I’m hoping to start a Friendica instance, it’s been around for a long time and actually has events, which is something NO other social network has managed to add and one of the main reasons people I know who don’t like Facebook will feel compelled to use it, there’s no other easy way to create and invite people to events.

I also tried to get people to try G+, before that Diaspora, and neither got many people interested: but I think Fedi has now proved its not going away. There needs to be sustained local push to relocalise communities, this is happening in a few places, and enough nontechy people are starting to really understand the danger of FB and the silo mentality.

This seems like a missed opportunity for a standalone device?

I recently got a couple of SenseCAP Indicators and similarly, they’re almost standalone but lacking battery and gps.

Can someone combine these please!! 🙏

I do concede that there has been a trend towards xenophobia that has been exacerbated by filter bubbles and even more by algorithms. But the balance is that people who once had no choice but to suffer ostracism and extreme isolation have been able find community online and have improved mental health and outcomes in many ways.

I certainly found this myself in the early days of the internet before the iron fist of corporatism grabbed this fledgling space, determined to extract value from it, and creating the nightmares of isolation and hate that are now Farcebork and its ilk. Fedi has been a welcome return to smaller communities that have to do the necessary work of self management, which reduces the hate and isolation that is promoted by antisocial media, even if it doesn’t stop it altogether.

My point is, the internet isn’t worse. Humans can be good or bad, but certain environments make them behave in worse ways, and these environments can exist both online and off.

Honestly? I live in a small town, and face to face isn’t much better. People are incredibly bigoted, and might be polite to your face but incredibly judgemental and small minded, especially to anyone perceived as different. Empathy is a skill that needs to be practised, like meditation. And many people lack it both online and off.

I’ve seen people say that Farcebork was like being in a small town, actively making that kind of everyone-knowing-everyone’s-business a reality again for communities fractured by urban anonymity.

But that was there in spades in the early internet, it’s just that normies hadn’t been beaten over the head by social conditioning by the corporate overlords yet to join in.

It’s human nature to think and behave tribally. So we should expect it to continue in the Fediverse, we just can’t shove the problem over to someone else to manage and take their tithe in eyeballs, and thus fracture our communities all over again: we have to do it ourselves. Drama fucking sucks, wherever is found, but we have to accept it’s our job to manage if we don’t want to trade our freedom for a padded cell.

Thanks! That’s super exciting. Will try and send out some DMs next time it happens - just to get the more reliable ack. I doubt many people are awake at the times it is probably strongest signal though.

Good point! I didn’t think to do that to check positions, that would have confirmed if the gps was accurate. But one new comment had confirmed that it could indeed have been a tropospheric duct, which is quite exciting, as I didn’t realise that was possible with LoRa, and don’t think I had seen mentioned before, even though I had read about AR events where DX occur, TV signals etc. So cool!

That is an excellent question! I have noticed it can change, and have been paying more attention to those numbers since raising the station g2, but this is a really oddly specific collection of nodes, all from one place. Maybe I should post a pic…

OMG how did I miss seeing this before now

I’m not sure, there’s lots of nodes closer, I would have thought if there was an MQTT connection that would see them first not a specific location further away? 🤔

Hmm. When you’ve hopped a plane, have they tended to be a cluster of nodes? I guess if it was a node on a flight from a particular airport it’s maybe possible… I need to go look at flight info, we’re not in an area with much air traffic at all, and the time frames don’t make sense, how could they keep refreshing for hours? 🤔 And the time of day, there’s just not usually flights occurring in the middle of the night here either.

Fairly unlikely it was a plane due to the time frame in which the nodes were refreshing - was over at least 4 hours from when the first distant node was seen, to no longer seen / refreshing. And all the nodes were apparently from this one distant area, which is about 4-5 hours drive away, because it’s on the other side of a big bay. And didn’t see any other familiar nodes that were closer, of which there are quite a few.

Interesting article, and it did change my view slightly of what ATProto is, but not by a huge amount.

Given the current political climate, a few days ago I randomly started wondering… what if some governments around the world acknowledged that communicating through Farcebok or Xitter is no longer tenable, and committed to providing social media infrastructure hosted in their own countries as a public good: “your tax dollars at work!”

Would ATProto make sense in these cases? They have the resources, and ATProto might seem more attractive/robust for that kind of scale compared to ActivityPub?

Yeah, this isn’t unusual for low end kits, but Seeed are getting a rep for quality but affordable in all areas of the LoRa spectrum.

Awww this reminds me of the early days of Flickr.

What kind of location are you/the node in? Are you inside or outside? Outside can make a huge difference, or even just being near a window helps.

Yup. At least a decade ago I used to explain how important interoperability was to legislate for, and used this as the main example of why. Networks are better for everyone when there is no lock in, and the waste of competition for eyeballs could be avoided. It’s sad that most people truly don’t understand this.

There’s a new server planned relatively locally to me and it’s capitalising on the terrifying plunge into fascism that all the Big Socials now have as their badge of dishonour. People have never been “happy” to be on Facebook but the local focus in a pretty leftie inner city area is a good idea. If people know people irl on Fedi they will maybe have an easier time.

I love Tusky, it is my app of choice for Mastodon

It’s the tusks, clearly.