But muh rural internet is not as good as muh urban internet! So, forgiven!

Imagine going to a public class on… let’s say playing the electric guitar, and the instructor just keeps going on and on about tuning forks, gear maintenance, and music theory. You were just hoping to learn how to play Stairway to Heaven, despite never having touched a guitar in your life.

The telescope is actually a hurdle to most people who will ever look through one. Introducing people to amateur astronomy by talking about making the sausage doesn’t whet the appetite. It’s dry, it’s small, and it’s boring. And it’s not relevant to 90% of people who will ever show up – they’re not going to race out and spend hundreds of dollars on a worthwhile telescope. It’s the kind of thing you talk about once people are hooked, want to view things independently, and are actually ready to invest their time, energy, and money into the hobby.

Amateur astronomy happens first in the mind. The imagination is accessible; the nitty gritty of operating a manual telescope is actually quite exclusionary, and fails to meet people where they actually are.

So many great things listed as negatives :(

RSS is back. Forums are back. It’s brilliant. Now I just need Musk and Zuck and Bezos to be no longer relevant to anybody’s lives.

I was wondering if anyone else has done any kind of astronomy public outreach and if they had any advice to help keep the engagement up when folks are taking turns peeking through the scope.

About 20 years or so, yup. Star parties, observatories, planetaria, etc.

My plan has been to teach the basics of star finding, telescope use, etc.

Don’t do this. The people who are going to show up to look through a telescope at the park do not GAF about how to use a telescope. They want to look through it and be awed by what they see. The work it takes to get to that point is of zero interest to 99.999% of them. Very often, the actual visual image you see is not awe inspiring, though, so you want to spend the time while people are looking through the lens explaining to them what they are seeing, and doing so in very awe-inspiring tones and terms.

Lead them to the feelings that they want to feel. Weave the story that reflects those desires back to them. Do everything you can to make them feel the scope of what they’re seeing. Use the fact that it’s an unimpressive smudge to hammer home just how god damn far away it is they are seeing. Trot out the big numbers. Tell them how far away it is in in light years, and then switch to miles. Reference what was taking place on Earth at the time the light first left its source. Relate it all to the things they relate to or care about.

And treat the telescope like it’s the least important thing of the night until someone asks about it.

It’s a lot for an average donor, though. “Huge” is not in relationship to the project’s needs. It’s in relationship to what the donor thinks is a lot of money or not.

How do you find someone on Instagram if you are not an Instagram user?

How do you find something on Mazda Forum if you are on Reddit?

How you find something on AVForums if you are on AVS Forum?

The fediverse has way, way, way more in common with the Internet of 2005 than it does with the Internet of 2025. You have to act more like it’s 20 years ago.

Pixelfed not a centralized service. It’s a web engine. It’s something that lets you host your own photo sharing website. If you want to syndicate stuff from someone else’s website, you need to find it on their website first. Fediverse websites just let you do the syndicating by automated request.

To initiate the syndication request, you take the post/user’s original URL, paste it into your website’s search bar, and then hit enter. It will request and fetch that content, creating a local copy for you. From there, you can follow the person who originally posted it, creating an auto-syndication relationship.

True. But we are not the open source community. And the fediverse is not inherently open source by nature. ActivityPub is designed to be used by anyone.

“internet thing from 20 years ago was smaller than big, VC backed social media giant from today. Therefore, thing that was defacto standard 20 years ago was never relevant” is a hell of a take

Single topic forums are still doing ok out there on the wider Internet. Create more well moderated, single-topic, federated forums, and then promote those specifically to users who care about those topics.

Don’t sell Lemmy to end users. Lemmy is a solution for admins. Sell the specific websites to end users.

Misskey’s probably the most polished feeling, though under the hood it’s apparently a total mess.

Bluesky isn’t a twitter alternative, it’s staged opposition. It’s backed by the crypto industry. It’s going to follow everything else that’s supported by the tech bros.

Most people have no idea about the fetish circles and the languaged used in relation to them. They recoil at “fediverse” not because of sex association, but because it’s a really lame sounding name.