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@samilcase Congrats on the new faculty position and welcome back to the fedi!

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Hi there! Finally made the journey over from Twitter. Im going to reintroduce myself in hopes of expanding my network on here!

My name is Sami and im a neuroscientist. My graduate research helped characterise how S1 neuronal network communication becomes altered with aging, is sexually dimorphic, and how these changes can influence gait.

I just started as an assistant professor at Colorado State University, where I teach neuro, phys, and pharm for veterinary medicine and undergrad students. ♥️

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I previously migrated, but failed to stick to it. I hope now to spend more time here and less time on Twitter. That's my intention. So I guess with that, here's my #introduction #infosec since I hadn't done one.

I'm Ovi, I have been hacking since I was a teenager and worked in information security for over 10 years. As a young man looking for the cutting edge hacking wisdom, I got sucked into working for government & defence in offensive security. Then moving on to working for Microsoft and other private sectors as a security researcher, mostly focused on 0day, APT and exploit research / threat hunting. After a number of years doing that I left to spend some time doing independent bug bounty/pen-testing. After becoming aware and frustrated with the destructive patterns government/private sector I decided to dedicate my time to civil society and digital rights space. I now do independent security research within the civil society sphere and the occasional bug bounty. I love reverse engineering, finding bugs and exploit development. You can find out more about me and my work on my website 0x0v1.com.

I live offgrid on a farm next to the sea. Away from the computer, I like to connect with nature and the land, hiking, growing food and the occasional surf.

Great to be here and hope to connect with more of you soon!

@idoubtit As I was saying over in this thread

qoto.org/@internic/11064593964

I was dearly hoping that people would converge on the Fediverse, with the diversity of servers and software meeting the differing needs/preferences of different groups, but through experience I've come to believe that there are some design choices and cultural aspects of the Fediverse that will prevent it from ever reaching the usability that many people seek.

It seems like that's especially true for people who (unlike me) depend on it professionally. But then, you may be one of those people, so it would be interesting to hear if you feel differently.

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@Lobrien @gmusser Some influential ML folks took a stab at Mastodon during the November wave, but I think almost all have drifted back. So less visibility in broad discussions as bridges like nitter have been blocked off.

To George's question, I think the solution lies outside of Mastodon. My half-formed hypothesis is that the solution is domain-specific aggregators websites that can support discovery/ranking and point towards the conversation (maybe on Mastodon, Lemmy, etc).

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The problems with #Twitter & #Reddit are not coincidental or unrelated. Capitalists will always see you as a thing to be exploited for as much profit as possible.

If you like it here, think of this as your gateway drug into free, open source alternatives to an increasingly worse dystopia of extraction and exploitation.

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Whenever there's a new wave of people coming to the #fediverse and #mastodon in particular, I'm reminded of this Simpsons clip where Marge is trying to enjoy a Rubik's cube but her family keeps pointing out things she's doing wrong and thus taking all the fun out of it.

youtube.com/watch?v=NO1DCQBd1_

Be kind to newcomers. Beyond the basic rules of any given instance, everything else are optional conventions. Let people enjoy #fedi however they want.

Don't be preachy (he says in a preachy tone 😅 )

@johncarlosbaez @gmusser Yes, I think that article describes the problems with Mastodon pretty well. I was interested in the concept of the Fediverse for some time The Musk buyout of gave me a push to act on that interest, but it was driven more broadly by a desire to smash the walled gardens and the cycle of exploitation and betrayal of users that @pluralistic and @catvalente have written about so cogently; to get back to the roots of the Web as an open system for the free dissemination of knowledge.

But as the linked article discusses and I have come to understand through spending time here, Mastodon seems to consciously prioritize anti-discoverability (as @kdund put it elsewhere in this thread). The aversion to even opt-in search and to algorithmic feeds seems to make it unlikely that Mastodon will ever be particularly good for discovering content. And the mercurial decisions made around federation/de-federation combined with the inability to cleanly transplant one's account from one server to another also mean that one can't really count on being able to build and maintain a functional following over the long term.

For these reasons, I'm beginning to give up my initial hope that the Fediverse can replace the walled gardens. I've begun to feel about it much as I feel about using Linux a desktop OS: it works for me and I like it enough to tolerate or work around its drawbacks, but there's probably too much friction/learning curve for it to ever become broadly popular.

For now I'm hoping that some new option based on ActivityPub or the AT protocol (that underlies Bluesky), or a fork thereof, may come along with more of an eye toward being useful enough to attract a critical mass of users while still being open and interoperable. In the meantime, I will keep using Mastodon and working around its shortcomings as best I can.

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@gmusser @jaztrophysicist need to get the American Physical Society to help push the migration forward, and stop using the bird site.

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If you are #new to the #fediverse and look for colleagues from a wide array of academic disciplines, you might want to have a look at these individually curated (opt-in) lists collected by @hendrikerz:

github.com/nathanlesage/academ #Academia @academicsunite @academicchatter

I maintain the list for #sociology, which can be found here: trutzig89182.github.io/Mastodo @sociology #Introduction

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Twitter, once the most powerful real-time information system ever built, so much so someone accidentally live tweeted the death of bin Laden, now not only can’t be used to save lives from bad weather, but won’t even let the existence of bad weather be seen by the weather people.

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Like @Popehat’s rule of goats and @mmasnick’s Streisand effect before it, @pluralistic’s enshittification has become a succinct and useful way to identify an increasingly relevant phenomenon.

@neurovagrant
Call: 🎵 I'm a blue check mark flee-er just back from the bird 🎵
Response: 🎵 Way, hey, burn the site down 🎵
Call: 🎵 I came over here 'cause that Musk is a turd 🎵
Response: 🎵 Give him some time to burn the site down 🎵

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Every Mastodon instance should have its own sea shanty.

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What a gaffe! There's an ad for Desantis that appears to compare him to Achilles, apparently forgetting that the wrath of the son of Peleus' was the direful spring of all the Grecian woes! #gaffe

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I do feel for the engineers working on whatever is going on over there btw. I worked on a "Self-DDoS" incident about a decade ago. It sucked. I wrote about it in my book "Hands-on Digital Forensics and Incident Response".

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