thegiddystitcher

Try it before you dismiss it, that's all I'm saying!

Edit: I have found my people.

I've been happily posting away here on two accounts since just before the Great Migration, and have no problem being openly a woman on the internet. Up to and including correcting people who assume I'm a guy, and even occasionally acknowledging the existence of periods.

Which, honestly that was a bad tactic back on Reddit, my inbox was a nightmare. But here it's gone much better, so thank you to anyone who ever received one of my corrections with good grace!

It's also brought quite a few DMs my way from other women who try to stay more anonymous with their posts, a choice I can completely understand.

So today on International Women's Day I just want to wave hello to the other women out there, even if you don't want to break cover and wave back. Anonymous or not, cis or trans, I see you out there and you're killing it.

This may break the community rule on encouraging discussion, if nobody wants to out themselves to say hello back. So I guess I should also ask a question.

Um...anyone else using it as an excuse to treat themselves today? I've given myself the day (mostly) off work and am doing some fun gamedev all afternoon instead, then we're planning a takeaway tonight. Easily pleased, perhaps, but sounds good to me 😄

Everything about this is wrong in every way.

Shame on you, Sainsbury's.

I'm thinking of starting a blog to document a new project, having not blogged at all in probably about ten years at this point.

Was hoping someone who has already researched this stuff might be able to save me some time and give a tldr of the Fediverse-friendly platform options and their various pros and cons?

I know obviously WordPress has ActivityPub now, but am not sure exactly how well it works or how integrated it really is. Then there's something called WriteFreely? Any others? Which do you prefer and why?

Really appreciate any pointers on this, and if this thread doesn't turn up anything useful I promise to come back and do my own writeup after finding out the answers by myself.

Cheers!

We're at the end of our rope with Asda. Everything is being substituted, and we're fine with that when it's just another brand of the same thing but like they're sending entirely different vegetables to the ones we need, they're substituting meat-free ordered items with actual meatballs, etc etc. It's got the point where the delivery guy just apologises sadly every week.

It's possible to set "do not substitute" on everything but it's a ballache, and then we'd still have to go shopping anyway since half our order would still be missing.

So. Which supermarkets actually deliver most of what you order? Or at the very least, have a sane policy of substitutions?

Thanks!

Edit: Added a cute dog pic for a bit of extra casualness.

Edit: We have established that everyone here is in fact old.

Like, I say that I'm getting old. I make jokes all the time about being middle aged. But I never really felt old until now, you know?

This realisation is brought to you not by random aches and pains, not by the ever-increasing number of grey hairs, not even by my long list of old lady hobbies.

But rather by how much I'm looking forward to spending a thrilling Friday night *checks notes* watching Top of the Pops reruns with the folks over on Mastodon. It's kind of hilarious because the rest of the week the #TOTP tag is usually all internet security and whatnot, and then we just shamelessly take it over for a couple of hours every Friday.

Missed it last week because husband was out somewhere so we caught up later, but it wasn't the same without the live tooting gang. Really excited to get back to the routine!

What have I become 😭

Tell me about your exciting Friday night plans a day early, that I may live vicariously. Or maybe join me in my grumbles about advancing age, idc, just distract me from all the work I'm not doing right now.

Sorry to utter the C-word in October, but I got into a conversation about this a couple nights ago where people seemed amazed that adults would still maintain a wishlist like this. I'm on the side of it's totally normal, but maybe I'm wrong?

Personally despite repeated attempts, my mam and grandma will not stop buying Christmas gifts. So I set up a wishlist on Giftster and they just have it bookmarked. I go through and make sure it's up to date a couple of months before Christmas or my birthday.

The husband also has a link to it so I suspect he falls back on that for inspiration quite a lot.

Normal or no?

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/8544858

Hi all. I recently decided to try PeerTube as a creator, and was quite surprised by a lot of what I found. Thought a writeup from the perspective of a newbie to the platform might be useful for others who are considering it.

Disclaimer: Some of the following might not be entirely accurate but it’s just what I’ve picked up over the last week. Corrections and tips very welcome!

First up, I’m already a small-time craft YouTuber with around 7500 subs. Nothing earth-shattering, but enough to be pretty comfortable putting myself out there on the internet.

I’ve been on Mastodon about a year, and on Lemmy since just before the Great Migration, with two accounts and a decent amount of activity on both. I’ve also poked around various other Fedi bits like PixelFed, Bookwyrm, Firefish etc. So essentially I went into PeerTube thinking I knew what to expect.

Things learned:

• It’s surprisingly difficult to find an instance.

The instance search is hard to find, and then it’s very limited with only 25 results (many of which are private). It claims to be pulling from this much larger list, so idk what the problem is there. The first time I tried to join PT, this was my stopping point.

I’ve now joined MakerTube, an instance dedicated to makers, artists etc. This fits my content perfectly, but the only way I heard about it was word of mouth. How many other budding instances are out there with no way to tell us about it? Who knows.

Instances need a way to be found, and people need a way to find instances. In the meantime this is a huge barrier to adoption, so if you know of a cool instance drop it down in the replies and help people out!

• Account vs channel

On signup you’re asked to create an account with a username, and then can optionally create a channel if you want to upload videos. Pretty standard stuff, you might think? Nah.

Most of your subscribers will be on Mastodon. It’s the biggest Fedi service by far, I imagine very few people are actually signed up on PT as a viewer account. The issue here is that when videos are federated to Mastodon, it’s from your user account and not your channel so they all end up following the user instead.

This gets your videos to your subscribers just fine, but does make your channel sub count look a bit anaemic 😅

So yeah, learn from my mistakes. If you want your subscribers to see videos coming from your actual branded channel name, you need to make sure that’s your user account name instead and then use channels more like playlists. And no, you can’t use the same name for both, I tried that already!

• Categories are useless, tags are not

Much like YouTube, the default categories on PeerTube are extremely limited to the point of being useless. There is a plugin instance owners can run to add custom categories for their instance, but whether that gets federated out in a useful way I couldn’t tell you.

Tags, however, are interesting. I’ve not seen them used anywhere in the PT interface, presumably they’re used in search. But remember what we said about most of your subs being from Mastodon?

It turns out when you publish a video with a tag like “cross stitch”, spaces will be removed and it’ll be added as a Mastodon hashtag “#crossstitch”. So anyone following that tag, can see it. Pretty sure I’ve had a few subs just from that feature alone, although the first time my own face popped up in my #crossstitch feed unexpectedly it was a bit of a jump scare.

• Licences

When you upload a video you’ll be asked to pick a licence from a list, and no further info or explanation is given on what any of them mean. It turns out, as far as I can tell, they map to the general Creative Commons licences here. But it’s very much not explicit and I was surprised to find it so difficult to dig up info on what they are.

• Viewers won’t just come to you organically because search is bad

PeerTube from the viewer’s side is actually a LOT worse than from the creator side. So it makes sense that there are very few viewers. I’m hopeful that as the experience gets a bit smoother it’ll become more natural for people to discover channels, but so far it’s pretty terrible.

The main issue is that search is almost unusable, and I am absolutely not the sort of person who throws around the word “unusable”.

Rather than the organic federated search results of Masto or Lemmy it seems like on PeerTube your results are dictated in large part by your admin’s settings, and choices they’ve made about where to pull from. So assuming you can find a suitable looking instance, this might be something you want to ask your admin about.

There is something approaching a global search, but assuming you find and remember to use it you’ll get duplicate results in just about the most inefficient layout I’ve ever seen in my life.

• Sorting algorithms? Also bad

Since I joined MakerTube last week, the default homepage sort of “hot” has shown the same first few results without change. Some as much as two months old.

It’s a similar problem to the ones Lemmy was having, and those only started to be looked at seriously once we had bigger numbers and people started complaining about seeing the same posts over and over. So again hopefully as more creators take the plunge and more viewers show up, these things will be dealt with.

• Enough whinging

There’s plenty to like about PeerTube. I love the idea of a themed instance. I love how easy it is to import my back catalogue. I love the wider Fediverse integration and how easy it is for someone on another service to follow my channel from there. I love that Jan Beta chose the same instance as me, it makes me feel cool seeing his videos next to mine.

But I’ve seen various discussions with people noping out of PeerTube based on hitting the same roadbumps I did. So if this post helped, great. If you want to ask questions, feel free.

And if you happen to be into kind of awkward crafting videos, well, you know where to find me!

Hi all. I recently decided to try PeerTube as a creator, and was quite surprised by a lot of what I found. Thought a writeup from the perspective of a newbie to the platform might be useful for others who are considering it.

Disclaimer: Some of the following might not be entirely accurate but it’s just what I’ve picked up over the last week. Corrections and tips very welcome!

First up, I’m already a small-time craft YouTuber with around 7500 subs. Nothing earth-shattering, but enough to be pretty comfortable putting myself out there on the internet.

I’ve been on Mastodon about a year, and on Lemmy since just before the Great Migration, with two accounts and a decent amount of activity on both. I’ve also poked around various other Fedi bits like PixelFed, Bookwyrm, Firefish etc. So essentially I went into PeerTube thinking I knew what to expect.

Things learned:

• It’s surprisingly difficult to find an instance.

The instance search is hard to find, and then it’s very limited with only 25 results (many of which are private). It claims to be pulling from this much larger list, so idk what the problem is there. The first time I tried to join PT, this was my stopping point.

I’ve now joined MakerTube, an instance dedicated to makers, artists etc. This fits my content perfectly, but the only way I heard about it was word of mouth. How many other budding instances are out there with no way to tell us about it? Who knows.

Instances need a way to be found, and people need a way to find instances. In the meantime this is a huge barrier to adoption, so if you know of a cool instance drop it down in the replies and help people out!

• Account vs channel

On signup you’re asked to create an account with a username, and then can optionally create a channel if you want to upload videos. Pretty standard stuff, you might think? Nah.

Most of your subscribers will be on Mastodon. It’s the biggest Fedi service by far, I imagine very few people are actually signed up on PT as a viewer account. The issue here is that when videos are federated to Mastodon, it’s from your user account and not your channel so they all end up following the user instead.

This gets your videos to your subscribers just fine, but does make your channel sub count look a bit anaemic 😅

So yeah, learn from my mistakes. If you want your subscribers to see videos coming from your actual branded channel name, you need to make sure that’s your user account name instead and then use channels more like playlists. And no, you can’t use the same name for both, I tried that already!

• Categories are useless, tags are not

Much like YouTube, the default categories on PeerTube are extremely limited to the point of being useless. There is a plugin instance owners can run to add custom categories for their instance, but whether that gets federated out in a useful way I couldn’t tell you.

Tags, however, are interesting. I’ve not seen them used anywhere in the PT interface, presumably they’re used in search. But remember what we said about most of your subs being from Mastodon?

It turns out when you publish a video with a tag like “cross stitch”, spaces will be removed and it’ll be added as a Mastodon hashtag “#crossstitch”. So anyone following that tag, can see it. Pretty sure I’ve had a few subs just from that feature alone, although the first time my own face popped up in my #crossstitch feed unexpectedly it was a bit of a jump scare.

• Licences

When you upload a video you’ll be asked to pick a licence from a list, and no further info or explanation is given on what any of them mean. It turns out, as far as I can tell, they map to the general Creative Commons licences here. But it’s very much not explicit and I was surprised to find it so difficult to dig up info on what they are.

• Viewers won’t just come to you organically because search is bad

PeerTube from the viewer’s side is actually a LOT worse than from the creator side. So it makes sense that there are very few viewers. I’m hopeful that as the experience gets a bit smoother it’ll become more natural for people to discover channels, but so far it’s pretty terrible.

The main issue is that search is almost unusable, and I am absolutely not the sort of person who throws around the word “unusable”.

Rather than the organic federated search results of Masto or Lemmy it seems like on PeerTube your results are dictated in large part by your admin’s settings, and choices they’ve made about where to pull from. So assuming you can find a suitable looking instance, this might be something you want to ask your admin about.

There is something approaching a global search, but assuming you find and remember to use it you’ll get duplicate results in just about the most inefficient layout I’ve ever seen in my life.

• Sorting algorithms? Also bad

Since I joined MakerTube last week, the default homepage sort of “hot” has shown the same first few results without change. Some as much as two months old.

It’s a similar problem to the ones Lemmy was having, and those only started to be looked at seriously once we had bigger numbers and people started complaining about seeing the same posts over and over. So again hopefully as more creators take the plunge and more viewers show up, these things will be dealt with.

• Enough whinging

There’s plenty to like about PeerTube. I love the idea of a themed instance. I love how easy it is to import my back catalogue. I love the wider Fediverse integration and how easy it is for someone on another service to follow my channel from there. I love that Jan Beta chose the same instance as me, it makes me feel cool seeing his videos next to mine.

But I’ve seen various discussions with people noping out of PeerTube based on hitting the same roadbumps I did. So if this post helped, great. If you want to ask questions, feel free.

And if you happen to be into kind of awkward crafting videos, well, you know where to find me!

24 hours spent stitching from Friday-Monday.

3833 stitches.

3.81% closer to finishing the project! 😅

Throwback post to the Steotchalone 2020 (or however you spell it). I don't normally take part in any time-intensive or team events because frankly I wouldn't be able to keep up, but during the lockdown they ran a version designed for solo participation and I signed up on a total whim.

Our instructions were to basically pick a palette of six shades with suitable contrast, then await the pattern!

Thoroughly enjoyed this stitch. It was amazing seeing it come together with so few colours involved, and the texture of the hair and beard is really cool.

You can tell I'm proud of it because I basically never FFO anything otherwise. I ironed this and everything! 😄

Really just posting this hoping for some solidarity.

I've been working on stitching up Garden Cat since last year. But actually, I'd stitched some of it previously and ended up picking out the whole thing and starting again due to what we'll just call "poor creative choices".

So, last week I finished the garden part and genuinely thought I was done. Got all celebrationy. Took it out of the q-snap and unrolled it to see the full glory....and realised I was just confused from having stitched the sky parts once already but I hadn't redone them yet this time around🤦‍♀️

So that's been my stitching this week. How about you?