Boris Mann @news.cosocial.ca I support #CoSocialCaTechOps for the CoSocial community.
I'm based in Vancouver. I like to cook and eat. DWeb, open source, and community building.
More: https://bmann.ca
What is your favourite place for waffles?
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/1566737
> I've tried Nero and remain unimpressed. The mochi waffle at Canffle is pretty good though!
David Moscrop: The battle between tech giants and the government is a turf war, and we're caught in the middle (Bill C18)
Google and Meta are fighting back against a poorly-crafted Canadian law. But that doesn't make them the good guys.
I’ve posted a fair bit of links around Bill C18 and how it’s bad, and had people assume that I’m somehow on the side of Google & Facebook.
Moscrop does a good job explaining that literally everyone involved here is bad, but that it does need fixing.
> we ought to accept a few things: the Online News Act is bad law that needs to be amended or scrapped, Google and Meta are not your friends, we need to find a way to save journalism, some (legacy) media companies are awful themselves, and we need to reign in the tech giants and force them to pay for what they extract from their workers and from us.
Update to Lemmy v0.18
The news.cosocial.ca server is now updated to Lemmy v0.18. Changes are described in the release announcement
I did hit the server error and set icon to null to fix from using ansible to deploy.
Michael Geist: A Massive Own-Goal for the Government: Google to Stop News Links in Canada Due to Bill C-18
Michael Geist's commentary on Google removing corporate media from Search and News
> That surely presented an unwelcome choice either way: agree to flawed legislation that creates a dangerous precedent on paying for links or knowingly decrease the value of its own service. By choosing to block links, the damage will be felt across Canada. For the news sector, this could result in news outlets shutting down altogether as the combined effect of blocked news links and news sharing on the Google and Meta will cut some sites traffic in half and lead to huge revenue losses. Services with existing deals with likely see that revenue disappear as well. For Canadians, Google search will be less reliable with Canadian news links removed and the Google News service shut down. This is likely to increase reliance on foreign news services and lower-quality services at the precise time that concerns over misinformation continue to grow.
(emphasis mine)
Previous post by Michael Geist: Media Chaos
The TLDR elsewhere is that... Canadian universities have actually risen in rankings and for our population this is actually good.
Michael Geist: Media Chaos: How the Government’s Legislative Plans to Support Canadian Media Have Backfired Spectacularly (Bill C-18 Commentary)
The Online News Act may be only days removed from having received royal assent, but the government’s plans to support the Canadian media sector have already backfired spectacularly. While it claimed its Bill C-18 would add millions of dollars to the sector and support struggling media companies, the...
> The Online News Act may be only days removed from having received royal assent, but the government’s plans to support the Canadian media sector have already backfired spectacularly. While it claimed its Bill C-18 would add millions of dollars to the sector and support struggling media companies, the reality has quickly intervened: blocked news sharing on Internet platforms with cancelled deals on the horizon, reports of direct corporate intervention in news departments, massive layoffs and regulatory requests to decrease spending on news, and now a nightmare merger proposal between Postmedia and Torstar. And that is just over the past week. Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez has amply demonstrated that there is no Plan B, offering up the prospect of further dependence on government through more public spending to mitigate the harms from his massive miscalculations. Not all of this is the government’s doing, but having relied on empty assurances that blocked news sharing was merely a bluff, Rodriguez picked politics and tough talk over good policy and is now left with media chaos.
There were a couple of food vendors and some singing when I walked by the other night.
Summer cold coffee & tea drinks at Prado Café
cross-posted from: https://news.cosocial.ca/post/3965
> I’ll have to add it to my Espresso Tonic List. > > Also Razzy-Jazzy iced tea, cold brew, and whatever Raspberry Ripple Cold Brew is. > > What other Vancouver cafes have espresso tonics or other fun drinks?
I have seen worse behaviour and bias from corporate media than independent. I think we perhaps have very different pictures of what this means.
My 20 years of seeing people denigrated as “bloggers” while opinion columnists are platformed and not held accountable hasn’t made me feel good about the information coming from corporate media.
And yeah we’re in a tough spot. We need much better discussion tools. I don’t think the CRTC is the right entity to do a good job here.
My opinion on the corporate media that is the only one funded by this is the same as what you've just said. Just in a rich get richer approach to media in Canada. That's (one of) the big issues I have with this bill.
DUST Exhibition New Media Gallery, June 4th - Aug 13th, 2023
The New Media Gallery is contemporary public art gallery devoted to the presentation of international, national and regional new media art.
cross-posted from: https://news.cosocial.ca/post/4190
I just went to see the current exhibition at the New Media Gallery, DUST:
> Search and you will find dust woven through the universe; swept up, dispersed and deposited across the globe; collecting in every corner of our lives. All of humanity lives on a fragment of cosmic dust…and we are dust. Visible, invisible, meaningful, reviled; dust has been exploited by artists as material, subject, ontology and here as landscape…full of properties, concepts and relationships and the potential to convey expansive ideas, Dust has been handed down to us through histories, words and images. In this exhibition it is interpreted through complex technologies, data collection, augmented videography and sound. DUST brings together three award-winning artists who have created extraordinary, populated landscapes, each underscored with striking aggregations of sound.
Features 3 artists:
- Denis Beaubois, No longer Adrift (2013, updated 2023)
- Herman Kolgen, Dust Surface (2010)
- Michael Saup, DustVR (2018-2023)
All three are amazing. GO SEE THIS SHOW
Also shout out to Director/Curator Gordan Duggan who was our guide for the show. We try and catch all the shows here and he's very often the person there, and he's a great guide and personally excited about all the pieces and artists.
DUST Exhibition New Media Gallery, June 4th - Aug 13th, 2023
The New Media Gallery is contemporary public art gallery devoted to the presentation of international, national and regional new media art.
I just went to see the current exhibition at the New Media Gallery, DUST:
> Search and you will find dust woven through the universe; swept up, dispersed and deposited across the globe; collecting in every corner of our lives. All of humanity lives on a fragment of cosmic dust…and we are dust. Visible, invisible, meaningful, reviled; dust has been exploited by artists as material, subject, ontology and here as landscape…full of properties, concepts and relationships and the potential to convey expansive ideas, Dust has been handed down to us through histories, words and images. In this exhibition it is interpreted through complex technologies, data collection, augmented videography and sound. DUST brings together three award-winning artists who have created extraordinary, populated landscapes, each underscored with striking aggregations of sound.
Features 3 artists:
- Denis Beaubois, No longer Adrift (2013, updated 2023)
- Herman Kolgen, Dust Surface (2010)
- Michael Saup, DustVR (2018-2023)
All three are amazing. GO SEE THIS SHOW
Also shout out to Director/Curator Gordan Duggan who was our guide for the show. We try and catch all the shows here and he's very often the person there, and he's a great guide and personally excited about all the pieces and artists.
Do you agree that indepedent Canadian media should also get paid?
But it's OK for independent media in Canada to not get paid?
Sure. Then it should also apply to independent media. Which the Canadian bill does not. The Canadian government is picking and chooseing who news media is.
Summer cold coffee & tea drinks at Prado Café
I’ll have to add it to my Espresso Tonic List.
Also Razzy-Jazzy iced tea, cold brew, and whatever Raspberry Ripple Cold Brew is.
What other Vancouver cafes have espresso tonics or other fun drinks?
OpenMedia on Bill C-18 and how it only supports corporate media in Canada
Bill C-18, the Online News Act needs major fixes to support a diverse and independent press!
This was OpenMedia’s fix Bill C-18 campaign. It’s unclear if any of this was fixed when it got passed.
> Right now, most of the funding goes straight into the pockets of large broadcast media like Corus, Rogers and the CBC. Newspapers? Minority players. Local news that’s already disappeared? Zero help. Startup outlets? Not included. Effective news support should be concentrated on where news is fast disappearing, not on broadcast outlets that don’t need the help.2,3 > > What about press independence? As written, Bill C-18 hands enormous power to Big Tech and to the CRTC to secretly shape the type of news that gets made in Canada. News organizations enter into secret deals with platforms to get funding; there's no public reporting on who receives funds, how much they’re receiving, or why some groups wind up approved while others are rejected.4 That’s not good enough. Transparency about who’s funding the news and how they reached their deal is vital for the public to maintain trust in the news industry.5 Any legislation must ensure that eligibility decisions are made publicly, transparently, and without government or platform pressure.
Because it’s supporting Canadian mega corporations. Read OpenMedia https://action.openmedia.org/page/121153/petition/1?
West Coast Family Nights In Woodland Park
cross-posted from: https://news.cosocial.ca/post/3896
> Walking through Woodland Park yesterday and saw this sign and went and looked up the event > > > A celebration of the rich cultural traditions of the West Coast Indigenous peoples. > > > > Every Wednesday night through the summer starting June 21, 6 PM to 9 PM. > > > > This is a family event. Alcohol and drug free.
West Coast Family Nights In Woodland Park
Walking through Woodland Park yesterday and saw this sign and went and looked up the event
> A celebration of the rich cultural traditions of the West Coast Indigenous peoples. > > Every Wednesday night through the summer starting June 21, 6 PM to 9 PM. > > This is a family event. Alcohol and drug free.
Sure. Except, if you read the article, this is about a fundamental discussion about paying to link to things. Should every post to Lemmy pay the website it links to?
No, you’ll get different content based on everything from flaky federation (software that isn’t perfect) to differences in moderation.
So, for moderation, let’s do an example. Bob has an account on Server A. He posts a comment on a community with his Server A account which is federated from Server B.
But Bob breaks the terms of service / moderation rules on Server B. Server B mods block his account and his comment is not visible there.
If Alice views the comments on the post on Server A, she’ll see Bob’s comment. On Server B, where Bob is blocked, Alice won’t see Bob’s comment.
On Mastodon, servers will sometimes connect to Relays which specialize in moving content between many different servers, which is different than moderation blocks ;)
TIL that in the docs there is a detailed explanation for how federation and search works in Lemmy
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1249965
> !
>
> Guide: One way you can take advantage of federation is by opening a different instance, like ds9.lemmy.ml, and browsing it. If you see an interesting community, post or user that you want to interact with, just copy its URL and paste it into the search of your own instance. Your instance will connect to the other one (assuming the allowlist/blocklist allows it), and directly display the remote content to you, so that you can follow a community or comment on a post. Here are some examples of working searches:
> > - [email protected] (Community) > - @[email protected] (User) > - https://lemmy.ml/c/programming (Community) > - https://lemmy.ml/u/nutomic (User) > - https://lemmy.ml/post/123 (Post) > - https://lemmy.ml/comment/321 (Comment) >
>
> You can see the list of linked instances by following the "Instances" link at the bottom of any Lemmy page.
DWebYVR Organizers Garden Gathering June 30th
The DWeb YVR organizers are meeting in the garden. Get a mini tour of the garden, and talk about what our next plans are on what to work on. Please add to the agenda on Github...
cross-posted from: https://cosocial.ca/users/boris/statuses/110590325981847185
> DWebYVR Organizers Garden Gathering June 30th > > https://lu.ma/pjdlgvpi > > We're doing a catch up next Friday afternoon to talk about what to work on next for #DWebYVR, plus share what we're all working on. > > Open to all, come meet us in the garden if you want to organize or attend events in Vancouver. >
Takahē new focus as ActivityPub home page server
cross-posted from: https://news.cosocial.ca/post/3451
Takahē is a Python ActivityPub server whose original goal was supporting multiple domains from one install:
> When I started the project, my main goal was to show that multi-domain support for a single ActivityPub server was possible; once I had achieved that relatively early on, I sort of fell down the default path of implementing a lightweight clone of Mastodon/Twitter.
I love the new direction, focusing on identity:
> So, my new design goal is now to really take advantage of the multi-domain support and provide an experience that lets a diverse set of people, projects or companies, with a set of different domain names, logos and design ideas, all exist on the same server but still have their own profiles and identities that they can shape more in line with what they want.
Will support microblogging, but be focused on a sort of homepage functionality.
It’s still new, but the Takahē server is now focused on homepage functionality.
Takahē new focus as ActivityPub home page server
Takahē is a Python ActivityPub server whose original goal was supporting multiple domains from one install:
> When I started the project, my main goal was to show that multi-domain support for a single ActivityPub server was possible; once I had achieved that relatively early on, I sort of fell down the default path of implementing a lightweight clone of Mastodon/Twitter.
I love the new direction, focusing on identity:
> So, my new design goal is now to really take advantage of the multi-domain support and provide an experience that lets a diverse set of people, projects or companies, with a set of different domain names, logos and design ideas, all exist on the same server but still have their own profiles and identities that they can shape more in line with what they want.
Will support microblogging, but be focused on a sort of homepage functionality.
TechDirt: As Canada Passes Corrupt Link Tax, Meta Says No More News Links In Canada
Two weeks ago, Canada’s Heritage Minister, Pablo Rodriguez, who has been the main Canadian government official pushing for C-18, the bullshit link tax bill, that is just a corrupt wealth transfer f…
TechDirt’s Mike Masnick gets it exactly right in covering Canada’s C-18 bill:
> If you believe in the open web, if you believe that you should never have to pay to link to something, if you believe that no one should have to pay to provide you a benefit, then you should support Meta’s stance here. Yes, it’s self-serving for Meta. Of course it is. But, even if it’s by accident, or a side-effect, it’s helping to defend the open web, against a ridiculous attack from an astoundingly ignorant and foolish set of Canadian politicians.
And just generally points out the huge holes in Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez understanding from the Power & Politics Interview.
Bluesky: Moderation in a Public Commons
> The tooling we’re building for moderation tries to take into consideration how social spaces are formed and shaped through communities. > > Today, we’re publishing some proposals for new moderation and safety tooling. The first focuses on user lists and reply controls which can be used for community-driven moderation. The second will focus on moderator services and how they can handle problems that small communities can’t. The third is for Hashtags, which are not directly related to moderation but can have a large effect on customizing what you see. (We wanted to include this to distinguish between the labeling proposal, which is intended to address moderation, and mechanisms for discovery.)
> The goal of Bluesky is to rebuild social networking so that there’s not a lock-in to the founding company, which is us. We can try to provide a cohesive, enjoyable experience, but there’s always an exit. Users can move their accounts to other providers. Developers can run their own connected infrastructure. Creators can keep access to their audiences. We hope this helps break the cycle of social media companies coming into conflict with the open web.
The post goes on and is all good reading.
Bill C-18 in Canada + Meta ActivityPub == Canadian media should join the Fediverse
The conjunction of Bill C-18 in Canada with the rumoured release of an ActivityPub-enabled service from Meta seems incredibly fortuitous. I will now shout for those in the back of the room. MEDIA COMPANIES IN CANADA: NOW IS THE TIME TO SET UP YOUR SITE ON THE FEDIVERSE. YOUR SITE, YOUR RULES. REA...
@evan posts on Mastodon:
> The conjunction of Bill C-18 in Canada with the rumoured release of an ActivityPub-enabled service from Meta seems incredibly fortuitous. > > I will now shout for those in the back of the room. > > MEDIA COMPANIES IN CANADA: NOW IS THE TIME TO SET UP YOUR SITE ON THE FEDIVERSE. > > YOUR SITE, YOUR RULES. REACH YOUR AUDIENCE DIRECTLY.
My wishlist would be to be able to link Mastodon accounts to Lemmy accounts, so the Lemmy system "knows" it's the same person. Including being able to edit the posts that come in from Mastodon, which right now is the biggest issue.
This post as an example, I was framing it as a Masto post, and it's pretty terrible on Lemmy. I'd focus on optimizing favourite/boost/comment from Mastodon as that is I think going to work best - comments don't need first class titles, links, and feature images.
For OPs, wouldn't it be amazing if I could DM some links and images and stuff, and then login to Lemmy/kbin and have it appear as a draft, and then publish it natively with rich text tools on the Lemmy/kbin side.
Subscribing via Mastodon works much better for me, even if I then go over and interact with my Lemmy account. I want both OPs and comments, and it's easy enough to put in a list or otherwise manage notifications from my clients. Micro-blog native vs Thread native people are going to differ in their opinions here :)
It's literally a quick test with me filling out two, and @[email protected] submitting one. Can you dump a link to a CSV or source into an issue there of the stuff you're gathering please -- I need examples to build out the schema, so I can actually display that rather than just the blog post stuff. Well, and the JSON file underneath that is meant to be used as an API.
I think being able to login with your Mastodon account and/or linking your Mastodon account to a local Lemmy account might be a good feature to write up.
I’m finding all sorts of edge cases. You can’t really edit posts that you make that are posted from Mastodon.
still, I really like it as a feature and am using it myself.
I wrote a whole article with screenshots of how Mastodon and Lemmy interop.
I was with TekSavvy for a long time but they were getting worse. I Switched to Oxio https://oxio.ca which is cheaper and faster than TS was. It’s a brand for Cogeco.
That's not how tenant unions work. I'm not in Toronto, but collecting a list of these unions and having a look at them might be useful.
Often times there are ones for particularly vulnerable groups, like new immigrants or single mothers. Rather than tenants have to figure stuff out on their own.
I did a quick search and found the Federation of Metro Tenants' Associations. Becoming a member is more about supporting and donating over time, much like you would any organization you believe in whether as an individual or a business.
The services of these organizations are free for tenants, like the Toronto Renters Forum that the FMTA runs https://www.torontotenants.org/toronto_renters_forum
Standing in solidarity might mean sharing their stuff, supporting their point of view, or any number of other supportive, joint action.
Mastodon <> Lemmy Interoperability
I did a bunch of experiments today and ... thoroughly confused myself, so I wrote down a bunch of things and took screenshots.
Here's what I learned:
(I have more protocol info but ultimately this is the lived experience of working across different software systems, federation, and the actual client / front end web experiences that people interact through)
Paste Lemmy URLs
Various things "just work" by pasting URLs into the Mastodon web interface or the Mastodon mobile app.
!Screenshot of Mastodon Web UI posting in a Lemmy URL
Posting the link to this post https://lemmy.ca/post/606549 finds this post
Clicking on the user profile shows me a profile for [email protected], with one post displayed. Including a follow button
Only one post is shown, because that's all that's available on the local server right now. If I chose to follow Doctor_Pi's Lemmy account, I'd get all of their posts going forward. Both OPs (which has a link to the post on Lemmy.ca) as well as comments (which appear as replies).
Limited support on other clients
Other clients (Ivory on iOS) have extremely variable support. You can't usually paste in Lemmy URLs, but you can paste in Lemmy accounts and follow them, and then see posts going forward.
Please leave a comment of what does / doesn't work in your particular client.
Follow Lemmy users on Mastodon
Every Lemmy user can be followed on Mastodon. So, for example, my Lemmy account @[email protected]. Paste that into the web interface of Mastodon or into the Mastodon native mobile app and you will find my Lemmy profile and can follow it.
Reply to a Lemmy post from Mastodon
If you reply to a Lemmy post using your Mastodon account, your reply will be posted as a comment. A user profile is created on the Lemmy instance.
I just did that with this very post, and it seems to have worked.
!Screenshot of Boris' CoSocial Mastodon profile, viewed here
This is my [email protected] Mastodon account, viewed through news.cosocial.ca as a local user profile. All of that info -- including the images -- are from my Mastodon profile.
The comment is technically originally on Lemmy.ca.
Create new OP post from Mastodon
You can create new OP posts directly from Mastodon. @-mention the group name, e.g. @[email protected].
Here's my test post which ended up creating this post in /c/cosocial.
It works! Exactly how the post ends up looking in Lemmy is a bit variable, so more experimenting to be done
Follow Lemmy Communities on Mastodon
!Screenshot of Masto Web interface of [email protected]
![Screenshot of Masto Web interface of [email protected]](https://news.cosocial.ca/pictrs/image/c729e731-9136-48dd-a62a-f6cf22f8419f.png){kind=link}
Screenshot of vaneats through CoSocial Masto web interface. You can see a little "group" label next to the name
I can't actually browse posts from here, don't know if that's a sync issue or what.
Here's a screenshot of @[email protected] which shows all the OP and comments.
All of the posts appear as boosts of the Lemmy accounts that are posting the content
Original
I reworked this post from a comment to LemmyCA Support on how the ActivityPub protocol works between Lemmy and Mastodon.
OK, this is VERY good. And just mention it anywhere? Hmm. Does the first link or image end up in the link or image field in Lemmy? I'll try your test group!
Ah yes, I didn't mean to skip group / community following, and I am following some already. The note there is that the communities don't make posts -- they boost the posts of the OP account posts / commenter posts (this would be a good screenshot too). I need to put all of this probably on a page on cosocial.info as a permanent FAQ.
You're right, if I were to create user [email protected], that would overlap with a group named vancouver. On lemmy, it's @ vs ! of course.
Feels like Lemmy should check for that and not allow it? My lag on sign up makes it annoying to test. One of the things I need to ask you about.
Both speak ActivityPub and yes you can use a Mastodon client to interact with Lemmy communities.
I did a bunch of experiments today and ... thoroughly confused myself.
Here's what I learned:
(I have more protocol info but ultimately this is the lived experience of working across different software systems, federation, and the actual client / front end web experiences that people interact through)
Various things "just work" by pasting URLs into the Mastodon web interface or the Mastodon mobile app.
Posting the link to this post https://lemmy.ca/post/606549 finds this post
Clicking on the user profile shows me a profile for [email protected], with one post displayed. Including a follow button
Only one post is shown, because that's all that's available on the local server right now. If I chose to follow Doctor_Pi's Lemmy account, I'd get all of their posts going forward. Both OPs (which has a link to the post on Lemmy.ca) as well as comments (which appear as replies).
Other clients (Ivory on iOS) have extremely variable support. You can't usually paste in Lemmy URLs, but you can paste in Lemmy accounts and follow them, and then see posts going forward.
You can't create an "original post" using just a Mastodon account, you have to have a Lemmy account and create it somewhere (I'd love this to be not true, and maybe we can make this a feature request!)
Every Lemmy user can be followed on Mastodon. So, for example, my Lemmy account @[email protected]. Paste that into the web interface of Mastodon or into the Mastodon native mobile app and you will find my Lemmy profile and can follow it.
If you reply to a Lemmy post using your Mastodon account, your reply will be posted as a comment. A user profile is created on the Lemmy instance.
I just did that with this very post, and it seems to have worked.
This is my [email protected] Mastodon account, viewed through news.cosocial.ca as a local user profile. All of that info -- including the images -- are from my Mastodon profile.
The comment is technically originally on Lemmy.ca.
I'll leave it there for now. Still exploring different combinations. I have two questions / features I'd like to enable for Lemmy <> Mastodon.
Being able to create OP directly from Mastodonworks!
- You'd be limited by character limits, lack of more formatting, no inline images, and so on. Depending on your Mastodon server you might have larger character limits, or something like the Elk or Phanpy web front ends could enable "Lemmy mode" from your Mastodon account.
- If I were designing this, I'd do it as maybe a DM to the group account. e.g. DM
@[email protected].
This does work, see @smorks, and his post on Mastodon.
- Logging in to a Lemmy instance with your Mastodon account
- If it's already creating profiles for Mastodon accounts, why not go all the way and just use your Mastodon account to login? You need to trust your Mastodon host more than your Lemmy host.
- More likely: a "linking" mode, where you do need a "local" account, but you can link it with your Mastodon account so there aren't two of you :)
I guess to put the question back to you, what would motivate you to pay $5/month or $50/year to support LemmyCa?
You’re also talking to people who also think it’s an important question. My answer is “I think we should all pay for it”.