Ben Taylor @VoxDei@social.cleverlibre.org

Saying not to bother with the favourite button on mastodon because it doesn't affect any algorithm is like saying not to say thank you to someone because no one else will hear.

Stop thinking in those old social media ways of engagement and visibility and algorithms and reach and audience and start thinking about being social.

Oklahoma Land Run, September 16, 1893. A photo from the archive of our Substack newsletter, "This Week's Best Old Photos." We do photos. That's it. Just photos; and people who like looking at old pix really like our newsletter. You might, too!
#history #photography #Oklahoma
https://look.substack.com/subscribe

I STILL have a spreadsheet full of #Steam #game keys (all legit!) and giving them away isn't just for Christmas any more.

I'm NOT doing this to get new followers. You DON'T need to follow me to get a key. This is about generosity when the world could really use some. The only thing I'd ask you to follow is the Wheaton rule: "Don't be a dick".

To avoid keyfarmers and resellers, I have some guidelines, though.

1. No new accounts. Sorry. You've got to have been here on Mastodon & obviously human; ie. no keyfarmers (If I don't know you, I'm checking profiles).

2. One game per person, but please pick your top three preferred games that you want to play.

3. First in, first served. If your first preference is gone by the time I get to you, that's why there's a 2nd & 3rd preference.

4. *DM* me with the row number, name, and preference order of the three games (my DMs are open)

Green: My keys
Blue: Keys donated by @McCovican.
Orange: Keys donated by @tojosan

Game listed multiple times = multiple keys.

We've given away ~100 games now, and I'll be adding new keys as I get them.

If you don't mind boosting this post; this is my small way of trying to make the world & Mastodon a nice place to be.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17uJVhaUJsFdQDTUbMa_swKiG_yphmhrmRHBB2MYz8V0/

#gaming #giveaway #MastodonGiving #Steam #PCGaming #Games

With Mastodon, decentralization strikes back https://reg.cx/46UY?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=auto&utm_content=article

Original tweet : https://twitter.com/TheRegister/status/1609486725717303296

Ever see a rocket engine combustion chamber completely split in half during a hot fire test?

👇 Now you have 👇

Courtesy of the good folks at #NASA Marshall

#3dprint #rockets #metallurgy #space #additivemanufacturing

An irregular reminder that calling this place "Mastodon" has a bit similar energy as saying "I just sent you a GMail."

"Fediverse" (or "fedi") is a better term.

Mastodon is just one of many software projects that talk to each other to create this multi-instance social network:
https://axbom.com/fediverse/

(kudos to @axbom for this fantastic infographic!)

There are blogs, Reddit-like communities, video instances and many more, all part of fedi.

#TwitterMigration #NewHere

I remember these coins well from my childhood. The ‘ring of hands’ 50p, introduced 50 years ago today, to commemorate our entry to the EEC. How far we’ve fallen since #Brexit - and how much we’ve lost. 🇪🇺😢 #BrexitReality

These shampoo bottles are very similar, that’s the bad news, the good news is that my kid is no longer shedding

What's behind the colours of #NYE fireworks? Here's a useful explainer for tonight's displays: https://www.compoundchem.com/2013/12/30/the-chemistry-of-fireworks/

I am seeing a lot of people commenting on this article commenting that unlike previous generations, millennials are not becoming more conservative as they age. The whole premise is wrong.

https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767cf4

An abundance of studies show that people don't actually change their political views as they age. What happens instead is that the polity changes in reaction to the changing social attitudes.

Back in the 1950s, anyone voicing support for civil rights was liable to be attacked, even murdered by white vigilantes in the US south and most of the US political class was just fine with that. Views that were suppressed with violence then are now more than just mainstream.

What normally happens in a political system is that the political parties adapt to the changing political views by becoming more progressive.

I have not changed my views on LGBQ rights since I was 20 and my views on Trans rights have changed largely because of changes in what is medically possible.

I have really not changed my views on any topic except where the facts have changed significantly such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Yet my views which were considered left in the 1980s are now firmly mainstream.

If politics were working right in the US and the UK, the Republican and Tory parties would have followed the change in social attitudes by moving to the left and accepting anti-racism, anti-bigotry etc. as the new consensus.

That hasn't happened and the reason is not hard to find, it is called Rupert Murdoch.

Fox News in the US and the Murdoch press in the UK have poisoned the Tory party by feeding their base with a constant diet of hatred. After it became unacceptable to attack people for being black, Murdoch had to find proxies. First it was gays, then professional women, then foreigners. Now they have moved on to hating Meghan for royaling while black, 'globalists' and the 'woke'.

The Murdoch press has turbo-charged right wing voter turnout among elderly bigots with a constant diet of hate. Meanwhile, the right-wing parties are utterly losing the millennial vote and much of the Gen-X vote as well.

The current political situation is anything but normal. I remember when the Tory and Republican parties used to actually talk about policies and ideas. And it wasn't even so long ago either. Now the only thing they have to talk about is their hate of the week.

The Tory/GOP response to the impending demise of their base has been to co-opt the language of the far left and start blathering about 'globalists' (i.e. Jews), 'bankers', (i.e. Jews) and 'wokeism' (more Jews?) and meanwhile attack everyone else for 'anti-Semitism'.

The current situation is clearly not sustainable but I for one can't see how either party changes course without a prolonged period in opposition and the removal of Rupert Murdoch.

Get ready for another oracle, folks, because I'm in a Cassandra mood right now.

I just found out today that Linode has begun offering Mastodon servers hosting. This occurred exactly as some of us had foreseen (or, in a mundane way, "called it" ​ ).

It was only matter of time before big hosting companies started adding Mastodon to their suit of software because they saw a big opportunity there.

This is big - no, huge. Let me tell you why.

For starters, it takes the sysadmin load off from the server "admin" (or should I call it "top mod"? "ruler"?) so they can focus on what really matters: Community.

Yes, yes, I know, as some people have said it before, Mastodon is not a product. But deploying and mantaining a Mastodon instance is a huge thing, and not everyone can do it. In fact, it's a great barrier to entry.

You've already seen the amount of effort that our admins have put in keeping their servers snappy and scalable.

Well, these hosting companies are already doing it for a convenient price; which means that more people can start hosting their own Mastodon servers. Is this good? Is this bad?

Well, the way I see it it was just matter of time; whether the existing communities in the Fediverse are ready or not.

Yes, more people will start setting up their servers, and yes, more people will start joining without any respect for community standards in here. This is our Eternal September, and it is inevitable.

But here's the thing: Twitter is already crumbling. Today their website stopped functioning. This had NEVER happened in at least 5 years. Or at least, not in an unpredictable way as it happened today. Server maintenance? I can get it. A storage unit failing and people having to switch to a backup? Within the parameters. A datacenter suffering from a natural disaster? Predicted and insured against. A DNS failure? A blip.

An entire website failing for no apparent cause with a lot of team members no longer working there and very few people to maintain it? Run. The fuck. Away.

We don't know if Twitter will last till the next month. Hell, we don't know if a failure on a critical power line will cause a bunch of servers to fail. We don't know the state of their backup systems. We don't know if someone will sabotage it. We don't know if someone will start using the 400 million leaked accounts to wreak havoc in there. We don't know if today's failure was the result of an intrusion. The stability of Twitter is hanging by a thread.

And what will happen to the people that need an online space? Where will they go if there are not enough Mastodon instances around?

This is where Mastodon users like you or me come in. The Mastodon hosting services are out there already. It can be a danger or it can be an opportunity.

Linode is the first, but soon other cloud companies will start to compete and offer their Mastodon hosting services. With competition, prices may drop (to a certain limit).

In a matter of months, sysadmins will gain more experience dealing with Mastodon administration: backups, scaling, all that stuff. Before you know it, companies will start hiring Mastodon administrators. Courses will appear on online learning platforms like Udemy and Platzi. It will become a valuable thing to put in your resume.

And we WANT that. The ball just started rolling.

So admins, this is a message specifically for you:

Get ready. You can panic like everybody else, worrying that Gargron will finally give up and implement quote toots OR you can start preparing for the time when the inevitable happens:

Making videos for Community leaders (aka admins) about online racism, how to get rid of trolls, common caveats when running a Mastodon server... etc.
Starting discussions between Instance admins about community standards and codifying them in server rules.
Making lists of trusted instances and their admins to add them as allow-lists on the versions of mastodon that support them, JUST IN CASE.
Opening admin-only alternative communication channels to deal with big problems when (not if, but when) they arise.
Doing your homework and finding out which laws and regulations you need to follow when setting up your instance.
Creating blocklists for known spammers and nazi instances.
Training and recruiting more mods.
Adding moderation wikis to your instance servers.

Yes, wikis. Where are they? I don't see any wiki on how to do Mastodon admin stuff! And we want to organize millions of people? Seriously??? Even reddit has built-in wikis, why don't we have them?!

Right now, the way I see it, a lot of new instance admins are winging it and learning along the way. But we need organization, because sooner or later Twitter will fail (even temporarily) and people will flock to here in even greater magnitudes than we saw in mid 2022. And I'm not talking about server capacity and our usual headaches. I'm talking about dozens, even hundreds of instances opening up with Linode or other cloud services, people joining in the hundreds of thousands per week, with very few moderators, and if we don't prepare for that, they will overrun us with their toxicity, dogpilings, harassment and doxxing. We can isolate ourselves but the fediverse as we know it is at risk of being outnumbered by a decentralized mob. Whether that happens or not, it's up to you. It's up to you to be ready for the moment that huge gate opens and millions of users come in a stampede.

#Meta #MastoAdmin #musings

Yvonne Brill Canadian-US rocket & jet propulsion engineer. Invented fuel-efficient rocket thruster that keeps satellites in orbit. Part of many national space programs in US including @nasa & International Maritime Satellite Organization b #OTD 30 Dec 1924 bit.ly/3wMQkzM

#WomenInEngineering #INWED #WomensHistoryMonth⁠ #WomenInSTEM #STEM #engineering #WomenEngineers #WomenInHistory #ExtraordinaryWomen #WomenInCulture #STEAM #HistSTM #WikiWomenInRed #Wikipedia #WomenInHistoryShouldntBeAMystery

Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong apparently filled out and signed customs forms when returning from the moon in 1969.
https://www.truthorfiction.com/apollo-11-customs-form/

Original tweet : https://nitter.privacydev.net/tilbots/status/1608759355041538048

I cannot keep this to myself. There is a website (radio.garden) where you can listen to radio stations all over the world for free. No log in. No email address. Nothing.

When the site loads, you are looking at the globe. Slide the little white circle over the green dots (each green dot is a radio station) until you find one you like.

I have been listening to this station in the Netherlands and it absolutely slaps. I have no idea what they're saying but the music is fantastic.

Using the command line is often faster than doing the same thing via a GUI.

Terminal velocity, innit.

PSA to all admins: I highly recommend a #FediBlock of #mastinator (ie. the entire mastinator.com domain).

Mastinator is a service that allows a person to anonymously follow people on the fediverse. No big deal you think? Your public posts are probably already anonymously viewable from your public profile anyways and all it is doing is aggregating public info? That is what its creator claims---it is just a convenience service!

Well no, it is mode concerning than that. It does this aggregation by following any account a mastinator user types into its service then replicating *all* your non-DM posts into a sort of "proxy inbox" in the mastinator.com domain that is completely out of your control and viewable by everyone!

In other words, if you are followed by mastinator.com it effectively turns your follower-only posts into public posts and lets people you have blocked keep following you by following the mastinator replica of your posts!

Innocent intentions or not this violates user consent.

He wasn't going first.