About ten years ago a dear friend and I started a community radio station. In order to make our FCC license more competitive, we started internet streaming pretty early on.

We had great community buy-in, but we needed to broadcast 24/7 and decided to record and rebroadcast live shows.

We had no money, just a MacMini. So we had to do everything with things that came with MacOS or were free or near free.

We ended up creating a pretty impressive interlinking set of AppleScripts, Automator apps, and iTunes Smart Playlists, all driven by Calendar alarms. Calendar alarms would start recordings, which would use the magic import to iTunes folder to get it into iTunes. This would then move into a smart playlist that was set to look for certain tags and only have the most recent audio file with those tags in it.

When a rebroadcast would come up, it was pretty simple. A calendar alarm would trigger an AppleScript that triggered one of these Smart Playlists.

It all worked well for a long time. Ultimately we got our FCC license, and donations allowed us to improve our IT. But this station ran on iTunes, AudioHijack, AppleScript, Automator, and Calendar alarms for years.

I’ve been on the Fediverse for years and I’ve never much encountered this. I curate my timelines very carefully. I don’t look at the Local or Federated timelines in Mastodon, Pixelfed, or Lemmy.

That said, I do the exact same thing with all social media. I don’t go to the subreddits that would have such content, don’t follow users on Twitter who spew this content, etc.

I’m not disputing that it’s there, because of course it is. But it’s also there on every other social media platform, and with far more resources these platforms haven’t been able to do nearly anything about it.

I don’t know what the answer is to this propaganda, and I want to make clear that I think it’s awful. But it’s the fault of social media writ large, not the Fediverse.

In fact, I’ve found the Fediverse to be better about calling it out and encouraging defederating offending instances than I’ve seen on traditional social media, which seems to shrug its shoulders at it at best and actively encourages it at worst.

I still really want to understand what those apps are doing in the background to cause this in the first place.

Not a bad idea! I think of works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilliogy, which has a pretty significant focus in the second book about what a new style of collaborative governance might look like. Narrative is always the most powerful way to convince people of ideas, so I say go for it!

What an interesting idea. As this project scales, how would you think of getting around the Reddit API limit problem? This sounds pretty API intensive. I also wonder if Reddit might see this as a TOS violation (particularly when the bot was posting comments) and killing it without even reaching an API limit.

That said, I applauded you for trying to think of creative ways to increase content on Lemmy. One thing in particular that I miss are the questions on niche subreddits, particularly hobby subreddits. You can learn so much just by reading others’ questions. Lemmy doesn’t have the user base and reach to support stuff like that yet, so I like that you’re trying to think of ways to increase that content here.

Makes sense. I just spent 5 days reconstructing my network due to a variety of inefficiencies. Happy to say it worked out on the end, but it was hell during.

Good luck!

Huh. Well, there goes that idea.

Next I would try removing the AppleTV from the Home. Force the HomePod to be the hub and see if scenes work.

If that doesn’t work, I’d try completely starting your Home over, with the first device you connect being the HomePod and the second being the AppleTV. I realize that’s not ideal but you’re having abnormal behavior here. I have an AppleTV, HomePod, and HomePod Mini on a network with multiple smart devices and everything works fine.

When you go to Home.app>3 dots in the upper right>Home Settings>Home Hub and Bridged, do you see the HomePod there?