The BBC's experiment with Mastodon is pathbreaking in English-language news -- a major organization setting up its own instance. They've really thought this through. Key language:
"We're using social.bbc as the domain, so you can be sure these accounts are genuinely from the BBC. And by linking to and from the BBC’s website, we have verified our identity on Mastodon."
It is common ground that the #bbc has published #transphobic material and that this ought to cease. Defining a large and rather diverse organisation as a transphobic group would take us down a dangerous road - certainly one I would hesitate to take. Knee jerk reactions tend to backfire wherever they come from. I just would prefer to see a #bbc which could no longer be called transphobic rather than see it #defunded and replaced by #GBnews and others.
I just had to update my numbers for a lecture, so here's your periodic reminder: Starlink is now 55% of ALL active satellites in orbit.
And given the recent news about that awful billionaire unilaterally deciding to cut of Starlink internet access to parts of the world whenever he wants to, this is extra important to share. Why did our governments effectively gift Low Earth Orbit to one awful dude? This is so bad.
@bittner That's just it - I have no fundamental problem with ads but I take a hard line on trackers. Trackers are not ads. Maybe at one point the blockers were mainly about ads. The blockers shifted focus to trackers as ads morphed into surveillance and the creepiness and danger that trackers pose was recognized. Ads stopped being about selling goods and services to meet someone's needs and more about harvesting their personal data and behavior. Any possible user benefit however minor evaporated once serving ads was no longer the goal. Reframe the message as "We see you are protecting yourself from surveillance and data mining..." and the guilt of using abusive software shifts from the reader to the site.
programmers are always posting like "worked on tracking down an issue with a Flurble deployment for twelve hours. the problem wasn't in Flurble at all - it was in the Gumbies install. It turns out if you install Gumbies 3.0 over Gumbies 2.7 and don't do a cache flush on all the client spiders they'll get stuck in the crystal maze." then you look up Gumbies and the site is one of those scroll scroll scroll types with one sentence per page, like
"GUMBIES is a lean, expressive sharding sandcube for testing and deploying large scale Woodchips playgrounds.
GUMBIES automates and streamlines away watersliding phases, meaning your team can get right to the chipping.
See why Microsoft, OpenAI and Bloingo have embraced GUMBIES in their Woodchips workflows."
and you get to the bottom and you're like I want this I guess but I still don't know what it is
@sc_griffith no one uses gumbies any more since the licensing debacle of Ought-Twenty-Three
we use the fork now, it's called makes a noise like 4 seconds of loud hissing static
I’ve found Gumbies Made Simple to be a great introduction:
1.1 What is Gumbies?
Gumbies is a happy sparkly funtime platform for much shiny things.
1.2 Hello World
To dereference null instantiations of bit-shifted Splorkl turds within a Xham or EGGS slop-bucket, it is imperative to first cache-spelunk your Gumbies injection. It is recommended you do this fully recursively, to ensure no hanging chads persist in your document wank frond.
There is an ongoing spam attack on the fediverse for the last couple of days. It's more widespread than before, as attackers are targeting smaller servers to create accounts. Before, usually only mastodon.social was targeted and our team could take care of it. For server administrators out there: If you don't need open registrations, switch over to approval mode. If you do, blocking disposable e-mail providers is a massive stopgap to the problem. Mastodon also supports hCaptcha.
@Gargron I honor every line of code that your team and you produce to maintain Mastodon.
But what I really miss as an instance administrator is some sort of spam detection. We have tools and libraries for that, e.G. for simple naive bayes detection.
Maybe it will not be 100 percent precise, but it would help a lot of Mastodon could block / delay suspicious posts based on simple machine learning mechanisms (like we have them for email).
In case you missed it, all links on Mastodon count as 23 characters towards your limit, no matter how many characters the link really is.
So, you don't need to use link shorteners on Mastodon as they won't actually affect the link's length.
Mastodon does this because it's better for everyone's privacy to avoid link shortener services, it means people can see what they're clicking on, and the link won't stop working if the shortener service shuts down.
@thomasfuchs It's a funny bug. I'm not one for cheap dunks on devs, but this was clearly a security issue with solid prior art (imagine if Let's Encrypt let me claim S3!), so I'm a little ok with a bit of dunking.