Gregory's Server
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15 posts total
I'm still maintaining the #eXit spreadsheet as best I can, (https://bit.ly/eXit → GDoc), but -- a good problem to have! -- the rate of notable account deactivations, especially in Europe, is difficult to keep up with. If folks still find it useful (I'm at this point mainly tracking the specific Mastodon/Bluesky accounts folks set up), I'd appreciate any volunteers willing to co-maintain it :) An Open Letter to All European Politicians and Leaders to Abandon X/Twitter: "By abandoning X/Twitter, leaders can reduce its credibility, promote fairer alternatives, and take a stand against the spread of disinformation, ensuring democratic principles are upheld." H/T to @everton137 for organizing this - already close to 1,000 signatures:  @eloquence @everton137 mira @Buenopin lo que quisimos hacer en su día pero a maoyr escla. A ver si así, y ahora..... It's hard to keep up with everything Musk is doing to undermine democracy in Europe and to promote 21st century authoritarianism. For anyone making the case to organizations, colleagues, and friends, this article from The Guardian is a useful summary: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/11/how-elon-musk-has-meddled-in-european-affairs  @eloquence soon there will be translations to all EU official languages here https://leavex.eu. What's astonishing to me about that WaPo editorial decision is how fucking tame that cartoon is. No offense to the artist, of course. But if WaPo isn't willing to publish an inoffensive cartoon of billionaires bending the knee to Trump, that says a _lot_ about where they draw the line. (This is re: https://anntelnaes.substack.com/p/why-im-quitting-the-washington-post) I have nothing against #Bluesky per se and am glad some folks are finding it useful as a drop-in replacement for the site that would like to use a swastika as its logo but settled on "X" for now. But if we want to face the challenges ahead (climate change, fascism, and the daily weaponization of hate and fear), we need to imagine and try out new ways of doing things, not just replicate old ones. The fediverse gives us a unique opportunity to do that. Bluesky doesn't.
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 @eloquence @eloquence I read that Elon cancelled a lady's 'bluecheck'. If I posted something here that seemed disagreeable, could I get banned here? Can I save my posts and migrate to a new server? Do I have to roll my own server to stop that happening? Not actually planning on being horrid or anything....just asking.
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 The good news is that I've seen screenshots of Mastodon posts floating around the internet a couple of times the same way as those from Twitter. We're getting there. A common refrain is that the web is _turning into_ garbage because of LLMs. But that's not really true. It's just that the garbage is _drowning out_ everything else, especially in search engines that themselves have decided to go into the garbage generation business. What can we do? We can promote the #IndieWeb right here. Highlight the good, perhaps obscure websites and blogs you come across, especially the ones that aren't loaded with ads & trackers. The web is still full of awesomeness.
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 @eloquence also this kind of statement makes it look like there was not bots, trolls and content farms, spam, SEO squatting and other form of flooding the internet with content-shaped manure. bad actors did not wait for LLMs to flood the web with shit.  @eloquence That's nice, but it doesn't help against the major developments. I do research in my job, for example, and it now takes me three times as long to find reputable sources. A few scattered private tips don't help much. This is where politics comes in, we need independent searches. @eloquence Hey I have a fun lil website I work on with my music and art and links to many other fun indie sites! This is a big deal: The W3C, founded in 1994 by web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, has quit X and declared the fediverse to be their primary social media channel. Follow them at: @w3c The future of the open web is .. the open web.
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 @eloquence they sould also give money to sailfish jolla and adopt an european OS.  @eloquence @sovtechfund @gnome Funfact, they have so called "Apple classes" in German schools. I love this move but idk if the German Government will be the one to switch to FOSS stuff, that's just one of their institutions! @eloquence @sovtechfund @gnome I understand that people here like open source getting funded (me too), but we should remember that the government takes money from people who might not care about foss at all; they would maybe rather buy a new fridge or go to a vacation to Costa Rica. If you like what open source devs and organisations do, please, give them your money and support. ❤️
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@eloquence my approach was - delete the app, then remove the link from the browser favorites and after a couple of days you might see that you’re not missing anything. Then delete the account. I’m not going to further support this crazy conspiracy-extremist person.  @eloquence "European suicide"
so I guess the ADL debacle wasn't just aspirationally Jewish Elon Musk profiting from fascist racism after all huh @eloquence Deleting one's account creates the danger of that handle being relaunched by an impersonator. Mere inactivity sends the same signal to advertisers & management. This is a really nice touch recently added to Mastodon: when you search for profiles, it now shows you if they've completed link verification for a domain. All the more reason for folks who want to verify their identity on Mastodon to do so. See https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/profile/#verification for docs.
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 @eloquence IIRC this is part of the effort to make website verification more dominant in the interface, it's a really good addition   Take it as a lesson from Wikipedia and other community-based projects: effort you put into making the fediverse better goes towards a community that will carry it forward for years to come. Effort to "create a presence" on the latest Twitter alternative boosted by venture capital (or by competitors smelling blood in the water) is free labor for rich people.
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@eloquence If the hardcore self-promoters and "personal brand" / monetize-all-the-things people all end up somewhere else… I'm not sure I'm going to be exactly bothered by that. I don't have a problem with businesses (even "brands") in my timeline, and I used to follow a bunch on #Twitter. But the grinding-for-followers stuff (or Google's equivalent on YouTube, grinding for subscribers) is super tedious. IMO it encourages the creation of really marginal "content", not conversation.  @eloquence Also, Threads is run by bloody Meta, which is just Old Man Facebook wearing a cheap rubber mask. Do not sign up. @eloquence generally agree, but unfortunately that free labor on VC-funded apps is sometimes necessary for other things, like job recognition With the Twitter reinstatement of the former US President who attempted to incite a fascist coup after losing an election, now would _really_ be a good time to stop cross-posting your Twitter RTs here. If you feel that cross-posting is the only way to maintain a presence here, please consider limiting it to original posts without mentions or RTs, to avoid cluttering timelines with Twitter URLs. Thank you kindly for your consideration.
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 Hear, hear. Enough already. :D Maybe it's time to put a filter on "@twitter.com" That always stuck out like a sore thumb, like facebook's heinous trying-way-too-hard custom laughter emoji. |
