ML2 @mathlover@qoto.org

So Marc Andreessen, one of the founding investors of Post.News is about to get involved in the whole Twitter Files fiasco.

I think I'm going to stay the heck away from Post.News, especially if it means it benefits him in some way.

Is there much Markey can do here, especially given the composition of the House in the next Congress? I'm also not sure there's much Markey can do to regulate a privately owned website, and I'm not sure the government should even have that degree of power.
I think #Congress and other government agencies should start up their own #Mastodon or other #ActivityPub based servers if they are serious about addressing this issue, as that would actually help address it. Complaining to Musk (who won't listen anyway) and grandstanding about doing things they cannot and should not do, on the other hand, does nothing.

@TheKinrar So I've been following this bot which takes data from instances.social (which you maintain) and 40 minutes ago it showed a huge spike in users and instances.

Me and some others are trying to figure out if it's a bug with the bot, if there is a sudden influx of spammers, or if instances.social suddenly added a ton of new Mastodon instances that weren't previously tracked. Let me know as soon as possible.

So it seems we know three things now:
1. Elon Musk can't spell first names properly.
2. Trump may be back on the platform at some point (if it survives long enough) which will cause additional user flight.
3. Apparently the content moderation committee was a big fat lie.

Cortez Masto has taken the lead in the race for the Nevada Senate Seat!
👍

Here’s something that’s missing entirely

The entry for “computer crime” is longer:

I think I’ll post images here. Here’s the article on computer networking:

So my mom (I have been living with my parents since the onset of the pandemic) got a dumpster a few days ago. There were some disks littering the bottom from before it came to us. Today I saw an old compact disk in its protective insert, and brought it in to see if I could read the data.

I now have, tucked away on a Windows 7 VM on my modern Linux desktop, an installed copy of a Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia … from 1992, the same year I was born.

Initial thoughts: it’s fascinating even at this level, simply as an artifact of the time. The thing is a grand total of 433 MB in size, and the articles I’ve read are tiny compared to modern versions. The multimedia is primitive, and the about page for the program, for reasons probably obvious to everyone here, doesn’t list a website. Yet … it’s the same age as me, and if I had been maybe a decade older I would probably have been begging my parents to get me this for Christmas on my 10th birthday.

I probably shouldn't have even bothered responding to this person with poll results.

Here's an excerpt

As a person on the spectrum, I can only say that this lawyer is a despicable human being for saying this tripe.

My dear boy Lovecraft.
Happy #caturday !!

The bear came down an hour after we brought the dogs in.

On June 30, my family's two golden retrievers treed an animal, which isn't unusual. What was unusual was the particular animal they treed...

Goatse

If a #Twitter #troll does not sway you with a tortured argument that a given person is a rapist, a block is their best response. It's not like trolls have class, after all...