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I've been blogging since bouncing off Twitter… almost every day? Little stuff, mostly links. Feels good. https://justin.searls.co
@acjay@qoto.orrg has moved
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so today i learned that i can follow a hashtag and get those posts in my feed.
yay!
@acjay@qoto.orrg has moved
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I'm not taking a side on the Eightpoint–Kolektiva confrontation because whichever side I take I'm going to have to say goodbye to half my friends because they were on the wrong instance
I turned off notifications of likes and boosts. I suspect it's healthier that way. I like that this product isn't optimized to capture my attention, provide the dopamine rush, or try to make me care about making my numbers go up.
I can imagine someone developing a network of peraonalized bots that exist to boost posts an account would like. Networked because some central store would catalog a much broader set of posts than any one account would normally see through its follows. I'm imagine an instance that only hosts these bots. Does this make technical sense?
I feel like I'm starting to understand this whole Fediverse thing. And I quite like it. There are some gnarly issues that I can see, and I do also have concerns about how it scales (maybe this isn't a problem, don't know), but I think that we don't need a centralized microblog service like Twitter.
The core Twitter value proposition is very stable. Stable enough to be a protocol, instead of a product. The innovation can happen at the product layer on top.
It occurs to me that boosting is probably much more crucial in the Fediverse than on Twitter, because there's no algorithm to surface things you might like.
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Every "just asking questions" anti-trans article quibbling over bone density or some other largely nonexistent or made up problem persistently ignores the fact that trans kids DIE without access to treatment.
Because these people don't care.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/recent-anti-trans-articles-miss-the-point-of-gender-affirming-care
The physical airplanes are safer, I guess. It would be cool if we could be honest about the reasons for expending so much of everyone's time.
I'm packed tightly with hundreds of people to go through airport "security". What am I being secured from? If people actually wanted to kill a whole bunch of strangers, we're sitting ducks.
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https://historians.social has been live for 48 hours!
We have well over 400 members on our server and we're growing just about every minute.
Although the instance says "historians," we're really a place for history and anyone who has an interest in or works with history. So #historyteachers history organizations, #libraries #archives #museums and anyone who wants to know more about the past and the process of history is invited to join us!
Lists of professions on financial services applications are so random. One I'm looking at has maybe 50 options, one of which is "Arms/Ammunition Dealer".
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So, the European Union has set up its own Mastodon instance, EU Voice, as an official channel/platform for all its many institutions - what a great initiative https://social.network.europa.eu/about
#TwitterMigration #europe #Diplomacy #Transparency
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My favourite time of the day is “chatting” with my non-speaking autistic son as we wait for his school to open in the morning. I say chatting in inverted commas as he uses a letterboard to communicate with (as well as typing and #proloquo2go) This morning he explained that sadly his lovely friend has lots of meltdowns. I asked him why he doesn’t have many meltdowns. He told me “Because I can communicate well”
I really don’t know where we would be without robust #AAC #LISTENtoNonspeakers #Autism
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Cricut cutting machines, ubiquitous in schools, libraries and makerspaces, can be used to make embossed or stenciled tactile graphics. A Braille embosser costs at least $1500 — Cricuts cost a fifth of that or less. Today I learned that I can handle the hardware and make great stencils: all that holds a Blind maker back is a set of unlabeled controls in the software. Does anyone know somebody at Cricut I could talk to about making the interface more accessible? Boosters beloved on this one!
I find some of the arguments compelling about how AI art plagiarizes the artists whose works the models are trained on.
But I'm also reminded of the controversy around sampling in hip hop, which gave marginalized people a way to create new art, changing the entire music world.
I think of Peter Gunz and Lord Tariq's hit Deja Vu. It sampled a Steely Dan song, and Donald Fagan and Walter Becker won 100% of the writing credit for Deja Vu in court. That doesn't seem right to me, but it's unsurprising the way the courts ruled against the Black dudes from the Bronx. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_Vu_(Uptown_Baby)
It's not exactly the same though. Samples in music can be identified, but the training source material in AI models might not be, let alone the contributions of specific pieces to a given generated output.
Cc @mykola
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Twitter was never a healthy "public square" for most of us. Let's not rewrite history while eulogizing the hellsite.
Twitter was a frightening battleground where we managed barely to claw out an uneasy existence amidst the worst violent neo-Nazi extremists who constantly published our home addresses, threatened our kids' lives, and sent hordes of racist trolls into our mentions.
The same principles that allowed us to survive uneasily on Twitter will be required here in the #fediverse. Community defense, thoughtful pressure on moderation policies, and eternal vigilance.
There are no safe spaces but those we make safe through constant effort. We keep us safe.
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@noracodes I really resent the whole "Mastodon is too technical" thing because
1) it feels like a concerted effort by a subset of influencers and opinion leaders who have realised that Mastodon is a lot harder to game and they may not be able to preserve clout they didn't earn, and
2) I'm a music major who doesn't use cohost because I couldn't CSS my way out of a wet paper bag, and I picked up Mastodon inside a couple of minutes, tops. People are trying to speak "Mastodon is too hard" into existence because they don't want their world to change, but an unchanging world is a luxury some of us have never had.
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Noticing a lot of weekend chatter about helping new people onboard and I literally cannot stress the enough - the experience changes entirely once you follow about 200 people.
Then your home timeline fills up, and you find more people to follow/weed out some of the randos you followed at first.
This place is NOT going to get "busier" if you do not follow people; there are so many posts going on that you are not seeing.
Use "Federated" and "Local" find ppl; follow liberally. It works.
Is there a good hosted Mastodon provider that's <$10/mo and isn't full? I'm just trying to host my own account. Or maybe at most my immediate family.
I am now @acjay
Joined Oct 2022
