On Grandstanding on BBS

Weighing in the risk of escalating the drama vs. having a safe, hate-free place for discussions, I cannot remain silent in light of recent abuse of BBS and myself.

BBS is a place I've enjoyed since its birth, to exchange opinions with other Geminauts. It's value is very much in the ease of starting and continuing discussions with others. Sometimes we agree, other times we don't. Occasionally discussions get heated. I've had my mind changed a few times by sparring (sometimes with too much gusto) with smart and better-informed people here.

What is really, really uncool, is to use BBS to publish a manifesto or a diatribe and immediately lock the thread from any discussion. Listing it on Antenna makes it an obvious abuse of BBS, dedicated to discussions. Rage on your own private server. Especially when the goal is to unfairly criticize BBS, its policies, and @skyjake personally, for being asked to stop bullying other members.

Hiding behind self-proclaimed victim status or being gay in an adverse environment does not give one the right to abuse those around them, label them as enemy for having an opinion, and systematicaly hound and distort their statements. As a victim of bullying as a child and as an adult, I do not think such behavior should ever be quietly tolerated. Hatred should not be tolerated. Rage and vitriol against individuals with different opinions, expressed while virtue-signaling as 'a way to defend the weak', should not ever be tolerated. Earning a badge for raging is a meaningless consequence of your behavior, and not a conspiracy against free speech.

It is disgusting to compare getting a badge for bullying -- to being persecuted by the Nazis. I was going to stay silent until I got to this point. No. My family was actully victimized by the Nazis. You don't get to compare yourself to a holocaust victim in a tantrum for being asked to stop being abusive. You don't say something like that and lock the thread to have the last word.

This discussion is open, although there is no way to justify such low behavior.

Dec 02 · 11 days ago · 👍 november, mk270, decant, cthulhu, bsj38381, poemas_infieles

21 Comments ↓

What the hell am I reading...?

At first I was with clseibold, because you were kind of being a dick, not gonna lie. How did in turn into civil rights discussion? A "this person violated the code of conduct" badge is NOT a fucking Nazi star, wtf.

And as long as we're playing this game, I'm a trans leftist.

@november, I've been 'a dick' many times in my life, but if you read the thread, how am I being a dick?

I never said anything negative about anyone. I never stated that I am against art or music, or streaming video is stupid or wrong or 'capitalist' or anti-gemini. All I said was that the only reason a media company wants you to stream is to track you and insert ads.

I explicitly stated that I did not mean to offend or tell anyone what or how to do what they want.

As someone on the spectrum I am often surprized by unfortunate outcomes of my interactions... But what in the world am I guilty of here?

I've been assaulted, and I cannot see it any other way.

re-reading the original thread - it looks like the original poster asked a question about what servers support streaming. then you commented about how there's never a need for streaming.

it really devolved after that.

If there's anything to take away I think it's that sometimes - if your answer isn't a direct answer to the question at hand (in this case: which servers implement streaming and are there any test streams?) - it may be better to sit back a bit.

I'm not saying anything about who's right or who's wrong - this is coming from a self-care, self-preservation perspective.

I've seen entire life-long friendships fall apart over this exact kind of thing. it's not fundamentally

different than say - somebody asks "what's everybody's favorite episode of sex and the city?" and someone comes in to say they think the show is stupid. they're better off just letting the fans of the show talk amongst themselves and finding another time to join in.

again I really want to emphasize I think nearly everything went poorly. instead of arguing back, it would have been better for the pro-streamers to try and table the pros and cons of streaming part and refocus on the original question. maybe offer to start a separate thread for it, something like that.

anyways. I've honestly been debating posting this comment for a while now. I'm not sure if it will go over well. \

it probably won't, to be honest.

I'm fairly certain I'll get accused of victim-blaming, which is what's giving me pause. because I really don't want to do that.

it's just, this is something I've learned myself, the hard way, via the ruined friendships I mentioned earlier. I've learned that I don't always need to share my opinion. I can find another way to express it. maybe I can do something quietly like, build software that works the way I think it should work.

this got long. I'm gonna post it. I'm sorry I'm advance.

To provide additional context, there is previous history of questionable interactions here, which colored the discussion.

I try not to apply any drastic moderation actions after the first strike. However, if one is unwilling to conduct themselves according to the rules, the consequences get progressively more severe.

Yes, there is a long history of similar situations in which my response was less than clean. To be fair it took me way too long to realize that the other party genuinly hates me and deliberately escalates. I work on being a better person every day.

As this is a public forum, when I post about things I am working on, I do so to hear people's opinions and ideas, especially criticisms. I learn a lot in discussiins that ensue, and peoole often point out problems I missed and provide unexpected insights. Side discussion are often interesting.

I assumed that's what others expect -- otherwise why go public on a _discussion_ site? And if they ate not interested in my opinion, why ask leading questions, obviously bating me?

I am finding out that perhaps some people just want confirmation, praise, and admiration.

Some people just want an answer to their question and not a critique. I may want confirmation, praise and admiration (being a normal human being) but trust me when I say there's seldom any of that here. I was called "scammy" when I announced Alhena. I was blasted for a scripting thought experiment I promised I'd never implement. I was bizarrely accused of violating the Gemini spec with Scriptonite. When I make an honest feature comparison with other clients here and elsewhere, I get strange pushback and veiled slights. One just resurfaced elsewhere. I could go on. It's actually been quite something. I'm just trying to make the best client possible and find out if there are any streaming stations on Gemini besides hashix.

@bluesman - true enough, strange objections come up more ofren then praise.

But praise you got from me at least, and it was genuine.

How do you tell who has locked a thread? OP versus Admin? I looked at the one in question, but honestly couldn't find that info.

If I've learned anything from this it's this:

I need to check out Alhena and play around with it.

I want to explore AururaGem to its fullest but it sadly appears to be down right now. Hopefully it comes back soon.

Then I need to play a round of Spellbinding.

Lagrange brought me here. BBS keeps me here.

We have an awesome community of people who build cool things and think outside the box. Let's keep building our cool things and thinking outside the box.

@roughnecks There is no distinction currently. I suppose it would be better to have separate OP and moderator lock flags, because as it is implemented currently, even if an admin locks a thread the OP or another moderator can unlock it.

In this case, it was the OP who locked it.

@skyjake I see and concurr. Thanks

I've now made a quick change in Bubble so that if @admin locks a thread, it will say "Locked by Admin". Non-admins naturally can't unlock the thread after that. This should be enough granularity for now.

@jprjr, appreciate your input.

In this case I did insert my opinion, no doubt, and that would've been it, but OP actually requested that I explain a few times -- which I was kind of concerned with as it seemed possibly cynical.

But I was careful to congratulate OP on what I thought was a good technical solution and explicitly stated that I am not here to tell anyone how or what to do! Also, that my opinion was in good faith and not there to offend.

I don't think anyone deserves to have pages of expletives and bullying directed at them for suggesting that forced real-time streaming benefits corporations and offers little to the end user.

I'm not sure if anybody else brought it up but - I've run a few Icecast internet radio streams.

People enjoy the experience of listening to music where they're not strictly (or maybe not at all) in control, and are hearing the same music as other people at (roughly) the same time.

It can become a fun, collaborative experience. My own were usually paired with IRC, so listeners could use a chatbot to request songs. Like "oh this song you just requested is great have you heard this similar one?" - it's a sort-of realtime, ephemeral playlist.

In theory you could build out similar systems that download the media and play it in sync with other listeners. But that's a lot of overhead

to solve a problem that's essentially already solved.

It's not all corporations trying to get ads in front of your eyeballs or into your ears.

@jprjr, that is a good point. I miss the shared experience of radio and TV of the past, and remember everyone waiting to find out 'who killed JR' as a kid...

I have nothing against that. It is one of the rare uses of real-time streaming that makes sense, akin to the 'call-in talk radio' format I mentioned.

I haven't participated in such a broadcast, and kind of wish I did. Haven't seen that on Gemini.

In the early days of the internet there was much activity in the 'multicast' space, which was supposed to offload the server to geographically-spread re-broadcasting routers... Don't know if icecast is a child of that.

Icecast isn't a descendant of multicast but it does have some geo-balancing capabilities. It supports the concept of relaying, so you could have distributed relays then route people to a particular one via DNS or http redirects.

@bluesman I confess to being one of the voices that pushed back on the Gemini scripting thought experiment, and I'm very sorry if anything I've said has ever come off as an attack or caused offense. I have my opinions on what best fits Gemini's ethos, as does almost everyone, but it's not my place to tell anyone what they can or can't do within the confines of the protocol spec. If I don't agree with it, the only thing I can do, and the only thing I'd be justified in trying to do, is not implement it myself.

It's strange to me that you would get pushback for developing a small Web client of your own, of all things. I haven't used Alhena myself, but any project in the Gemini sphere is a good project to me, because that's how a community grows and finds the paradigms that work best. Plus, freedom requires choice, and the more choices available to browse Gemini, the better, as far as I'm concerned. Keep at it and forget the naysayers.

@stack, if you would genuinely like to participate in something like that please stop by hashnix. The radio station there is Gemini-enabled (I use my pxc client and pipe the cgi page to mplayer), and when people do shows we hang out in the hashnix dream chat and enjoy together. This morning our DJ pa2 did his Astral Peaks show with several people around.

@ingrix, thank you, I will do that! Currently traveling but will have free time in a couple of weeks.

At least one good thing came out of this.

@jsreed5 Thanks. The scripting "thought experiment" remains just that. I never intended to implement it and never expected the gemlog to get the attention it received (I posted that gemlog before I even knew how to submit content to Antenna).

I did make Scriptonite which runs sandboxed JS on my server using Gemini template pages. I think it's cool - especially how easy it is to prompt for user input (which has nothing to do with scripting). That project got a lot of pushback including claims that it violated the Gemini spec. Odd considering it works in every client that correctly supports URL encoding rules.

Anyway, to each his own. My comments about pushback were in response to another post speculating about my motivations and not an attempt to gain sympathy. My tech friends seem bewildered by the amount of work I've done here and sometimes I'm bewildered myself. Maybe I'm just a stubborn guy who also happens to be a glutton for punishment.

While I have you here - one of your CGI programs "My Age In Miles" inspired me to write a Scriptonite version a few weeks back. I give credit and a link back to your page.

I am not sure why anyone would object to that.