Ian Kenway @iankenway@social.cleverlibre.org

I hope everyone had a fantastic Pi day. Its always a bit sad when the holiday season is over though. I will miss the pi day carolers and all the pi day treats and lawn decorations.. cant wait till next year!

#math #maths #mathematics

Caroline has been experimenting with Digital Manipulation for an art project. This is two photos of herself and a photo of my Grandma in layers. She is also using this project to educate her students about race. I think it's interesting and timely too. What do you think? 🤔 Caroline Saynor UK
@welshpixie

#Photography Nikon Z6, Tamron 18-400mm, processed in Darktable

And lastly, some rocky coastal views. Found a lookout point that had a little path leading to the edge. (more in next toot)

#Photography Nikon Z6, Tamron 18-400mm, processed in Darktable

Let's do it.

#politics #Brexit #Scotland #Yes

British exports to the EU countries fell by 40% in January (compared to the previous year).

Who'd have thunk it? 🙄

#politics #Brexit

@freemo Oh, didn't you hear?! Because of coronavirus you should have already switched all web activity from TCP to UDP!

It's to avoid the handshakes...

Boom! There goes my very first toot. Oh wait, the max character count isn't 280, but rather 2^16? I would love to take advantage of that in my first toot. I guess I can celebrate Pi Day, even though I am 1 day late (2 days even, for a few countries), so happy late Pi Day! I am also considering to open Diaspora*, Friendica and PixelFed accounts, but who knows? Look at that! Until the incoming comma character, (<-- that one behind the parenthesis!) I have already used 411 characters. Neat!

Nice chatting with you.

I'll close by thanking you for providing this instance.

It's great that there's a place that a) allows unfettered access to the entire Fediverse; b) hasn't descended into complete chaos because of it; and c) most surprisingly of all, hasn't been widely blocked due to it.

It seems to me that by far the most important thing about Mastodon is now sadly overlooked in this age of censorship and general intolerance of open discussion; and that ironically even includes the network's creator.

Thanks for providing a safe haven for the open exchange of ideas. Only in such an environment can ideas flourish and the human race truly progress.

For that reason, I feel very strongly about free speech, and I consider the worst excesses of free speech a very small price to pay for its benefits. The alternative is unthinkable. This seems to be an unpopular opinion nowadays.

Have a good day and thanks for the crossposting tip.

@ianmacd We put a lot of effort into being respectful well behaved members of the wider community. So I'm glad that can be seen.

We actually had a rather unique history with our stance as free speech. Early on when GAB came ont he scene is when instances started to push other instances to defederate with anyone they didnt like. As such you get a few instances with massive block lists of pretty much any instance that federates with any instance they block, and then any instance that federates with them, ad nauseum. At the time we were stuck to make a decision, get cut off from short sighted but well intentioned instances, or start censoring our users view of the fediverse. So it entered a debate here in our very early days as an instance.

It turned out that the LGBT community were actually the ones that convinced me of a free speech stance, which is ironic as many of the LGBT instances are the ones that ultimately took a block-first mentality. What had happened is LGBT servers were very heavily blocking instances that exhibited anything remotely resembling intolerance. This left very few LGBT friendly instances that were free speech and as a result we had a sort of exodus of LGBT scholars joining QOTO (and boosting our early numbers).

It turns out the LGBT community had a strong voice when we opened the discussion up to the community. Many of them explained to use that they came here because they monitored hate-speech accounts on GAB and other places to identify doxing within their community and other threats and warn the members of their community. So they felt their safety was at risk on other servers, they also didnt feel safe on other free speech instances since hate was common on those servers and didnt want to be on a hate speech instance. So they urged us to not block other instances, and ultimately the community agreed and we remain free-speech.

It is also why we implemented features like subscriptions, specifically for the LGBT communities safety and others in a similar position as them. This way they can get alerts of the public posts from threatening accounts they monitor without actually needing to follow the account and alerting the account that they are following them.

Its just really sad how some in the LGBT community have ultimately used that against us, that we went out of our way to take the heat for the LGBT community at the time only to see a small number of people use our decision as a weapon against us. Thankfully its a small minority of servers today, but still it was sad to see.

For what its worth QOTO is one of the most heavily connected servers in the fediverse. Last I checked we were in the top 10 of english speaking servers.

@users nice! I hate the twitter algorithm. All the time giving content i didn't want!

The U.S. locks up far more people than any other nation. Check out this incredible infographic
https://boingboing.net/2021/03/12/the-u-s-locks-up-far-more-people-than-any-other-nation-check-out-this-incredible-infographic.html

Happy Pi Day.
Vi Hart in particularly reflective and musical mood at 2021-3-14:1.59 (and 26 seconds?).
#PiDay2021
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AHrth9lOfzo&ab_channel=Vihart

Supermarket stories 1/2

My local supermarket has a serious supply issue with Chinese 5 Spice. They haven't had any for at least 3 weeks, everytime I go in there they have an 'expected on' date 2 or 3 days in advance. When that day comes they change the expected on date to another 2 or 3 days in the future. No-one I've asked at the store has any explanation as to what the problem is!

I blame Brexit!

Supermarket stories 2/2

Magazines and newspapers are essential items in my store but books are not. Mother's Day cards are essential and so apparently are Mother's Day gifts. So they've put a stand saying MD gifts and have moved some books into it so that they become 'essential'.

On the stand are Michelle Obama's autobiography or the Pinch of Nom slimming recipe book.

Hello Mam,

Happy Mother's Day, you need inspiration
or
Happy Mother's Day, you could lose a few pounds

You decide!

I have enjoyed having a single rose bud and flower on this legacy rose bush on the farm, and a couple of days ago I was delighted to see that it has grown a strong water-shoot, proving that the plant is in good condition. This is how a rose bush rejuvenates itself, creating new, strong flowering wood from low down on the main stem. It is a harbinger of more flowers the next flowering season.

I am encouraged enough to be planning to build a wire-netting enclosure to protect it.

#roses #photos

@iankenway
And the united states has more than just 2(republican/democrat)... But it seems most people don't realize this...

Today's #Covid19Cymru headlines:
Cases trending down still. Trend in deaths looks stalled again. Positivity a record low. Indicators for R slightly improved.

There were 190 cases reported today. Friday often tends to have higher figures than the rest of the week, but this week has been different. I can't see that this is because of reporting issues; by-sample-date data seems to be coming in at the usual speed.
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