Hexnut @ambihelical@qoto.org

I just switched my phone to airplane mode and a small child appeared and started kicking me in the back.

Kind reminder that commentary about the #WorldCup — or about any other #sport event (past, present or future) of any kind — is always like this.

http://www.vectorbelly.com/electrical177.html

Run out…

@yisraeldov @freemo @louis@emacs.ch Rather than being premature optimization, this is late in coming. You might not be aware of this, but in the absence of a central authority, self-moderating instances have joined together to build domain blocklists that are shared widely and based on nothing more than the say-so of one or two people.

While mastodon does have plenty of tools we can use to block content that we don't want to see, many instance admins choose to really aggressively block entire instances without any due process or evidence or opportunity for counter-evidence. I've seen QOTO described as having "no moderation at all," something I know to be factually false. I've seen entire instances blocked because of the actions of one non-admin user, which is the right of any server admin, but doesn't bode well for federation. I've seen entire instances blocked *not* because of something anyone said or did, but because the instances were insufficiently aggressive in promising to seek out and block other bad instances. It's mind-boggling, and scary for anyone thinking about running an instance of their own.

Primarily at this point, the UFoI is about a guarantee of due process, which is currently lacking in the fediverse. It might not cause the super-aggressive blockers to change their approach, but it will at least guarantee that smaller instances won't be completely isolated from everyone on the whim of someone at a big server having a grumpy day.

If mastodon were as safe and friendly as you say it is, the UFoI wouldn't exist, and the hashtag for BlackMastodon wouldn't be filled with people saying that they're seeing worse treatment on Mastodon than the bird site. I'm glad your personal experience has been positive, but that is not the case for everyone.

The one thing everyone can agree on.

#Bicycling #Hiking #Transportation #Drivers #Linux #meme

I got an email about how to read maps backwards

It was SPAM

Hello people of the Fediverse! Some of you may have heard that a new Mastodon client, Ivory,  is in development for iOS (and Mac!). This is true! Tapbots is going all in on Mastodon and we hope this place continues to grow and thrive. Tweetbot will continue to be developed alongside Ivory as a lot of code is shared. A new Mac version of Tweetbot and Ivory are also currently in development and we are working hard on getting those towards a public beta state.

Wow, after 25 years of Unix experience, I learned that you can filter output in #less.

Press ampersand (&) and enter a regex to show only lines matching the regex.

Press ampersand (&) and then exclamation mark (!) to apply an inverse filter.

Punk's not dead

I do really like it here, but it's super clear that Black folk and POC are absolutely not having the same nice peaceful experience as I am, and until that changes I'm not gonna be all-in on this place.

I learned exponentially more from listening to the experiences of these folk on the birdsite than I did from any "equality and diversity initiative", and if they're not coming here then that's a huge problem.

#Twitter
#TwitterMigration
#twitterdown
#twitterexodus
#twitterrefugees

A recent Salon article lists 5 potential problems during a mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon:

https://www.salon.com/2022/11/17/how-mastodon-works--and-why-the-federated-network-wont-be-the-new-twitter_partner/

Despite the silly headline (we would hope it doesn't become a new Twitter) would anyone be interested in commenting on any or all of these 5?

" 1. ... finding a server to join on Mastodon can be hard, especially when a flood of people trying to find servers leads to the creation of waitlists, and the rules and values of the people running a server aren't always easy to find.

2. ... there are significant financial and technical challenges with maintaining servers that grow with the number of members and their activity. After the honeymoon is over, Mastodon users should be prepared for membership fees, NPR-style fundraising campaigns or podcast-style promotional ads to cover server hosting costs that can go into the hundreds of dollars per month per server.

3. ... despite calls for newspapers, universities and governments to host their own servers, there are complicated legal and professional questions that could severely limit public institutions' abilities to moderate their "dorms" effectively. Professional societies with their own methods of verification and established codes of conduct and ethics may be better equipped to host and moderate Mastodon servers than other types of institutions.

4. ... the current "nuclear option" of servers entirely cutting ties with other servers leaves little room for repairing relations and reengagement. Once the tie between two servers is severed, it would be difficult to renew it. This situation could drive destabilizing user migrations and reinforce polarizing echo chambers.

5. ... there are tensions between longtime Mastodon users and newcomers around content warnings, hashtags, post visibility, accessibility and tone that are different from what was popular on Twitter."

picking a mastodon server to join is easy -- just think of it like you're allying with one of many families in a war-torn medieval land, each with their own histories, feuds, laws, blood rituals

"No Mr. Die, I expect you to Bond"