We’re nearing the end of the season, so as usual, there won’t be much new this and the coming weeks.

A quick disclaimer regarding Backerkit: They have redesigned their website again, which of course broke the crawler. I will try to get it working again as soon as possible, but until then, there won’t be any Backerkit projects included in the lists.

It still looks a bit quirky in Kbin sadly (especially on mobile where it gets very squished), but at least it should work in Lemmy now.

So it seems like the table formatting bug as finally been fixed in Kbin. In other words, the inline lists are back!

So for some reason the inlined tables didn’t format at all in this post. I’m generating them automatically, so I have no idea why they didn’t work this time. Probably some project that contained some invalid character in the name or description.

The Google Docs still works however. Meanwhile, I’m gonna see if I can find what the issue could be.

Edit: It seems like there’s a bug in Kbin that somehow breaks the tables (even when posting to a Lemmy instance). Until that is fixed, I guess the Google Docs will have to do, sadly.

I don’t want a Meta account, but I want to communicate with the billions of people who do, including all of my family and friends.

But that is the power of the Fediverse. There is room for both small isolated instances as well as those that are part the larger “main” network, and everything in-between.

There are probably several reasons, many not entirely clear to any one of us now, but one can guess.

I think not an insignificant reason for this is the coming expansion of the EU Digital Markets Act where Meta among a few other tech giants are labeled as gatekeepers. As always, while the EU might be one of the earlier ones, other markets will likely follow in the coming decade.

Meta will going forward be forced to open up their platforms and incorporate interoperability with other services. It starts with messages, but knowing the EU, that is probably just the first stepping stone.

If Meta have to do it anyways, they will probably want to make sure that they are the first one in establish a strong presence in the technology that every other tech giant will also need to embrace.

I don’t think they care even a little about the present Fediverse community, what they do care about is the technology that Apple, Microsoft, Google, TikTok and so on will agree on to use going forward. By embracing ActivityPub early, they are betting on having already a strong position when these companies are inevitably going to have to try to agree on a common standard.

Yeah it’s always a project to get new people started with Mumble. It doesn’t feel like it should be so difficult, but people always struggle.

Ironically, I struggled immensely with forcing Discord to stop messing with my system audio settings, which is apparently something apps are allowed to do in Windows.

It seems like the formatting kinda works. On Lemmy it looks alright to me, while on Kbin the columns are a bit squished, but otherwise it appears to hold together. I’ll see if I can refine it a bit next week.

Edit: Oof, Kbin really doesn’t handle tables well on mobile. At least it looks alright on Lemmy.

JetBrains have some quite extensive VC tooling built into their IDEs which I use almost exclusively. I used to do everything in the terminal, but I find it so much quicker and simpler to do it directly in the IDE.

It actually came to my attention recently that Lemmy/Kbin does in fact support markdown tables similar to Reddit. The issue is that there is no preview function, at least on Kbin.social which I’m using, so it’s very difficult to see that it’s formatted correctly.

In theory, it should be possible to use the same or at least similar markdown that I’m generating for Reddit, but I’m quite heavily relying on abusing Reddit specific quirks in order to get the formatting to look right.

I’ll see what I can do next week.