disrespecting, deprecated, monolithic industrial mining silo.
First discovered in 2002, paleontologist draw comparisons of #Dinocephalosaurus_orientalis with other aquatic species having no modern day analogs - why did the entire family of #Tanystropheidae or the genera exhibiting these morphological functionalities not continue?
Perhaps just as interesting is the convergent evolution (especially with respect to their necks) between that of Dinocephalosaurus and members of the Tanystropheus genus. A close resemblance on the surface, yet Dinocephalosaurus orientalis was strictly an aquatic species.
I've included an artists reconstructive rendition of Tanystropheus longobardicus for comparison between the two, but note that Dinocephalosaurus had four flipper-like feet of the same size, and unable to exist, or at least thrive in a terrestrial environment, where Tanystropheus exhibited larger feet in the rear - not unlike your hands being smaller than your feet.
And yes, as Yuki (@youronlyone) offers up as a contemplative inference, the whole "Dragon" and "Loch Ness Monster" corollaries are uncanny, raising questions as to why would pre-industrial societies actually have such fables, or in the case of the latter, claims of sightings, if not rooted in some previous observation by humans?
First discovered in 2002, paleontologist draw comparisons of #Dinocephalosaurus_orientalis with other aquatic species having no modern day analogs - why did the entire family of #Tanystropheidae or the genera exhibiting these morphological functionalities not continue?
Perhaps just as interesting is the convergent evolution (especially with respect to their necks) between that of Dinocephalosaurus and members of the Tanystropheus genus. A close resemblance on the surface, yet Dinocephalosaurus orientalis
Yes source based distro's have been around since the very beginning - in fact, MCC Interim Linux and #SLS weren't far from that mark, except that they merely tried to make it a bit more convenient by packaging up tarballs to be exploded during installation. And there's always #LFS.
If you think about Slackpkg - and you consider that you can actually re-install the entire system by compiling every single component of the default (full) install with the evocation of a single command, followed by the customization of your entire system by installing every kind of software imaginable through the use of #sbopkg or some other automated, dependency resolving package manager that uses #SlackBuilds (which are downloaded, then exectuted, and subsequently download the latest release of he software package desired, which is in turn compiled, packaged, and exploded) - you actually have a fully source based distro installed on your box.
That's right - Slackware is (can be forced to be) an entirely source based distro installed on your device.
And choosing to convert from a point release to Slackware -current switches you from a point release to a #Rolling_Release distro.
*Debian Testing, aka at this time, Trixie is a rolling release. #Arch_Linux is a rolling release, SourceMage and Lunar Linux are source based distros based on #Sorcerer_Linux, the original fully source based Linux distro released when Linux was only about 8yrs old in 2000, and the #Gentoo or #Funtoo source based Linux distros.
SystemD my ass. That has nothing to do with nothing in that conversation - it's completely non-sequitur and truth be told, most source based distros (Arch, Gentoo) support the type of init system that *YOU CHOOSE. For Debiantards such as myself, well..... There's #Devuan - and that's very refreshing to actually have control over your system again with true init scripts. But I rarely use Devuan, even though I've been associated with the initiative since its inception, after leaving the #Mageia team several years ago.
As I state in almost all of my profiles, I'm a Slacker, since 1993 (Slackware Linux), and I'm also a bit of a #Debiantard. On the BSD side, after leaving #Jolix (386BSD) for Slackware, I've pretty much settled on either #OpenBSD or #Dragonfly_BSD, w/the awesome #HAMMER2 FS. I still have a lot of love for #FreeBSD and of course #NetBSD - where I spend a lot of time in my proper #Korn Shell....
But what the heck does any of this have to do with a comparison of using Gentoo Linux being akin to using SystemD?
I don't like SystemD - but if you're a realist, that doesn't mean you forgo using distros that only have that init tooling. You just roll with the punches and keep following the innovations that support you - NO ONE STILL RUNS WINDOWS XP in production - at least, no one outside of state mental hospitals, that's just insane to do in a forward facing business environment.
But a lot of companies do leverage OpenRC, SysVinit, etc., instead of SystemD - that's not going away, and SystemD itself and Poetering have their own up and coming challengers.
SystemD is (supposed to be, originally) a way to boot your box. Yes, it's indeed encroached upon other landscapes since, but not all of those constructs are even considered by many mainstream distros - it's not a fact of life. Other init systems thrive in the UNIX world to this day and will continue to do so.
Likewise, Source based Linux distros are just one among many distros that exist, and may or may not leverage SystemD as their init systems - to really get a good grasp of this, I recommend doing a few Arch Linux installs - with and without SystemD as the base init system. Heck, even Debian still supports your regular, good old #syslog, and at every turn during your updates, reminds you how to keep it enabled since the whole journalctl crap just isn't as elegant, IMO.
Personally, I think more concurrent options are usually better - space is cheap. Storage no longer costs a dollar a meg. or worse, like it was when I was a kid, a few thousand dollars a meg. That's right... MegaByte - Not TB for penny's!
Okay so now I'm waiting to hear back from the OP and see just what the heck they meant when I got triggered. In the meantime....
Enjoy installing and using #Sorcerer_Linux, or the subesquent forks of it's surviving lineage like #SourceMage and #Lunar_Linux - you're now a part of mainstream source-basedLinux History once you do 🤘 💀 🤘
Yes source based distro's have been around since the very beginning - in fact, MCC Interim Linux and #SLS weren't far from that mark, except that they merely tried to make it a bit more convenient by packaging up tarballs to be exploded during installation. And there's always #LFS.
If you think about Slackpkg - and you consider that you can actually re-install the entire system by compiling every single component of the default (full) install with the evocation of a single command, followed by the...
Big skillet = a couple of eggs frying along with a couple of slabs of bacon.
Small skillet = prolly two or three russet potatoes frying w/garlic, onjions (sic), and pepper - after breakfast (whatever time I decided to make it, obviously noonish or early afternoon judging by the sunlight/shadowing) those potatoes will serve as a cold snack or a side dish w/supper after a quick reheat.
The Kettle has boiling water, and I often would move it to the wood-fired heating furnace to keep hot, using it to make tea at various points of the day and night. The Stanley cooker doesn't stay hot for long. It's firebox is small, and consumes a lot of wood. You can see at the left rear that I have a heat exchangers with hot water pipes, but all it does is produce small amounts of tepid water, and not even that when it's cold outside.
This must have been a warm day, because I have the one of those kitchen doors open off the side of the cabin. Those are the same doors I met a big black bear through. That's another story, with a video, but suffice it to say that by the time I realized that bears don't know what windows are, and it was only two steps away from being able to rip my face off, I continued getting more and more frightened after it casually lumbered off and it finally dawned on my how much peril I was actually in... and became more frightened, and more frightened, and then I strapped my 1911-A1 to my chest and didn't even sleep without it or take it off for a couple of weeks. Dead bears are better than Dead Bradley's, and I suppose I could eat that fucker if it could eat me (although I've heard various stories as to whether they taste good or not).
Oh, back to the hot water heat exchanger - I installed a propane fueled on-demand water heater that fed the shower.... If you're going to have only one amenity that is a guilty pleasure of convenience... let it be hot fricking water. You can thank me later for that wisdom :)
Big skillet = a couple of eggs frying along with a couple of slabs of bacon.
Small skillet = prolly two or three russet potatoes frying w/garlic, onjions (sic), and pepper - after breakfast (whatever time I decided to make it, obviously noonish or early afternoon judging by the sunlight/shadowing) those potatoes will serve as a cold snack or a side dish w/supper after a quick reheat.
Reprinted from the Fediverse-City Matrix room, with permission from the author (myself):
I was just participating in another discussion elsewhere on the connotations and perceptions relating to a global feed of the entire known Fediverse, as it pertains to what various platforms call it (in their selector tabs).
Lots of suggestions, and every platform uses a different nomenclature. Some use 'global', some use 'live', and there's a few others as well that try to convey that type of extremely busy feed.
But then I touched on the subject of Local feeds - not all Fediverse platforms utilize this type of concatenated feed. I related that the Hometown fork of mastopub was [at least one of] the first to incorporate this as both a feed, and a type of post that is localized to only that particular instance.
I also, because I've read his contention, included the Dev's reasoning on having such a utility as a feature - because he intended Hometown to be a Fediverse platform that could encourage a Highly localized "community".
So you can select the other various, common types of scope for a post when making a post, as well as posting something that is only viewable to other users on your local instance - thereby supporting the 'local community only' aspect that has eluded and mostly deluded users on other platforms.
Why "deluded", because having a Fediverse account in the minds of most folks coming from the deprecated, monolithic silo space is something that has been heavily promoted by Fedizens as one of the reasons why it's better to use the Fediverse instead of those impersonal deprecated silo systems.
And that's simply not true.
Take me, for example. I have several accounts and interact using them with different circles of people (I won't get into the power of recursive circles as they were implemented in gplus). So I'mma just use mastodon.social, one of the biggest monolithic-like silo instances in the Fediverse, as an example here.
People there, most often n00bs from the November Rain or later) talk about the sense of "community" they have there, when they're really only speaking of the connections they have by following and being followed by not just people on that instance, but across the entire Fediverse.
The sense of community that almost everyone in the Fediverse perceives is mostly a compilation of the follows and followers that they each have, and is unique to themselves alone.
For example, I prolly know 4 or 5 people on each instance I have an account on. My community is comprised almost entirely of the direct connections I have made with others across the Fediverse at large, and yes, people on platforms with 'local-only' feeds to see my posts, know them to be local, but so do folks on other instances watching their 'global feeds' (or home feeds where someone they follow includes a follow of my account).
So to me, in my experience, my community is comprised of those who I've made connections with and the people they are connected to, with very little traffic from the local instance I am on at any given time.
To think that you're going to have a community on mastodon.social consisting of people primarily from that instance is a bit naive, IMO, coz your default feed grows exponentially with foreign user's posts the more you connect with anyone - not just the people you follow that are local to your instance. You see something, you interact because it's interesting, pertinent, or relevant to you - you don't do that because you've discerned that you will only interact with local accounts... that just ain't natural, human tendency.
So the creator of the Hometown fork realized that one type of vehicle in the feature set to mark this kind of delineation was that of the ability to post and see in your feed, local only posts, with the overt assertion that Hometown is a fork that in part, is a platform that can facilitate the social diaspora consisting of a 'mostly local' community.
Even entire instances, named or stated as localized geographically or topically, as having publicly open registrations miss this mark in a big way - people for whatever reason, want a Fediverse account, pick a host/instance, by whatever criteria, and then inadvertently end up creating their own diaspora of social connections across the entire Fediverse anyway.
nostr, Bluesky (when it eventually fully supports other instances), Threads (yeah, I know, it's a bastard, lolz), Minds, and other, bigger instances or monoliths, don't try to capitalize on this notion of "Your instance is your community" because overwhelmingly, it just isn't the case in reality.
I'm not saying that there aren't Fediverse instances are successful in cultivating small communities consisting of connections with others on those particular instances, but the most successful of those are the instances that have actually disabled Federation on those instances, lolz.... There's lots of examples of that, which is kewl - to each their own.
But the tendency of everyone to follow the Ew! Shiny! paradigm of simply liking and following what you like irrespective of whether it's on your local instance or not is the lions share of how people interact with each other.
Your thoughts, observations?
Attached graphic attrib: A Jack Russell, happy as can be, sitting in the pilot's seat flying a Cessna, not knowing WTF he's doing.... but he's really happy! The caption reads: "I have no idea what I'm doing".
Reprinted from the Fediverse-City Matrix room, with permission from the author (myself):
I was just participating in another discussion elsewhere on the connotations and perceptions relating to a global feed of the entire known Fediverse, as it pertains to what various platforms call it (in their selector tabs).
John, I thought of you when I first saw this little doggy - not the caption, but the puppy is just so happy in the pilots seat, in a sort of, "Look Ma, No hands! w00t!", way.
I don't think I've ever actually seen a medical examiner use the words Pulverized and Liver in the same sentence when referring to a murder victim, let alone a toddler.
About twenty five years ago, we laid out the keels for a new adventure - The Twin Brigantine project, in the parking lot of the #Los_Angeles_Maritime_Institute, next to the #Los_Angeles_Maritime_Museum, in the old ferry building that was, along with a pontoon bridge, obviated by completion of the #Vincent_Thomas_Bridge connecting the mainland to #Terminal_Island.
Up until that time, #LAMI operated and sailed the 70' gaff-rigged topsail schooner, Swift of Ipswitch (previously James Cagney's personal yacht) for it's youth sailing program. It took a few years to complete the Irving and Exy Johnson, sister Brigantine vessels built and outfitted by dozens of volunteers over the duration of the program. At some point, another gaff-rigged schooner was borrowed and enlisted, the136' Bill of Rights filling the need for accommodations of a youth sailing program that had greatly expanded over time, with many ups and downs, achievements and disappointments, but building two square rigger tall ships for and by a non-profit organization dedicated to youth educational programs for the community, a truly novel pursuit, eventually came to a close as a great success.
This photo shows the 113' brigantine Irving Johnson, on 23 March 2005, and which, after less than three years of service, she had run hard aground on a sandbar following several storms that affected local charts, leaving them partially obsolete - in short, on her way into the Channel Islands harbor, well... sadly, the pic speaks for itself.
Another year and two million dollars later to repair structural damages and flooding, the #Irving_Johnson once again joined her sister ship, #Exy_Johnson, in the pursuit of education as #school_ships, something that Irving and his wife Exy (Electa), following no less than 7 circumnavigations together, pioneered and championed in the 20th century aboard their three successive sailing ships - a #schooner, a #brigantine, and a #ketch - each named the #Yankee.
This image or file is a work of a United States Coast Guard service personnel or employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image or file is in the public domain (17 U.S.C. § 101 and § 105, USCG main privacy policy)
About twenty five years ago, we laid out the keels for a new adventure - The Twin Brigantine project, in the parking lot of the #Los_Angeles_Maritime_Institute, next to the #Los_Angeles_Maritime_Museum, in the old ferry building that was, along with a pontoon bridge, obviated by completion of the #Vincent_Thomas_Bridge connecting the mainland to #Terminal_Island.
For more info on Irving and Exy, their circumnavigations of the globe, and love of life together living aboard and blue water cruising, There's this National Geographic, as well as a several books that together and separately have published about their lives at sea.
@tallship @thenexusofprivacy thing is though there are also many existing alternatives to Mastodon already on the Fediverse, so why fork it? GoToSocial looks interesting and they don't have a central instance, you host your own even on a Pi.