update on my WIP industrial ag zine:

starting in the early 1970s, the dream of scientific/industrial agriculture began to lose its shine for a variety of complicated reasons. although the dream lost some of its luster, the reality of industrial ag only intensified and globalized into the monstrous international network we have today.

as i'm picking out the pieces of text and images to include in the spread i'm calling "the end", i'm adjusting the visual style to match the visual style of the 1970s. we're done with the breathless "miracles!" of technicolor 1960s scientific ag and are now moving into a more grounded and restrained style, which i think is related to the contracting of american visions of progress that came with the oil crisis, intensification of the vietnam war, social movements exposing cracks in the american image of "abundance for all", the degradation of the american environment, and the hollowing out of cities with deindustrialization and white flight.

so below (on the left) is a little snippet of the spread - still in progress.

on the right is the cover of a 1974 USDA report called "protecting crops and the environment." i think it's an excellent example of "1970s business report" visual style.

btw, many thanks to the typography nerds who helped me identify the fonts used in some of the archival materials i'm using. "1970s business report" is such a distinct and instantly-recognizable visual style, and i wanted to evoke a bit of that. there was a lot of helvetica and i'm using "helvetica world", which is the only version of helvetica available for free on canva 🤷

#zines #art #wip #agriculture #agriculturalhistory #food #typography #fonts #visualdesign

I thought it was more to see if it gets deleted like .ml.

EDIT: The developer has replied in this thread, see below :)

We banned a spammer from this instance recently, and I went to see what instance it was coming from (in case there was more)

coves.social/community-guidelines

Coves is built on the AT Protocol, which means it’s part of a larger decentralized network. Your account and identity exist on your Personal Data Server (PDS), not on our servers. These guidelines and our moderation only apply to the official Coves AppView at coves.social. Other instances of Coves or other AT Protocol services have their own policies and moderation. If you’re banned or have content removed from our AppView, your AT Protocol identity and data on your PDS are unaffected — you can still use other services on the network.

They do credit Photon and they have released the source code for their modified frontend: coves.social/legal

I also found this on their GitHub: github.com/BrettM86/tidepool

Tidepool is a read-only ActivityPub → atproto bridge for the threadiverse. It follows Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin communities (FEP-1b12 group federation), materializes their posts, comments, and profiles as social.coves.* records in a virtual PDS it operates itself, and serves them over com.atproto.sync.* so the Coves AppView indexes fediverse communities exactly as it indexes native ones. Votes stay bridge-side as aggregates behind one sanctioned XRPC.

EDIT: The developer has confirmed that two-way federation is planned

I think it’s neat that someone is working on this, but I’m a bit concerned that it’s read only from the threadiverse:

• They would suffer from a problem similar to what we have, when someone sets up a Reddit repost bot. Users interacting with some content while not knowing that their replies aren’t reaching the original poster
• they get content without giving content back

yea it’s awful but they’re used to it lol

I just saw this new paper on the arxiv:

AI and The Enclosure of the Scientific Commons

Very interesting and worth a read!
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27251

@_elena @andycarolan Tech is run by sociopaths. I cannot consider this in other terms any longer.

Having mindless tankies parrot ccp and russian propaganda is getting tiring.

@hannorein

I come at this from a broader historical perspective. The English 'enclosures' are often regarded as the founding 'privatisation' of capitalism, because they represented not just the theft of common land, but a change in the legal and ideological understanding of 'property'.

Property is, in fact, only ever a set of legal rights and obligations - which were different in pre-capitalist societies, and in fact still differ in different legal systems, and in the 'common sense' of different societies today.

But there has been a continuous struggle in almost every aspect of life over privatisation. It is still live in any English village where the 'village green' is threatened by 'development' - or indeed in cities where what were once public roads and squares are incorporated into shopping centre developments that have 'security' men on the doors and close when the shops close (revealing their true purpose: to take your money).

Slavery and colonialism were and are forms of privatisation: theft of what nobody previously 'owned' to enable private profit; the first mass slave traders and colonisers were not states, they were the first joint-stock companies.

Moreover, the fundamental mechanism inside the capitalist form is the exploitation of 'externalities': taking what nature and society provides for free and turning it into private property. No major industry today would be profitable if it paid for its true environmental costs - not to mention its use of public infrastructure (roads, schools, police, etc...).

Most hidden of all, perhaps, is the 'externality' of labour: the love and care exercised in family homes and communities, freely, with no cost/benefit analysis, that actually produces the labour force, the 'human resources', as they say.

The battle rages on, in the confrontation between open source, the open web, and the privatising tech giants, and now, of course, around AI: take what was once a common treasury - I use the words of the first rebels against English enclosures - and turn it to private profit.

3 years ago I had to rake some leaves on 31st of December and it was so warm I only had a tshirt on

I’ve tried both [Lemmy and PieFed], and the UX is incredibly unintuitive and unpleasant. The main problem is that it’s quite hard to discover content you want while avoiding content you don’t, Bluesky at least has really good custom feeds that are easy to add (the default feed sucks). Another big issue is the general site layout, it’s hard to figure out how to do things as simple as saving a post for later or how to go back to the feed without being redirected back to the post I’m trying to exit.

Maybe they didn’t see the “Feeds” feature in PieFed? The top navigation menus in PieFed are a bit messy. Although shareable blocklists could be cool too, or maybe toxic?

That’s excluding the horrible lack of contrast most frontends use, which makes reading and parsing the site elements unnecessarily difficult (no Lemmy, grey text on a grey background is not good for readability).

I like the Lemmy colors, but maybe it should be easier to change, because they might like the darkly-pureblack theme.

Fediverse feels slower, but not in a good way. More of a ‘if I don’t use this for a week, I’ll see new things’. If I log in after 2 or 3 days, I’ll scroll for 10 minutes and see the stuff I saw last time.

Maybe this is a UX issue of not finding the right feed they would like.

I’ve tried using lemmy and have exactly the same issue. After blocking all the politics stuff, left wing meme stuff and tankie stuff there’s bugger all remaining. Even with all the blocks I’ve made it just seems to be a bunch of toxic left wing people calling each other fascist because of some minor difference in opinion.

I also want nsfw stuff now and then. I hate how censored the internet has become, at least with reddit if I want to see a bit of porn, I can.

Again maybe a UX issue of not presenting what communities they could subscribe to.

I tried twice to join those forums within the Fediverse and I can’t get past the captcha test. The fact that you need approval to validate your access doesn’t seem designed to encourage you to recommend it.

The captchas on Lemmy are AWFUL, I can’t do them either.

(that’s the “Medium” difficulty)

Lemmy v1.0 is adding the ability to do invites, so maybe there will be an invite-only instance that gets some momentum, that could be cool. Invite sites seems like a cool old-internet type of culture.

The fediverse stuff is way too complicated for me, Reddit is very easily accessible and actually has active communities for the topics I’m interested in.

Of course these are naturally going to be all negative because they’re users that bounced off the Threadiverse, but there’s probably hints to what can be improved

Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.

For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.

Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.

The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…

While changing people's views when they're antagonistic to the ideas shown is an uphill battle, it may help still to those quietly reading the comments.

@dgar i hope they gave him wings

@peter_koenig Ich habe nicht gefragt, wie es nicht geht.

Ich habe gefragt, wie es geht.

Kannst du darüber noch nachdenken?

@tazgetroete

@_elena The hard part of this problem is limiting myself to three bullet points for my kids!

Still wouldn't use an AI.

Chromatic Symphony of Landscapes by Moriyuki Ochiai Architects https://theinspirationgrid.com/chromatic-symphony-of-landscapes-by-moriyuki-ochiai-architects/

Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature

No! The whole point of the fediverse is not to have centralised blocklists. Having blocklists baked in to the code, especially ones that get updated in a centralised manner with no accountability and without telling users they’re on it is absolutely antithetical to the platform and one of the main reasons why people are leaving reddit and coming here. If you want to curate the experience of a user in that manner, what you do is open an instance and advertise it as such. That way people can, at least on lemmy, know where they’re banned from without having to dive into the code or pull API endpoints manually. In fact how a lemmy instance federates and how it curates this experience is one of the distinguishing features among the instances. You have instances like lemmy.zip that federate all that will have them, instances like hexbear that are very quick to defederate in order to keep a safe-space and instances like blahaj that are somewhere between.

A front-end (or any piece of code that is made for being deployed on multiple instances) should be agnostic to all of this. It’s up to the admins of the instances and not the devs to curate and this is one of the main reasons why I don’t trust the piefed dev. Sure you can disable almost everything, but that still means that an admin has to do work in order to get to a neutral place from where they can then curate.

@dansup how are you? You have a good profile can I talk to you