*banned 4 MarkDown love* @design_RG@social.cleverlibre.org

@realcaseyrollins That's great, hope you have an enjoyable day, Casey!

@realcaseyrollins Good morning, someone is all chirpy!! 😃

@pschwede
We had a good and lively discussion here, right at the Local feed, back in November. Then a request was made that we transferred it to the Discourse Forum, and I prepared a thread there, with links back here to most relevant posts, but it never had much participation.

Thread is here : https://discourse.qoto.org/t/nov-2019-site-issues-discussions-non-english-and-foreign-script-posts/102

From the various posts from various people, it seemed improper to limit the membership to English only, or even European languages only, as it could be perceived as exclusionary.

We had an influx of Indian users at the time (November 2019), and a lot of unfathomable script that we couldn't even moderate unless alerted by someone else about improper contents. That has receded it seems.

Late December brought a wave of Spanish twitter users looking for a better alternative, and a number of them chose Qoto as their new home. Thankfully this is more manageable for us, in questions of understanding the contents of posts and even responding to them.

There is also another thread in the same forum, regarding the Theme line and what to do about it - an important one, that had lively discussions here in November, but has fizzled out lately.

Here: https://discourse.qoto.org/t/nov-2019-site-issues-discussions-preserving-qotos-s-t-e-m-focus-in-a-time-of-growth-steering-site/103/7

Both of those threads are in the Moderation section of the Forums, and a user login is required to see them. They do not require higher user account priviledges, but simply a registration and email confirmation to access them, if someone doesn't have an account at Discourse yet.

Or we could reopen talks here as well, if someone desires.
@freemo

@users And we are over the 7,000 Users mark!

I had seen the joinmastodon.org page listing Qoto as "7K" users, but now we are officially over this mark.

@snow Ah, thank you!

@mandlebro I heard a comment that someone bought an exploit and NSA decided to burn it to deny them using it.

@snow
That link was for magvids. 😉

@magvids

@snow That was an interesting read, thank you! The INTJ description fits me really well, as I expect you noticed. 😃

do you think Freemo is an ENTJ ?

@snow @magvids see this post : https://qoto.org/@design_RG/103161778896393842

@magvids yes, there is a place you can select only languages you can understand.

@realcaseyrollins Not yet, although there are some suggestions in the Forum thread, no finalist chosen yet.

We should move on this, I think it will catch on.

@greylaw89 I understand your concern, and it's valid. There are so many towns in the middle of the US which were once vibrant and now are down in their luck, the industries gone, young people without much options for a decent living locally. Despair, booze and drug use has climbed as a result.

Reducing the size of the vehicles people use, and the amount of fuel consumed, would be a good way to go, but it's unpopular in the US. In Europe, fuel prices are higher and people conserve, use smaller vehicles or pay the costs at the pumps if they prefer that.

@realcaseyrollins@mstdn.social LOL, no, certainly not, as many people are commenting on it.

One possibility is that someone bought this on the exploits market, and that buyer is intending to use it against the US government or infrastructure.

The NSA has whole teams searching for this kind of thing, full time, but not to warn anyone. 😉

** Windows Update -- important security risk, read and patch ASAP. **

The NSA has notified Microsoft of a serious vulnerabilty in Windows 10, and some of the Server versions, which is related to the authentication of secure web connections.

Ars Technica has an article, it's also all over the Tech press probably.

For the NSA to come out and give away this (an exploitable error) is an indication of how serious it is.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/01/patch-windows-10-and-server-now-because-certificate-validation-is-broken/

@aficientifico hello, yes, I can try. What's happening?

@realcaseyrollins @freemo
And after reading all of these articles I had linked above (some read in previous days, and now collating into a better understanding), I went back to scanning the hashtag, and came across what's got to be the most out of control block list I have seen so far.

Really, I mean.

Who else is Blocking mastodon.social --- and accusing its admin of not doing a proper job of controlling access and posts from the instance? Yep, she is, this girl

Queen Bee's full list is at : https://stardew.city/about/more#unavailable-content

@pschwede Amazing! Lyudmila tiene 23 Boosts, magnifico. Fue veer que post era, y es una foto realmente muy expressiva. Congratulaciones, Lyudmila!

@realcaseyrollins @freemo One good thing came out of this (which I felt at first really spoiled my day). We got a good conversation started here, which will be on record for others to find and read later too.

And I did some extensive reading -- finding again the The Verge article that I had enjoyed (being really well written and rich), plus other articles that I branched into from links and add to my understanding of the whole Mastodon project, it's history and how things are.

Got another really interesting one that I finished just now - and that touches on the important questions regarding the way the project is lead. This one: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/mastodon-fediverse-eugen-rochko/

This article references two pieces I had read previously (and are important in the historical comprehension aspect), published on Medium.com. These were written by Allie Hart.

https://medium.com/@alliethehart/gameingers-are-dead-and-so-is-mastodon-705b535ed616

and a later one: https://medium.com/@alliethehart/mourning-what-now-10964cce22a8

@freemo Thanks, I enjoyed reading the post you just made in this thread, and will follow on to this other one. TY!

Went looking for some references, I recall reading a really good article describing the situation and the Mastodon developer dilema on what to do, when Gab approrpiated the open source code for Mastodon (which he couldn't oppose, with it being open source) and forked it into their own version.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork-of-mastodon/

And some commentary from a page I am still reading, seems a conservative voice but explained with reason : https://reclaimthenet.org/mastodon-blocks-gab/

AHHH -- found the article I wanted to link here, it's on The Verge : https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking

@lnxist @snow

@lnxist Gab.com is a site that used to run their own social network, until their client apps started to be removed from the two major App Stores, Google and Apple.

Gab attracts a radicalized population, and is right wing, sometimes to the extreme. A lot of people on the Fediverse got really annoyed last year, when they saw and opportunity to avoid any more problems with their client apps being blacklisted -- by using Mastodon as their platform.

Lots of people here don't want contact with them, and are not happy to block the Gab instances (and their peripherals, there's a few other ones). They want their own instance and EVERYONE else to do that too.

I discovered recently that a large Technology based instance does block us here at Qoto; without any problem having existed, no conflict, no notice was sent, they simply blacklisted us along with Gab and some other less savoury characters.

@snow , I know, but it does bother me - there's enough sh1t going on in politics all over the world that I haven't been reading the newspapers as much as I used to. Annoyances galore, stupidity, outright biggotry, argh.

We got some twits here too, maybe I will have to write another blog post on Politics in the Fediverse. Would prefer some more positive theme, though...