Gregory's Server
Maybe I'll start a nasty rumor that a local water bureau official diverted funds earmarked for conservation into repairing a lock gate
Because, you know, what's good for the sluice is good for the slander 😎
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Enjoying Portland thunder and lightning fediverse right now (for those not local: yes it rains here a lot but thunder and lightning are rare)
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@darius Seattle had a lovely light show, too! Seemed like it was coming up the sound, or from the Olympics.   @darius I was impressed with the amount of thunder I was hearing this morning. Here is an intermediate-level #feditips for those of you who have found The Content, but now have Too Much Content: Many apps (including the Mastodon web app) let you turn off all boosts in your timeline. On the Mastodon web app you click the "settings" button at the top of the Home timeline and deselect "Show boosts". Then you will only see content posted by people you follow, no boosted stuff. I like how the timeline feels following 1000+ accounts I picked, but not seeing any boosts.
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@darius It's certainly useful in some circumstances, and I'm glad to see this feature promoted, as it's not immediately obvious to new Mastodon users. However, I find it to be of limited use in solving the curation problem. My issue isn't boosted vs. non-boosted, it's content that's relevant to me vs. content that isn't. Solving the latter will require changes to the Mastodon filtering, to make it far more granular than it currently is.  Irony alert. If I had boosts turned off, I'd *not* have seen this post. You can use Mastodon like an email list if you want but IMO you're walking through a museum with your eyes closed and just looking at the gift shop. In a serendipitous moment, I ran into @iffybooks at a block party in Philadelphia I happened to wander through!! Super cool to wander a neighborhood event in a city I don't live in and say "hey there's someone I know from the fediverse!" @darius @iffybooks Iffy Books is one of the few reasons I could ever imagine myself visiting Philly. @darius @iffybooks wait wait I live in Philly! Care to grab a tasty beverage of some kind while you’re here? "there are no algorithms in our software" is rhetorically isomorphic to "there are no chemicals in our food product"
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@darius one of the most irritating conversations I ever had was with someone who insisted that they were allergic to "all chemicals" @darius I totally agree! But does really someone claim to have software without algorithms?  @darius That sounds like a phrase from Homestar Runner. I can hear Strong Sad coining the phrase, which then becomes a running gag.   @darius lol, the thing I wanted searchtodon to become, the tech will be super similar, but somehow this is ok? 🫠 just banned my first (self-identified) GPT-powered spam (sorry sorry, art project) reply bot, which confused me for a good couple seconds because it was not really replying to what I wrote but what it imagined I wrote. AKA it was a shoo-in for the usual replies here on the fediverse Just remembered my bot on Dolphin Town, @0E6, that posted just the letter e's and punctuation from Moby Dick, 20 lines at a time. I legitimately can't tell if it completed its task or if it broke haha  "Hello, This is a notice that your app - veryoldtweets - has been suspended from accessing the Twitter API." RIP old friend
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"Virtual real estate platform Decentraland, once valued at $1 billion, is now in free fall. Revenues have absolutely cratered over the last year, The Block reports, with only a handful of users actually trading virtual real estate [...] The numbers are absolutely brutal. According to the report, only between 20 and 30 people are actually buying and selling property on a weekly basis, amounting to roughly $50,000." https://futurism.com/the-byte/virtual-metaverse-real-estate-trouble
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Well, not really very surprised... What is surprising is that people still invest their time in writing these articles... probably #LLM 🤔  @darius There’s nothing different between virtual real estate and name-a-star scams. Finally, a way to use the internet to watch celebrities pal around with one another and develop my own parasocial relationship with them! I was not able to imagine this before, but now I can. Thank you Substack (Screenshot from Substack's announcement of their "Substack Notes" feature) (Also because this is the fediverse: I AM BEING SARCASTIC I HATE SUBSTACK)  @darius Substack is a terrible company*, and/but they are very clever to identify that one of the big attractions of Twitter was that any random person† could be plucked from obscurity by the attention of an important person. That's a real source of voltage! (Just not here.) * I moved my free covid newsletter to them when the previous host failed out and will not be moving it because please god I cannot write it long enough to make it worth moving † would-be media commentator @darius is this personalized? It looks kind of like ai celebrity mad libs, aspiring to incorporate your tastes including your actual celeb crushes. Soon it will because there are no secrets any more It's RFC 1's 54th birthday! If you were unaware, in 2019 I did a blog-a-day project where I read through and summarized/contextualized each of the first RFCs up through RFC 365. https://write.as/365-rfcs/table-of-contents I even uncovered a lost RFC! https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/pdf/draft-flanagan-rfc32alt-00
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 @darius It’s a great project. I kinda wanted to do something similar (although I definitely didn’t have the ambition to do 365) for registered/well-known tcp/udp ports.  @darius This is one of my favourite blog series of all time. Just wanted to say thank you for it. Boosting from a friend: Open job postings at Invest in Open Infrastructure! - Product Lead More information about the roles and links to apply can be found here! Deadline for applications is May 15. https://investinopen.org/jobs/ @darius I can vouch for someone who’d be a good fit for the Django contractor gig. Is it better they just apply directly, or maybe talk to your friend first? LMK I find myself saying "community-owned independent social media sites" rather than "fediverse" in mixed company because it gets a much better reaction (active interest rather than blank stares) I realize that the venn diagram of the two does not overlap perfectly but the overlap is precisely the stuff I actually care about and I'd rather be inaccurate in a way that garners interest than similarly-inaccurate in a way that doesn't
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  every time I see a friend has moved over to the new AOIR (Association of Internet Researchers) server my heart grows three sizes So... anyone else on fedi gonna be at #RightsCon in person? My session proposal "Content moderation infrastructure for decentralized social media" was accepted so I'm going!
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@darius you already know this, but I'll be there! probably alternating between lurking in a corner and hanging out with the AN Helpline team :)  @darius meet @lilianedwards who is also giving a paper at RightsCon. I know Lilian through SF fandom and Darius through Mozilla. I was asked during Q&A of the #PlatGovNet panel I was on yesterday about the energy consumption of many federated servers vs the implied efficiency of a centralized service in a data center. But centralized services have user surveillance and advertising mechanisms that small community servers do not - my bet is that hundreds of thousands of smaller servers, hosted individually, and delivering only the services their communities WANT will ultimately do less stuff and thus use less energy.
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 @darius I was just reading your Patreon bio. When I first heard of ActivityPub, I imagined thousands of digital project leaders who sounded just like you, who already understand this unique opportunity to make "local" a thing in community online services. I was disappointed to find so few. Can you suggest where am I am likely to discover more? I am particularly interested in community referral, refdesks, and public, academic and special libraries in general.  @darius I think decentralized is better, but I think you're underestimating the sheer energy usage of ActivityPub. If there are 2 AP servers, they share info with each other. If there's 3, A shares with B and with C, B shares with A and with C, and C shares with A and with B. If there's 1000 of them, there are 1000! connections. If there are 100000 small servers, there are 100000! connections. Factorials grow faster than exponentials. Ludicrously fast. I'll be doing a small #Hometown release later today to incorporate this Mastodon security release: The following statement is to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119]: MUST love dogs |
@darius
Flip's sake.
* immediately presses 'boost' *
@darius
🥁
@darius Ouch, baby.