Well if it isn't cryptocurrency spam coming from the biggest, open instance on the #Fediverse. 👀
I wonder if this is at all related to challenges with moderating an instance of checks notes 200k active accounts? Or with moderating new accounts on the only instance actively promoted in the official apps? :thinking_rotate:
Thankfully we can always defederate! What's that? It's the biggest instance so there are real concerns about a lot of people losing connections? Whodda thunk it!
The size of mastodon.social means that it is hard to moderate current accounts there.
The fact that it is promoted as the instance by the official apps, combined with the fact that in the public mind fedi is Mastodon, means it's difficult to effectively moderate new accounts.
And its size also means that bad actors are not compartmentalized into small, manageable groups on defederate-able instances.
The size of mastodon.social is breaking the moderation story of the #Fediverse.
Moderation on fedi relies on:
instance admins and moderators being able to manage bad actors on their own instance;
instance admins being able to silence or defederate from insufficiently moderated instances.
Mastodon.social's size and the speed new accounts are set up there means that 1. is very difficult. The size of m.s. and the clout of some of its users means 2. is a hard decision.
@cliffwade No, I took the optical drive out of my laptop and replaced it with a second HDD. That said I do have (and already had) a portable usb dvd drive just in case... I used to have a client who would contractualise financial models by burning two copies to CD, then both parties would sign both CDs with a marker pen, and each party would get one each. That went on for a long time after it became hard to find CD drives.
Sadly optical media standards don't grow with the need for more storage and whilst #TapeDrive|s do, modern versions of #LTO#Ultrium are absurdly expensive so unless one needs to backup Petabytes offline it doesn't make financial sense...
Personally I prefer the form factor of 3,5" #FDD|s but their abysmal capacity makes them rather useless these days.
🤔 :fediverse: :mastodon_oops: Zastanawiam się, czy fenomen niezwykłej łagodności #Fediwersum (w porównaniu z Twitterem, Facebookiem itd.) nie bierze się z czegoś całkiem innego niż się powszechnie uważa. Ludzie mówią: tu nie ma algorytmów, za pomocą których BigTechy manipulują emocjami ludzi, dlatego ludzie w #Fedi są milsi, mniej konfliktowi, bardziej pomocni itd. A czy nie jest tak, że o tym decyduje po prostu
b i o l o g i a ? 🍃
Skoro ponad połowę użytkowników stanowią osoby po czterdziestce, to czy sam ten fakt nie sprawia, że w atmosferze jest mniej testosteronu, gówniarstwa, fochów itp. przedszkolnych zachowań?
@chlopmarcin Alternatywną hipotezą byłaby większa bańkowość — czy czasem nie jest tak, że nadużywanie narzędzi służących do wycinania zachowań abuzywnych prowadzi do skuteczniejszego odcinania od siebie grup ludzi od osób o istotnie odmiennych poglądach.
Innymi słowy: czy jest łagodniej, bo ludzie o różnych poglądach faktycznie rozmawiają ze sobą łagodniej, czy też jest łagodniej, bo ludzie o różnych poglądach szybko przestają ze sobą rozmawiać w ogóle?
W rozmowach o tranzycjach mieszają się co najmniej trzy różne narracje:
narracja medyczna: mówimy o problemie medycznym (chorobie, zaburzeniu), i rozważamy możliwe terapie, oceniając ich skuteczność w sensie poprawy jakości życia w relacji do skutków ubocznych, kosztów itp.,
narracja indywidualistyczna: niektórzy ludzie chcą robić pewne rzeczy ze swoim ciałem, jak tatuaż, brazylijski lifting pośladków, albo wazektomia.
narracja kulturowa: przynależność do danej grupy wiąże się z wykonywaniem pewnych zabiegów, jak obrzezanie czy rytualny tatuaż.
Dopóki te narracje nie wchodzą sobie w drogę, każda z nich jest dość dobrze rozpoznana. Nie musimy wymyślać koła, zastanawiając się np. jak się ma kwestia „żalu” do medycznego uzasadnienia terapii. Pytanie o to, jak się ocenia terapie, nie jest nowe, to przecież podstawowe pytanie evidence based medicine. I to nie tylko pytanie, czy pacjent mówi że jest zadowolony, tych pytań jest dużo: inwazyjność, ryzyko komplikacji vs oczekiwane skutki, wpływ przyszłe potrzeby medyczne i pozamedycznie, na funkcjonowanie społeczne, no i sama poinformowana zgoda to dość skomplikowana sprawa. To jest coś, co powinniśmy być w stanie oddać, jak piszesz, kompetentnej organizacji lekarskiej i zaufać że robi to zgodnie ze sztuką.
Problem jest wtedy, gdy zaczyna się to mieszać z tymi dwiema pozostałymi narracjami. Z jednej strony mamy rozważać „ratujące życie” terapie medyczne, ale z drugiej podważanie takich terapii staje się „odmową prawa do istnienia” grupie ludzi o danej tożsamości, czyli ludobójstwej, pogromem, staniem po stronie faszyzmu, „chęcią mordowania”, oraz zamachem na autonomię cielesną, a w ogóle to nawet mówienie o „zaburzeniu” jest przedstawiane jako patologizująca medykalizacja, jako analogiczne do patologizacji homoseksualności. To jest silna presja, zaburzająca naszą zbiorową percepcję, musimy sobie ją uświadomić. Zob.: https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p382
I disagree with the current CEO of Mastodon about his stance on mid-sized instances. We don't want to be run in isolation, we are part of the Fediverse. "Normal users just want the default", he can repeat that as many times as he wants, it doesn't make it true because of that.
Diversity is the DNA of the Fediverse and Mastodon is just one part of the whole. Thousands of people spend their time and money to make it successful. Anyone who dismisses that and single-handedly tries to market the Fediverse as a Mastodon brand and use "crowding out" techniques to prevent users from even being encouraged to choose an instance from a diversity will ultimately fail.
I am super disappointed with the direction Mastodon Corporation is taking. If there is not enough headwind here soon, then sooner or later it will lead to a schism.
@jjk it's not some app that decided to default to some instance, it's the official app of a project that gets identified with the whole fedi deciding to make default an instance that has 1/10th of all active accounts on fedi.
And that's a problem. I wrote why this is a problem, with some history of a similar social network a decade ago that got badly hurt in similar circumstances: https://rys.io/en/168.html
@louis The most strategic thing Eugen could have done would’ve been to keep mastodon.social small and make it socially unacceptable for instances to grow beyond a certain size. That would’ve been a poison pill against the infinite growth death cult of Silicon Valley. Maybe not a permanent one but it could have delayed things a little. Instead we’re welcoming them with open arms and equating their interest with success. Like sheep flattered by the gazes of wolves.
Heute ist »Ask me a question!«. Stellt mir eure Frage aus dem Themenbereich IT-Sicherheit oder Datenschutz. Ich antworte mit Ja/Nein oder enthalte mich. Regeln:
Jeder darf eine Frage stellen
Die Frage muss aus dem Themenbereich IT-Sicherheit oder Datenschutz stammen
Formuliert die Frage so, dass diese mit einem Ja/Nein beantwortet werden kann
Project Tapestry is a universal chronological timeline of your favorite social media services, blogs, RSS feeds & more. All updates in one place, in the order they’re posted with no algorithm deciding what you see or when you see it.
But we need your help! Check out our Kickstarter campaign to learn more about the project and the backer rewards we have planned, then make a pledge to help us turn Project Tapestry into a reality.
It took just four amazing days for #ProjectTapestry to become 100% funded on Kickstarter! To say we're floored would be an understatement. We couldn't have done this without you and we wanted to give a sincere thank you to everyone.
We'll be posting more details about stretch goals and a video overview of the DIY API behind Tapestry in the days ahead but for now, a sincere thank you from all of us here at the factory. You are the BEST!
🆕 blog! “Rebuilding FourSquare for ActivityPub using OpenStreetMap”
I used to like the original FourSquare. The "mayor" stuff was a bit silly, and my friends never left that many reviews, but I loved being able to signal to my friends "I am at this cool museum" or "We're at this pub if you want to meet" or "Spendi…
@cliffwade their Circles idea was pretty cool. Unfortunately the discourse never seemed to stray too far from talking about the platform itself, and then they soured a lot of people to it by attaching it to YouTube and other Google services.
@xahteiwi@cliffwade same here - it was the best social network I've ever used, although I'm not at all "social".
I had all the right people in my circles on G+ and enjoyed discussing all the relevant topics with them.
FB-peeps always complained G+ was a "ghost-town", that's because it was very focused "no bullshit" and I preferred it that way. And because of that, I was willing to forgive Google all those little missteps, which were not critical.
Pretty happy with the sign up process so far. I’m gonna tweak some animations (mainly on the server check) and I need to add some error handling but this is pretty much there 😁
Like, if you're totally fine with not being able to effectively moderate a server you operate, then by all means, test out #kbin and #lemmy, but encouraging folks to use either en-mass as if they're anywhere near the calibre of Mastodon or Pixelfed* then you're in for a very very bad time.
Alpha software does need alpha users to test and provide feedback, but we should be VERY careful recommending alpha software to mainstream massive audiences as an alternative to $centralisedPlatform.
🔥 We are excited to let everyone know that our full website is now live!
We hope this will be an easy way for new users to get started with #Mastodon & join the wider #Fediverse & an organizing hub to build & spread a better, more open social web of ALL fediverse offerings.
Shortly we will be opening up all the code used in this website to a full Open Source license.
Not everything would apply, but we would hope this open source code could be used by anyone building out a similar onboarding portals for the Fedi.
For example: #Calkey, #Pixelfed, #Kbin or #Bookwyrm or #Goldfish or other sites may find parts of the code here useful and not have to rebuild EVERYTHING from scratch.
I don't think most people realize just how important that distinction is.
Open, non-product protocols are the whole entire reason why the Internet succeeded, and proprietary networking solutions like IPX/SPX and DECnet didn't.
It's also what brought us successful Internet applications like email, IRC, and the web, and it's the reason Gopher failed.
Now we just need to send commercial social media platforms like X and Discord to the dustbin of history where they belong.
Aral: share your concern about centralization and big single points of failure.
But wouldn’t the solution here be a “round-robin” where the app recommended a fast sign on - super easy - but changed every X sign ups to recommend a different server? Each one hand chosen to be of high quality, well federated, high uptime, etc?
That to me would give the best of both worlds. Address THE biggest pain point to new users, plus decentralize the new user glow around the Fediverse.
Embrace. Use the email standards such as SMTP to talk to other email servers.
Extend. Encourage all email users to use your service by making it the default and positioning yourself as "the server" via applications and partnerships, eventually adding features that are limited to your mail interface.
Extinguish. Say that all other mail servers that aren't yours are spam and block them.
If you don't see how this could happen on the Fediverse today then I don't know what to tell you.
There's a lot of shit flying in the #Fediverse lately and a lot of times perspective seems to get lost. Yes, there are things we need to talk about, and yes there are things we will not agree on. And that's okay.
But leave the pitchforks and torches out of this.
Fedi admins put in the hours and effort and emotion into making fedi happen. Sometimes they make decisions we might not agree with. We should criticize, but we should not pile-on.
And to make this abundantly clear… regardless of how much you disagree with a person and how much you feel their decisions might be wrong:
👉 harassment is harassment, and is unacceptable
👉 calling for harm is calling for harm, and is unacceptable
👉 pile-ons are pile-ons, and are unacceptable
People who engage in that sort of thing are like locusts. They join a community, destroy it, and move on.
If you care about fedi, push back against that, even if it targets someone you disagree with.
> Mastodon-the-software is used by far by the most people on fedi. The biggest instance, mastodon.social, is home to over 200.000 active accounts as of this writing. This is roughly 1/10th of the whole #Fediverse, on a single instance.
> Worse, Mastodon-the-software is often identified as the whole social network, obscuring the fact that Fediverse is a much broader system comprised of a much more diverse software.
@edavies@rysiek part of why i liked using mastodon is that i enjoyed looking at the local feed, and my posts being seen by people there. not only on this art instance, but also a more generalist one which has a specific aesthetic that imo attracts people i more likely would enjoy reading. i haven’t had that experience so i can’t say for sure, but i think that mastodon.social users might not get the appeal of mastodon unless they try a smaller instance right away.
This is not the first instance of somebody donating their time and expertise to translate a blogpost of mine. Each and every time I am thankful and humbled by that! :blobcatblush:
Every time that happens I am also reassured that CC By-SA :cc: :ccby: :cc_sa: is the right license for my blog.
When I look at https://lemmy.ml/c/startrek vs https://kbin.social/m/startrek I see two entirely different lists of posts. Why? It's the same topic, just on different instances. How can we have communities about topics without having them siloed into their own instance-based communities? Is this just related to that 0.18 issue...
She suggests Famous Five but I would like something with a bit more modern "mindset" than the girls always helping in the kitchen and the boys in the barn.
Ideas?
Also, thanks for boosts as my bubble is German speaking.
Also, wow! boost some of those good answers from the #Fediverse community... wow! ⬇️⬇️⬇️
@samsteiner depending on her reading age. Anything scholastic is fun! I loved Tamora Pierce (knights in fantasy) but it might be a bit to YA for middle grade...
I discovered yesterday evening that Lemmy.ml is blocking all inbound ActivityPub requests from /kbin instances. Specifically, a 403 'access denied' is returned when the user agent contains "kbinBot" anywhere in the string. This has been causing a cascade of failures with federation for many server owners, flooding the message...
I am once again encouraging #Fediverse#admins to add a clause to prohibit using their server’s data for machine training into their Terms of Use, because at some point in the near future there is likely going to be a lawsuit against some major company for scraping and exploiting users’ data, and we should make sure we have a legal leg to stand on.
@drahardja@seb Meant to respond to your earlier post (a couple weeks ago IIRC) to strongly endorse this suggestion and to encourage developers, especially those of us who offer open APIs, to do the same. (We already have thanks to your suggestion)
@drahardja@seb Hi Dave! This is something the admin team is already working on, along with some other policy updates.
I'll push this to the top of the queue.
We have a lawyer on the team (that's me), so no need to collect money for the updates; I do SFBA work on a pro bono basis.
Actively pushing against others to adopt your protocol is how you ensure that your protocol won't "win." I'm a firm believer that a decentralized protocol will be the future of social networks/feeds as we know them. I don't know if it is going to be #ActivityPub or #ATProto or something else. But I believe a decentralized protocol will be the future. But the winner will be the one that centralized-acting services adopt. That's a good thing for everyone. It means users have data portability. 🧵
But I'll tell you right now who will not win: the protocol and community that wants to make it as difficult as possible for people to adopt/build-off of and interoperate with. Ogg Vorbis, Opus, and Theora tried to do the whole "open" standard audio and video codec thing. It was bad quality and hard to implement, but “open.” Everyone smart used MP3 anyway. And eventually, MP3 became patent free. Even smarter people started working on things like VP8 and VP9 and HEVC and eventually we have AV1
