Brent Williams @hbw@social.cleverlibre.org

If I was planning to develop and launch a major social media platform, my first step would be to hire a room full of experts on community moderation, digital harassment, hate speech, history, sociology and psychology and let them talk me into moving to Peru to raise llamas instead.

Some Mastodon tips I've learned:

- You need a fit, young hunting party
- They are not easy to bring down, so make sure your spears have extremely sharp tips
- Ensure you have a supply line and pack animals available to transport the meat and pelt back to the cave

What have we learned? Never again should we go to a social company that does not promise portability and interoperability, that does not federate with others, that is not sufficiently open-source to allow emergent innovation from users. This is a test.

🚨 BIG EXOPLANET NEWS! 🚨

Our team has released FIVE papers today on the most COMPREHENSIVE study of an #exoplanet atmosphere to date!

Using #JWST we obtained four transit observations of #WASP-39b early in the telescope's operations to study both the planet itself, and the telescope's capabilities to observe exoplanet atmospheres.

We detected numerous molecules in the planet's atmosphere, including CO2, CO, H2O, and SO2 🧵

The future is here! ⭐ 🪐 🔭 #Astrodon #Science

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2022-060

Amazing map: Where people are concentrated

120 years of climate change animated

Countries turn from mainly blue to mainly red in more recent years, illustrating the rise in average temperatures in that country.

For each country, the average temperature in 1971-2000 is set as the boundary between blue and red colors, and the color scale varies from +/- 2.6 standard deviations of the annual average temperatures between 1901-2000.
"Warming stripe" data: https://showyourstripes.info/c/globe
Viz: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/hdoxkv/oc_animated_map_showing_120_years_of_climate/
#Climate #ClimateChange

@tiago @lmrocha @estebanmoro @hirokisayama @PessoaBrain @danielemarinazzo

With this high level of unequal resource distribution, the admins of the largest instances also will have costs that are not even comparable to the ones of the smallest instances: the scaling is simply not that simple.

Sustainability, moderation, robustness to attacks: tons of potential problems for the #Mastodon system.

#TwitterMigration #MigrationShock #ComplexSystems

Again, a quick and dirty analysis, but if I have no bugs then the 1% largest #Mastodon instances accounts for 84% of all users.

The top 5% accounts for 97% of all users.

We can say that the system is effectively centralizing around a few instances, and this might be a problem for the overall stability and sustainability.

@tiago @lmrocha @estebanmoro @hirokisayama @PessoaBrain @danielemarinazzo

#MastoStat #ComplexSystems

Thread.

Q: “Republicans enact policies that hurt their own constituents.

So why do people vote for them?”

A: It has to do with the purpose of government.

For some people, purpose of government is to help people. We think fairness is possible and the government's job is to create fairness.

Others have a different view.

They think there’s a natural order: Some people belong on top; others at the bottom.

They think people with money and power deserve their money and power.

1/

I'm curious about the extent of political diversity in the mainstream Fediverse.

If you're in the U.S, which is the best match for your political identity?

Please boost.
#Mastodon #politics #Twitter

EXCLUSIVE: Senior Dem lawmakers give Chief Justice Roberts an ultimatum on ethics issues, in wake of reports on alleged 2014 #SCOTUS leak & lobbying of justices. You probe or Congress will, Sen. Whitehouse & Rep. Hank Johnson declare in new letter https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/20/supreme-court-roberts-whitehouse-johnson-00069673

This is the binary black hole animation I made for Black Hole Week 2021 and the reason I joined twitter at the time. So I guess it is fitting to start with it here.

We’re obviously still waiting for more details about the horrific Colorado Springs mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub, but based on everything we do know and everything we’ve seen in recent months and years, this looks like stochastic terrorism — and the persons responsible for the rhetoric are already targeting another LGBTQ org in Colorado Springs. 1/