Adrian Cochrane @alcinnz@floss.social

reminder that if you're interested in experimenting with Gemini, you can create a site via web interface on https://flounder.online/ -- it's free and always will be! (also supports SFTP uploads and custom domains)

Ok, some more searching has turned up this: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/nr2806/help_ff89_not_rendering_properly/ - I've set gfx.webrender.force-disabled to 'true'... will see if that has any effect.

Quick question: is anyone else out there with a Radeon 5500 XT graphics card seeing font rendering corruption (e.g. missing and corrupted characters) *only affecting Firefox versions from 85ish-90* and no other apps? I'm trying to figure out what's happening. Fwiw, I'm running Linux Mint 20.2 and a 5.12.x kernel (due to the amdgpu support).

Hello, Fediverse! I am an author who will be published under Balance of Seven small-press publishing and I'm so very excited! I plan to use this account to talk about the experience of being published. I am currently through my developmental edits and am coming into my copyedits stage.

#amwriting #writing #novel #publishing

@loke @alcinnz @CyclopsCaveman yup. Community dynamics are tough. And motivation has to involve the right balance of practical gratification (i.e. technical progress and merit) and principle.

@alcinnz @CyclopsCaveman In my experience, forks that happen due to a single point of contention rarely if ever succeeds. Only people who feel strongly about this particular point will even pay attention, and the fraction of those who would be willing to contribute is generally not enough to give the fork momentum.

To be fair to Glimpse, they did want to make real improvements to the software. If they had launched with some use-visible changes to the software itself then perhaps that would have given people a reason to switch. I personally would love a version of GIMP that doesn't have a horrible UI.

There was a fork of GNOME that happened when GNOME decided to swap the order of the OK and Cancel buttons (from the Windows order to the one used by OSX). There was some drama going on around it for a few months before the project died.

Then there was the Mastodon fork, which followed a similar path.

I'd put Remacs in the same category. That project hobbled along for a few years, but it was pretty obvious from the beginning that it would never be an actual thing.

@alcinnz yeah, i've gone long stretches without even opening an image editor. i think i've used glimpse maybe once since downloading it? its really hard to justify even wasting the minimal amount of space i do use on any image editor, so getting laity to use your specific fork of a program is a huge uphill battle, and requires lots of patience and laying low in order to succeed, because you may never succeed or may not even be a blip on people's radars for years and years

glimpse could be seen as a case study in why "just fork it" is not a viable option against the a program with a large segment of market share among open source projects

"Our main issue was that we could not find contributors willing to step up and help with non-code tasks like moderating communication channels, triaging bugs, fixing packaging problems, working with the GNU Image Manipulation Program contributors, monitoring our social media accounts, running servers, testing/documenting new releases, and answering questions that users reached out to us with. As a result, we struggled to scale the project to match increasing demand."

this seems like an excruciatingly full plate for a two year old project. especially the social media accounts and communication moderation, what the fuck

lets be real, part of the reason the gnu imp people didn't change the name is because they knew the majority of their market share were either not aware of the movement to change the name or simply didn't care

Reducing CO2 emissions by targeting the world's hyper-polluting power plants #germany #climatecrisis #climatechange

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac13f1

From a comment on HN : According to this article just 5% of the world’s power plants account for almost three-quarters of carbon emissions from electricity generation.
The paper lists the top 10 polluting plants - one is in Germany.
If Germany wants to set an example, there’s where to start.

@freedcreative @alcinnz @doctormo *open *ideals* not just ideas :) My typo. It's great when open communities don't require their participants to sacrifice their privacy and data sovereignty in order to participate.

@freedcreative @alcinnz @doctormo very cool to see that, unlike many open communities, the Inkscape folks (it's software I've used since its early releases and love) have adopted community comms tools that support their open ideas, too! (I'm a big fan of Rocket.Chat even though I'm less enamoured of their recent move to a communit vs. enterprise software split - I run 6-7 instances myself for open communities).

@freedcreative @alcinnz And the structural power balance that builds in to #FOSS communities ensures less is taken for granted by all involved, including the leaders. Successful FOSS communities tend towards gift cultures and empathic instincts. Because those are the ones that are most sustainable.

@freedcreative @alcinnz absolutely. As with all self-organising communities of interest, they differ in culture and leadership, often from day-to-day! But unlike proprietary communities, in FOSS communities, authority is only ever based on respect - i.e. it's given but can't be demanded. If the latter is attempted, the community can always vote with its feet: by forking or walking away (depending on how valuable the software is to them)..

@lightweight @alcinnz Lastly, a practical example, for anyone reading that may be interested, of contributing to UX without being a programmer:

The maintainers at Inkscape are very warm and welcoming people. I see @doctormo out on socials daily helping people off his own back and encouraging others to get involved in the project.

And they have an open invitation to people to give feedback and suggestions on UX via their team_ux chat:

https://chat.inkscape.org/channel/team_ux