👁️ autosurveillant 👁️ @pee_zombie@schelling.pt

The discourse around admins wanting to start "automated importable block lists" is really fucking deeply shitty and problematic in so many ways and if yall go through with it, fedi will be so much worse for it in a culture where people already use the fediblock hashtag for petty personal drama

I read this post a little bit ago, and have been sitting with my thoughts.

https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/

I posted here about this earlier, but I've been through many internet migrations. I joined the internet (mostly usenet and IRC) a few months before the infamous September That Never Ended. I was a teen, but I still remember how people jockeyed around acceptable behavior and norms.

There was a time when people had sincere debates about how to be "a good netizen."

#TwitterMigration

I find it so weird how nowadays i have to justify WHY i think privacy is nice.

So lack of privacy is now the norm and those who want privacy must be fishy and up to something suspicuous?

Mention Duck Duck Go, Proton Mail or Signal and you must be a mobster.

#Privacy #Surveillance #Tracking

A cyberdeck built into an 1980s boombox: https://cyberdeck.cafe/mix/sanyo

In the next year, the Fediverse is going to become a business. Specifically, in four areas:

1. Web development
2. Web-hosting
3. Account management & customer service
4. Security

Many people won't be happy about this metamorphosis, but for the long-term survival of the Fediverse, it must happen.

If you download your #Twitter archive it arrives wrapped as a static HTML page, which is not very useful for doing anything with, and worse: it requires the original account to be still active to do useful things like enlarge the images since they use t.co links.

So here's a #Python script to convert a Twitter archive to #markdown or other formats: https://github.com/timhutton/twitter-archive-parser

Now you can archive your tweets in any way you want.

Often times people ask me, "But how do I learn about how ActivityPub works? Where do I get started?"

Friends! The ActivityPub spec itself is here to help you! There's a really lovely story-driven tutorial about ActivityPub right at the top of the spec in the "Overview" section! https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview

Give it a read! I tried really hard to make it easy to follow, and it has beautiful illustrations from @mray!

Amazing chart on the growth of Mastodon.

Graphic by @estebanmoro

A failproof method to scam anyone from the Less Wrong/rationalist community.

#LessWrong #rationalist #smbc

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/pascal39s-other-wager

I see a lot of people emphasizing to new users that "mastodon is not twitter", in a way that I suspect alienates those users while also being misleading.

Mastodon and mastodon-like fediverse nodes (ex., pleroma, gnu social, etc) look and act almost exactly like twitter, very intentionally.

To the degree there are technical differences, they are largely either scale-related (the fediverse was federated since long before mastodon was a twinkle in gargron's eye, because centralized social media is only possible with stupid amounts of no-strings-attached VC money) or downstream from culture.

Almost every technical decision that differs from twitter here is downstream from culture, and almost every technical decision that isn't different from twitter is the result of the culture not yet having enough discourse to change it.

What is the culture?

The culture on the fediverse is formed from ex twitter users -- people who left twitter in various waves at various stages. These waves are mostly people who felt like they didn't fit in (or who felt actually unsafe) on twitter.

The first wave predates mastodon by years, and was open-source / free-software / security / privacy / civil liberties people. Basically, the kind of guy who tries to get everybody he knows to use tor & kali linux. These folks felt like the proprietary nature of centralized social media software was an ethical problem, and that the centralization & ad-based monetization was a security risk.

Later waves include: furries, LGBTQ people, and non-white people, all of whom faced systematic harassment on twitter; anarchists and communists, who don't like the profit motive in general and were happy to move as soon as they were aware that something else was available; retrocomputing / slow-computing people, who felt that centralized social media produced an unhealthy and environmentally unsound relationship between people in social media; sociology-of-UX & software-utopianism people, who felt that centralized & profit-driven social media produced unhealthy relationships between the people it mediates.

These categories overlap, and the more of these categories you fall into, the more likely you've actually been on the fediverse for a while. (For instance, I'm an anarchistic free-software guy with sympathies for slow-computing & software-utopianism, so all of the concerns other than systematic harassment have affected me personally, & I've got a lot of friends who have gotten systematic harassment too, so I've been on the fediverse for a good half-decade.)

Anyway, despite the fact that the fediverse is populated mostly by people with strongly-felt objections to the way things work on twitter, these cultural concerns actually only rarely result in visible technical changes -- and even then, they tend to be subtle. Emphasizing the technical differences is probably not helpful for onboarding new users, because new users are unlikely to encounter them on their own for weeks or months! To a new user, mastodon looks like twitter with a different color scheme.

It is more useful, in my opinion, to emphasize to new users that the fediverse, in general, cares about the users that twitter was happy to subject to harassment & other forms of violation long before a Musk regime was on the radar. Then, when a user encounters a technical difference, they are primed to understand it as downstream from culture: they know that it's somebody's attempt to fix a social problem that was rampant on twitter, and every former twitter user is aware of the kinds of social problems that were rampant there.

OK so here’s my brief guide into computering on 86box

Socket 8 machineIntel VS440FX
Intel Pentium II Overdrive @ 333 Mhz
192 MB of RAM (max supported ootb by Rhapsody DR2, feel free to raise)
HDD with up to 1023 cylinders, 2GB or higher recommended
Diamond Stealth 3D 3000 PCI (S3 ViRGE/VX)
Creative Sound Blaster 16
SLiRP with Novell NE2000 ISA16 network card
Standard PS/2 mouse (haven’t played with this yet)

If you want OS/2:

Install in orderOS/2 Warp 4.52Leave the default graphics driver or pick SciTech Display Doctor
Add Sound Blaster 16 manually (configure IRQ correctly!)
NE2000 Microsoft driver (configure IRQ correctly!)
Enable DHCP, leave DDNS disabled
Some software might only reliably work with up to 256 colors
Object Desktop 2.0 (see https://www.stardock.com/support_old/os2/od/odbug20/sec1.htm#question2 for errors!)
Latest version of WarpIN

this will go into a proper webpage later someday eventually anytime sometime

since a lot of folks are becoming newly interested in escaping corporate silos and moving to community-based services, are you aware of @matrix?

Matrix is to Slack and Discord, what Mastodon is to Twitter: a decentralized, federated network based on open standards/specs. It also supports full end-to-end encryption, just like Signal, so you can exchange messages privately!

If you find the fediverse interesting/inspiring, I recommend giving matrix a whirl. The quickest way to get started is to head over to https://app.element.io/ and make a (free!) account (although you can also join any number of other home servers, or host your own--they all talk to each other!).

If you _do_ end up checking it out, please do say hi! I'm @zkat:zkat.tech over there. I also manage a "space" (a group of channels, kinda like a Discord server) that you can join by clicking here: https://matrix.to/#/!tKdDSgQTxQzcOuTXqV:matrix.org?via=zkat.tech&via=matrix.org&via=envs.net

I hope this sparks your interest! I'd love to see you over there, too!

i have switched to cele.st 😌

if you would like an account here, i might give a few out, just dm me

folks are talking about embrace-extend-eliminate in the context of XMPP, and implying that this might happen with activitypub

that's true

but keep in mind that activitypub is kind of the product of mastodon doing an accidental embrace-extend-eliminate on the already-existing gnu social protocol, which it was *almost* compatible with

if you weren't here in 2016-2017, you didn't hear all the gnu social and friendica users complaining about how CWs rendered differently on their clients

what we really should be worried about is not so much what happened with XMPP but what happened with SMIL in 1998-1999, because XMPP still exists and is theoretically usable but SMIL disappeared off the face of the planet within a year of standardization and was completely forgotten until somebody gutted it to turn parts of it into SVG and HTML5 media extensions

i wish to find mutuals!

if you're feeling generous, boost this or reply with tpot people i should follow

Check out Fedi.Directory -- it's a list of "interesting accounts to follow on Mastodon and the Fediverse"

Hand-curated, just like Yahoo in the 90s!

I love it

https://fedi.directory