Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

I’m beginning to see quite a few “this is a positive space, there is no place for negativity here” style posts (especially by newer folks) so I want to hopefully clear something up:

This is also a space to be protected. From fascists, bigots, etc., and also from corporate capture (unless you want to watch it turn into what the greater web turned into. Some of us lived through that once. Would be nice not to again.) Opposing such things—and vocally if need be—is not a negative; it is a positive.

obviously the best part of being an "adult" is that you can buy all the plushies you want

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":
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/profile/

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

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.

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

Does anyone remember the end of The Truman Show? Where he finally leaves the set and everyone's left staring at blank TVs and wondering what to do with their lives?

No reason.

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.