the atrocious webp format

I continue to be confused by the level of widespread hate WebP still gets. It’s old enough to be widely (albeit not universally) supported in software like web browsers, but new enough to provide similar-or-better (usually better) lossless compression than PNG (21,578 bytes for the original image) and typically better lossy compression than JPEG at comparable perceived quality, especially for the types of images typically shared on the internet (rather than say, images saved directly from a DLSR camera). It’s why servers bother to re-encode JPEG images to WebP for delivery - they wouldn’t bother wasting the compute time to re-compress if it wasn’t generally worth doing.

I can understand it if we were, say, 10-15 years ago when the format was still not super widely supported yet, but that’s basically where we are with JPEG XL and AVIF support right now too. If one of these two had exactly the level of support that WebP does right now then yes, of course we should probably use one of them instead - but we’re not there yet. Until we are, WebP often has the best compromise between compatibility and compression efficiency as far as image formats go, and that’s why a lot of sites do this re-compression thing using WebP. I gave some examples using digital art (one of the things I was compressing a lot at the time) a year ago in a related discussion: https://lemmy.world/post/6665251/4462007

A news website local to me recently-ish started choosing to deliver AVIF-compressed (or probably re-compressed) images the same way a lot of sites currently do it for WebP because my browser supports AVIF, so at least we are starting to see a token amount of uptake on the next-gen formats in the wild.

This section shall be known and may be cited as the “Contraception Begins at Erection Act.”

OP has been mislead by Big Ejaculation /s

Thanks for sharing!

satire_irl: Trump forgets instructions to not mention Canada again until future governor Poilievre has won election

This guy also gave a great talk a decade ago about his journey to winning the lottery: YouTube

Apparently media doesn’t know as of yesterday: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mount-fuji-climber-rescued-twice-returned-to-get-phone/

It was not known whether he was able to find his phone in the end, local media reported.

Wow, they literally added more horse armor lol

The mbin equivalent (which is relevant to the OP) is More -> Open original URL or Copy original URL

Unfortunately seems to not work for mbin (which fedia.io runs)

computer sad

But (it sounds like) you’re talking about voluntary grouping, where if you dump 100 people together at a party or networking event or whatever, theoretical-person Amy will vibe best with certain types of people, and so ends up chatting up Cleo, Ming, and Kiara because they share similar interests / humor / whatever – but there’s nothing actually stopping someone from outside of that from walking up and chatting with the newly-formed group. That’s kind of what (I thought) we had now in the fediverse, where for example I can go talk about Australian news on aussie.zone, jump to lemmy.world to talk about fediverse stuff, swing by redd.that to look at Unraid updates (all communities I’m part of), but then browse the incoming feed of everything coming into my instance and view a whole lot of communities which I’m not part of, most of which I never will be. It’s (nearly) all open-by-default. Yes, there’s some blocking / defederation etc, but the default state is that users on one instance can (whether or not they actually choose to) talk to other instances.

If a new user randomly picks any instance from the top 50 (of any fediverse software, excluding maybe Pixelfed since that’s probably the least interoperable with the others) to join up on, chances are very good (but will vary based on personal interest) they’ll be able to participate in like >=90% of the conversations that they want to in the sense that their instance is federating with all the people and communities they’re interested in.

What I’m thinking-out-loud-ing (“arguing” sounds a bit more assertive than what I’m aiming for) is that this might not be how ActivityPub would optimally be used; maybe just because ActivityPub could allow 90% of users to talk to 90% of users, it doesn’t mean that’s actually the best way to use it. Maybe it serves the user’s interests better if there are clusters of “sub-fediverses” instead.

As a grounded example: Beehaw partially self-isolates from the wider fediverse (it’s not just that users could communicate but don’t; the connection is severed) in an effort to better maintain its vibe and values. I had always viewed that as the exception to the norm, but maybe having (e.g.,) clusters of instances that only communicate with a comparatively smaller amount of other instances, say the other instances in its “cluster” plus a few other clusters only (as opposed to most instances communicating with most other instances) is a different – and potentially healthier – way to architect things. So I guess partial, selective federation rather than (what felt to me like) the current goal of “if it uses ActivityPub, we want to communicate with it*”. * with obvious exclusions for spam etc.

but the fediverse is equally suited to federated islands as to one fediverse, right? Most people will want the full fediverse but people can also create their separate spaces if desired.

I guess, yeah, but it has tradeoffs. Each island loses even more diversity of perspective (e.g., political echo-chamber, or building fedi tools that might work well for their island but make no sense for other islands), and making it harder to use as replacements for Xitter / reddit etc.

Like, a lot of discussion happens on topics like “how can we make Mastodon better for former Xitter users?” or the same thing but for lemmy and reddit. Maybe they’re fundamentally not the right questions to ask if the endgame state of federated social media is that it isn’t a direct replacement of centralized services.

Although it wasn’t really specifically the point of the post, reading it’s made me think that maybe the whole idea of “universally” federated social media (even excluding the spam etc) is fundamentally untenable regardless of the technical protocol, and that treating it as the end-goal might not be the play.

Yeah, I think it’s not unreasonable to be restricted given the contents - just wanted to note the change

Interesting, it wasn’t age-restricted a few days ago!

The linked listings seem to have already been taken down, RIP

Once in a blue moon, something that seemed impossible does become reality!

Well I linked to an article from the Australian national broadcaster, so that tracks :P

They’re still called athletes I guess? but for some reason we* nonetheless never (?) use “athletics” to mean “all sports”. I’d never really thought about how it’s a bit strange until this thread!

* at least here - can’t speak definitively for everybody

It’s referring to athletics - Wikipedia suggests that in North America it’s usually called “track and field”?