mbirth 🇬🇧

Meshtastic is good for local mesh nets with a limited number of participants. If you rather want to connect to larger meshes, Meshcore is the better choice as it’s far more reliable in larger nets.

Not much to expand. Some German left-wing politicians “ordered” a report on the German right-wing party. That report was deemed “secret”, so nobody was supposed to see it. Left-wing politicians told everyone that this secret report is the ultimate proof the right-wing party is extremist and can finally be forbidden and banned. Which is the part I said I doubt until there’s a way for everyone to see the actual report and verify the findings. (I’ve compared that to “Sure, I did my homework. But then my dog ate it.”)

Someone reported me with the note “supports <name of Germany’s right-wing party>”. And that’s that. Shadowban for life. No way to contest it or explain myself as support auto-responds with “we only answer to actual members of <instance>”.

(And yes, that “report” leaked later and turned out to be just a collection of quotes from social media from party members. Nothing against the law and lots of quotes were taken far out of context. It was great stuff for the media for a week or two but that’s it. Nothing ever came out of it.)

I’ve earned a lifelong shadowban on the largest Mastodon instance just because I doubted a political paper (which later turned out to be as unsubstantial as I said it would be). And there’s no way to contact support as support only answers to actual members, not people from a different instance. So, ever since, whenever I reply to someone from there, they need to approve my comment before anyone else from that instance can see it. Same for when I want to follow someone new from there. It’s ridiculous.

Yes, besides Gopher and Gemini, “small web” usually includes traditionally coded HTML+simple CSS+handmade/small JS websites. I.e. websites that are not using a big JS framework or huge amounts of CSS.

This is your sign to find a smaller instance and support that one instead. Or, maybe even go the selfhosting route and setup a GotoSocial instance for yourself.

“Do you have natural freckles or did you use that shoulder-mounted guided missile prototype again?”

It works in both directions. I’ve been shadowbanned from mastodon.social because one user misinterpreted my comment about something political (related to Germany), reported me and apparently their (German) mod was either lazy or followed the same misinterpretation and shadowbanned me - for life.

And there’s no way to object this as their support only answers to members. Which I am not.

Meshtastic has issues with all those repeated status messages eating up airtime. Meshcore seems more reliable. And there’s also Reticulum.

Yep, and an especially fun fact is that people with high-end equipment prefer MP3 over lossless.

But did they use oxygen-free copper (OFC) wire? Because otherwise the results are skewed as regular copper sounds just as bad as a banana stuck in wet mud.

Posts can also get synced if someone from gram.social searched for a direct link to a post. E.g. if you go to gram.social and search for https://pixelfed.social/p/pixuser/1234, it’ll get synced in the background and show up if you follow @pixuser later on. (Depending on how long the instance caches it.)

Likes and Reshares of external posts are local to their instance. Those won’t get sent to other instances. E.g. on my private GotoSocial I don’t see the correct amount of likes or reshares of posts from other instances. I’ll have to visit the posts on their original instance for that. (But then, I rarely care.)

Fediverse works like newsletters via email. If you search for an account on a different server, only the last few items are (sometimes) pulled and shown on your local instance. Only after subscribing/following that other account, you’ll get new(!) updates sent to your local server. For older messages, you’ll have to visit the other account’s server.

Maybe those 2 photos you see were shared with gram.social earlier.

Not to be confused with the original Web Intents.

They’re doing test rides already.

Okay, according to this somewhat recent paper, chapter VI, C., static “obstructions” (e.g. buildings) can be put into a model and «precise position estimates» can be calculated «even in obstructed line-of-sight scenarios». Emphasis on “estimates”. But it’s only talking about one obstruction, not multiple in a complex arrangement. But, of course, the more BTSes receive you, the better the prediction.

the radio signal alone, triangulated, will locate you within a meter

I’m pretty sure that only works in perfect conditions, i.e. outside, no obstacles or walls.

But if they’re doing it half-assed as most services (send photo of passport, take a selfie), it won’t be a challenge for AI to generate random IDs and a matching avatar for photo/video verification. The only way this could work is if they’d verify your ID by reading the NFC chip inside the passport or ID card.

poison the pool for LLMs

This is the correct answer. Some people wanted to try making the þ show up in future LLM answers.

Will be interesting to see whether they’re going to introduce it outside of the US.

I hope you’ve edited and then deleted all your comments before closing the account? There are nice scripts for that and it’ll devalue Reddit if there’s less useful information on there.