juergen_hubert

This is the true promise of the #Fediverse : Everyone has the right to freedom of speech, but no one has the right to a captive audience.

Which is as it should be. Yet what other social media system can say the same?

The recent downtime of the #InternetArchive reminded me

(a) How vital the site is for my own work. Fortunately, I save pretty much all old books I need for my work to my hard drive, so I am not totally lost without it - but still, most of the links to the individual folk tales I am translating go to online archives, and the Internet Archive is the most important among them.

(b) How storing all this vital cultural heritage stuff at one single site is a terrible idea. Today, the Internet Archive might be taken down by hackers. Tomorrow, the site might commit suicide by lawyers. And in a possible future, a fascist US government might take the site down out of sheer spite.

While there are a fair number of other, more specialized digital libraries out there, too many public domain works are only available at the Internet Archives. And another huge percentage is stored only at the Internet Archive and Google Books, which is not a lot better.

We need a more distributed archive system where all these works can stored on multiple servers around the world - yet where users can search through all of them with comparable ease. Only in this way will our digital cultural heritage be truly safe.

Perhaps a #Fediverse - based approach could work? Something like #Bookwyrm , but with actual data storage?

What do you think?

There is a lot of disdain here on #Mastodon and the #Fediverse for those who have chosen to stay on #X / #Twitter and other social media platforms. And I think that this is not helpful.

I mean, sure, in the case of governments, political leaders, and major news organizations, disdain away. But many activists and small-time business owners depend on having a large reach and good networking for their activities, and this reach might simply not be feasible on the Fediverse - especially if their primary focus is on a demographic underrepresented around here (as the Fediverse skews heavily towards white Europeans and North Americans).

Hating on these people accomplishes nothing useful - and worse, it contributes to the Fediverse's well-deserved reputation for snobbery, which has driven a lot of people away.

So instead try empathy. Understand why such people make the choice to stay on other social media platforms, despite their problems. And instead of berating them for it, emphasize that these platforms will almost certainly get worse over time, due to the Enshittification cycle that all tech businesses touched by Silicon Valley venture capitalists must inevitably go through.

Suggest that developing a Fediverse presence is a useful "Plan B" for their social media efforts - and that among social media platforms, the Fediverse alone has the potential to develop into something better over time.

A surprisingly large part of my research of old German folk tales is trying to identify the places mentioned in these details. They are often not mentioned on Google Maps, although Open Street Maps frequently provides better results.

But a particularly useful resource has been Arcanum Maps, which uses old survey maps from the 19th century or earlier as Google Maps layers - and these often do have period names for locations that have vanished from modern maps. This has been especially important for Silesia and other regions where German place names were common, but which now only use Polish names.

If you are interested in historic maps, then check this site out!

#cartography #history
https://maps.arcanum.com/

We got lucky on our birdwatching trip to the coast.

#wildlife #photography

One of my compulsive habits is visiting local little free libraries and taking any #travel books or books about #history in the hopes of reading them one day and using them as inspiration for #ttrpg #worldbuiling .

But the main tangible result is that I have run out of bookshelf space. Again. 😭

https://bookrastinating.com/user/juergen_hubert

There's the "Creepy Amusement Park" vibe so beloved by horror movies, and then there's the "Creepy Amusement Park set in a Never-finished Nuclear Power Plant" vibe where I have ended up today.

#photography #NuclearPower

One of the high points of my visit to the Harz Mountains was a visit to the Teufelsmauer ("Devil's Wall"), a massive sandstone ridge stretching east of Blankenburg, and parallel to the Harz mountains themselves.

There was a footpath right on top of the ridge, which provided a spectacular view in both directions - although it required some climbing, and it was definitely nothing for people who are afraid of heights!

#hiking #mountains #photography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teufelsmauer

Sonnenuntergang hinter dem #Brocken .

#photography #Harz