Ooh. I like this idea! When I’m at a computer again I’ll look into adding a similar sidebar to !manchester@mcr.town

It’s great, isn’t it? I was having a conversation with someone on here the other day and didn’t realise they were on Mastodon. I’d shared the original post there and replies turned up in Lemmy and vice-versa. It’s very cool.

The only thing I wish could be improved is the having to manually go back to your home instance and search for a community on another server. It feels even worse than the same process on Mastodon, which already feels clunky.

Eugen Rochko is CEO of Mastodon gGmbH which is the company which develops the Mastodon software. It isn’t the software itself; that’s open source and could be forked and developed by anyone. Nor is it any of the instances which can be operated by anyone who wants to and they don’t even have to use Mastodon’s code to do so.

I could set up a company to run an instance and call myself CEO if I wanted, it would only mean something to users on my instance, I guess.

The overlapping names are, probably unintentionally, slightly confusing.

I’m old enough to remember when Facebook Messenger was compatible with XMPP (as was Google Hangouts, then called Talk). You could talk to people on there from your own server, you could use whatever open source client you wanted. It was great.

Then they cut off the federation. Then they cut off the API.

They’ll do the same again. Once enough of your friends and family are on their network they cut of federation and you have to move to them if you don’t want to get cut off with it.

My wife and I are currently rewatching all of The Good Fight, which is still my favourite thing ever on the telly. We’re also rewatching Ranganation, which totally got us through lockdown.

Tunes wise, I’m working through the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die using https://1001albumsgenerator.com/ - today I’ve got If I Could Only Remember My Name by David Crosby which, if I’m honest, is not doing it for me.

👋 I’m from Torquay originally. Living in Manchester these days, though.

Not so sunny now!

If you’re interested in a Manchester based group, btw, I’ve set one up at !manchester@mcr.town

I live in Manchester, so I have tram lines to contend with. With them you’re often going along the lines so it’s extra terrifying!

Ooh. I’ve never ridden a Brompton but I could see how it would present extra difficulties!

As someone who used to cycle Dartmoor a lot, I have a technique for normal cattle grids.

Speed up at much as possible, grip the top tube with your knees, cling onto your hoods with white knuckles, close your eyes and pray to any gods you can think of. It’s always worked so far.

In all honesty though, stop pedalling, hit them at 90⁰ and do not turn the handlebars and you’re fine.

Funnily enough, we got a new mattress recently (it’s amazing after the ill-advised rolled up foam one we’ve been using for years) and also had a crap experience with Dreams. We ended up at Benson’s and they were great

There’s a word I had to look up and will now annoy everyone with as much as possible!

Also stirred a memory of a Terry Pratchet book from a scarily long time ago!

Let us know what you win at the tombola!