I got mine recently and have been playing a little bit of a lot of different stuff, but the thing I’ve put the most hours into has been Midnight Suns. I did not expect a Marvel game to my new favorite turn-based tactics deckbuilder, lol.

The stupid open world collectible part blows chunks, but the actual core gameplay is shockingly fun, if not perfectly tuned the way some deckbuilders are. The extremely weird lightweight high school dating sim / bioware relationship management aspect is very odd but produces some extremely funny interactions at times.

Unsurprisingly given its extremely high profile as a purveyor of transphobic coverage, many mastodon instances have greeted them with a firm block. (If this confuses folks who don’t pay attention to this sort of thing, just picture in your head if it was fox news.)

It’s pretty widely known and has been an issue for a long time. It’s not terribly hard to google for.

The question is, if there are instances that are full of transphobic content, and they’re reported, does firefish defederate them. If they do, the view will improve. Although, global feeds are never very useful.

The actual issue is, that as an instance admin who had previously been in the loop for some time with #fediblock and other channels in which admins share this kind of info, folks expected him to already have disqordia blocked.

Also, it seems from his posts elsewhere that he actually was aware and didn’t care. Ample reason to defederate from .art’s perspective. (Firefish.social has subsequently silenced but not blocked disqordia)

All of this is relatively routine, the screenshot fabrication thing more unusual.

I posted a medium-short summary elsewhere with a couple of links for folks looking for slightly more context.

I don’t think the eris or defederation things are Huge News in themselves, but if it’s true he doctored a screenshot to make the .art admin look bad, that’s not a good look for a lead deve/flagship instance admin.

.art is an influential leader in community safety/moderation standards in the fediverse; their standards for federation are moderately high, and probably higher than folks on many lemmy instances would likely agree with. But it feels like the firefish guy has possibly a pattern of not doing his homework about things in general?

Obviously the big question is, did he actually doctor screenshots and if so, WTF, man.

The iceshrimp fork actually came before the thing with .art broke and seemingly had to do with issues internal to the calckey development community. It’s hard to say for sure what the situation was because most of the stuff on both sides was pretty vaguely stated.

I feel like finding a good instance in the fediverse (that’s accepting users) is always a nightmare.

That being said, I’ve been happy with the vibes on lemmy.blahaj.zone and they have a calckey/firefish instance (that’s the main blahaj.zone). But it’s not strictly general-purpose.

https://mas.else.social/@choyer/110746384528095273

Someone checked and there’s already an existing trademark for Firefish in software specifically, at least in Europe. Apparently they make HR solutions of some sort.

https://jobs.firefishsoftware.com/about-us/meet-the-team.aspx

Firefox, but make it wet

(I don’t know if it’s a worse than “calckey” tbf)

Tech also involves corporate $$, “disruptive” (read: anti-worker) innovation, etc. the general skew of tech as an industry seems center-right to me plus lots of tech bros fully engaged (sometimes “ironically”) with the alt right.

At the local level, tech bros form natural partnerships with right wing interests around gentrification and policing.

From an opsec standpoint, certainly. Or they’ll kick in your door like the Kolektiva admin. Definitely best to use end to end encryption if you have any need to protect yourself from state actors. But also fuck meta

The more the merrier for the Fediverse and if you don’t like it, join a smaller project or find one with the privacy policy that suites you. defederate

The good thing about decentralized platforms is that you don’t have to immediately cede the public square to corporate ownership or resign yourself to sharing space with the worst bad actors.

lol “suspicious” is a little much (but no denying that it’s drama)

I have no desire to see facebook in the fediverse, but that’s not really gentrification, it’s more like Walmart. (Anti-competitive corporate monopoly suppressing competition and forcing everyone to serve their bottom line)

Gentrification refers to the displacement of poor and working class people, and especially people of color, by affluent people, especially white. That’s not the specific dynamic here, in no small part because Mastodon has been self-gentrifying^[1] aggressively from the beginning. (It is jokingly referred to as the HOA of the internet)

::shocked face:: who could have predicted this, lol

I don’t have any philosophical objection for paying to use a platform I enjoy, but in the case of youtube, they have been so deliberately detrimental to society in terms of platforming fascists that I feel bad about the prospect of paying them, even if much of the money is going to creators I do like who I’m actually watching

This is absolutely a decision based on aesthetics over functionality, but I just got myself a Signal. (Text references the bureau of sabotage from Frank Herbert’s ConSentiency novels)

For example, did you know a release of a new fully open source LLM called OpenLLaMA just got announced by the Researchers at Berkeley AI Research?

Lol, a lot of my friends experience all LLM news as doomscrolling basically because of how those tools are being used, to whose profit and at whose expense.

Not trying to pick a fight about that here, just that it’s funny how relative “doom” is.

Anywho it would be entirely reasonable to create a community dedicated to good technology news however you define it. Reality itself is pretty dark these days so any given cross-section of it is going to contain a lot of doom by default.

Some folks won’t be able to access some communities due to defederation, and in other cases folks may want to start a community on their home instance for certain reasons. This isn’t the end of the world; probably in the long run either everybody will centralize on the biggest one, or you’ll end up with one or two alternatives that have a bit different culture or focus.

That being said, if you like to read comments, it can get confusing when a bunch of different communities all have high interaction posts about the same topic at the same time.