What happens when you get training data from Reddit:

I know it’s a lot to ask of our media overlords PostMedia, TorStar, Rogers and Bell, but if you want to be protected from persecution from America, you’d better be sounding the alarm bells now.

I mean old, un-Musked Twitter was what people wanted. Mastodon is similar, and I like it but it’s not Twitter (which personally I couldn’t get into even in its heyday).

That is what we have now, but clearly people are averse to making a choice that they are not technically inclined to know how big or small the consequences of that are. My solution is a spitball one with obvious flaws, but essentially it is that the instance is picked randomly out of a group of very closely, if not identically aligned servers.

It’s one place that the Canadian legal system has gotten one-up on the US system (Johnson v. Grants Pass), between this and the City of Victoria case. Unless cases in other provinces rule differently (i.e. Prairies’ Bench courts say its no problem to evict, Cour Supérieure de Québec okays it as long as displaced residents get 3 packs of smokes and a 2-4 of beer each etc.), I could see that any appeal could eventually see the federal supreme court ruling along the same lines.

It shows that we have a robust set of Rights given to us by the Charter, but it is easier for cities to overlook them if they aren’t asserted.

You’d have different domain names to get people used to the concept. John Doe would sign up, and become john.doe@apple.server.hostname, Jane Doe would sign up and become jane.doe@banana.server.hostname

Hey… that just gave me a small idea… what if we made a “flock” or “herd” of Mastodon servers? The group of servers would all federate with each other, have the same block and allow lists, moderation policy and teams spread throughout them.

When you make an account you can be assigned a random instance name within the flock. If your instance goes down you could still possibly log in using other servers? Main benefit would be spreading server costs and maintenance effort and de-centralized operating, but still keep a centralized feel to it?

Work together and be nice to each other? Sure.

Solving problems? Eh, not really a thing here. Kicking them down the road is a popular sport at every level of government here.

Yes, the same media campaign that has gotten the public at large (including young previously ‘liberal’ generations) to believe Trump’s lies is happening in Canada. Aside from a neutral reputable public news source that is CBC, we are hardly insulated from it.

It would take a HUUUUGE leap of logic

US Fifth Circuit of Appeals and Supreme Courts: “Hold My Beer”

For example, if Trump’s Republican Congress gets rid of elections, then this Amendment doesn’t matter.

I don’t know what it would look like but I know what it would sound like – a heat-pump compressor starting up.

Sorry, I can’t hear your talk about long-term consequences over the sound of my short-term profits and savings! Cha-ching, cha-ching!

People want to leave X, but they still want the same old, rather than new stuff to make things better as a whole. They don’t want to have to do this “pick a server” thing, they want to have an algorithm spoonfeed them popular content, and it would be best for them to have to put in zero extra effort. In Masto you have to put in the hashtags to get found, and search for and follow people and hashtags to find stuff you want, and essentially DIY-ing your feed seems to be too much work for people.

I don’t think it’s the worst outcome or the Fediverse needing to be written off because of this. At least for now BridgyFed is a thing, and it’s not like we have to capture every refugee, Mastodon has thriving and tight-knit communities.

You were right. The body text had transcribed as ツイッター incorrectly. It’s been edited out since.

I’m so glad that Killdozer Willie is now public domain.

I identify with the raccoon… call solid waste management if you find me like that.

The purpose of my comment is to refute the notion that “no one cares”, only partially true. Yes, most people aren’t interested in what OS I use and I’m not interested in theirs. Where they care is when things stop working the way they wanted it to.

With Linux, it can take a while to get to a comfortable spot, but you can have a configuration that keeps working for a long time, and you can upgrade when you want to. Things in Windows just happen to appear whether the user asks for it or not. If I wanted a weather widget I’ll get one, that has nothing to do with security or anti-malware except that it looked like a malware toolbar when I first saw it on a public computer. Various UI elements (like OneDrive on my work computer) keep jumping all over. With Windows it’s not my computer, and work and Microsoft spy and collect reams of my PC usage data for reasons other than anti-malware, anti-cheat and security, I personally want to keep that out of my non-work life, and I imagine others would as well.

It doesn’t matter to me that much whether you use Windows, Mac or Linux. It’s just that there are a lot of articles saying how Windows keeps nagging people to upgrade to 11, how they keep breaking their own product, how they haven’t fixed 20 year old bugs, how they tack on stuff like AI that nobody asked for, on and on. As the local tech wiz my family and friends complain to me about these unwanted changes too from time to time. On the Mac side it’s more polished but you’re locked into a very limited set of hardware options. The thing is that it’s not a given that an OS or computers do these things. There is a good alternative, and Linux evangelists (which you could call me one of) are simply making people aware of it.

“I use Linux” is an assertion that you haven’t ceded most of the control of your computer to Microsoft or Apple, and that you are willing to trade a little bit of convenience for software freedom. Just like Lemmy is to Reddit, Bluesky and Mastodon are to Xitter.

Kamloops, BC?

It’s got mountains around, it’s not completely caught in the Conservative trap, you’ve got decent amenities of civilization around without the big city or suburb vibe of Metro Vancouver, (I still think it pales as a “city” compared to Toronto), but as a day trip you can head there to sightsee or pick up big box stuff.

If you want something more laid back I second Yukon.