Hello, lovely people! As an #introduction, I'm a historian (of the Soviet Union) working as an editor and project manager for transcript academic publishing.

I was born&raised in Berlin (east if that matters), spent some time in the UK and live in Bielefeld, Germany now. (yesyes, the one that doesn't exist).

Feel free to get in touch about academic publishing esp. in history or heritage studies!

@schmidt_fu@mstdn.social ach je, Dankeschön!!

CC @mho@social.heise.de

Liebe alle - wie wäre es mit einer #FediParty in der Region #Hannover, um alle Interessierten schnell zu einem positiven Erstkontakt mit dem Fediverse zu verhelfen? Ich organisiere den Raum und bringe einen Kasten Club-Mate mit, den Rest bekommen wir gemeinsam hin. Bitte tragt eure Ideen und eure terminliche Verfügbarkeit hier ein: https://tib.eu/fediparty - Vielen Dank!

Ihr dürft diesen Toot bzw. den Link auf das Dokument natürlich weiterverbreiten, aber bitte berücksichtigt, das dies hier ja noch KEINE Einladung ist - wir müssen erstmal herausfinden, ob genug Interesse vorhanden ist, wir einen Termin finden der für viele passt, sowie ggf. weitere Details festlegen.

Doch schon jetzt: Herzlichen Dank an @chpietsch@digitalcourage.social und @ueckueck@dresden.network für die Inspiration hierzu!

CC:
@tibhannover@openbiblio.social @lingucat@scholar.social @fraueickmann@mastodon.social @MalteHollmann@mastodon.art @datenteiler@fosstodon.org @JRehborn@mastodon.social @jan@toot.haus @corinnaehlers@openbiblio.social @kbusse@scholar.social @goettker@openbiblio.social @SemAntiKast@openbiblio.social @anotherfami@openbiblio.social @cochise@wien.rocks

Great points here…from @manton:

“The current Fediverse is impressive. It’s further along than most people would’ve guessed possible a few years ago, largely thanks to Mastodon’s polish and Twitter’s implosion. The next step should be getting to the point where the answer to my question above can be ‘yes’…”

https://www.manton.org/2023/07/25/next-step-for.html

I have this in my mentions before my second coffee this morning (*please* don’t go bother this person). This POV shows up in every masto/fedi usability conversation I’m in.

I have two compound questions for the people who believe product-design barriers correctly keep out undesirables. One now and the second in a few hours.

Which people and groups of people do you want to exclude from fedi, and which other groups are you fine with losing as collateral damage to keep out the first group?

Some people say they don't want to join the Fediverse or Mastodon, because they think the UI sucks. As a front end developer, a designer-kind of a person who creates user interfaces, I agree. Most of the web clients on the Fedi are horrendous, even Mastodon by default. There's lots of room for improvement.

We should really focus on how to make it more pleasing to the eye, more modern and more pleasant. This should not be a nerd network, just for geeks to geek out. This is not IRC or BBS.

As long as Mastodon for instance looks like it's designed by a back end engineer, contains font-awesome icons, looks like 2010, and stuff like that, being open and free is not good reason enough for many. I'm not bashing it, Mastodon is not the worst out there, in fact in my honest opinion Mastodon user experience is far better than Akkoma or Calckey for example. It's also more accessible than many modern UIs, for example my visual impaired wife prefers the Vanilla Mastodon UI over my #BirdUI modifications, she has some small tiny improvements of her own like distinguishing the colors in the action buttons as they have no proper contrast in any of the default themes. But that's it. She likes it as it is. So it cannot be that bad. However, it could be better overall.

#OpenSource doesn't mean the product should look like it's created in a basement by a math teacher. For some people Mastodon UX is sufficient (it even is for me, I like it enough and it doesn't prevent me from using it), but it should be WORLD CLASS. I don't say the answer is #MastodonBirdUI but it should be something much more modern and minimal than the current default UI. Pixelfed's developer is a designer oriented, Pixelfed is indeed an example of an awesome Fediverse app experience throughout the web and apps. That is how it should be.

Just my 2 cents.

#UI #UX #UserInterface #Design #Mastodon #Fediverse #Pixelfed #WebDev #FrontEnd #CSS

So much has happened - and so much still needs to happen!

What is the "Open" answer to the platform monopolism of Elsevier and Co, to DEAL negotiations, but also to the climate crisis and poor working conditions in the lab? (#IchbinHanna and #IchbinReyhan, anyone?)

Barcamp Open Science 2023 offers no ready answers, but inspiration, activists, and the space to find answers, together. Free registration starts today - we look forward to seeing you in Berlin (or online)! #oscibar

👉 Register at https://barcamp-open-science.eu
👉 Follow #oscibar or @tibosl@openbiblio.social for more

*So* much has happened - and *so* much still needs to happen! What is the "Open" answer to the platform monopolism of Elsevier and Co, to DEAL negotiations, but also to the climate crisis and poor working conditions in the lab? (#IchbinHanna and #IchbinReyhan, anyone?) Barcamp Open Science 2023 offers no ready answers, but inspiration, activists, and the space to find answers, together. Free registration starts today - we look forward to seeing you in Berlin! #oscibar
👉 https://barcamp-open-science.eu

Look at this ridiculous sweetheart.

#birds #birdphotography #birdwatching

"LibraryThing is looking for a systems administrator / reliability engineer. This is a remote position open to applicants worldwide."

https://blog.librarything.com/2023/07/job-syst

"LibraryThing is also looking for a great developer to work on our library projects. This is a remote position open to anyone eligible to work in the U.S."

https://blog.librarything.com/2023/07/developer-work-from-ho

#z_lib #LibraryThing #jobs #work #Developer #systems #computer #Library #Libraries

Ich frage mich, wann Politik, Medien und Institutionen begreifen, dass ihre Tweets auf Twitter nur von einem kleinen Kreis gesehen werden können. Sinnvoller wäre es, die kurzen Tweets endlich in Tröts umzuwandeln - die kann jeder sehen. Auch ohne Account.

#fediverse #mastodon #troet #treots #twitter #tweet #tweets #freiheit #freedom #nobullshit #noads #noalgorithm

Du hast Bibliotheks-/Informationswissenschaft, (Wissenschafts-) Soziologie o.ä. studiert, bist fasziniert von Wissenschaftsforschung, und scheust dich nicht davor, ein Drittmittelprojekt zu koordinieren? Bei uns (@tibhannover@openbiblio.social) hat @hauschke@mastodon.social eine interessante (befristete) E13-Stelle anzubieten, in einem sehr diversen, anregenden Umfeld. Näheres siehe unten. Geht bei uns auch mit hohem Anteil Remote-Arbeit. Bei Interesse fragt am besten direkt mal bei Christian nach, und im Zweifelsfall bewerbt euch einfach. 🍀

RE: https://mastodon.social/users/hauschke/statuses/110768461822120884

Wikipedia is the most impressive invention of the web, in my opinion. Endless pages of highly accurate and mostly well moderated information, all done without a profit motive. As useful now as it was in, say, 2004, and yet it doesn’t seem dated or to have aged at all. It’s like someone preserved the absolute best Web 1.0 page and then gave it just enough Web 2.0 interactivity to avoid it becoming a cesspool. 👇 https://disabled.social/@Lacci/110762516144375569

A dataviz map showing which states lean Barbie vs Oppenheimer: https://www.neatorama.com/2023/07/23/Does-Your-State-Lean-toward-Barbie-or-Oppenheimer-2/

I drew this 22 years ago when the letter "X" was getting commercially played out.

"Die Republikaner kandidierten seit Generationen als die Pro-Business-Partei. Doch damit ist Schluss. Die republikanische Wirtschafts­politik hat das Modell des freien Marktes aufgegeben. Plus das des möglichst zurück­haltenden Staates. Neu gilt das klassisch autokratische Modell. Bei dem die einzige Frage ist: Bist du für uns oder für die andern?"

Zugespitzte, aber gute Beschreibung der Vorgehensweise einer neuen Generation autoritärer Politiker*innen weltweit, die bewundernd auf Orbáns Ungarn schauen.

RE: https://republik.social/users/republik_magazin/statuses/110757475907937533

It’s quite terrifying how profoundly mindless these tech bro pseudo-prophets are - apparently incapable of understanding the world around them beyond the silliest level of superficiality, and yet enabled to have an outsized influence on the lives of future generations.

The #barbie movie is everything, go see it, etc., but on reflecting today: there’s something profoundly distressing in the fact that you can make a movie explicitly criticizing the Mattel corporation, indeed corporate America writ large as a vector of patriarchal power and greed, producing and reproducing subjugation, and Mattel will fund your movie because that power is so untouchable, so entrenched, that the movie is simply going to result in more profit

Had drifted out of the nuts and bolts of LLM/"AI" discourse, so somewhat surprised to learn that Facebook/Meta trained their model "LLaMa" on someone's dump of a private torrent tracker for ebooks...

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/fruit-of-the-poisonous-llama/

#AI [H/T @Edent ]