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Let me put a phrase into your mind: nonconsensual virality. It's why quote-posts on Twitter led to harassment. People's words stolen, taken out of context, used purely to incite a mob of griefers. The answer is to give #Mastodon users control over whether someone else can quote-post them, with a simple setting. We should be allowed to stop people from taking our posts viral without our consent.
New blog post: Expand Your Mind With One Weird Trick
My strategy for building expertise in new areas.
https://acjay.com/2023/01/02/expand-your-mind-with-one-weird-trick/#more-2512
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Always admire Fred Wilson's candor. On Web3 crash: "Our family’s net worth has taken a massive hit. The carrying value of USV’s assets under management has been cut in half this year. And yet, I am fine, my family is fine, and USV is fine."
https://avc.com/2022/12/what-happened-in-2022/
The Fediverse replicates one of my real world pet peeves, the conflation of mailing address with physical location.
Every year, my wife sends out Christmas cards and we have to recheck everyone's mailing addresses, because people move. But why should moving change your mailing address? A mailing address could be some other identifier than a street address. The postal service could maintain a mapping that we could change whenever we move. Mail would never again go to an outdated location. Most people want to "send mail to Alan, wherever he happens to be", not "send mail to a given house and hope Alan resides there".
The Fediverse is similar. I chose Qoto as my initial home because I liked some of the decisions they made in setting up the instance. But now my identity is tied to Qoto. There are mechanisms to migrate, but they involve telling everyone my new location.
#Fediverse #Mastodon @identity
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Yes, the #Fediverse and #Web at large.
#Identity #Authenticity can be handled using existing open standards; it just needs new thinking on the parts of both end-users and solution providers.
If you lookup any of the following tags you will see related posts on this important self-sovereign (#SSI) matter: #YouID, #NetID, or #WebID, or #DPKI.
The Fediverse needs a better answer for identity, decoupled from hosting. Identity needs decentralized verification. I know none of this is easy.
I'm pretty sure this is where Bluesky is trying to differentiate. But it feels like it could be vaporware and I admittedly feel biased against things from the Dorseyverse.
A modest 2023 resolution: I'm always going to alternate my alcoholic drinks with water.
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@atomicpoet Not included but often promoted as a philosophical sibling protocol to the #Fediverse is #Matrix.
I know #MicroBlog is also popular, although it's more of a centralized application that partially supports #ActivityPub (basically what #Tumblr is trying to become).
#Plume still has an active user base despite not being actively supported.
I wish #Diaspora supported ActivityPub, but fortunately, there are alternatives like #Friendica that do.
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The Times confirmed something I had heard, that Twitter employees are now bringing their own toilet paper into the office and that it stinks like hell https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/technology/twitter-elon-musk.html
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When you think about a plant, say a dandelion, what sort of image forms in your mind?
#plant #dandelion #hiddenlifeofplants
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The transcript of the interview with @atomicpoet talking #GreatApe, future of the fediverse, and what organisations can do to best support the fediverse is online!
Transcribed with OpenAI Whisper and a bunch of editing (it's a long interview), audio is up on our funkwhale instance if you'd prefer that https://tunes.artemai.art/channels/acrossthefediverse/
Becoming a parent has forced me to come to terms with the finiteness of my time, mental, and emotional energy, in terms of getting things done. It's humbling. Honestly, I'm very privileged in what I have to work with.
Some days, I feel like I'm crushing it. Other days, I feel like I can't get anything done. I try to be at peace with whatever I can do, because I do feel that in the long arc, I get the important stuff done. Even if it never actually feels enough and there's always an immense amount of things left undone.
But that's the trap, isn't it? If there even are people out there that can do it all, they must be so few, and everybody else just feels like they're failing. Most of us are getting by, and I think that's just fine.
As the year ends and I start thinking about 2023, I'm a big fan of steering my life around values, rather than goals. Where are the places my life can better represent the values I aspire towards? That should be what I continually check in against over the new year.
I don't think QTs (or lack thereof) are the reason Mastodon feels more civil than Twitter. I think it mostly comes down to *not* having an engagement-driven algorithm that rewards spectacle.
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Excellent post by @jonielena on @joan-mastadon about building communities in the #Fediverse:
“We don't need to sell our lives to mediocre billionaires. We can build our own social networks and movements! Thanks to the efforts and creativity of some very cool people, we now have the open-source technology to build resilient, democratic digital communities ourselves.”
👉🏾 https://write.as/joan-mastadon/final-reflections-at-a-funeral-for-a-bird
Read the whole thing!
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I'm pessimistic about the chances of a federated Twitter gaining and sustaining wide adoption. But I could be wrong, and I'd love to be wrong. So in the spirit of contributing rather than just whining, I wrote up a few thoughts.
Don't let federation make the experience suck.
cc @blaine
http://benlog.com/2022/12/28/dont-let-federation-make-the-experience-suck/
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$TSLA crashing because the company is on autopilot is the most fitting end to 2022 possible
I blocked some dude who was a jerk in his first interaction with me. That sort of thing I think is fine to handle as an individual. I wouldn't report someone for being a jerk.
I'm talking about serially abusive people who interject slurs into threads. There's no reason every Fediverse user should have to individually deal with these people and the instances that facilitate their behavior. And to the extent that they have to, give them good tools.
We're badly in need of better decentralized moderation tools.
Individuals blocking individuals is not an effective way to handle abuse.
I want the ability to have an automated way to block instances if they do not handle abuse reports. If I see an abusive user from an unfamiliar instance, it's not easy for me to know whether their behavior is the norm or will go unpunished. It would be nice to have a one-click:
1. Block this user for me from an abusive post
2. Report to *their* instance admin "If the linked behavior is acceptable on your instance, I will block your instance."
3. Autoblock the instance if no response in, say, 3 days
4. If the admin responds, give the option to block the instance.
Just released a new blog post!
It's a pretty quick read on the counterintuitive ways in which I see AI changing the world. In short, look past the impressive demos and simplistic solutionism towards the ways in which technologies might be combined to create entirely new phenomena.
I am now @acjay
Joined Oct 2022
