Gooseus @gooseus@qoto.org

It’s wild that we can see images like this from NASA’s Webb Telescope - galaxies hundreds of millions of light years away, stars being born & dying - and yet carry on ravaging the planet as if it’s not miraculous that somehow, we’re here.

A tiny speck of sand in the vastness of the cosmos. #space

Whenever I'm tempted to think that a new thing seems too complicated, I read newspaper articles about pizza from the early 1950s.

@maxplanckgesellschaft
✅ All links on Mastodon count as 23 characters, no matter how long they really are

URLs can be as long as you want, they will never exceed 23 characters of your limit.

There is no need to use a link shortener!

#FediTips #MastoTips #LinkShortener #LinkShorteners #URLShortener #URLShorteners #CharacterLimits #Mastodon

After a couple of days on #Mastodon I’m very impressed & excited to be part of this growing community! #mastodonmigration

My only humble suggestion is that it needs more #tardigrades aka "water bears."

Tardigrades have survived every mass #extinction on Earth since they evolved about a 1/2 billion years ago. There are ~1,300 known species. And millions of years from now, they won’t even notice we’re gone.

Never thought Elon Musk would do so much for the adoption of a decentralised infrastructure…

Please Elon, can you buy Elsevier ?

"The entire $16 billion fortune of FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried has now been wiped out, one of history’s greatest-ever destructions of wealth."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-11/sam-bankman-fried-s-assets-go-from-16-billion-to-zero-after-ftx-collapse

I couldn't find a good reference diagram of the relationships between #Python types, so a while ago I made one.

For anyone interested , here is an introduction to Overleaf, the online, collaborative \LaTeX\ editor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8Ejj0T0yG4

@JoshuaACasey Agreed, especially when the system makes it so easy for individuals to block. You onnly need to block servers not people and you address mostly all bad actors.. so a dozen or two blocks and an individual is good. There is no NEED for a master block list forced upon them because the block lists are so manageable.

Moreover users can just import the blocklist as a CSV, so it literally takes a few seconds.

I mentioned this in a private message to someone recently about why a small handful of servers block qoto. I wanted to reiterate it here for the new comers on QOTO who dont know the history:

So there are some servers out there that demand every server int he network block every instance they do, and if a server doesnt block an instance they block then they block you in rettatliation.

Their reason for this is quite flawed but it goes like this.. If we federate with a bad actor instance and we boost one of their posts then their users will see it and defeat the purpose of the block. The problem is, this isnt how it actually works. If they block a server and we boost it, they wont see the boost, thats how blocks work.

The issue becomes even more complicated when you consider the fact that these servers, by virtue of their policy, have huge block lists where they block tons of major servers. So in order to satisfy them we too would have to block a huge number of servers.

This means you have a choice, you either join a server that isnt blocked, but has a huge block list themselves, or, you join a server that doesnt block and be blocked by a small handful of servers. Obviously that means on QOTO you will have bigger view of the world than you would on any of these others servers. In fact QOTO has onne of the largest federation footprints of any server in the network.

I want to also explain why we choose the decision we did. Years ago when this controversy started and servers across the fediverse started blocking there was a divide of people taking sides. WOTO was one of the few servers that didnt take sides and allowed people read content from any server (but with strict hate speech rules). This caused a huge influx of people,s pecifically from the LGBTQ community, onto our server. It turns out many people relied on us not-blocking for their physical safety. There were big name biggots (like milo yanappolus) who were on the network. They used their accounts here to watch his account for doxing so they could warn themselves and their community and protect themselves accordingly. In fact we added a feature just for them called subscriptions which allowed them to monitor accounts without following them so they could do so anonymously.

In tthe end for the safety of the LGBTQ community here we refused to engage in mass server blocking and instead encouraged our users to block servers on an individual basis and provided access to block lists for them to do so. But some really misguided servers blocked us anyway.

Thankfully the servers blocking us are few and far between and are limited to only the most excessive and aggressive block lists. As I said, QOTO has one of the largest federation footprints on the fediverse,

#mastoadmin

@PausalZ @gooseus Always write code your future burned out and very confused self can understand.

Happy Carl Sagan Day!
Still in awe of this man, he's missed.
https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2022-ann-druyan-sagan-day

The Programmers’ Credo: we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy.

Some Mastodon thoughts, for bird-site expats (which include myself). I'm aggregating these from posts I've boosted before, so little of this is my own brain.

- There's no algorithm here. That means favoriting/liking doesn't do anything except communicate approval to the OP and others (which is still nice!).

- No algorithm means boosting ("retweeting") is the true method to increase a post's visibility. Do that more than you did on birdsite.

- There's no post-quoting here, and that's by design. Look at quote-tweets on the birdsite; it's a feature primarily used for toxicity.

- There's no direct word-search here either; that means you want to use hashtags to make posts more searchable. This is also intended, since word-searching posts was often used to harass/stalk on the birdsite and elsewhere, so that was left by the wayside here. This also means hashtags are much more a thing here than any of the algorithm-powered sites.

- It's encouraged to put in text descriptions when you post images; a lot of Mastodon users use screen-readers due to various disabilities, and getting an image description read out loud helps them immensely.

- Speaking of screen-readers: using capitalization in your hashtags allows the screen-readers to read them more easily, especially if you're smashing multiple words together. #rockmusic = unreadable. #RockMusic = readable.

- The best way to make threads is to make set your first post as public, but "unlist" all of your replies. This prevents your whole thread from clogging up feeds.

- Content Warnings should be used more liberally here. If you haven't gotten the impression yet, much of Mastodon was built and populated by marginalized groups who were harassed/bullied off of other platforms. This is the culture they built, to respect each other's mental health. It's not a rule, but it's well-appreciated.

- Consider chipping a few bucks towards whomever runs the server you're on; the strain is real, and most server admins were likely paying out of pocket before so don't have an existing donation base. The growth here has been extremely fast, and that means money's needed.

- DMs are just posts with privacy settings. So if you @ someone in a DM, you pull them into the thread. That could be embarrassing.

- Also, no, DMs aren't end-to-end encrypted, but they aren't on Twitter either. Don't use either if you want true privacy.

- Including your Mastodon handle in your birdsite profile will help people find you here; there's a tool (pruvisto.org/debirdify/ is one of them that's used) people can use to pull Mastodon handles from Twitter profile.

- Use the blocking and reporting features liberally, if needed. This should go without saying, but they work, and work well!

- If there's an entire Mastodon server you don't want to hear from, you can block the whole thing too.

- Preferences -> Appearance -> "Slow Mode": this can make larger "Local" feeds and any "Federated" feed much more readable.

I'll reply with some more as I see them, or reply here too. I've only been here 4 days but I'm loving it so far.

RT @TahaYasseri@twitter.com

Several fully funded PhD positions ( fees+€18,500 per year tax-free) on the Foundation of Data Science in three leading universities in Ireland.
Attend a very strong group of 100+ students in the programme. Application opens on 2nd Dec: https://www.data-science.ie/how-do-i-apply/
@data_science_ie@twitter.com

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/TahaYasseri/status/1589960349880823808

daily reminder: fewer lines of code is not necessarily better code

Mastodon will update to 4.0 soon! Here are the most exciting new features (in addition to fixes & changes):

- ability to follow hashtags
- ability to filter by language
- ability to translate posts
- ability to post HEIC files (i.e. your iPhone’s native photo format)
- define user roles (big deal for admins)
- define sign-up process on your Instance (admins again)

See all changes here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.0.0rc1

Thanks, @Gargron and @Mastodon Team. #Mastodon4

Probably not a lot of people know this now, but Mastodon's web app started out with "Publish". In 2016 a famous YouTuber jokingly offered to support Mastodon's Patreon forever if I changed the button to say "Toot" instead. Needless to say, this was a really early, and not very informed decision. The first glimpse of attention and financial support. As a non-native speaker I had no idea there was another meaning.

Excited to #introduce myself on #ScienceMastodon

I am a 2nd year Ph.D. student in Complex Systems and Data Science at the University of Vermont.

My research focuses on group-level data ethics, privacy, security, and sovereignty using complex systems and network science methods.

I also work on creating opportunities in open science and open source.

my site with more info is https://juniperlovato.com/

#complexity #networks #dataethics #opensource #OpenScience

I just asked my communications and IT colleagues at #Stanford to consider hosting a #Mastodon server for our University community (as MIT has already done: mastodon.mit.edu).

Such institutional sponsorships (e.g., higher ed, academic associations, etc.) seem like a compelling & sustainable equilibrium for the #TwitterMigration. I also think organizations that do so would benefit in several ways without meaningful new risks.
#OpenSource #fediverse #Twitter #EconTwitter #Economics