Partner in Crime

Last night was a very good night, and one that I have needed for awhile. It had absolutely nothing to do with what I happened to be playing, which was of course Guild Wars 2, but instead the company I kept. I’ve talked about my friend Grace so many times over the years on this blog and quite honestly they are one of my favorite people on the planet. It used to be that we were pretty regularly on the same bandwidth when it came to games and were partners in crime… whatever that crime happened to be. Lately however we have fallen out of step and the crossover opportunities have been limited. Our fallback was always Diablo 3 and the coming of a brand new season roughly every three months. However we’ve both sworn off Blizzard titles for the moment until the situation there improves… which has been more painful than I can put into words because it has also cost us our regular decompression sessions.
The pandemic has been hard in wildly different ways for different people. Grace and I have managed to stay in contact and pretty much still talk every single day, but our long gaming sessions over voice chat have dwindled to non-existent. Last night however we opted to remedy that and while they spent the evening on a combination of the Switch and Knitting and I had a casual night of World Bosses in Guild Wars 2, we spent almost three hours just talking about whatever the conversation happened to bring up. We talked about parents, jobs, and they graciously listened to me go on at length about Guild Wars 2. I am not necessarily trying to sell Grace on the game but I certainly would love to have them try it, but also know that at least until Living World Season 1 has rolled out completely that is going to be a non-starter. I just have a problem with gushing about something when I am super into it, and Grace has been there for me as I gushed at length about other games that they were not interested in at all.
The sad thing as we were talking is that we realized we had not done one of these big lengthy catch up sessions… since probably last year sometime. That is way the hell too long honestly. Granted we hang out for the length of the AggroChat podcast, but that is a more directed conversation and less free form random word association. The next step however is we have to figure out some game we are both interested in playing at the same time. While I have missed the conversation, I have very much extremely missed the random nonsense that we often got up to when playing games together. Aging and adulthood sucks sometimes, because it often pulls you away from the sorts of interactions you need most. Part of it for me is that I have also not been as available as I once was given that I can only really hang on voice chat when I am upstairs due to the quirks of Parsec blocking microphones. Since I have been working remotely for the last three years… the upstairs is “Work” and when I get off I go downstairs to “Home”. Though last night was fine and I really need to try and sort out how to make a microphone work in spite of Parsec.
In other random news I am really enjoying the Halo series. I’ve said it before but I know next to nothing about Halo and I think it has helped my enjoyment. It does however make me want to go back and try and play the games again. I find it to be a really compelling setting and maybe it will act as a catalyst for me to actually get into the series in general. I know I had not played any of the Witcher games to the end until I watched the Netflix series, and that lead me to go on a deep dive and play everything Witcher related I could get my hands on. I technically own all of the Halo games, and even if I did not they are all available through Gamepass. At some point when I decide to get on a single player kick again, I should try and play through them all. The post Partner in Crime appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Moving Your Home Fediverse Instance

Good Morning Friends! Over the last several days I have fielded a large number of questions about Mastodon and the Fediverse at large. There is one aspect that I hinted about in my guide post, but did not really cover in detail and that is how to move instances. I bring this up in part because yesterday I moved instances. It is something that I have done a number of times over the years for various reasons. For fun here is a quick rundown:
  • Mastodon.cloud – I started here because I had no clue how anything worked and was joining during another wave of mass exodus from Twitter in 2018.
  • Elekk.xyz – I was not there long and then moved to Elekk because in the directory it reported to be a gaming focused instance. While gaming discussion does happen I was kinda surprised by how not true that statement was.
  • Nineties.Cafe – My friend Liore decided to start up an instance and happily moved over, and ended up helping with the administration and moderation a bit. We had some fun times here.
  • MMORPG.Social – After awhile Nineties.Cafe died down and my friend Gazimoff wanted to try and create an MMORPG focused social network, and as such I moved houses once again and helped a bit with administration and moderation.
  • Elekk.xyz – When things got too hard for Gaz to keep it running, I migrated back to Elekk and mostly went into read only mode for awhile, occasionally favoriting and posting daily blog posts but not a ton of direct interaction.
  • Mstdn.social – Then yesterday I moved once again to a larger instance run by a lovely Dutch fellow that goes by Stux, and is more general purpose.
To most people this is going to seem like madness, but in truth instance migration is built into the fabric of the Fediverse and a rather normal custom. Why did I decide to pick up my box and move it to another home? Well the reality is in the time I had been semi-afk on Elekk, it became a much more locked down environment than I realized and as a result I had been severed from a number of people on Mastodon.social and Mastodon.online, who through no fault of their own decided to pick the big flagship instances that some instance operators are blocking. Elekk is still a lovely place and if you are there currently there is zero reason to ever leave, that is unless you ALSO have friends in places that you could not communicate with.
Most instances that you would be migrating to or from are going to be running Mastodon as the backend software. Pleuroma is also extremely popular, but I have no experience with those instances and as a result I am uncertain how this process works there. However if you see an interface that looks something like this when you go into user preferences, you are on a Mastodon based instance. Under Account > Account Settings there is a functionality that allows you to move from one instance to another. There are two ways to do this, but the first is automated where you plug in the information for the instance you are moving to, and go through a series of dialogs to indicate which bits of data you want transferred. The instance you are leaving will then go dormant and show that you have moved to a new instance (will show this shortly).
If for whatever reason there is a difference in software versions, a misconfiguration… or something purposefully blocking this functionality there is another method. Essentially you can go into the Data Export section of the Mastodon user preferences screen and dump individual CSV files for each of the pieces of data you might want to migrate. Then on your new instance you can go into the Import screen of the same area and pull in the individual CSV files. Something you need to know about this process is you can migrate the people you follow, but you cannot migrate your followers. This moving process happens often enough that when someone gets a notification that you have followed them on a new account, most of the time they click follow out of habit. The Fediverse in general is way less focused on clout and making follower numbers go up. I personally like this manual process because it allows me to edit the CSV which is just a text file, and remove any accounts that I might not want to carry over to the next instance for any reason.
When someone goes to your old profile, they are going to see something like this indicating that the account has gone dormant and moved. Notice how my header image and avatar are greyed out, and in the side there is a note indicating that I have moved to @Belghast@Mstdn.Social. What is nice about this process is that if anyone happens to stumble upon any of your older “toots” out in the ether, there will be a breadcrumb trail that can lead them back to your active account. Among all of those accounts I talked about earlier, the only instances that are still alive are Mastodon.cloud and Elekk.xyz, and as a result I logged into both of them yesterday and set up my redirections. Hopefully through this little sequence you can see that the process of moving instances is nowhere near as tedious as it might sound at first. As always if you have any questions about the process please feel free to drop me a line below, or if you are yourself dabbling in the Fediverse feel free to reach out to me @Belghast@Mstdn.Social. There are certain customs and traditions in the Fediverse that might see a bit odd at first, but over the last four years I have gotten accustomed to them. I am always willing to help new folks as they start down this journey. The post Moving Your Home Fediverse Instance appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Inconsistent Icebrood Saga

Good Morning Friends! This is me… officially in Cantha and having legitimately gotten there through the story. This means that I have now finished all of the available story content in Guild Wars 2 prior to the release of the most current expansion, End of Dragons. So far Cantha seems to be a massive leap forward in the way the storytelling takes place, but we are not going to talk about that this morning. Instead we are going to talk about Living World Season 5, or what is otherwise known as the Icebrood Saga. Season 5 featured some of the best content I had experienced to date as well as some of the worst. Largely it was a season that felt like it was developed by two wildly different teams… and given the way layoffs hit ArenaNet in 2019 and 2020… that might be literally what happened.
The entire adventure spans the course of three zones: Grothmar Valley, Bjora Marches, and Drizzlewood Coast. Each of these is extremely well built and features some of the most interesting gameplay to date, especially Drizzlewood which is effectively a PVE only version of a WvW map. The story that unfolds is effectively one of a Charr civil war, as an entire culture of warriors is not quite certain who they should be fighting. It also furthers the character arc of the Norn prophecy and more specifically the evolution of the character Braham Eirsson. He has honestly turned from an insufferable ass of a character that I hated… to someone that I actually enjoy taking along on missions. The content is divided into a prologue and five chapters for a total of six parts. Everything but that last chapter is expertly crafted and deeply enjoyable… however it is in the end that the wheels fall off the cart.
It is in “Episode 5: Champions” that we are introduced to a new type of activity in Guild Wars 2, the Dragon Response Mission. At face value these are actually somewhat enjoyable, and reminds me of something akin to a Destiny 2 strike. You entire an area of an existing map, are given story dialog over coms, and asked to complete a sequence of tasks. They follow a very predictable pattern:
  • You Zone into the Map and are given 5 minutes to complete three different tasks. You will not have enough time to do all three but this is effectively the “matchmaking time” while it searches for additional players. Doing any effort seems to award you gold participation.
  • You are given a new task which is usually either escort someone to a place, or kill a bunch of things scattered around the map.
  • Upon completion of this task a Champion will spawn somewhere around the map. You will need to kill it and the standard “boss” rules apply, in that at some interval it is going to do a thing that makes it invulnerable… which will require you to perform some gimmick to begin dealing damage to them again.
Again this mission construct in itself is pretty enjoyable, and would have been a great addition were it sprinkled in sparingly or just something you could do on the side. However the ENTIRETY of Episode 5 is doing these missions… ten of them. Every couple of missions you are going to get a brief story interlude where you are asked to go talk to Aurene… where some member of your entourage is going to interrupt you and tell you that you need to do more Dragon Response Missions. This is something that I more or less had to grit my teeth and just grind out, and it felt awful.
The finale of Episode 5 is effectively doing a story mode only version of the Dragonstorm event. This is also exceptionally good and I really enjoyed experiencing the full story version. However it in no way makes up for the slog that the player has had to go through in order to get here. It is my understanding that when they were released they were doled out two Dragon Response Missions at a time. MAYBE playing it in that manner would have felt a bit better, but having to do ten of them in a row without coming up for air… just is the worst. As a result I deem the Icebrood Saga both the best expansion content to this point in Guild Wars 2, and also the worst.
I hear there are challenge mode versions of the Dragon Response Missions, but I am not sure if I want to set foot in another one. There are a few where I was so dead set on burning through them that I missed checking whether or not there was a mastery point I should be getting. I need to revisit these and at least pop in long enough to get those. Otherwise I maybe never want to see that content type again until I level another character through the content. I am greatly looking forward to digging into End of Dragons because so far… it has been delightful. I do want to take a quick moment to note that Kalidris Sparrowhawk is maybe one of my new favorite characters and I am hoping at some point… she joins Dragon’s Watch. The post Inconsistent Icebrood Saga appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

The Fediverse: A Wildly Incomplete Primer

Good morning friends. It was not my original intent to make this post but after having several people ask me to do one I am bending to public sentiment, or at least as public as this blog audience and my social sphere is. I’ve been on Mastodon or as it is more correctly known The Fediverse, since the great Wheaton Exodus of 2018. Most people left… I stayed around at least partially active and have some words to say about the matter. These are by no means authoritative words, because like many things the Fediverse is what you make of it. However I am still going to fill a post with words nonetheless.

So You Want to Leave Twitter?

Every so often an event happens to make people extremely nervous about the future of their social media platforms. We’ve gone through this many times over the course of the years with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and even further back when you start counting instant messaging platforms and IRC networks. So what happened to cause this current disturbance int he force? Basically an asshole bought Twitter, and has spouted off some random bullshit as he is wont to do about his grand plans for it. What is going to happen as a result is anyone’s guess. Elon could be playing 5D chess right now and trying to rattle the cage to get the stock price to go down… so he can pay less to buy the company. He could also be completely serious because he has had more than one run in with a Twitter user… like this situation where a bot was tracking his plane. I wanted to start this post with a bit of editorializing, to get it out of the way. Twitter can be an awful experience for anyone who is being harassed or is in any way marginalized and abused because of it. Twitter can also be a magical place where you can connect to people of similar interests from around the world. Coming up this Friday, it will mark my thirteenth year on the platform and I have seen so many things over those years and it has both positively and negatively impacted my mental health. There is no replacement for Twitter… I know I have looked many times. There are OTHER networks that exist out there, but if you go into them attempting to remove twitter and replace it with something else… you are going to end up sorely disappointed. Again I know… I have looked… and while I enjoy the various places I have found in the process there is no direct Twitter Killer just like there is no WoW Killer (other than sometimes itself).

What is Mastodon / The Fediverse?

So let’s start things off right by stealing a definition directly from Wikipedia!
The fediverse (a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe”) is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other. On different servers (instances), users can create so-called identities. These identities are able to communicate over the boundaries of the instances because the software running on the servers supports one or more communication protocols which follow an open standard.[1] As an identity on the fediverse, users are able to post text and other media, or to follow posts by other identities.[2] In some cases, users can even show or share data (video, audio, text, and other files) publicly or to a selected group of identities and allow other identities to edit other users’ data (such as a calendar or an address book).

Wikipedia
Twitter is a single open platform and everyone on it can see everyone else on it and all of the content contained within… with a few caveats for things like blocks and mutes. The Fediverse instead is a group of individual platforms running on the same protocol and agreeing to “federate” data between them in order to facilitate communication across multiple platforms at the same time. There are many different software platforms running on this shared protocol but the most popular of these is called Mastodon. This is in part why everyone mistakes the name of the broader platform for Mastodon, when in actuality it is just a subset of the greater Fediverse running on ActivityPub. There is some nuance here but really for sake of understanding that is about all you really need to know.

Usernames and Instance Names

In The Fediverse you are your username combined with your Instance name. So for example I currently reside on the Elekk.xyz instance of the Fediverse which is largely gaming focused. I am Belghast on that instance and in order to reach me you would use my username and the instance name like this:
@belghast@elekk.xyz
Essentially you are telling once instance who has authority over your account. When you follow someone from another server, there is some verification that takes place to make sure that both accounts are valid before setting up the syndication of content between them. Once followed, that user will effectively act like they are on your instance with you and you will see content from them similar to following someone on twitter.

The Feeds

The default web interface for Mastodon/Fediverse looks an awful lot like Tweetdeck, so for me it is extremely familiar and comfortable. However at a high level the Fediverse itself functions a little different than twitter. Everyone has Four feeds that they can access without any additional configuration. Lets talk about these and give a quick overview of how each functions.
  • Home – This is essentially a feed of everyone you are following on your account. Unlike twitter you will often times see partial conversations as the @ behavior is a little odd at times.
  • Notifications – This is a feed of mentions, favorites, and boots… which is the equivalent of a retweet. There are no quote retweets in the Fediverse, so those simply don’t exist.
  • Local – This is a feed of everything that is being talked about currently on your local instance and is ultimately what gives a given server a “community” feel.
  • Fediverse – This is everything being talked about on the Fediverse as a whole or at least the servers that your instance is currently Federating content for.
Apart from that you can create columns for Hashtags and create user lists similar to twitter and configure your interface to include these. There are also mobile apps but I will get into those later.

Post Audience

Let’s talk about a little quirk that is a bit different from Twitter. Each post you make has the ability to change the audience that it is currently targeting. In twitter when you send someone a direct message, it shows up in a completely different interface. When you send someone a Direct message in the Fediverse, there is a visual indication that it is private but it shows up in your feed. The only difference between the two is that the “audience” is set to one or more users. You get to this interface by clicking the Globe icon and you have a handful of options by default. I am going to run through these but please note that various servers have various other options because these can be configured by the server admin.
  • Public – This shows as available to anyone who is federating content with your server and is watching the local feed of the server.
  • Unlisted – If someone is following you directly they will see the content or if someone clicks on your profile, but otherwise it will not show up in public timelines.
  • Followers-only – This will only show up if someone follows you, and will not show in public feeds or on your timeline if someone clicks through and is not following you.
  • Direct – This is flagged to only show up as the users included in the message.
This message was going around yesterday and causing some great concern. The truth is that nothing you say online or on your phone should ever been considered private full stop. There is some nuance here, but everything that you say on ANY platform… is readable by someone. When I used to run forums all the time, it would have been trivial for me to get in and read private messages sent between users. I didn’t do that because it would be a violation of privacy. Having administered a Fediverse server, the truth is there is no EASY back end interface to allow admins to read your messages. They would have to get into the table structure and mung around with the data to find them… but just like your corporate email administrators can read your messages… it is a possibility. Someone at twitter can also read your messages as well… you never had any privacy there either. That might not be the assurance that you want, but it is the truth. So let’s move on to another “quirk” of the network when some things start to break down.

Remember the Joy of Netsplits?

The largest “Instance” is called Mastodon.social and there is a similarly sized overflow instance called Mastodon.online. The first is run by a man named Gargon, who lists himself as the CEO and Lead Developer for the Mastodon project. He is both revered and reviled depending upon which segment of the broader Fediverse you are talking to, and mostly based on my long distance view of his actions… does whatever the hell he wants without taking into account the suggestions of other server admins. Mastodon.social is both the most twitter-like of instances, but also largely lawless and un-moderated. It could just be the sheer scale of the server, but little has been done to take action on known bad actors on both .social and .online. So instead various segments of the community and server admins have taken action for them. This means that sometime between I went absent in December 2021 and now… the instance I am on has actively stopped federation with those two servers. That is one of the unique “features” of the Fediverse is that each community can determine who they will and will not accept posts from. The end result however is that you can have users on two different server instances that cannot communicate with each other… effectively breaking the “miracle” of open federation. I culled through my friends list yesterday removing everyone that I could no longer reach and it was not an enjoyable thing. Apparently votes were taken among the community I am on, but I was not paying attention at the time and as such did not get to vote.

Moving Instances

One of the interesting features of the Fediverse is that essentially took into account that it is unlikely that you are going to stay on the same instance forever. If decisions like blocking an instance end up harshing your enjoyment of the platform, you can effectively pick up “your house” and move it. There are semi-automated and manual ways that you can export all of the people you are following, blocking, and muting and import them into a brand new account on a different instance. This does not move the people who are following you, but when you move you will ultimately ping everyone when you “follow” them from the import, and given that this is a fairly common practice most people just take it as a normal practice on the network. During the course of my stay on the Fediverse I started on Mastodon.Online, then decided that the community was not my jam and moved to Elekk.xyz. When my good friend Liore decided to roll her own instance I moved again to Nineties.Cafe while it was active, and then again when my friend Gazimoff started MMORPG.social moved over there. In both of those cases I helped with the moderation and administration a bit, or at least enough to understand what a pain in the ass it is. Finally when both of those instances ended… I came back to Elekk.xyz and reactivated my account there. One of the default features of The Fediverse is the ability to go into user preferences and indicate you have moved and the account that you are moving to.

Remember the Term Netiquette?

Since every server that you interface with is effectively its own small island on the larger collective federated platform, they are each going to have their own “community norms”. For example Elekk.xyz the gaming instance that I hang my hat on tends to be very queer and very liberal. There are going to be instances that are very much the opposite of that… in fact the new “Trump” social network is running on the exact same open platform as is Parler that darling of the rightwingers. This is in part why finding a community that fits you is so important. However one of the things you are going to see a lot more on the Fediverse than on Twitter is “Content Warnings” because they actually do something. The above screenshot is an example of the interface when I have clicked the CW icon, giving me a line to write what my warning entails and then the normal dialog for composing a message.
What is shown to other users is something that looks like the above image. You get a line indicating what the warning is and then a Show More button allowing you to unroll the image. You can go into the back end interface and determine if you want this default behavior to happen or not, but honestly I find it terribly useful. If you want to “toot” about game spoilers then you absolutely can, just indicate that your content warning is a game spoiler and what game it is for and talk away. Anyone who responds to the original message is going to will also be wrapped within the content warning keeping the thread hidden from anyone who does not want to look upon it.
Similarly you can mark images as sensitive and they will not by shown by default unless the user clicks on them. The negative side of this is that users will self police their instances and give you a piece of their mind if you are posting something potentially triggering that does not happen within a content warning or sensitive flag. Another thing that the fediverse is extremely big on is accessibility, and as such there are users who will give you a good deal of grief if you make it your practice to regularly post images without descriptions. To get to this interface click the Edit button after uploading an image, and it will bring up the dialog shown above allowing you to give a description of the image for the visually impaired. It also has a functionality where it attempts to auto-describe it with AI… but that does not seem to work on any of the video game screenshots I have tried it on.

Read the Room

If I had one piece of advice to give potential folks migrating over to the Fediverse, is to lurk for a bit and read the room. Scroll through the local feed to see what sorts of interactions are happening on the server. Each Instance Server in the Fediverse honestly has more akin with an old school forum than it does Twitter. When I used to join forums all the time for different groups of friends, or even more modernly new discords… I would attempt to pattern my own behavior after the behavior of what I was seeing in the community. That is not to say that I would behave significantly differently than I normally do, I would just attempt to adopt the customs of a given server/forum/discord. The Fediverse/Mastodon is not the new Twitter and honestly anyone saying that is being disingenuous. I’ve been here roughly four years and what I found instead was an interesting and wildly different community to the one I had on twitter. It can scratch a bit of the same itch, but if you go into this experience looking for a one to one replacement, then I feel like you are going to be sorely disappointed. I posted a long “explainer” thread yesterday not in an attempt to get people to convert, but to explain the network at a high level. Your are more than welcome to join me there however. If you are interested in Elekk.xyz I can send you an invite, because it is an invite only community. However that said I myself do not play on burning down Twitter any time soon. I’ve simply existed in both places for a long while… as I also exist on Instagram and to a very limited degree Facebook. The post The Fediverse: A Wildly Incomplete Primer appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.