Weather has always significantly influenced my life. When I was a young athlete, knowing the forecast in advance would have allowed me to better plan my training sessions. As I grew older, I could choose whether to go to school on my motorcycle or, for safety reasons, have my grandfather drive me. And it was him, my grandfather, who was my go-to meteorologist. He followed all weather patterns and forecasts, a remnant of his childhood in the countryside and his life on the move. It’s to him that I dedicate FediMeteo.

The idea for FediMeteo started almost by chance while I was checking the holiday weather forecast to plan an outing. Suddenly, I thought how nice it would be to receive regular weather updates for my city directly in my timeline. After reflecting for a few minutes, I registered a domain and started planning.

Tumblr always suited me better than micro-blogging as there is no word count restriction (I can find brevity a problem) and you could have any number of blogs/channels for whatever topic was tickling your fancy at the time.

So I’ve been keeping an eye out for Fediverse alternatives, jotting down notes and now I’d like throw this open to the Hivemind. And yes, Tumblr is now on ActivityPub, but I am not putting my time into corporate platforms again. edit: oh no it isn’t, that was the plan (as if December 2023) but there’s been no updates since Tumblr moved to WordPress.

Added bonuses: markdown (or something similar), adding links to posts, quoting other posts and perhaps being able to login from another Fediverse service.

Here’s a few I found:

• Goblin - It’s a FireFish fork from a former Tumblr employee. Allows multiple accounts but they have to have a different email address, some markdown but not links. I’ve heard it suggested that most *key forks could be set-up as a Tumblr alternative
• Loforo: “Another surprise is that Loforo is the second most active ActivityPub blog platform in the Fediverse, behind only WordPress.” Easy multiple blog creation, formatting in HTML. Unfortunately you can’t create your own instance, last time I checked.
• micro.blog - not free, not open source
• Wafrn

Not listed as Tumblr equivalents but some of the general services are flexible enough to do this:

• Hubzilla - has channels but seems more a CMS. Nomadic identities is a great feature.
• Friendica - the BlueSky integration seems increasingly important and, with Meta’s enshittification, it feels like a general social media service is a good idea. The way you can have the equivalent of Google+'s circles seems a good feature (while I am no fan of Facebook, Google+ worked well for me while it lasted). The main issue I see is you can only replicate channels with different accounts.

Any suggestions? Have I missed any key features from the above?

Meta is now granting its users new freedom to post a wide array of derogatory remarks about races, nationalities, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, and gender identities, training materials obtained by The Intercept reveal.

Examples of newly permissible speech on Facebook and Instagram highlighted in the training materials include:

“Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”

“Gays are freaks.”

“Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl).”

The changes are part of a broader policy shift that includes the suspension of the company’s fact-checking program. The goal, Meta said Tuesday, is to “allow more speech by lifting restrictions.”

…

While Kaplan and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have couched the changes as a way to allow users to engage more freely in ideological dissent and political debate, the previously unreported policy materials reviewed by The Intercept illustrate the extent to which purely insulting and dehumanizing rhetoric is now accepted.

…

Kate Klonick, a content moderation policy expert who spoke to The Intercept, contests Meta’s framing that the new rules as less politicized, given the latitude they provide to attack conservative bogeymen.

“Drawing lines around content moderation was always a political enterprise,” said Klonick, an associate professor of law at St. John’s University and scholar of content moderation policy. “To pretend these new rules are any more ‘neutral’ than the old rules is a farce and a lie.”

She sees the shifts announced by Kaplan — a former White House deputy chief of staff under George W. Bush and Zuckerberg’s longtime liaison to the American right — as “the open political capture of Facebook, particularly because the changes are pandering to a particular party.”

…

Another policy shift: “Referring to the target as genitalia or anus are now considered non-violating and are allowed.” As an example of what is now permissible, Facebook offers up: “Italians are dickheads.”

While many of the examples and underlying policies seem muddled, the document shows clarity around allowing disparaging remarks about transgender people, including children. Noting that “‘Tranny’ is no longer a designated slur and is now non-violating,” the materials provide three examples of speech that should no longer be removed: “Trannies are a problem,” “Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl),” and “Get these trannies out of my school (beneath photo of high school students).”

…

According to Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Meta’s hate speech protections have historically been well-intentioned, however deeply flawed in practice. “While this has often resulted in over-moderation that I and many others have criticized, these examples demonstrate that Meta’s policy changes are political in nature and not intended to simply allow more freedom of expression,” York said.

Meta has faced international scrutiny for its approach to hate speech, most notably after role that hate speech and other dehumanizing language on Facebook played in fomenting genocide in Myanmar. Following criticism of its mishandling of Myanmar, where the United Nations found Facebook had played a “determining role” in the slaughter of over 650,000 Rohingya Muslims, the company spent years touting its investment in preventing the spread of similar rhetoric in the future.

“The reason many of these lines were drawn where they were is because hate speech often doesn’t stay speech, it turns into real world conduct,” said Klonick, the content moderation scholar.

Meta announced a series of major updates to its content moderation policies today, including ending its fact-checking partnerships and “getting rid” of restrictions on speech about “topics like immigration, gender identity and gender” that the company describes as frequent subjects of political discourse and debate. “It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms,” Meta’s newly appointed chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, wrote in a blog post outlining the changes.

In an accompanying video, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the company’s current rules in these areas as “just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

In tandem with this announcement, the company made a number of updates across its Community Guidelines, an extensive set of rules that outline what kinds of content are prohibited on Meta’s platforms, including Instagram, Threads, and Facebook. Some of the most striking changes were made to Meta’s “Hateful Conduct” policy, which covers discussions on immigration and gender.

In a notable shift, the company now says it allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’”

In other words, Meta now appears to permit users to accuse transgender or gay people of being mentally ill because of their gender expression and sexual orientation. The company did not respond to requests for clarification on the policy.