If you signup to social media it will pester you for your email contacts, location and hobbies/interests.

Building a signup wizard to use that information to select a instance would seemto be the best approach.

The contacts would let you know what instance most of your friends are located (e.g. look up email addresses).

Topic specific instance, can provide a hobby/interests selection section.

Lastly the location would let you choose a country specific general instance.

It would help push decentralisation but instead of providing choice your asking questions the user is used to being asked.

Thats two hundred years and would cover the end of Plantagenet reign and the Tudor era.

Henry VIII reign happened during that period, at the beginning of your time period everyone would be catholic and at the end Queen Mary of Scotts was executed because the idea of a Catholic on the throne was unthinkable.

The UK is littered with castles and estates, normally they focus on specific historic events which happened at that location.

Mint was a reaction to Gnome 3, the unique workflow upset a lot of people and the people behind Mint decided to build Cinnamon desktop (its Gnome 3 made to look/work like Gnome 2). They needed a distribution to build/test their work and so based a distribution off of Ubuntu and called it Mint.

As a bit of explanation, there are only a few projects which attempt to build an entire linux distribution from scratch. This involves finding code from thousands of sources, work out packaging, etc… We call these ‘base’ distributions, Debian is the base distribution for Ubuntu, Ubuntu is the base distribution for Mint.

Ubuntu tends to be slightly ahead of Debian in the software versions it uses and automatically enables the ‘non-free’ repositories. Ubuntu tends to push some Canonical specific things like Snaps (which everyone hates)

I believe Mint rolls the Canonical specific things out of Ubuntu and you get the latest version of Cinnamon.

Its all a bit…

If its for work I would suggest picking a “stable” distribution like Debian, Kubuntu or OpenSuse.

A lot of people recommend Arch or Fedora but the focus of those is getting the very latest releases, which increases your chance of stuff breaking.

A lot of people will suggest niche distributions, those can be great for specific needs but generally you will always find Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL support for commercial apps.

I would also suggest looking at the KDE Desktop, many distributions default to Gnome but it is unique in how it works, KDE (or XFCE) will provide a desktop similar to Windows 11.

Lastly I would suggest looking at Crossover Linux by Codeweavers.

Linux has something called WINE, its an attempt to implement the Windows 95 - 11 API’s so windows applications can run on linux.

WINE is how the Steam Deck/Linux is able to play Windows games. Valve embedded it into Steam and called it “Proton”.

WINE is primarily developed by Codeweavers and they provide the Crossover application that makes setting up and running a Windows application really easy.

People will mention Lutris but that has a far higher learning curve.

There is an application database so you can see in advance if your applications would work: https://appdb.winehq.org/

SpaceX are launching 26-52 satellites at a time and have sustained 3 launches a week for most of the year.

The satellites are in a Low Earth Orbit, without constant thrust, atmospheric drag will force them to re enter earths atmosphere within a few months. This means they aren’t adding to junk in space.

Unlike Nasa, ULA, Arriannespace, RoscosMos, etc… SpaceX have always performed 2nd Stage Deorbit burns, so they aren’t adding to Space junk by launching either.

The Low Earth Orbit is to ensure low latency and the need for constant thrust means the satellites have a short life expectancy by design. That is why SpaceX fought to keep the satellites as cheap as possible (e.g. $250k)

First stage booster reuse and fairing reuse means the majority of the launch cost is the second stage ($15 million).

The whole lot is privately funded

SpaceX have funded it privately. It apparently started operating at a profit this year.

The admins to perform upgrades, monitoring, fixes, etc… will require root access to the database. That means they can alter all your posts to say *blah blah blah" if they wanted.

Similarly passwords will be encrypted within the database and encryption algorithms have to be able to go in both directions. Normally they need a seed value to start random generation. The admin defines the seed as a result an admin can decrypt everything in the database.

Your posting this on KBin which implements the twitter style fediverse API and federates with Mastodon.

Click the microblog button … Behold twitter replacement

Its a responsive designed website, why do you need an Application?

Activity Pub has a few parts, Lemmy implements the Threaded message part.

Mastodon implements a short messaging (posts) part. Meta’s Threads will implement this.

KBin implemented both parts, within KBin you’ll see microblog as an option for magazines (communities/subredits). This shows either ‘posts’ made to the magazine or posts with hastags associated with the magazine.

The posts and threaded message parts have overlap in how they work so mastodon users can see certain threaded messages and comment on them.

Github stars is not a good metric, firstly because KBin is hosted on codeberg but mainly because a healthy project has lots of unique contributors and regular updates/enhancements.

KBin has 79 open Pull Requests, while Lemmy has 29. From a visual check PR’s seem to be older than 2 weeks. Its hard to say one is “healthier” than the other, without scraping information into a spreadsheet.

Secondly Rust is new and has a lot of hype surrounding it, as a result you get a lot of people using it on random projects.

Languages have strengths and weaknesses and developer ecosystems build on the strengths.

For example if I was writing a web application with a database backend I would choose C#, Java or Node.js because there are loads of libraries, tools and frameworks to make it really easy.

Rust is gaining a lot of adoption by embedded system users (replacing C mostly). Lemmy is the only Rust based web server project I am aware of. Which means the level of work to do anything and to keep it updated falls on the Lemmy devs rather than spread out amongst a larger community.

Everyone loves to insult PHP but it has a niche in webservers and won’t disappear anytime soon. KBin effort will thus be spent on KBin.

There is a standard for sharing tweet style information and for threaded type information between websites.

You have software which implements the tweet standard (Mastodon), the threaded standard (lemmy) and both (KBin).

You’ll notice some communities will be community@kbin.social or community@kbin.cafe, etc… this indicates they are not local to the website your using and those addresses are KBin instances, its just your website has a copy of the information.

KBin is newer than Lemmy, it has a fairly simple responsive design that works well on mobile. Lemmy has a REST api so its easier to build mobile applications, a lot of people seem to expect/need to access websites via mobile applications.

The key difference is Lemmy is developed by Tankies, they think China’s genocide of Ughurs is justified and they administer lemmy.ml.

You’ve just moved the packaging problem from distributions to app developers.

The reason you have issues is historically app developers weren’t interested in packaging their application so distributions would figure it out.

If app developers want to package deb, rpm, etc… packages it would also solve the problem.

Nice out of date dependencies with those lovely security vulnerabilities!

KBin/Lemmy should provide a combined local view for duplicated magazines/communities across the fediverse. Treating the concept like a hashtag.

The point of the fediverse is to distribute content so no one has a monopoly. People squatting on communities/magazines don’t understand there is nothing stopping people creating one on a hundred other instances.

Each kbin/lemmy instance decides to follow magazines/communities from others through activity pub and stores it locally for the instance.

Having the UI retrieve all local posts with the same magazine/community name (e.g. m/star_trek@kbin.social c/star_trek@lemmy.world). Wouldn’t be hugely difficult, I believe Kbin uses postgres database as the local store and suspect it would be a tweak to the SQL query it runs.

Even if that wasn’t an option, there is a means to get all of the magazines/communities from the kbin UI/lemmy REST API. As well as retrieve all posts for a specific magazine/community. So you could do it entirely in a web client, for KBin it would be more work.

The combined view wouldn’t change how you comment on specific posts. The issue is where do you post and what view would take dominance (e.g. if a magazine had themed itself).

The solution here would be to default your local instance if it exists or the instance providing the most posts/comments. Perhaps with a drop down so users can choose.

I would also configure things so instances can select a site wide default if they can’t moderate it effectively. For example pushing all posts to the star trek instance rather than local magazine with a mod who is MIA.

This would remove most of the concerns users have about the fediverse, since they wouldn’t be confronted by different instances. To them the fediverse is <insert instance> it would also encourage distribution of content.

Change to subscribed
On KBin the default view is similar to /r/all this can be changed to limit your view to only magazines/communities you are subscribed to by going:

• Select your account name in top right corner
• Select ‘Settings’ from the account context menu
• Select ‘Subscription’ from the ‘Homepage’ drop down
• Select ‘Save’ on the settings page

This will change your default URL to https://<insance url>/sub (e.g. https://kbin.social/sub). This will change your feed to the top/newest/hottest from your subscribed magazines/communities.

Time Filter
If you look at the KBin screen, you will notice a filter by time option. Look for the navigation bar with hottest/newest/etc… on it on that bar is a upwards arrow and 4 lines representing a triangle (its normally used as a sort symbol). That will let you set time limits similar to those mentioned in this post (e.g. 3 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, 1 day, 1t (is 1 week).

Microblogs
Its also worth looking at the ‘microblogs’ feature under /sub as that will focus on mastodon messages/kbin microblogs with hashtags associated with your magazines/communities.

You can ask KBin to subscribe to people you find through Mastodon, due to the rate changes various twitter users are migrating around. I find KBin a nicer way to read their content.

This could be achieved within the UI and seems like a good idea.

Each kbin/lemmy instance decides to follow magazines/communities from others through activity pub and stores it locally for the instance.

Having the UI retrieve all local posts with the same magazine/community name (e.g. m/star_trek@kbin.social c/star_trek@lemmy.world). Wouldn’t be hugely difficult, I believe Kbin uses postgres database as the local store. The community/instance should be columns you can search for, it would be a small SQL change.

Even if that wasn’t an option, there is a means to get all of the magazines/communities from the kbin UI and retrieve all posts for a specific magazine/community. So you could do it entirely in a web client.

The combined view wouldn’t change how you comment on specific posts. The issue is where do you post and what view would take dominance (e.g. if a magazine had themed itself).

The solution here would be to default to the local instance if it exists or the instance providing the most posts/comments. Perhaps with a drop downso users can choose.

So reading twitter…

It seems much of the “Ammunition shortage” Prigozhin was loudly complaining about was stock pilling. Similarly much of Wagnar was pulled out of Ukraine to rebuild.

There have been suggestions Prigozhin was planning to launch an attack on Sunday but the Russian MoD attacked a Wagner site forcing him to launch a day early.

One tweet suggested Wagner soliders had been calling family all day (e.g. before a big operation).

Seizing Rostok Von Don was a clever initial play, since its a major logistics hub. This allowed him to arm his troops and provides a base if the coup fails.

It seems the South Military District gave up without a fight, with soliders surrendering.

Prigozhin has sent a shock force to Moscow, its bypassing major cities and trying to get there ASAP. There is a belief senior Kremlin officials will abandon ship.

Various helicopters are attacking the shock force but it seems Wagner are using air defence. Various MI-8, KA-52 and a ll-s2 have been shown destroyed.

The Tik Tok bigrade are trying to attack Rostok, considering they aren’t “true Russians” and were used as barrier troops, this doesn’t seem to be going down well. They are also stripping Donetsk of defenders to do this.

This kind of polling is pointless.

Brittish media/government never really mentioned the concept of “ever closer union”. To the average British citizen the EU was primarily a trading block that was to blame for everything wrong.

You can see it in things the UK vetoed (e.g. EU Defence Army, Euro, etc…). There was never interest in “ever closer union”.

For Britain to rejoin it would need to accept the concept of “ever closer union”, but considering half the country was sold on “muh sovereignty” its highly unlikely people would want to give up what the EU would demand.

The ideal would be to scrap the hardest of brexit style deal, for something closer to EEA. Give the UK to figure itself out and move forward with the ability to rebuild ties.

While I think the next election can bring a change in political will from the UK side, I think many in the EU were upset and there isn’t the drive to improve relations.

Its a really immature and niave response from Kev. Information is power, he’s chosen to operate without knowledge for internet points.

Meta think there is potential to enlarge their market and make money, Kev’s response won’t impact their business making decisions.

Kev should have gone to the meeting to understand what Meta are planning. That would help him figure out how to deal with Meta entering the space.

I don’t expect he could shape their approach but knowing they want to do X, Y or Z might make certain features/fixes a priority so it doesn’t impact everyone else