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I have a request.

Bad actors will soon figure out - if they haven't already - that setting up impersonations of important organizations now will allow them to set off an explosion of chaos and confusion at a time of their choosing.

So if you run an account for an organization (especially #LGBTQ), please set up link verification between your Mastodon account profile and your organization's website.

If not, please boost.

Instructions are here under "Link Verification":
docs.joinmastodon.org/user/pro

If you think it’s horrible one billionaire bought up the public square and killed it, wait until you find out why your city doesn’t have a trolley system

shitposty about bad instances and transphobia 

Instance blocks, like puberty blockers, are completely reversible.

They are also almost never reversed because the regret rate is vanishingly small.

It would be neat to try to make an activitypub client that doesn't do anything useful but instead uses the feed to create pretty art that changes in response to all of the activities pubbed like imagine having a tiny picturesque rural village on you computer that's full of tiny people going about their lives visiting busy market places and shops and riding a tiny train and then suddenly a building burns down because someone complained about not having "quote tweets" again.

I can't help but notice many toots from helpful newbies encouraging you to support the Mastodon Patreon.

It's fine to do that but understand it goes to just two big instances and the official Mastodon dev team.

It does NOT trickle down to YOUR instance. If you want to support your server, donate to it directly. Nearly all the costs of the explosive growth of the past few weeks is borne by local instances.

Mastodon is decentralized. There is no Mastodon Inc. This is not Twitter.

@zens@merveilles.town This is going to depend on what the underlying assumption for that belief is of course, but a common assumption is that every place is as dire as Twitter and therefore without an algorithm, nobody would care.

I usually try to emphasize to people that here when people follow you, it's because they actually care about what you're *doing*, and so that makes them far more likely to share something cool you've created.

I've gotten like 10x as much interaction on here with a fraction of the followers I had on Twitter, and I've seen other people pretty much universally report the same. It's just not a fight pit like Twitter is, people *care* here.

All of that is hard to get across of course, but mentioning it explicitly might help to get at the 'root cause' of her belief?

@zens@merveilles.town Isn't that pretty much the core population of the fediverse...?

re: meta 

@anildash @jon@social.lot23.com Addendum: a specific point where I'm strongly questioning the data is "doesn't increase abuse". How was this measured exactly?

Because marginalized folks have been complaining for *years* that their reports are not being taken seriously, and that they eventually just stopped bothering reporting stuff.

So how did you ensure you were actually measuring abuse, and not just a proxy metric for people's maximum tolerance of bad moderation?

meta 

@anildash @jon@social.lot23.com Very much this. I'm seeing a lot of assumptions in there about what Mastodon is supposed to be, not the least of which is "optimizing for the majority of the world population".

That's the goal of a startup looking to establish a monopoly. It's not the goal of people building a nice place for themselves and their friends, which just so happens to also be usable by others.

I don't doubt that this is what the data showed in the context of Twitter's goals and context. But even leaving aside that data can be highly misleading for a variety of reasons, Mastodon and the broader fediverse simply *do not* have the same goals and context, and so you cannot port over the conclusions from that data 1:1.

(There are also some quite questionable implications about 'human nature' in there, but that's a separate topic.)

:RSS: Never forget Google Reader
:BlobCatKnife: Never forgive Google, reader

Cyber Alert: hackers have figured out how to "promote" toots, causing viral spread across the fediverse.

If you see any such posts, it's extremely important to avoid clicking the 🔁 icon, to prevent further spread.

#CyberSecurity #CyberTips #FediTips #Cyber #Security

↗️ Promoted

@doot@glitterkitten.co.uk @selfagency@kibitz.cloud Oh, clearly. But by this point that's a choice, not a mistake.

so since I am here now, allow me to do some SLEEP PROPAGANDA

SLEEP IS GOOD

SLEEP IS IMPORTANT

SLEEP IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANY EDUCATION OR JOB

and the fact that we are forced to compromise on sleep in order to fulfill duties to capitalism is an immense injustice and health risk.

lack of sleep obviously increases stress levels and therefore the risk for all kinds of diseases, but it also damages your brain on a cellular level because SLEEP MAINTAINS THE INTEGRITY OF YOUR BRAIN.

@doot@glitterkitten.co.uk @selfagency@kibitz.cloud I warned the guy running the instance privately about precisely this sort of thing by e-mail, like over a week ago. I never did get a response.

Here's your irregular reminder that:

Twitter was a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees.

Mastodon is a niche hobbyist product run by volunteers

The fact that we're being seen as a viable alternative to them is an admission that a federated, decentralized future is not only possible, but desirable.

Mastodon is not one thing, or one place. It's a network of many things and many places. We don't have a spokesperson (I mean, there's me. I'm the official spokesperson for 💯 of the fediverse, but beyond me there is no spokesperson) we don't have consensus on moderation or blocking or tools or what is good and what is bad. Some of us are professional SREs and Sysadmins, some of us aren't. Some of our instances have been around for 5+ years, some won't be here in six months.

And that's good! All of it, every last bit of it is good.

We're wrestling power away from the billionaire class, in real time, and reclaiming it for the People.

Upon further news of journa[.]host banning a trans journalist for calling out insufficient moderation action against transphobic posts on their instance

we reiterate that journa[.]host is a threat to safety on the fediverse, especially of marginalised voices and identities, and recommend an immediate #FediBlock

friends, queer.party has been updated to fix those awful new captive links - right clicking the timestamp of a toot will once again give you the toot’s canonical URL instead of a URL that keeps you on queer.party.

the patch in question is located here if you’re an instance admin familiar with applying patches to mastodon and you also don’t like the twitter-fication of mastodon.
commit.pup.cloud/maff/queer.pa

"Meta’s misstep—and its hubris—show once again that Big Tech has a blind spot about the severe limitations of large language models. There is a large body of research that highlights the flaws of this technology, including its tendencies to reproduce prejudice and assert falsehoods as facts."
technologyreview.com/2022/11/1

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