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.
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
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.
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.
https://commit.pup.cloud/maff/queer.party/src/branch/master/deploy/4.0.0_4-revert-captive-links.patch
"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."
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/18/1063487/meta-large-language-model-ai-only-survived-three-days-gpt-3-science/
I've updated our little list of queer and kink-friendly instances with a few new ones. Let me know if you'd like your instance added to the list! #admin https://blog.woof.group/docs/see-also
@zens *thirty years later*
26: our makeshift photolithography table can now etch up to three photovoltaic modules and one FPGA per ounce of crushed sea glass, now that our vegan photoresist recipe has been adapted to use with saltwater. Soon we won't have to barter with the atoll's magistrate anymore for e-waste
I like myself much better since I quit Twitter. And, yes, I understand that many marginalized people found community there, but it's like making a home in a sewer. The people you live with may be wonderful, but your enironment is poisonous. The thing about Mastodon is that, unlike a big corporation, it's what the users make it. Come here and make a racket until the problems here are fixed. Is there toxicity here? Yes, but at least the toxicity isn't built into the software, as it is on Twitter.
#FediTips for new arrivals: Now is a great time to review who you're following, especially anyone whom you used to follow back on the birdsite, and decide whether you _still_ feel like following them.
Seriously, how do you _feel_ about each account that you're following? Check in with your gut. It may be time to let go of that account you hate- or dread-follow, not to mention the accounts you only follow out of inertia or guilt.
Now's the perfect time to clear house and make room on your feed for constructive voices, marginalized voices, future voices, and your friends' voices. Do what the algorithm couldn't and make your feed your own. Heck yeah!
meta, personal struggles, long
So when I created this account, I originally intended to use it as a quieter, semi-private place for self-discovery - especially getting more used to expressing myself emotionally again; with a stretch goal of becoming comfortable with talking about my sexuality in public again, as I once was.
This is a really big thing for me - years of Very Serious And Professional masking for activist purposes has made it more and more difficult for me to express myself as a person, because it's hard to shake the role once you're used to it, and easy to become worried about how it'll affect whether people take your words seriously. My forms of activism *do* often involve talking to non-radical folks, after all.
This has become... increasingly challenging, as Twitter is on fire, everybody is moving here, and many followers on Twitter have started auto-following me here - probably not aware that I may be considerably more personal here. And likely coming from a very different and more 'professional' background.
And that's become a problem. Because I wasn't really done with that process of self-discovery yet, and I'm now becoming less and less comfortable with expressing myself fully, for (mostly irrational) social pressure reasons.
At the same time, I don't want to lock my account, because my activism work *does* continue to be a big part of my life, and for that to work, it needs to be easily accessible and followable.
But compartmentalizing into different accounts *also* sucks, because I am a whole person, and the activist and the personal (*including* the sexual) are inextricably connected to each other, even if it might not be immediately obvious to many people why. I don't really want to separate them out.
So... now what the hell do I do?
supporting the fediverse financially
This is a topic again, and it should be, but some of our newer neighbors aren’t aware of all the dynamics involved.
the primary developer of the mastodon software has a patreon. it generates tens of thousands of dollars monthly for him and supports his two enormous poorly moderated servers and development of mainline mastodon.
there are thousands of other servers and dozens of other projects that make the fediverse the fediverse.
your support there would be far more meaningful and effective than Eugen’s patreon.
it’s the difference between donating to a multi-national charity that pays execs big bucks from your donation and donating to the group of folks watching out for our unhoused neighbors in our local communities.
please look around this place and see where the hard work is being done and toss your support there.
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.