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.
> Adobe Tells Users They Can Get Sued for Using Old Versions of Photoshop
We need #FLOSS tools to get to the point where they can replace Adobe tools. Open alternatives are great, but they are sadly not there yet to replace Adobe tools for professionals.
And won't be unless projects like @inkscape get enough funding to develop to a point of being viable alternatives.
If you can replace #Adobe tools in your workflow today, great, more power to you! Not everyone can, sadly.
Tools like @inkscape, @Krita and @Blender are fantastic and built with love and energy and care. But in many cases they are still not an option for a lot of creative types.
So support them if you can. Use them if they work for you. Help improve them if you have the skills (that includes writing documentation, and working on better UI/UX!).
@rysiek@inkscape "Adobe is warning some owners of its Creative Cloud…" – Not correct at all. Adobe is the only "owner" of its cloud. Boggles my mind that this can be news to people. You rent rights and own nothing.
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.
"But can you prove ChatGPT is not intelligent in the human sense?"
Oh my that old chestnut. 🙄
I am not making a claim, I am merely rejecting somebody else's claim that ChatGPT is intelligent in the human sense.
The burden of proof is on whoever claims that ChatGPT is intelligent in the human sense. That proof would also need to be accompanied by a clear, unambiguous, testable definition of what "intelligent" means, that ideally includes humans but excludes calculators.
@rysiek 💯 The worst is when people try to "prove" it by saying we can't prove human sentience either. Stringing words together that sound smart to people is not the same thing as stringing words together that actually MEAN anything.
I wonder if the whole #AI thing will finally convince artists that modern #copyright regime was never meant to protect them.
It was meant to protect the middlemen. The Amazons, the Spotifies, the Sonys, the Disneys. The film studios, the publishing houses.
Now the middlemen figured out they own basically all of art, and that they can just train a computer on that, to replace artists with a piece of software.
And then stop paying artists even the pittance they were being paid so far.
> Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software. I'm talking about major label recording contracts.
Now the same companies that had cried "protect the artists!" to extend copyright over and over again are salivating at the thought of replacing artists with software.
I hope this becomes a wake-up call to all #artists, to all creative people out there — a wake-up call not just about #AI and automatically generated content, but also, and more importantly, about how urgently we need solid #copyright reform.
We had been needing it for decades, in fact.
#Art is not supposed to be hoarded by Disneys or Sonys, not supposed to be locked in corporate vaults. Art is more than just means of "maximizaing shareholder value".
If you are a citizen of any EU Member State, I implore you to consider signing the Tax-the-Rich citizens' initiative: https://www.tax-the-rich.eu/
The idea is to tax the super rich and then use the money for climate transition. :blobcathappypaws:
This is an official EU citizens' initiative, meaning that if it reaches certain thresholds, it will have to be considered by the EU institutions. That's a really powerful tool, if actually used.
Yes, it's a JS-heavy website with a webdesign that makes my eyes hurt. Sigh, can't have nice things, can we?
You can skip right to the signing by going to the relevant Citizens' Initiatives website on europa.eu here: https://eci.ec.europa.eu/038/public/
Both sites seem to work fine in a Tor Browser, and the signing requires solving a self-hosted captcha (no Big Tech captcha involved, it seems), so at least that's good.
And, in totally unrelated news ‒ „More than 250 billionaires and millionaires are demanding that the political elite meeting for the World Economic Forum in Davos introduce wealth taxes to help pay for better public services around the world.
“Our request is simple: we ask you to tax us, the very richest in society,” the wealthy people said in an open letter to world leaders. “This will not fundamentally alter our standard of living, nor deprive our children, nor harm our nations’ economic growth. But it will turn extreme and unproductive private wealth into an investment for our common democratic future.“
"#Mastodon is failing" so hard that #Fediverse just crossed 4mln monthly active accounts (based on the-federation.info). :blobcatgiggle:
This is already slightly more than Nov and Dec #TwitterMigration waves' peaks. And it is still going up.
What I find particularly important is that it seems like a lot of this is not new accounts, but people returning to accounts created before and then left unused.
I expect this to be a more resilient kind of growth. Less of a drop after it peaks.
Looks like #Lemmy and #Kbin keep being mentioned together, which to me suggests we might have averted "mastodonization" of the #threadiverse — i.e. a situation where the whole network gets identified with a single piece of software. 🎉
@hook@rysiek the biggest difference I would give between the two is kbin federates nicely with microblog content. kbin posts will show up properly on something like mastodon instead of just being a headline and link like lemmy stuff. also you can view, follow and create microblog content on kbin
if you want to try it out, I'm hosting an instance with open registration at https://fedi196.gay
> Zuckerberg declared in a March update that Meta's "single largest investment is advancing AI and building it into every one of our products." Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, told CNBC in April that he, along with Mark Zuckerberg and the company's chief product officer, Chris Cox, were now spending most of their time on AI.
Even a strictly open market (without "mysterious ways") is a trickle-up economy if there is no wealth redistribution. You can run a #YardSale model with octave in a few seconds [1]. The code is just a few lines.
I hear instance admins and moderators "keep people hostage" on this here fedi. At least that's what some people commenting on my BlueSky-related blogpost keep claiming. Somehow always in a "free speech" context. :thaenkin:
Anyone feeling taken hostage by their admins/moderators? :blobcateyes:
@rysiek Not sure if I mentioned it but I'm building a tool people can use to move their content to new instances (since Mastodon only migrates follows). I felt a bit "held hostage" when my content focused account ran into problems with instance admin and I realised how tough it'd be to move. Can only presume that's what they're talking about.
In any case, a test version should be out within a week or so. Testing it myself at the moment to migrate 140 posts with images and video.
Here's a half-formed thought I need to mull a bit on:
Somehow, algorithmic (and especially "AI-driven") decision making tends to only be proposed in contexts where it can only — or mostly — affect those with the least power in the system.
Migrants and asylum seekers.
Prisoners.
Families using any form of state support (child benefits, foodstamps, etc).
Palestinians in Gaza.
It somehow never gets proposed for use-cases where it might affect the wealthy and powerful.
There's a lot to take in here, but here's a kicker that really goes to the heart of this: there is no way for a person subject to SRAT to ever improve their score.
Every category of events to be recorded and taken into account by SRAT is negative.
Instead of AirBNBs can we have aparthotels offering small but reasonably nice rooms with private bathrooms, plus a (shared or private) kitchen annex please?
The reason a lot of people go for AirBNBs when traveling is because it's much cheaper to cook for oneself than eat out.
AirBNBs are a horrible solution to this problem though, as their owners compete for apartments with people who need a place to, you know, live.
Hostels exist, but they do not offer the level of privacy and basic comfort.
@rysiek In many US cities, AirBnBs are technically illegal. There are "hotel laws" that define per-night rentals as commercial accommodations. And hotels are subject to various regulations: inspections, taxes, etc.
But almost no one enforces those laws. Because wealthy people like making money from AirBnBs. And having sky-high apartment rents.
@rysiek Same problem everywhere. It is not sustanaible. The right and desire of affordable travelling can’t be prioritized over the right and need for decent housing.