Addicted to love. Flower cultivator, flute player, verse maker. Usually delicate, but at times masculine. Well read, even to erudition. Almost an orientalist.

  • 4 Posts
  • 74 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 9th, 2023
  • Prouvaire@kbin.socialOPtoStar Trek@startrek.website•Skydance Makes Offer For Paramount Global; Star Trek Franchise Could Be Under New Ownership, Again
    5·
    6 months ago

    Lots of negativity in this thread, but that seems to be par for the course for any fandom. Personally I’m cautiously optimistic.

    Skydance produced/co-produced (often partnering with Paramount) on a number of franchise movies, including Star Trek, Mission Impossible, Jack Reacher, Top Gun, GI Joe, Terminator, The Old Guard and Spy Kids. Some of their productions have been well-received (eg Mission Impossible, Top Gun Maverick) and others less so (Terminator Genysis and Dark Fate, although personally I quite liked Dark Fate). They’ve also produced smaller, critically acclaimed movies like True Grit, Annihilation and Air; as well as their share of dreck of course, like Geostorm.

    What I think is clear though is that Skydance is primarily interested in big franchises, so if they were to acquire Paramount, I think more Star Trek movies would very likely be in the works which, as a fan, I’d be happy about. I know there’s an argument that Trek is best suited to TV, but some of the best Star Trek has been big screen Star Trek. And studios are more willing these days to have franchises run across both TV and film concurrently (MCU, DC, Star Wars), granted with mixed success.

    Re Larry Ellison’s involvement - my guess is that he’d be a silent partner, putting some of his personal fortune - rather than Oracle’s funds - to help out his son. I believe he did the same thing for his daughter, Megan Ellison, whose company Annapurna Pictures he helped fun and which went on to produce films like Her, Zero Dark Thirty, Phantom Thread and Books Smart (and the stage musical A Strange Loop). I doubt Larry Ellison will take a hands-on role in the management of Skydance/Paramount.

  • Prouvaire@kbin.socialOPto/kbin meta@kbin.social•Combating spam on kbin - some thoughts
    3·
    6 months ago

    Ernest hasn’t posted since last week, so hopefully he’s okay. He’s alluded to having a fever and having to figure out kbin’s finances (and a bit before that, mentioned that he had to take on another job to cover the bills), so I’m guessing life has gotten in the way of kbin. It’s worth bearing in mind that all the threadiverse projects are basically someone’s hobby at the moment.

    Some of us _aspire _ to dwelling in a basement!

  • Prouvaire@kbin.socialOPto/kbin meta@kbin.social•Combating spam on kbin - some thoughts
    4·
    6 months ago

    Magazine moderators have the ability to delete posts in their community (also pin/unpin them) and ban users from their community. I don’t think it would take a huge amount of time as a rule - it’s just a matter of checking in regularly (I suppose ideally several times a day) to see if there are any moderator actions that need to be taken.

    Beyond that, moderators typically play a role in curating content and setting/monitoring community guidelines. But we’ve been talking about people being appointed solely to carry out the more technical/administrative functions in certain magazines to prevent the recent flood of spam. Ie, people have said they’d be happy to ban spam accounts without necessarily taking on the curation of the magazine in question.

  • Prouvaire@kbin.socialOPto/kbin meta@kbin.social•Combating spam on kbin - some thoughts
    9·
    6 months ago

    Agree, but it’s not a question of him appointing moderators. It’s a question of people stepping up and volunteering to be moderators. There are literally thousands of kbin magazines which are currently abandoned, ie where the moderator of the magazine hasn’t been active on kbin.social. Anyone can volunteer to take over ownership of these magazines by clicking a button, but there isn’t enough interest in the userbase at the moment.

    However, you are correct in that spammers are targeting the bigger magazines like m/fediverse, and because Ernest is owner of these magazines but is active on the site, these magazines don’t appear in the abandoned magazines list. I agree that in order to ease the administrative burden on him, Ernest should call for additional moderators for these most active magazines, and even step down as the owner of these when one or more replacements have been found.

  • Prouvaire@kbin.socialto/kbin meta@kbin.social•Issue with sort by hot
    3·
    6 months ago

    The “sort by hot” algorithm was probably designed with a larger user base in mind, but I agree with you. For small communities in particular (and the vast majority of Fediverse communities are still tiny) I think even posts with no upvotes (ie no self-upvotes) should be included in the “sort by hot” view. For larger communities, where the threshold for “new” and “hot” may be set higher, so it doesn’t matter so much. (I don’t know what the algorithm is, but it might be something like ‘hot is defined as getting a minimum of X votes, where X scales with the size or activity intensity of the community’.)

  • Prouvaire@kbin.socialtoFediverse@lemmy.world•One thing I hope to see in the Fediverse is people engaging with old content
    8·
    6 months ago

    It would be nice to see people engaging with old posts when they stumble across a community and subscribe to it.

    One barrier that will make this difficult is that instances only get a community’s feed from the moment they first subscribe to it, if that community’s home instance is on another server. So if you’re a user on - say - leminal.space and you’re the first person on that server to subscribe to - say - Musicals@kbin.social then you will not see any of that community’s old posts, only posts created (or boosted) after you’ve subscribed. This makes it difficult to engage with old content unless other people on your instance have been members of that community for much longer.

    This is one of the issues with the fediverse model that doesn’t exist in a centralised model like reddit. And - sadly - smaller, niche communities are the ones most likely to be affected by this limitation, because they’re the ones least likely to be federated to a large number of instances. It makes smaller, less active communities look even more inactive than they actually are.

  • Prouvaire@kbin.socialtoScience Fiction@lemmy.world•More things like Star Trek?
    2·
    6 months ago

    As others have pointed out, Foundation isn’t a particularly faithful adaptation of Asimov’s stories, but there good things in it. It might be more accurately titled Foundation and Empire IMO, because it focuses as much on the Empire side of the story as the Foundation. The first season was lopsided. The Empire plotline was compelling, the Foundation ones were… not. Haven’t watched the second season yet, but apparently it’s more consistent.

  • Prouvaire@kbin.socialtoScience Fiction@lemmy.world•More things like Star Trek?
    271·
    6 months ago

    For All Mankind is the Star Trek prequel we should have had. Co-created by Ron Moore (Deep Space Nine, Battlestar Galactica), the show has a bunch of Trek alumni working behind the scenes. It features human drama (and sometimes melodrama), geopolitical diplomacy, sweeping cultural change and scientific adventure against the backdrop of a multi generational future history, starting with the first moon landing.

  • Prouvaire@kbin.socialtoFediverse@lemmy.ml•*Permanently Deleted*
    4·
    7 months ago

    Fedilab is a Fediverse client for (according to the website) Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfed, Pleroma, GNU Social and Friendica. You can also follow kbin users (and, I assume lemmy ones as well, though I haven’t tried). The app will allow you to manage several accounts on Mastodon, Peertube and Pleroma instances.

    You can block content by keywords or phrases (either hiding them with a warning or hiding them completely) but I don’t know if you can bulk upload keywords. (You can add several keywords/phrases at a time manually.)

    Unfortunately (for you) the app is currently only available on Android.

  • Prouvaire@kbin.socialto/kbin meta@kbin.social•Missing search results when looking for federated communities (at Lemmy)
    4·
    8 months ago

    This is one of the biggest issues and barriers to discoverability with the Fediverse in my opinion.

    As I understand it, unless an instance has already subscribed to a community (magazine in kbin parlance), then in order to make that community (magazine) appear in your own instance, you need to:

    • First search for the community (including the community’s home instance) name in the magazine search function.
    • The search will come up blank, but the act of searching for it will trigger a backend request for your instance to start federating content from that community. However there’s no message to tell you that it’s doing that. It just looks like that community doesn’t exist.
    • Further, it may take up to several days (in my experience) for federation to start, ie, you have to repeat the search for the community and only then can you subscribe to (follow) that community
    • And when it does start, it only starts grabbing new content. So first it looks like the community doesn’t exist, then it takes a long time for content to appear, and then it looks like the community is sparsely populated unless you go back to the community’s home instance, rather than staying in your own instance, to catch up on old content.
    • Further pinned posts aren’t federated (at least between lemmy and kbin I believe), so you can’t even rely on a “here’s what you need to know” introductory post to orient new members.

    Contrast this to reddit, where (because it’s a centralised system) searching for a subreddit produces immediate results, you can join a subreddit immediately, and you can immediately see all current and past content for that subreddit. Much more intuitive and useful to users.

    Unfortunately the activitypub protocol that underlies lemmy and kbin doesn’t appear to have been designed for reddit-like communities in mind. Ie communities that tend to feature long-form content, posted relatively sporadically, and where having access to the community’s archive is very useful to members. It works somewhat better for twitter-like communities where it’s easier to jump in “mid-stream” and - because posts tend to be only a few words long - you’re more likely to start seeing new content after only a short delay.

    I wish that this is something that’s addressed at the Fediverse level.