Australian urban planning, public transport, politics, retrocomputing, and tech nerd. Recovering journo. Cat parent. Part-time miserable grump.

Cities for people, not cars! Tech for people, not investors!

  • 19 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: November 5th, 2022
  • AJ Sadauskas@aus.socialtoFediverse@lemmy.ml•Federated Blogging Platforms
    6·
    5 months ago

    @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.

  • AJ Sadauskas@aus.socialtoFediverse@lemmy.ml•Pixelfed introduces Loops, a Short-Form Video App
    1·
    8 months ago

    @thegiddystitcher @helenslunch I think hashtag feeds being overrun with vertical videos is an excellent point. (One I hope @dansup considers!)

    But beyond that, I think vertical videos through Loops on the Fedi are likely to be far less obtrusive than they have been on other platforms.

    What’s so annoying about them on Instagram and YouTube is that the algorithm automatically drops vertical videos into my feed.

    And there’s *lots* of them in my feed, often on topics I’m not interested in.

    They’re not there because I’m interested, but because they serve the commercial interests of the social media app’s owners.

    Hashtags aside, on the Fedi, they’ll only appear in your feed if you follow a Loops account you’re interested in, or someone you follow finds one interesting enough to share.

    And if people on your Mastodon server all find them really annoying, there’s always the option to just block the Loops servers and be done with it.

  • AJ Sadauskas@aus.socialtoSolarpunk Urbanism@slrpnk.net•Office to Apartment conversions won't save our Cities
    3·
    9 months ago

    @ohlaph @maegul@lemmy.ml I watched it, so you don’t have to.

    Okay, so he’s mostly talking here about older, 1980s or 1990s suburban office park buildings, rather than CBD office towers.

    Think large floor plates, large open air car parks, one set of toilets and kitchens per floor.

    They were basically designed for one purpose, as @maegul@hachyderm.io pointed out, and that’s to cram in as many desks as possible. People were, of course, expected to drive to work.

    From a property investor’s standpoint, it would cost more to buy these buildings and then retrofit them then you would get back by selling or leasing them as apartments.

    And even if you did spend the money to renovate (including completely redoing the plumbing and HVAC systems), you’d still be left with crummy apartments with windows that don’t open and bedrooms with no windows.

    He argues the best option is to tear it down and start over.

    To be fair, he does raise some good points. I can see how a large floorplate would be difficult to subdivide into apartments where every living room and bedroom has a window.

    And I don’t think anyone would argue that suburban office parks aren’t hideous places.

    My thoughts as follows:

    1. If it doesn’t make commercial sense to retrofit buildings to apartments, perhaps governments need to step in and do it?

    I mean, I can’t imagine too many commercial property owners and banks would complain too much right now about a government stepping in and buying up older office buildings.

    And even if it doesn’t make commercial sense to retrofit them, it might make social and public policy sense to convert them into public housing, while at the same time avoiding having disused or abandoned office blocks laying around.

    1. Going forward, we have to make sure the buildings we design are reusable, and can support a range of different uses.

    That means, in many cases, having buildings that support different uses on different floors (so shops or restaurants on the ground floor, offices or community spaces on the lower floors, apartments above).

    More importantly, we need buildings that are designed from the outset to be able to be used for different purposes over time.