Notices by Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org)

Elgg joined the Fediverse.

Which happened on March 7, 2025 with the release of a plugin. Almost no one noticed. But it’s kind of monumental.

Because Elgg isn’t new. It’s not some trendy project that showed up last week and slapped on federation as a proof of concept.

No, Elgg has been around since 2004. That’s older than Facebook, older than Twitter, older than Reddit. And unlike those platforms, Elgg was always open source.

It was originally designed for e-learning. But it quickly became something more—a full-blown social network engine that you could host yourself.

Profiles, groups, blogs, activity feeds, photo galleries, file uploads, granular permissions—you name it. It had everything Facebook had in its earlier years. And in some ways, more.

Now, with the ActivityPub plugin released for version 6.1, Elgg is federated. Which means Elgg instances can follow and be followed. They can share posts to Mastodon, Akkoma, Friendica, you name it. They can receive comments from Lemmy or PeerTube or Firefish. The plugin supports inboxes, outboxes, WebFinger, even group federation. You can block domains too. It’s not a toy. It’s real.

And yeah, almost nobody’s talking about it. Which is wild, because this is the kind of thing that should be huge. Elgg isn’t some flash-in-the-pan experiment. It’s a mature codebase with a long history, and now it can talk to the rest of the Fediverse. That’s not just important—it’s rare for something this mature to federate.

Most federated platforms lean minimalist. They’re great at one thing—microblogging, video, link aggregation. But Elgg gives you the kitchen sink. It feels like a complete social network. Honestly, if you miss how Facebook used to be, this is probably the closest you’re going to get.

So yeah. Elgg joined the Fediverse. And if people really want alternatives to Big Social, maybe it’s time to give this old horse a look.

https://elgg.org/plugins/3330966

@fediversenews

Itch (2003) is a Windows-exclusive puzzle game where your job is to herd fleas into rows before they overrun the screen.

That’s it. That’s the pitch.

The premise sounds like a dare—what if a tile-matcher starred literal parasites? You line up four same-colored fleas in a row or square. Do it fast because they keep spawning. And once the grid is full, you’re done.

It’s got three modes—Time, Rounds, Puzzle—and that last one gives you 100 handcrafted challenges.

Visually? Think bargain-bin weirdness filtered through early-2000s CD-ROM sheen. It’s not pretty, but it moves. And it’s got just enough quirkiness to keep some people (not me) entertained.

Critics gave it a shrug (about 70%), but that misses the point. Itch! isn’t here to impress you. It’s here to crawl under your skin and see if you flinch.

And in a world drowning in clean, focus-tested puzzle games, there’s something refreshing about one that feels slightly diseased.

@videogames

Just tried upgrading to nvidia-driver-580 on Pop!_OS.

Result? Blinking cursor at boot.

Luckily I know my way around Linux. Hit Ctrl+Alt+F2 to drop into a TTY, logged in, and ran:

That got the driver back in shape.

But if you’re not comfortable in Linux, this fix is anything but obvious.

This is another core reason why #Lemmy and #Piefed are better than #Reddit.

On Reddit, if a head mod of a major subreddit goes toxic or starts power-tripping, the community is stuck. That mod only got control because they lucked into claiming a name like r/movies or r/pics first—and now they hold the keys.

On the #Fediverse, it doesn’t work that way. If people don’t like !movies@lemmy.world, they can move over to !movies@piefed.social. Even if lemmy.world is the biggest Lemmy server, it has no monopoly on access.

And that’s exactly what happened. People voted with their feet. Which is why !movies@piefed.social is now the most active movie community on the Fediverse.

Someone just sent me a very angry DM because their replies to my #Akkoma posts (I don’t use Mastodon) showed up on #Piefed.

So let’s clear this up. When I tag a Piefed community like @movies@piefed.social or @videogames@piefed.social, your replies automatically appear on Piefed. On Piefed itself, the @ is swapped for a !—that’s how communities are marked.

That’s not a bug. That’s ActivityPub doing what it does best. Almost anything you post on Mastodon can show up elsewhere on the Fediverse.

I know a lot of you still think of the #Fediverse as just “Mastodon”.

But it’s far more than that. There’s an entire ecosystem of federated message boards that’s already proven popular: #Piefed, #NodeBB, #Lemmy, #Mbin, and #Discourse.

Even the classics like #Friendica and #Hubzilla have solid forum features baked in.

If you’re only here for the microblogging, you’re missing a key piece. Communities built around interests are something #Twitter never offered, and #Bluesky still doesn’t.

So if you’re looking to replace your #Facebook Groups, the Fediverse already has you covered.

Freaks of Nurture (2018) is a stop-motion short directed by Alexandra Lemay and produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

It’s six and a half minutes of pure craftsmanship. The story? A daughter dealing with her wildly quirky mother—who somehow balances raising kids, fostering dogs, renovating houses, and never breaking a sweat. Amanda Plummer voices the mom, and the whole thing is inspired by Lemay’s real life.

What floored me wasn’t just the humor, but the detail. One scene has spaghetti flying straight at the lens, and you catch yourself thinking: wait, this is clay. That’s the magic of it—every little gag is handmade.

And here’s the thing: people give endless hype to Japanese anime, but Canada has been quietly dominating animation for decades. The National Film Board has more Oscars than any other studio outside the U.S., most of them in animation. Freaks of Nurture fits right into that legacy, and it’s picked up its own share of festival awards.

Short film? Sure. But it’s also six minutes and thirty seconds of stop-motion at its best.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d6YYCEO4OA

@movies

I need more people to join !videogames@piefed.social.

Yes, I talk about video games here a lot. But I want a community that’s specifically about games—and one that’s actually good.

Now, why spin up a new video game space when #Lemmy already has several? Easy: I think #Piefed is better.

It’s smoother to crosspost from #Mastodon. The moderation tools are more powerful. And unlike most platforms, Piefed even lets you move your community elsewhere if you need to.

But here’s the real kicker: so many gaming communities on Lemmy feel stuck in Reddit-land. Bad moderation. Too self-serious. The same stale culture.

What I want to build instead is simple: a gaming community that’s open, welcoming, and fun.

https://piefed.social/c/videogames

LaserDisc looks like a giant CD, but don’t let that fool you—it’s not digital.

The picture on those discs is actually analog video, recorded as a frequency-modulated signal just like broadcast TV or VHS. Instead of storing pixels, the pits and lands on the disc encode continuous voltage changes. When you pop it into a player, the machine reads that FM signal and spits out plain old composite video—the exact same yellow RCA connection you’d get from a VCR.

Since it’s analog, LaserDisc doesn’t have a neat pixel count. There’s no “480p” baked in. Instead, sharpness depends on bandwidth, which works out to around 425 horizontal lines on NTSC discs. That’s miles ahead of VHS’s muddy 240, but nowhere near DVD’s clean digital precision. Which is why LaserDisc looks sharper and steadier than tape, yet still has those analog quirks—dot crawl, color bleed, and a bit of noise if you look closely.

Audio tells the same story. Early discs carried nothing but analog stereo FM tracks, while later ones layered in digital PCM for CD-quality sound. So you’d get crisp audio on top of video that was still fundamentally analog.

That’s what makes LaserDisc such an oddball—it’s futuristic optical tech on the outside, but inside, it’s pure broadcast-era television.