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Sh.itposter

They are quite different! My Pilot pens have fairly narrow bodies, while the Pelikan M400 is more stout. As a western fine, the M400’s nib is a little broader than the Pilot fine nibs. I can feel this as a write, a little more contact with the page. Perhaps the nib is also a little firmer. Nothing I don’t like, just a different feel.

My biggest complaint about my Pilots is they seem to dry out quickly. (But I still really like them!) I haven’t had the M400 long enough to know how it holds up. I expect it to last longer, by virtue of having a screw cap.

Overall I’ve been enjoying the M400. The nib, being slightly broader, can produce more shading than my Pilots. It is a newer M400, and in the last few years, Pelikan stopped making the barrels translucent, which is a bit disappointing.

I was looking through here to see if anybody was recommending a Pilot Vanishing Point or Majohn A1/A2.

Don’t have time for a screw cap? How about no cap at all!?

The Vanishing Point is really handy. There is the full sized VP and the slightly smaller VP Decimo. The Majohn A1 / A2 pens are lower cost clones. I have a Decimo and find it can go quite a while without drying out. Longer than my snap cap pens. If you do a lot of writing, I’d suggest a fine nib, or even extra fine nib, to get more mileage per fill. Some people have trouble with the placement of the clip on the pen interfering with their grip. In general, if you use a tripod grip, the clip shouldn’t be an issue. The Decimo sells around $160 USD, but you might be able to find a deal. The regular VP is a little more still. I haven’t used an A1/A2, but they are less expensive alternatives that still seem to be well liked.

Waterman inks may be easy to overlook because they are moderately priced and have a reputation as safe, well behaved inks. But I really like the shading I get from Serenity Blue with all but my finest nibs.

According to this earlier announcement, voting will run for a week. I don’t see a need to push notifications out. Just check weekly for votes. A discussion will precede a vote, so interested users will have had time to know the vote was coming/happening.

What if I have multiple people in my household who want to vote? One vote per IP address would not allow for this. And as others have pointed out, sophisticated users can get around the IP restriction.

I think putting up even small hurdles would drastically cut down on the bot problem. I outlined one idea here: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/455909

It is basically go out and solve a CAPTCHA, then vote, pasting in a url with your vote that verifies you solved the CAPTCHA. A script should be able to verify that the url is indeed for the user who cast the vote. It is not a bulletproof method, but raises just enough of a hurdle that is would be hard for bots, but realitivly easy for humans (we’d want an audio version or other alternative for the visually impaired; I’m not sure what the state of the art is).

Doesn’t solve the problem of one real person operating several alts. Frankly, I don’t know how important that is to solve.

I think OP raises a valid concern. In the near term, I don’t know what will be voted on that will be worth the effort of spinning up a bot army. But it could happen eventually. Large floods of votes might be easier to detect. Smaller bot armies could be harder, but still impactful to the outcome.

Perhaps we could fire up some kind of identity service. A user goes there, puts in their username, solves a CAPTCHA, and gets back a url to a page that contains their username. The pages can be specific to a particular vote so urls aren’t reusable. Every time a user votes, they need to solve a new CAPTCHA. User will include their identity url when voting.

Admins can confirm that user names and identity urls match.

Could be more efficient ways to do it, this was my first thought.

Let’s just all take a breath. This instance has its rules, and I expect them to be adhered to for content on this instance.

Let’s give moderator time to get involved, and the community time to navigate precident setting actions. I think it is cool this instance is being set up to be self governing. But it’s just getting set up. And people work and are otherwise not constantly available.

Difficult_Bit_1339 @Difficult_Bit_1339@sh.itjust.works

Thank you, I see your point now. You are worried bad actors could simply join this instance.

They could, but then they would fall under the guidelines and moderation of this instance. I’m not sure in practice how big of a worry this is.

And bad actors can join without needing to come from a banned instance.

This doesn’t change my view of defederation. (I won’t claim to know the correct use/threshold for defederation, this is all new to me! I’m mostly here to enjoy the discussions, not worry about what might go wrong.)

I don’t understand the point you are trying to make. On the one hand, you say:

Defederating entire instances does not stop bad actors, but an active strongwilled community does.

This makes me think you are saying not to defederate because it would be better to call out bad behavior - interact with the bad actors and point out their falsehoods, hate, etc. But on the other hand, you say:

I don’t interact with them. I don’t provide them with any value.

and

It’s not our responsibility to moderate other instances.

These make me think you are saying just ignore them. And if we’re going to just ignore them, how is that different from the perspective of the bad actors, from defederating? How does not moderating and not interacting stop bad actors?

This is all new to me, I don’t know the best use of defederating, but I didn’t follow the argument you were making.