Notices by Ewen Bell 📸 (ewen@social.ewenbell.com)

One of my favourite things about these cockies is their attitude. This crest action when they land is just a taste of what they're capable of. When they wanna get rowdy at each other and scream from the rooftops, that crest gets a workout. It's marvellous.

#Melbourne #WildOz #CockyCrest #CityBirds

Thanks so much for taking time to look at this.

[ I've just spent the evening trying to switch back to Pleroma-FE and spend more time with it. I grabbed an updated Soapbox a week ago and it's blatted my static folder... so I'm trying work out how to get back to Pleroma-FE. It's ignoring my admin settings! ]

Anyway, I will figure it out. Then I'll look more closely again at your suggestions.

One more thing that was a big issue for me, which I forgot about, was having a larger box to write my posts in. One reason I started exploring self-hosting an instance was to give myself freedom for very long posts. Is there flexibility on the Pleroma-FE interface to create a nice big space for typing long posts?

Am attaching a screenshot of this post by way of example.

I should add, I'm a 55 year old ex-geek with bad eyesight. My feedback is probably not going to reflect what a lot of younger audiences are thinking. I might be boring :)

Yeah I didn't want to throw out too many specifics to my reply. Happy to elaborate more.

The UI is very busy and makes me anxious having that much jammed into a screen. It's trying to do a lot all at once. I'd like to be able to just rearrange what is on screen, or scale back sections to an icon instead for example.

The main section with the feed in PleromaFE is especially intense. Tight fonts and lots of icons. Clicking on a post expands that thread, but I'd much prefer to have a break-out section where highlighted or expended content can be viewed instead. A second column for example, like the advanced web UI on Mastodon.

Indeed that UI is a very effective and useful way to setup a screen, in my opinion.

Overall, the PleromaFE UI feels very dated. 90s dated. At the other end of the spectrum is Soapbox – very clean, and somewhat lacking in features. But it's a calm space and the UI is nicely responsive. It's very smooth. Maybe some inspiration to be found there.

Those are my thoughts!

I like the sounds of this.

Trouble with that kind of lawsuit is that it ensure the dirty laundry is being aired for years to come. This story will live longer than Trump.

Even a single decade ago.

I remember when the royal wedding took place and the entire supply of chicken was diverted to the event and for a week or so you couldn't buy chicken momos anywhere. A friend told me that nobody in Bhutan was willing to wear the burden of killing wholesale quantities of chickens, so they just imported them from India instead.

Today that is no longer the case, they grow all the chickens they want locally.

Bhutan is changing in a lot of ways, mostly for the worse and mostly with far greater gravity than just the chickens. It's a society that has found strength on the idea of being happy with your lot in life, now tipped sideways by the internet and desire to possess all the things they see elsewhere in the world.

Used to be that a plot of land from the parents would allow oyu to grow enough rice to pay for a decent living. But growing rice doesn't buy iPhone and Landcruisers. A huge percentage of Bhutan's best have left the country since the pandemic, looking for greater wealth. It makes me very sad that they didn't see their existing lives as more valuable.

But I digress :)

George Monbiot made a good point a few years ago about "lab grown meat", which sounds terrible at first but absolutely can taste great to those who enjoy the real thing. There exists a world not far away where no animal needs to die to satiate my carnivorous desires. A bit like solar electricity... It's taking over not because we want to save the world but because it's better and cheaper.

[ sorry this was a long one! ]