@sunzu @dvdnet62 Oh come now. If there’s one thing Mozilla doesn’t need anyone’s help with, it’s shooting itself in the foot with its own gun.

Now excuse me, I have some Pocket articles to read on my Firefox OS phone…

@makeasnek On a broader note, I think possibly the best approach for decentralised, open-sourced web search might be an evolution on the SearXNG model.

At the top of the funnel, you have meta search engines that query and aggregate results from a number of smaller niche search engines.

The metasearch engines are open source, anyone with a spare server or a web hosting account can spin one up.

For some larger sites that are trustworthy, such as Wikipedia, the site’s own search engine might be what’s queried.

For the Fediverse and other similar federated networks, the query is fed through a trusted node on the network.

And then there’s a host of smaller niche search engines, which only crawl and index pages on a small number of websites vetted and curated by a human.

(Perhaps on a particular topic? Or a local library or university might curate a list of notable local websites?)

(Alternatively, it might be that a crawler for a web index like Curlie.org only crawls websites chosen by its topic moderators.)

In this manner, you could build a decent web search engine without needing the scale of Google or Microsoft.

@makeasnek @schizoidman YaCy is still around.

And https://searx.space/ is an open source metasearch search engine with many instances. (Try https://searx.be/ if you want to test it out.)

SearX/SearXNG allows you to aggregate results from a number of different search engines. You choose which ones, and they’re stored in your browser without setting up an account.

@sabreW4K3 Plume doesn’t appear to be active, unfortunately 🥺

There’s a notice on the official Join Plume website saying the former developers don’t have the time to maintain it anymore. Most of the former public instances now throw up errors of various kinds.

WriteFreely ( @writefreely ) is alive and well. I was seriously toying with the idea of setting up a blog through its main instance, which is called Write.as Professional. The sticking point for me was that the official on-platform monetisation tool (Coil) appears to be dead, and doesn’t support members-only posts (like Ghost).

Ghost, when federation goes live, looks like it will be the best option for my blog.

WordPress plus @pfefferle 's plugins is another great option, depending on what you want to use it for. (There’s no shortage of WP plugins!)

As for Lemmy, I could see a blogging-focussed front end being created for it, in the same way FediBB put a traditional message board front end on it, but one doesn’t appear to exist at present.

@paulwallbank @franksting @unionagainstdhmo @firstdogonthemoon @stilgherrian @mpesce Crikey/Private Media really could (and probably should) be a much bigger company than it is, just it’s been really horrendously managed.

Hopefully Will Hayward is doing a better job, because many of his predecessors have left a lot to be desired.

For most of its life, Private Media barely turned a profit, and that’s been with Crikey subscriptions and SmartCompany basically carrying the various other websites that have come and gone over the years.

Many talented young journos have worked there, only to move on to the Nine newspapers or the ABC after a year or two.

You had the former CEO who one day was running cables through the ceiling of the old offices next to the Immigration Museum.

You had the other former CEO who loaded the organisation up with sales staff, only for them all to be made redundant within six months.

You had ideas that could have made money (spin out Patrick Stafford’s SmartCompany tech newsletter into its own small business tech publication) knocked back, while vanity projects with no business model (remember Paul Barry’s Power Index?) got the green light.

At one stage, Crikey used a heavily hacked WordPress as its content management system. SmartCompany and LeadingCompany used Joomla!, and StartupSmart used FlexiContent. All self-hosted out of a Port Melbourne data centre.

Despite owning a digital media company, the people in charge at the time didn’t know enough about digital tech to know what a massive resource black hole this was.

(Eric Beecher had to bring in consultants to tell him!)

I could go on…

#Auspol #Media #Politics #Crikey #Politics #Business #Melbourne #Sydney #Fairfax #Economics #Journalism #Vicpol #NSWpol

@franksting @paulwallbank @unionagainstdhmo @firstdogonthemoon @stilgherrian @mpesce Grundle is still around, and still writing for Crikey: https://www.crikey.com.au/author/guy-rundle/

@Dymonika @MossyFeathers I’m guessing you’re overseas?

Super fund, short for superannuation fund.

Basically, in Australia 11% of wages are automatically deposited into a compulsory retirement savings account, known as a superannuation account.

A superannuation fund is a financial institution that manages these accounts.

More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia

@lemmyreader Here’s a starting point for a fediverse StackExchange: Make sure it’s interoperable with Lemmy.

Now, you may not get the full feature set on Lemmy, but you should be able to interact with it from Lemmy as if it’s a group on there.

#StackExchange #Fediverse #Coding

@AllNewTypeFace Of course there were.

For commuters:

* More densification around existing stations and tram lines instead of suburban sprawl.

* Upgrading buses across Melbourne to a 10-minute minimum frequency and straightening out existing bus routes.

* Rolling out high-capacity signalling and automatic train control across the Melbourne suburban rail network

* Building Metro 2 from Newport to Clifton Hill would double the number of trains that can run on the Hurstbridge and Mernda lines.

* Building the Doncaster Railway.

* Building the Heidelberg to Box Hill section of the SRL first.

* Extending the 48 tram to Doncaster and giving it dedicated lanes for more of its journey.

And then for freight, there’s a bunch of things too:

* Converting more suburban lines to dual gauge.

* Converting more regional Victorian lines to standard gauge

* Electrifying regional rail and freight services

* Building more multimodal facilities near existing rail lines.

@HubertManne @sqgl Yes, the linked article is about the Australian ABC, rather than the American one.

The two entities are not connected. The Australian ABC is a government-owned public broadcaster, while the American one is owned by Disney.

It’s basically claiming a former Murdoch executive, who was appointed to manage the Australian ABC, is still working to promote his former boss’ political and business interests.

@greg @sydney You mean the one near the station that does the freshly grilled pork banh mi?

Also, there’s a few other good things about the place as well: https://aus.social/@ajsadauskas/112405402308405600

@naevaTheRat There are many upsides to Hornsby.

The Westfield has most major chains you’d want, including a David Jones and a cinema.

There are some good local restaurants.

For a satellite city/outer suburb/exburb, the area around the Hornsby CBD is surprisingly dense. Three-storey blocks of flats and apartment buildings, for the most part.

Very multicultural these days.

Walking distance to national parks.

Multiple train lines to most of northern Sydney, as well as the Central Coast, Newcastle, and beyond.

You can comfortably live without a car there.

I’ve had the misfortune of visiting the local hospital. It’s clean and modern.

Good public and private schools.

It’s close to the Macquarie Park business precinct, as well as the university.

It’s reasonably affordable (at least by Sydney standards).

But.

There’s little in the way of live music. Or arts and culture.

It’s a long way from many of the places you’d want to visit in Sydney.

No local beaches.

While there are good restaurants there, it doesn’t hold a candle to somewhere like Newtown, or Surry Hills, or Church Street in Parramatta.

So it’s a good place.

But it’s a long, long way off top five place in all of Australia.

@naevaTheRat Hornsby definitely isn’t bad by any stretch — I used to live there.

But.

If you made a list of the five top places in Australia to live, Hornsby probably wouldn’t be on the list either.

@alcoholicorn Yeah, that’s not how it tends to work in Australia.

What happens is a state government puts up a good chunk of time construction costs (as much as half in some cases), plus public land.

In some cases, the freeway already exists, but the state government wants one more lane built, because it thinks that will ease congestion (as happened with sections of the Tullamarine and Monash Freeways in Melbourne).

It gets handed off to Transurban, who builds it under a long-term operating agreement (30 years is common).

In some cases, the agreements have clauses saying railways that compete with the toll road can’t be built.

As the end of the lease approaches, Transurban offers to build one more lane — in exchange for extending the agreement.

@alcoholicorn It is when it has been privatised to a company that pretty much pays no tax (hi Transurban!), for roads that taxpayers helped to pay for, and those toll roads connect car dependent suburbs that have next to no public transport.

@unionagainstdhmo Definitely a bad take by Bernard there.

As for whether Crikey as a whole is any good?

Honestly, I think it and its parent company Private Media have been really poorly managed at times.

Many of the best reporters at the Nine papers and The Guardian used to write for Crikey and its sister publications at one time or another.

Some current and past Private Media journos/contributors are active on the Fedi, including @firstdogonthemoon, @paulwallbank, @stilgherrian, and @mpesce.

@Gurre @fuck_cars The road lobby’s big answer to the mess they’ve created with the Rozelle Interchange is to build a second road tunnel under Sydney Harbour.

Engineers at the inquiry into the Rozelle Interchange fiasco have already testified that will only create traffic jams elsewhere on the road network: https://aus.social/@ajsadauskas/112383313109173146

Just one more lane, bro!

@LostXOR @yogthos @NoIWontPickAName @technology There’s a few other steps they could potentially take.

The first would be to block any financial institution in the US, or that deals with the US, from sending any payments to or from ByteDance’s accounts.

They could also freeze any assets currently held by US financial institutions.

Second, if they can get Apple, Microsoft, and Google on board to help do their bidding, they could pull the ByteDance app from the Apple and Google Play app stores.

That includes removing it from any apps where it’s already installed. Globally.

They could also request that TikTok is removed from Google and Bing search results.

On top of this, they could do what you suggested, and ask ISPs and mobile carriers to block domains and IP addresses used by ByteDance.

And the US could apply diplomatic pressure on other countries to implement similar financial and ISP-level blocks and bans.

So, potentially, it’s also blocked in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and elsewhere.

@crispyflagstones @yogthos Someone is named @dansup who also created @pixelfed, the app is called Loops, you can follow his progress here: @loops

@sydbot @sydney Anyone end up getting up early for the dawn service? Or do anything interesting today?