👁️ autosurveillant 👁️ @pee_zombie@schelling.pt

Introducing Mastodon battlepass.

I get the angst of long-time Mastoneers facing the sudden rush of migrants like me. I'm old enough to remember when the net was pissed that AOL (after Delphi) offered access, when nontechies (political people) discovered blogging, when tweeters were unhappy with a crush--and most of all when citizens starting committing acts of journalism. Now Mastodoneers fret. I get it. But speech will always spread as more means provide more people with the opportunity to be heard.
https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/

calling the fediverse the "mastodon network" is the same energy as your parents calling every video game console a nintendo

Human universals

condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm

A discussion about distributed federated systems else-network did bring up some concerning history that we should keep in mind:

#XMPP was, briefly, the dominant messaging system on the Internet. It was fully federated allowing hosting anywhere. Major extensions were being done by major companies (Apple adding voice and video for example). And it all fell apart because the three big providers (Apple, Google, Facebook) ditched it to have more control.

#mastodon (1/2)

Figuring out how to verify the authenticity of an account is a problem that's going around again, and I see people suggesting that institutions could set up their own instances to help support account/identity verification.

I first wrote this up nearly two weeks ago, give it a read:

https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/4230/

(There's two follow-ups that I'll post in the thread.

#mastodon #identity #verification #institutionalinstances #newsmedia #media #academia #unions #government

One advantage of community moderators is that when they kick you off platform (or defederate) they tend to actually say why.

And if it's stupid, you know that that person is stupid.

As opposed to on Twitter where you get kicked for <violating ToS> with no explanation of how you did so and no way to get a review.

#noxp

I've got trust issues. We all do. Some infosec pros go so far as to say #TrustNoOne, a philosophy more formally known as #ZeroTrust, that holds that certain elements of your security should *never* be delegated to *any* third party.

The problem is, it's trust all the way down. Say you maintain your own cryptographic keys on your own device. How do you know the software you use to store those keys is trustworthy? Well, maybe you audit the source-code and compile it yourself.

1/

suya..

🌱💐🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌹🌱
🌾🌱🌱🌱🌸💐🌱🌾🌱
🌱🌱🌱🌱🍄🌷🍀🌱🌱
🌼🌱🌱🌱🌱🍄🌻 🌱🌱
🌾🌱🌱🌱🌲🌱🌺🌿🌱
🌱☘🌱🌲🍄🌱🌱🌱🌱
🌱🌼🌱🌿🌱🌸🌱💐🌱
🌱🌳🍀🌱🌱🌱🌱🌸🌱

#feditip: go to https://{your mastodon server}/users/{any username}.rss to get an RSS feed for your RSS reader.

Level 2: go about your day without internet, then in the evening settle down at your Computer Desk with a nice cup of tea to RSS-digest the day's shitposts.

Level 3: Aggregates your RSS feeds into epub format. Load the output onto your 2000's e-ink e-reader via USB cable. Sit in an overstuffed armchair with a nearby lamp, say aloud "Ah, yes, today's internet" and sip your port.

🚨 Today I learned

Apparently the 'note' field at the bottom of someone's profile is private to you, & you can add a wee note to remind yourself about them

Such as the reason you first followed is b/c they collect mushrooms or love black garlic or something else not listed in their bio or otherwise obvious 😊

Or perhaps you unfollowed them b/c you love their stuff, but they post too frequently & you need to remind yourself not to get sucked in again 😵

Help your brain! 💪

#feditip #toptips

one thing I think that might be lost on newcomers is the fact that this past week has been BANANAS for everyone who's been on the site for years, and if you feel like people are being snippy or pushy about social norms, that's probably why.

on a normal week when people talk about "hey please CW that" or "please don't spam your tweets here with a crossposter" or whatever they're more likely to do so patiently and explain the reasoning behind why we do things that way but on a day like today things are more likely to get a little snippy or terse.

don't take it personally! the old timers are trying to maintain social norms in the face of a flood of change, and they're worn out. keep that in mind if you think to yourself "hm; this place doesn't seem that friendly". give it some time to get back to normal before you bounce.

⁣

Why Content Warnings on Mastodon Are Toxic Censorship - LA Times

In this article I will describe why I feel content warnings block us from seeing the content we n--

⚠ You've reached your free daily article limit. Subscribe to the LA Times for $9 a month to access the rest of this page

Mastodon user: *Stands in the public square and shouts a public message into a bullhorn for the public to hear*

Fediverse search engine: *writes it down*

Mastodon user: "I DIDN'T CONSENT FOR YOU TO WRITE THAT DOWN!!!"

Some people think Mastodon is too weird to become popular:

I joined Twitter in 2008. We had to put a "d" in front of a tweet to convert it to a direct message and every other day you had some embarrassing private moments exposed because someone forgot about the “d”. Hashtags were just a community hack, introduced by Chris Messina to somehow tag content. Search? Hah, you wish! Tweets via SMS were supposed to be a thing. Oh, and the daily meet and greet with the failwhale. Totally not weird.

I'm really not worried about Mastodon scaling issues at all.

When I left Twitter in 2008, we had roughly twice as many users as the current combined Mastodon network, all running on one MySQL server that had the same specs as a high-end 2013 MacBook Pro, plus roughly 10 web servers and 5 queue servers.

To be fair, growth wasn't as rapid, and we had local-infra advantages over federated systems, but these problems are solvable and I have no doubt will be fixed soon.

*Hugops to all admins!*

Really important thing you need to know about Mastodon: You don't need to use the official app!

There are some good third party apps listed on Mastodon's own site:

➡️ https://joinmastodon.org/apps

The third party apps have more features and had way more development time.

Android users might want to start with Tusky and Fedilab

iPhone/iPad users might want to read this: https://transponderings.blog/2022/05/21/eight-mastodon-apps-for-iphone/

Mastodon is an open platform, so third party apps can use its features fully.

When I got here in 2016, the majority of the fediverse was pre-Mastodon instances. They were inhabited mostly by edgelordy free speech types: think 4chan casual slur shitposting. The bar for tolerant behavior was very low.

And there was no CW or privacy or account migration; everything everyone said was dumped onto the public timeline of mastodon.social and you had to start over from zero if you moved, so nobody wanted to move. Predictably, within the first few waves of users on m.s, this immediately made some accounts with preexisting grudges try to harass each other off the site. Gargron insisted for a time that federation itself should solve these things(i.e everyone runs their own little instance), but eventually bent the knee and added some features based on community proposals. And as soon as he did, things calmed down and a larger number of people found the place tolerable. That has remained basically true with each new wave and refinement to the tech.

That is the specific experience that those features came out of and why the norms are what they are. Even having lived through it, we don't truly understand them, we just know that they addressed a certain problem at a certain time and raised the average quality of experience.