Brecht Savelkoul

@sarangshah@mastodon.social Bram is on his way here by the way. His confirmation mail is still clogged on an overworked server somewhere, so maybe give it another 12 hours or so.

@sarangshah@mastodon.social I also remember how our Etherpad crashed because a power cut in my place corrupted my Pi's SD card... It also ran my personal mail server so I lost a few months of mails in the process too.

So yeah, investing a little bit more in robustness might be advisable lol.

*I'll still be keeping an eye on things there until it completely collapses, but I've switched off my crossposter and will probably limit myself to replying to people and gently helping them towards the exit.

@lukestarwalker@mastodon-belgium.be Er is een builtin setting om het automatisch afspelen van GIFs te stoppen. (Preferences >Appearance, en dan "Auto-play animated GIFs" uitvinken.)

Having bowed out* of Twitter by posting "Always Hardcore" by Scooter, I'd like to welcome all new people here by sharing a tune from another giant of German music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80Jw8MuZxo

@untitaker Maybe, though I've always found the domain block feature mostly makes up for the cases where instance moderation is lagging (or even not desired).

Basically, I think the need mass-blocking was a symptom of the Hobbesian war of all against all on Twitter, and that we hopefully won't need here anymore.

This post needs more boosts and less faves. Let's make the grumps feel welcome!

(Not too welcome though, lest they stop being grumpy.)

@bokane Ah maybe Tumblr is your best bet for now then, as their current owner has shown interest in adding ActivityPub support: https://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1589665959337656322

@bryankam Right, it's often very helpful to be able to click on a specific concept and see how contemporaries in different schools used it. Of course it regularly raises more questions than it answers, but that's part of the fun.

@bokane Yeah I'm not too keen on it either. Real-time chat is no match for the fast-but-still-asynchronous experience of microblogging. But under the current circumstances I'm prepared to go back and weather out the siege, hoping that an improved fediverse can Dunkirk us out of there eventually.

@bokane The worst control freaks will either loosen up a bit or get forked.

This has already happened before over a disagreement on server-only posts (see: https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown), so it's bound to happen again over whichever pet feature gets people worked up enough to make it happen.

I'm pleased to report that @yuanyi_z has (albeit somewhat reluctantly) entered the building as well.

@bryankam About three years ago I picked up a second-hand copy of the Dao De Jing which also included the characters of a particular manuscript. Since then I've been close reading it character-by-character (partly as a way to procrastinate on my learning of modern Mandarin).

In trying to figure out the meaning of particular characters I often end up clicking through (on https://ctext.org) and reading fragments of other classical texts like the Analects, the Zhuangzi, Shang Jun Shu, etc.

Oh right, I forgot to mention @SexyCyborg. She's been around this place longer than me, which might be why I'd overlooked her originally.

On the other place I followed a lot of people who posted interesting stuff on Chinese culture, language, and economics. To see if we can rebuild that here, I'll go ahead and recommend some people to follow.

Let me start with some folks who I first encountered on here, just to prove that we don't need Twitter to make new connections:

@TaoJiang
@bryankam
@jared

New arrivals from Twitter might want to check out @debirdify to find back their connections from over there. It seems to be struggling a bit under the load right now (or maybe it's Twitter's API that's struggling?) but it does work for me still, just slightly slower.

Note that this will only work if Twitter is still running, so I wouldn't postpone it for too long...

Heuristic: if the first paragraph of a person's Wikipedia bio includes the word "philantropist", there's an 80% chance you're dealing with a narcissistic sociopath. #EffectiveAltruism #moa

(Quoting from memory, feel free to correct any mistake.)