The latest version is almost out, and it sounds like it's a pretty major improvement, so I'll likely be upgrading tonight. If you have some wonkiness, that's why. Positive thing is it sounds like there's some big improvements to federation in general.

I reused the hardware for it for my lemmy instance so it’s down now, but for a while I ran an openstreetmap instance. OSM has a big map that shows all the continents. Then you zoom in a bit, and you can see countries. Then you zoom in a bit, and you can see provinces. Then you zoom in a bit, and you can see cities. Then you zoom in a bit, and you can see neighborhoods. Then you zoom in a bit, and you can see individual buildings.

And this incredibly detailed map of the entire planet right down to individual buildings doesn’t know about the stories of the people in those buildings, it doesn’t know about individual trees, individual blades of grass, of the bugs in the soil, of the nematodes that are to the bugs as the bugs are to us, to the bacteria and archaea, to the viruses, to the molecules, to the atoms, to the subatomic particles. And that’s just one map of one planet in a solar system, in one galaxy, of so many it’ll break your brain seeing all the different galaxies they found out there.

And at every scale, you see what’s in front of you and think it’s the most important thing, but there’s everything you can’t see at the scale you’re at, and all the other things at all the other scales, but it’s easy to become fixated on one thing in one place at one scale and forget the universe as a whole is a lot of things all at once.

One of the biggest risks lemmy carries is that if we allow one or two instances to become our exclusive points of discussion, then we tax those instances, and also put a lot of power and pressure in the hands of volunteers. The best things to do about it are to decentralize: Go out and try to find communities throughout the fediverse, not just on the top few servers.

I was able to find many new servers to join communities in, I'm hoping communities pick up all over the place so we can have a strong, healthy fediverse, and my part in that is making sure someone's listening when they post.

I stuck it out with lotide, but with kbin coming online and not federating with it, and with bugs in lemmy such that lotide isn't federating at the moment, so I decided it was time to set up a lemmy instance. It's running on dedicated hardware, and it's set up with image upload capacity, and a black theme. How much more black can the theme get? None. None more black.