Gadfly (-booq-)

@gunchleoc @liaizon So this sort of usage I can honestly respect, but it's notably not what gets presented top-line by any of the Observers/Stats Aggregators there.

Comparing an instance's self-reported stats to themselves over time, or to a qualitative look at the instance itself, are reasonable comparisons that keep those numbers in operations sharing approximately the same unit ("number of posts /in this space/", "number of [active] users /in this community/").

Those are not adding columns of different numbers that are not meaningfully the same unit, and putting it into a graph. But that's exactly the stats -- Accounts and Monthly Active Accounts, Servers, Posts, globally summed or summed by self-reported server software -- that FediDB (and unless I'm forgetting Observer) surfaces, solely (unless you dig and know to dig), as What Its Data Is.

And those stats are just absolutely meaningless.

@liaizon That there is no objective "bounds"/"border" to the fediverse that you can point at or ask about everything "inside", that summing self-reported numbers of posts/accounts don't add up to a coherent total "activity" in any useful sense -- nobody is experiencing or has the ability to experience that, it has never been assembled or queryable, and the different posts on it aren't the same things -- an instance with 8 people talking to each other a few times a day which might never even have turned up in the aggregator's awareness isn't ten-or-more times less "active" than an instance with 80 RSS/twitter mirrors updating on the hour that hooked up to a relay, in any useful, more than a few steps away from immediately-circular, sense.

@liaizon They're impressively wrong on accuracy because the enterprise was and is philosophically misguided and incoherent.
And so people, seeing this downstream of them, just had fun with it instead.

@liaizon I'm for backups of the data but also it should definitely be contextualized with, people (of those who have been indexed) have been lying in the API responses (as they should) since the start to make the graphs pretty&funny. Like it was an interesting collective-project but not an uncomplicatedly objective one.
So hopefully the backups of the data somehow keep that context in or adjacent to them.

@cwebber (To just put the context here for people who don't have the exact same cultural background as the makers of the list, they're doing the common FOSS (and other cultures) thing of "oblique reference to some other context", and are specifically referencing a podcast by Cool Zone Media named "Weird Little Guys", about rank-and-file hate-crime-doing members of the far-right.)

(I assume you, Christine, specifically, possibly-more-than-50-50 know this, but to put this in the comments for other people.)
(Also to be clear this is a "here's context that I didn't see mentioned" and not a "you should know this before having an opinion/reaction" -- you should absolutely have an opinion/reaction before knowing this factoid, it would be completely silly to expect people to know oblique references as a condition of having opinions about how they feel about names/terms used, and would be destructive to the community.)

I think I'm actually really pro George W. Bush's retirement art, socially.

Not in like an "ohh, he's HUMAN, that makes me think BETTER of him, maybe he feels BAD about bombing people etc." way,
but like, here's someone who went through life having experiences and is now making extremely mediocre art for his own sake to reflect on those experiences.

That's a move that I feel like got pushed out of acceptability in our society, and I think seeing a high-profile war criminal do it is raising its profile and might make more people feel like they can just Do That.

@jwildeboer I remember that @404mediaco did an article on queer.af going down after the Taliban took over governance & infrastucture of Afghanistan.

I wonder if they'll specifically pull on that to frame this one.

@liaizon (Obligatory Disclaimer: This is just Posteing, and in particular I do not Actually Want either random fediverse admins nor the W3C SocialWG (nor the people involved in it) to be targetted by the US State.)

(The subtext of this Posteing is that I am interested in the possibility of ActivityPub being successful enough at enabling and supporting safe communication and coordination of social projects, that it would be seen as a similar level of threat as the email & blog hosting of A/I.)

@liaizon *look on with increasing interest--*

https://icosahedron.website/@gaditb/117168661696023324

The attack on A/I raises a very important question:

Is there any way we can get the IETF or any W3C WG cool enough to likewise be declared a terrorist organization?

@d_rift @0xabad1dea Okay actually honestly tho, linter or # TODO(...): categorization scheme?

Like, I've been trying to grow some sort of annotation-habit that would theoretically let me grep (or extensions thereof) for a given specific pattern of failures across the codebase to handle them one-pattern-at-a-time,
and haven't succeeded much yet,

and honestly maybe marking them up as "what kind of sin is this, which abstract folkloric category will need to forgive me for this" might actually work there.

Like, like the `// athena: forgive this lack of wisdson` -- `// TODO(arachne forgive the insufficient weaving of the type system here): ...` or `# TODO(janus forgive my compatibility issues): ...` or `; TODO(aphrodite forgive this lack of elegance): ...` or `<!-- TODO(sysiphus forgive this drudgery): ... -->` or ...

@davidrevoy Related experience, from the writing side:

"I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me."
Marcus Olang' (2025)
https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt

Dumping #permacomputing and #algorave into a comically large mixing bowl amd whacking it to create "impermacomputing".

@liaizon MoNeTizE your FeDi-KlOuT !~

@liaizon Is Mullvad the Scandinavian fascist one, or the other one that's had controversy recently?
(Or neither..?)