Unsurprisingly given its extremely high profile as a purveyor of transphobic coverage, many mastodon instances have greeted them with a firm block. (If this confuses folks who don't pay attention to this sort of thing, just picture in your head if it was fox news.)

I posted a medium-short summary elsewhere with a couple of links for folks looking for slightly more context.

I don't think the eris or defederation things are Huge News in themselves, but if it's true he doctored a screenshot to make the .art admin look bad, that's not a good look for a lead deve/flagship instance admin.

.art is an influential leader in community safety/moderation standards in the fediverse; their standards for federation are moderately high, and probably higher than folks on many lemmy instances would likely agree with. But it feels like the firefish guy has possibly a pattern of not doing his homework about things in general?

Obviously the big question is, did he actually doctor screenshots and if so, WTF, man.

Lol what does any of that wall of text have to do with "diversity."

There's not much drama here tbh; "admin defederates a somewhat controversial instance and some people agree and some people don't" is, as other commenters have said, very business as usual for the fediverse.

I do think it's natural in lemmy for people on other instances to have takes about defed calls because they may use communities on one of those two servers, or both, and be impacted as defederation splits the user bases. But it feels like most of the "drama" here is just free speech maximalist/libertarian trolling.

...it doesn't.

I would definitely recommend binging James Hoffmann’s YouTube channel or getting his book on home coffee as he does a very good job of breaking things down in a way that is detailed but approachable. It’s a great jumping on point.

Pick one or two inexpensive brewing methods to try first and try coffees from different roasters and different origins and processes and roast levels to figure out what you like.

You don’t have to drink coffee black if you don’t want to, but it’s a good idea to at least try coffees black first (let them cool down a bit too) before you add milk. Light and medium roast coffees that are good quality and brewed well can be sweet and fruity with little bitterness and should taste good on their own. You may still end up preferring to take it with milk, though, and that’s fine!

There are many different visions for "success" of decentralized projects, some of which require/imply explosive growth and some do not. There are also some goals, such as diversity and inclusivity, which can have complicated relationships with the concept of "growth."

I want all kinds of people (that are NOT BIGOTS) to be join the fediverse, participate safely and form their own communities[^1].

To achieve this, it's beneficial for it to be easy for folks to join the fediverse at all, e.g., being able to easily find an instance and sign up for an account and not worry about the infrastructure or instance politics, and critically to be able to easily find one another and interact. These are also features that just fuel userbase growth generally.

But to sustain it, it's necessary to have strong moderation (which in turn requires a manageable workload for mods) and to keep large pools of bad actors in check. It's also important on a safety basis for many users to be less discoverable because high discoverability of marginalized users results in high rates of harassment by bigots. These are features that support a better and safer experience for people who are in the fediverse.

These things are directly in tension, which makes it very difficult to have a healthy fediverse. The result on Mastodon has been a bifurcation of "successful" (by different definitions) instances into, on the one hand, very large but poorly moderated instances with garbage fire local timelines but lots of people and lots of content to interact with, and, on the other hand, smaller, well moderated instances that flourish internally but can be hard to join or to interact with if you're on one of the large instances.

Both models exert exclusionary forces in their own ways. If you keep everyone in your federation, and that includes nazis, then you are de facto participating in driving people who are targeted by nazis off of the network. But if your happy little closed instances are impossible to join and has a constraining monoculture, then a lot of other nice folks may get left out.

There's not an easy solution to this. The situation for lemmy will be similar in some ways and different in others. The piece that worries me particularly is that instance politics questions become potentially more charged due to the fact that instances are hosting the communities[^2] and not just the users, plus there's not yet a way to migrate communities.

[^1]: in the sense of social connections generally, not just "community" as a lemmy feature [^2]: In the lemmy feature sense

I'm not on lemmy.world, but I've joined some communities that are. I think an important question is, for any community mods who take this stance, do you plan to shutter your lemmy.world community and move to another?

This situation is one reason why it's important to get tools for community migration into Lemmy. (Another is: what if an admin simply has to shut down their instance for personal reasons?)

(Also FWIW there's already reason to defederate based on the garbage moderation even if you're not concerned about EEE, so I don't get admins who are in "wait and see" mode.)

It's hard to say what will help each individual because everybody has different ergonomic needs, and obviously, nobody here can provide medical or occupational health advice.

That being said, some things to think about:

• If you haven't already, make sure that your desk height and typing style are reasonably ergonomic. Conventional wisdom is that you want your forearms to be about level with the floor and your hands should be floating above the keyboard, not resting on your desk.
• For issues that are caused by wrist angle, there are two major features a keyboard can offer:
  • Split, letting you separate the halves so that your wrists aren't pointing inward
  • Tented, meaning that you can change the angle of the keyboard so that you can get the most comfortable position rotationally
• Many ergonomic keyboards also use a column-staggered layout, which should be better for your fingers, but will require some learning curve to get used to
• Some also have keywell designs that are scooped so your fingers don't have to stretch as far

You may want to compare different layouts before deciding on a board to try: https://compare.splitkb.com/

For off the shelf prebuilts, see things like Kinesis, Keyboardio, the Glove80, Ergodox, Moonlander

For something a bit more DIY, Keebio offers a range of split boards, and some of them are available prebuilt in addition to kit form. Some are hotswap as well. Splitkb also makes really good kits.

There are lots of other vendors, like Little Keyboards, Beekeeb, Falbatech, BastardKB, ohkeycaps, and others

The more the merrier for the Fediverse and if you don’t like it, ~~join a smaller project or find one with the privacy policy that suites you.~~ defederate

The good thing about decentralized platforms is that you don't have to immediately cede the public square to corporate ownership or resign yourself to sharing space with the worst bad actors.

I have no desire to see facebook in the fediverse, but that's not really gentrification, it's more like Walmart. (Anti-competitive corporate monopoly suppressing competition and forcing everyone to serve their bottom line)

Gentrification refers to the displacement of poor and working class people, and especially people of color, by affluent people, especially white. That's not the specific dynamic here, in no small part because Mastodon has been self-gentrifying[^1] aggressively from the beginning. (It is jokingly referred to as the HOA of the internet)

[^1]: Through white techies being constantly obnoxious to POC who have the temerity to try to join the fediverse, the particular culture of content warning policing, and lack of discoverability making it hard to form community. Note: there's no reason to think facebook would improve any of this.

Bripe it

https://youtu.be/_IOKQpixkiY

For example, did you know a release of a new fully open source LLM called OpenLLaMA just got announced by the Researchers at Berkeley AI Research?

Lol, a lot of my friends experience all LLM news as doomscrolling basically because of how those tools are being used, to whose profit and at whose expense.

Not trying to pick a fight about that here, just that it's funny how relative "doom" is.

Anywho it would be entirely reasonable to create a community dedicated to good technology news however you define it. Reality itself is pretty dark these days so any given cross-section of it is going to contain a lot of doom by default.