but for something fairly simple like that? Nah, the show is just bad.
Ok, why was the ship erased from the records? Why did it have to go into the future? What was the sphere thing again? How were Discovery going into the future again … couldn’t they have just sent the important thing separately? Does Discovery going into the future and being “erased” actually prevent the problem … which was what … AI?!
Honestly, I don’t know the answer to all of those questions. And as much as I personally liked the idea of doing Trek 900 years in the future (finally, something new in trek), I remember the plot of the backend of season 2 being just a bit too much “what? really?”.
I can’t break it down, like at all, but I’m personally not convinced at all that Discovery needing to be erased made much sense. Convince me otherwise, please. But also, to anyone else … do you honestly remember why Discovery had to go into the future and be “erased” … and even if you do … does it feel like a good or interesting story point to you? If you answer with at least one “no”, then the whole “erased” thing just isn’t a good explanation or defence for why the spore drive in a prequel is somewhere between bad and awkward.
Personally, I’d go further and say the whole “erased” thing cant be anything other than contrived … because it’s simultaneously so extreme and completely necessary to handle the issue of the spore drive … they had to do something like this and it’s just too hard to not think about the writers trying to work their way out of the problem. That their reason for needing to be erased and go into the future doesn’t seem to have any connection to Discovery or its spore drive, but just happens to have struck the same ship with a spore drive and no other ship, only affirms the contrivance.
Maybe I’m missing something here, it’s been a while since I’ve season 2. But the “erased from the records” plot point might just be a part of the problem we’re citing here, not a defence against.
And Star Trek was never about human ingenuity coming together to make near-magical technology work? Stamet’s DNA changes weren’t recorded? They weren’t studied and replicated or had the essence of their effect distilled into an interface that mimicked the physical effects?
This all seems like clutching at very untrek-like straws … which kinda encapsulates the whole issue that some have with Discovery.
I personally don’t mind the idea of a mycellial network, or more broadly, some sort of futuristic bio-physics phenomenon/technology. I just think Discovery didn’t land the handling of it. I think there are plenty of possible reasons for the spore drive not being used by all of the federation that are more interesting than these “lucky, only one person got the DNA so I guess it’s over now” reasons … reasons that would actually contribute to the Sci-Fi of it all. Like, just shooting from the hip … it has an immune system that learnt to kick out foreign starships.
It was always a part of it though … travel times were always there and relevant, the delta quadrant was very far away, getting to the battle in time wasn’t always possible, being alone when in trouble was almost always the point … space hadn’t been reduced from a final frontier to an irrelevant playground.
a single ship having it
Well this was part of the contrivance … once Discovery made it work why wouldn’t the whole federation be running spore drives ASAP? Security wise they’d be nearly unstoppable.
Yea, just checked now out of curiosity. First, it was definitely a bit mirror universe creepy. Second, yea, it did seem a bit shallow and childishly dumb from what I saw. Funny.
Thanks Ernest!! Hope you’re going well and kbin development isn’t too much of a burden!!
I’ve seen that view before, and just checked it now again. It still feels like there’s more in the feed than should be. I’m probably missing some of the boosts etc that you cite, but it feels to me like some posts are coming in without it being clear why they’re there. My guess has always been that my subscriptions are playing a role somehow.
Anyway, hope the new changes go well!! And thanks for the response!
What do you mean kbin doesn’t really support microblogging?
I could be wrong about this … but as I understand, you can’t see a feed of microblogs/posts from people that you follow. Instead everything is viewed through magazines, which pickup microblogs but combine them with the ordinary threadiverse content posted to those magazines. Following people and viewing their personal posts is, I’d say, the essence of microblogging.
Not a criticism of kbin at all BTW … easily the youngest platform on the fediverse but doing quite well it seems with already a fork that’s doing well too (mbin).
Yet it’s normal for Mastodon users to join in on the conversation here.
Well, as neither of us are presenting or citing data on this, we can’t be sure.
Personally I care about this and keep a bit of a lookout for it and have in the past tried to advocate for and create more cross-platform talk. In my experience, and from what I’ve heard from others, the UX friction from the mastodon end makes it mostly a dead end. So while some cross talk certainly happens, I’d estimate it’s quite minor and meaningless in so far as we’re talking about it as a salient strength of ActivityPub compared to its competitor ATProto.
That’s a decision on the side of the developers, not a weakness of the ActivityPub protocol.
What this misses is whether the protocol makes it easier or harder for developers to ”decide” to allow for more inter-platform cross talk. Part of my critique was that the protocol and its general design isn’t making this easier. Kbin, for instance, doesn’t truly support microblogging. And the lemmy devs have acknowledged that allowing users to be followed like communities would be good but is just too hard right now.
The question then is whether the protocol could have made this easier for platform devs, either through its design or through providing fundamental tooling that enables developers more and removed the need for constant wheel-reinvention. From what I’ve heard from actual developers working with the protocol, they’re real technical critiques to be made around how hard it is to work with. So I believe that it isn’t helping anyone interested in making something new and interesting with it (which has yet to be done IMO, though kbin gets close ).
I was going to say the same but don’t know enough about BlueSky’s ATProtocol to be sure about the possibilities.
In principle, you’d hope they’ve added enough flexibility on there for different platform types. If they have, next year could get interesting as they open up federation. There seems to be a bit of buzz and interest around BlueSky, and if they garner the interest of enough developers who feel like they can make new things on the platform/protocol, then new things could happen and, if they attract a sizeable Twitter migration, go kinda mainstream pretty quickly.
the strength is tooting a reply to a peertube video and having a discussion on lemmy in which all these comments are shared
I’m with you. The problem is that this promise is mostly empty, at least at the moment.
ActivityPub, from what I’ve gleaned, is too vague and open ended and under-developed in terms of software for this to be true. The result is that each platform is implementing a sub-set of the protocol and often adding their own custom twists/additions to it. Which means that just because two platforms use ActivityPub does not mean at all that those two platforms can communicate in anyway. And, even if they can communicate, there’s no guarantee at all that this will be usable.
The interaction between lemmy and mastodon is illustrative. Technically they can communicate, and at times this can work well. But the two platforms are hardly mutually enriching each other because the interactions between them are fairly limited in number. And that’s because they don’t talk to each other well. Some of that is because they’ve implemented different parts of the protocol. Some of it is also their differences in design and UI/UX that just add too much friction to consuming and meaningfully interacting with content from the other platform.
What’s more, this problem is fairly predictable and has been criticised as a false promise in the past. At the moment, I’d say it’s fair to say that ActivityPub has not been proven as a way to enable communication between substantially different platforms. That might change over time, though I suspect the load on developers to make that happen will remain high without some major foundational work.
But right now, unless there’s something I don’t know/understand, I don’t see the extra-platform capabilities of ActivityPub playin any role in the success of the fediverse in competition with BlueSky, at least as far as Mastodon is concerned which, as a platform, is relatively happy just doing its own thing.
one thing I can’t seem to figure out is how to set custom categories for Lemmy communities that I subscribe to/order them
Yep. Lemmy doesn’t provide any community management tooling, which is a shame, because a little can go a long way. Some clients provide some help, but generally it seems to be a lacking feature set.
yea, maybe, but the admin of lemm.ee has been very open and responsible in their administration of the instance. If they decided to walk I think it likely they’d hand things over to anyone willing to take up the reins.
I haven’t seen anything. Hopefully nothing tragic happened. Otherwise, there’s obviously a bit of scope for this, for a single admin to just walk.
I think as communities/instances get to be more of a big deal, we as users should ask for multiple admins and moderators and multiple contact points (eg a mastodon account) so that there are fail safes and clear signals. So, if a single admin walks, there’s someone else with the keys. Or at least if the instance goes dark we have the alternative contact to at least get a signal about what’s happening.