I guess people tend to look to astronomers for information about space, while the Fermi paradox probably borders more on philosophy than on astronomy. And in a lot of people minds philosophers are not real scientists, unlike astronomers.
I suspect it could be from an old postcard, which might indeed have had some artistic retouching done to improve upon the original photograph. If so, the version hosted on Wikimedia might be more true to the original. :)
I guess it's also a period in which people were going crazy about Buffalo Bill's Wild West show - it's a strange period of history in which the glorification and mythification of the past started before the dust had even settled.
I have understood the parade to be supposed to symbolise that the hatchet was buried and that all peoples of the nation rallied behind the republican idea of America. But I'm by no means a historian - would love to hear a more enlightened take on it!
He participated in a parade in Washington in relation to Roosevelt's second inauguration. This landed him an audience with the President, in which he asked for the pardon of himself and his fellow prisoners of war. Roosevelt rejected him personally.
He was happy to parade him in front of the nation as a symbol of national unity though.
I find it easy to read, but in terms of constructive feedback I would try to write the letters larger. As there's a lot of whitespace in the speech bubbles, the text could be made quite a bit bigger without even needing bigger bubbles.
The option to keep followed users and subscribed communities separate in the feed will be great!
Really impressed by the pace of progress lately - it's very much appreciated. You're building something special here. :)
What do you mean kbin doesn't really support microblogging?
The only real issue I can think of right now is that it does not display videos or polls yet, but for being an early version of a software developed primarily by one guy as a hobby project those are pretty minor omissions.
I quite disagree. Of course interoperability is not going to be a perfect one to one - that's in the nature of these being different services. You don't want threads from a link aggregater taking over your microblogging feed.
Yet it's normal for Mastodon users to join in on the conversation here. From their perspective they never left Mastodon - from my perspective, I never left kbin - and you, for your part, think it's all happening within Lemmy. But it's really not. So these things happen all the time, it's just that you don't necessarily notice unless you check the domain of the person you're responding to. Mastodon users of course often leave in the @-tags, making them a bit easier to identify.
Lemmy is a bit more isolated than Kbin, as it is not integrating microblogs at all. That's a decision on the side of the developers, not a weakness of the ActivityPub protocol.
I used to like it, now I avoid it at all cost. The problem is that the algorithm is never neutral, even if it's made with good intentions it can be gamed and manipulated, and it traps you in a spiral where what you interact with is what it shows you is what you interact with is what it shows you...
I never really used Twitter or any similar service, so I never had this happen to information shaping my opinions. I did, however, feel that the music I was listening to became shaped by the Spotify algorithm, and that I ended up listening to less rather than more diverse music than when I was sticking to vinyl. That's absurd - you have all the music in the world at your fingertips, and you end up limiting yourself more. That was my experience of course, other people probably have different ones. Anyway, I cancelled my subscription.
If there's a risk for music streaming services narrowing your field of vision, platforms shaping your opinions are downright scary. Algorithms can be tricked into showing you content, which is what russian troll farms excelled at. Tech bros tend to believe the solution is in adding more and more complexity to the point where nobody understands how it works - this is the opposite of how I want the content that helps informing me about the world to be curated.
I'm obviously not diagonally opposed to algorithms. The choose your own algorithm approach might have some merit, and I look forward to seeing more experimentation with this in the fediverse. But I do not trust corporate interests with any of this - nor do I trust a bunch of tech-optimistic rich man's sons.
I also think Kbin is way ahead of Lemmy in terms of integrating with the Fediverse at large. It's not perfect for sure, but in my opinion it builds on a better starting point. The real test of Mastodon integration for me will be when Mastodon finally introduces groups - it will be interesting to see how they integrate with communities in the Threadiverse.
I honestly also struggle to get an overview of what's happening in Lemmy development, to me Kbin seems more transparent. But both platforms are obviously fine, and Lemmy is still more mature for sure.
Since the URL is pretty vital for federation (users from federated instances would follow for example !main@pigedove-lemmy-clone-u9568.vm.elestio.app in order to join a community), it's probably worth getting the domain up and running before you start federating anyway. Even though it's a frustrating wait for sure!
I think there's potential for a bird instance - I've heard rumours the birdwatching community is pretty active over at Mastodon.