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  1. Crypto makes me sad

    Crypto has been so predatory and actively evil that it actively killed my excitement for decentralized, democratized technology, although Mastodon has restored it somewhat


  2. lemmy refugees

    So far, a lot more than Mastodon, I’m noticing that the people on Lemmy are people who do not understand why they have been banned from reddit

    which means that while the dream of federation is in and of itself just, reddit itself might have to get bad enough to drive away some adults before lemmy is fully usable

    In my experience, internet communities formed around the locus of “we’ll create a place where :existing community: can’t ban us for NO REASON” lack the deep introspective reserves necessary to form a healthy community


  3. botnet

    So, our company, as a matter of policy and practicality, doesn’t allow users from email providers that can algorithmically spin up new e-mail addresses with no restrictions, because they have an enormously high tendency to be botnets.

    This has resulted in one prominent privacy focused email provider (the one that I use, humorously enough, but I have a custom domain so it doesn’t matter) petitioning us repeatedly asking us to unblock them.

    But they can’t fix the problem, so…

    it’d be a bigger problem but my assumption is that anybody technically clever enough to want to have an account with this provider is also technically clever enough to figure out a way to use our service anyways


  4. how to use mastodon

    The first and. I think most important step in learning how to use Mastodon is that you should follow me.

    The second step, and this is crucial, is to log in regularly to see the things that I am saying.

    The third thing is, of course, actually I don’t care just do the first two things and you’ll probably be fine.


  5. mastodon good

    man, for a protocol that doesn’t seem like it has much of a defense against random bullshit from third party outsiders, Mastodon’s moderation (on my instance, at least) is pretty tight.

    Sometimes I’ll see someone blast loud garbage everywhere on a popular tag like “canada” from an account they just made on a reliable instance or an homemade server, and then minutes later they’ve been lasered from orbit.

    either their reliable instance got them, or MY reliable instance got them, or their server was completely defederated

    when I first looked, I thought “this has all of the same problems as email, there is no way this doesn’t immediately devolve into the spammiest spam ever to spam a spam”

    but actually, the layered silo approach means that there are lots of opportunities to catch a predator if you merely have loads of people pouring a lot of effort into it, all the time

    i am very surprised that this all works and I suspect that the thing holding it all together is “effort”, so remember to kick some money towards your silo admin if they’ve made it an option (they probably have, go check)


    sometimes I’ll look at something unbelievably stupid on Mastodon for a few beats too long, then think about it for a second and think “wow, it is super nice that a malevolent algorithm didn’t get behind-the-scenes convinced that my staring at it was interest motivated and send me 100x more of that exact kind of content”

    it feels like a real luxury to be able to take some time and examine content that I don’t plan to ever return to


  6. plenty of people

    Lately it seems there’s a tonne of anti-anti-natalist discourse in the conservative sphere, like “how dare women decide not to have children, where will new children even come from, what’s wrong with people that they don’t want big families anymore” but i’m not sure what huge baby shortage they are talking about, it seems like there are plenty of fuckin’ people, which makes me think that this has always just been a racist dogwhistle because the babies being born are the wrong ones I guess?

    everyone knows that the only babies that matter are the ones your millennial daughter-in-law are not having, how dare she

    there are loads of people

    if someone has a one-in-a-million mental disorder you could still find 8000 people like that and put them on the same website

    how else would you explain Mastodon?

    “Hey, gang, let’s see who this ‘millennials aren’t family oriented enough’ discourse is coming from!”

    “why it was old man white supremacy all along”

    I guess, in a different direction, calling anybody who doesn’t have kids for whatever reason “anti-natalist” is wrong, on account of actual anti-natalists being real weird.

    I don’t want kids, but I’m not an anti-natalist.

    Hardcore anti-natalists appear to believe that anyone having children At All is on the face of it evil, and believe in the voluntary extinction of the human race, it’s actually an extremely Overwrought Anime Villain belief system.

    “Existence contains suffering, ergo, making people exist is doing violence to them.” is an extremely “I am going to have a second boss-phase where I grow wings and deal massive extra damage” kind of philosophy.

    It’s fine to want to have kids and to have kids. It’s fine to not want to have kids and not to have kids.


  7. caked up foxes

    one of the things I like about the fediverse is how weirdly optimistic and naive everybody is about the clout of a distributed social network that’s compelling and fun, but absolutely has less users than the virtual reality video game that I work on for a living

    I think that all governmental orgs and offices should be on VRChat, not because that’s practical or a good idea, but because not enough government employees have to deal with caked up foxes on the regular


    watching someone try to get the government of Canada to put up a public Mastodon instance is one of those things that’s funny and tragic, like if they spent all of their time trying to get their cats to play Poker

    like, here are creatures fundamentally incapable of understanding or caring about what you’re trying to get them to do, and even if they were on board with your plan, they would not be able to do it well because they do not have the dexterity in their little paws to hold the cards right


  8. the CBC, everybody

    recently I saw someone circulating a petition requesting that the Canadian government use public funds to provide a mastodon server for all Canadians

    in something of a rebuttal, I would like to note that the portal that every single Canadian needs access to for crucial tax information is down for the entire weekend for one of it’s regular nappy naps, and this is one of the government’s more modern and prominent public digital projects

    now if someone were to write a version of Mastodon that ran entirely on IBM servers that haven’t been manufactured since 1997, that would be a whole different ball game

    behold, the comments section at the CBC:

    please, for the love of god, do not let the Canadian government anywhere near your technology


  9. software conferences

    the thing I like about javascript conferences is that they only have one room for talks but they just get whoever’s on the mic at any given time to hand it over when they need time to set something up, so you can quickly catch loads of talks so long as you don’t mind that they’re in kind of a jumbled order

    the thing I like about C conferences is that if you find the end of a line and stand two spaces behind it, the building will explode

    the thing I like about Erlang conferences is that if anything goes wrong in one of the rooms, everyone will just leave, get back into the room, and pretend like nothing happened

    i can’t remember what I liked about memcached conferences because there was a power outage

    the thing I like about rust conferences is that they’re a huge amount of effort to set up but once they do they run really smoothly

    the thing I like about PHP conferences is that they’re easy for anybody to set up and that it’s really hard to predict what will happen at them, which is also a thing that a lot of people do not like about PHP conferences

    the thing I like about Go conferences is that they’re exactly like C conferences, but with a guy who comes around and collects the garbage every now and again

    the thing I like about Postgres conferences is the consistency, but they only ever throw the one and honestly if they can’t find a bigger venue they’re going to start running out of space

    i’m not such a big fan of AWS conferences, they seem reasonably priced at first but then you wander from one region to another and suddenly you owe them fourty eight thousand dollars

    i’ve never managed to get in to a RabbitMQ conference but I’ve had a great time just waiting in line for one

    I wasn’t sure which mastodon conference to attend, there were so many and most of them seemed like they were run by amateurs, so I just went to the biggest one

    the thing I like about lisp conferences is that there aren’t a lot of standards or guidelines for them so each of the big ones just kind of makes up its own rules

    the thing I like about retro emulation conferences is that you go into a huge, modern conference hall and they’ve set up a perfect recreation of a conference from 1993 in there, all the way down to the carpeting

    the thing I like about roguelike conferences is that if you miss a talk you just have to leave

    the thing I like about VC-funded conferences is how fun they are in the first few years, before they inevitably need to justify their massive investment and start to get weird

    the thing I like about C# conferences is how much they improved over Java conferences, which they were clearly modeled after, but honestly I haven’t seen or thought about either in years and I think I’m a lot happier for it

    the thing I like about scrum conferences is that they’ve clearly never put any more than two weeks worth of effort into planning them so they’re always just all over the place

    (I would, of course, refuse to attend any scrum conference that took more than 2 weeks to plan: that would just be a waterfall conference and who wants to go to one of those?)

    I attended a pure functional programming conference and as a result I changed my mind about functional programming, which , when I think about it, means it can’t have been a pure functional programming conference after all.

    The thing I like about quantum computing conferences is that they’re run in a lot of different states at the same time

    The thing I liked about AI conferences in the 80s were that you could set your booth up in a part of the conference hall that nobody could get to, and, in doing so, bring the entire convention to a halt.


  10. welcome to mastodon

    (smug, haughty)

    welcome to our haven, poor and desperate tweetsite refugees. together we shall create a shining utopia

    (just as soon as a handful of dudes buy some slightly larger postgres servers and reconcile the problem of one entire sidekiq thread per toot)

    i will be your guide to the customs and desires of this place we call home, as I have been here for fourty five entire of the minutes


    the first decision you have to make in the fediverse is which of the five camps you fall into:

    • an artist
    • a programmer
    • a programmer, but also bi
    • german
    • other

  11. Fediverse

    I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Mastodon, is in fact, Fediverse/Mastodon, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Fediverse plus Mastodon.