kemuri 🦀 @kemuri@social.cleverlibre.org
Joined Nov 2022
kemuri 🦀
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@Rolistespod Here is my back-of-envelope calculation: Assuming that Mastodon grows at its current rate (unlikely) of ~85000 users per day and that Twitter keeps growing at ~25000 and given that Twitter has 237M users and Mastodon 6M, Mastodon will be bigger than Twitter around 2034🤷♂️
kemuri 🦀
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@McPatrick Yes, the sign-in process is not trivial. That creates a lot of friction for the normal user. This is why I feel a lot of bias towards tech+academia in Mastodon. Hopefully, other groups will come in the end if the process gets easier.
kemuri 🦀
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Something big is happening in Mastodon over the weekend. Here is my graph, updated. Right now Mastodon is growing ~3 times faster than Twitter.
kemuri 🦀
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"Zero to Production in Rust" walks you through to the steps of how to execute a deployment to a real PaaS quite early in the book - in chapter 5.
There's a note of the end of the deployment chapter. It invites readers to email me a screenshot of the running app on DigitalOcean.
Those emails never get old. A little token to remind me, every other day, that I have written something useful and it was worth it.
kemuri 🦀
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When it came time to reckon with social media’s failings, nobody ran to the “web3” platforms. Nobody asked “can I get paid per message”? Nobody asked about the blockchain. The community of people who’ve been quietly doing this work for years (decades!) ended up being the ones who welcomed everyone over, as always.
kemuri 🦀
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Tip for the new folk:
Often Mastodon’s features work the way they do because it was first populated by people who had been harassed on FB and the Birdsite.
For instance (not sorry), you cannot search Masto for a simple term. Only #hashtags. Say you’re having a private conversation about iguanas. Anti-iguana trolls will not be able to search for “iguanas”, find your conversation, and drop into it to say, “Iguana luvers suck!”
But if you are wanting to connect with new iguana fanciers on Mastodon, slipping an #iguanas hashtag somewhere into your posts will allow people to search for and find them.
kemuri 🦀
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Last night, out on the town at dinner, in a moment of questionable judgment* and weakness**, kid3 asked to post to my Twitter account. I figured she’d post something snarky and cute, but she asked all of my followers to follow her. Now people are trolling me by sending her links to local kittens that need adoption and urging her to add more cats to the household.
*three very god bourbons
**as I now recall she said “have a third one dad why not”
Curation Algorithms are Important, We Should Control It
Curation Algorithms are Important, We Should Control It
The curation algorithms, from search result ranking to timeline ranking to recommendations, may be the most impactful and useful algorithms humans have ever derived. They cut through vast amount of noise to deliver signal relevant to each user. The lack of them on Mastodon and other places is sometimes touted as a feature -- it's not, it's simply lack of an important feature.
That's not to say the algorithms deployed by Twitter et al are perfect. Much has been written about how they are not tuned for the benefit of the users, but the corporations; not tuned for the improvement of the users, but the addiction of them; etc. But a competititor must provide a fix for those problems to measure up to the existing networks.
In a sense, the curation algorithms are bubble creators, because curation is the process of creating bubbles. I hypothesize that there is a trade off among three desirable qualities of these bubbles: effort spent to curate, granularity of the boundary, coverage of the potentials. For the same effort, one must trade off granularity and coverage, as more granularity demands more effort for examining each item.
The importance of the curation algorithms then is to scale up the curation effort available beyond human limitations, leading to improvements in both granularity and coverage. Improvement in coverage is straightforward: Google Books enables searching in unprecedentedly many books in one query. Improvement in granularity is more subtle: recommendations are relevant to complex queries, not simple combination of source and recency. Except, instead of bothering the user to input the complex queries, the corporations choose to infer inputs from user tracking data.
Simply opting-out of tracking is not really taking back control of the curation algorithms from the corporations, as many have suggested. The control of the curation algorithms is in the complex queries. Currently, the corporations sell that control to their customers: advertisers. They can use a set of complex queries to control in what kind of rankings or timelines they want their ads to appear. But the users don't get to control what kind of rankings or timelines they want to view.
Curation algorithms are too important and beneficial to give up. To really take control of a machine learning based curation algorithm, there needs to be a language for both describing its learned parameters to users and for expressing complex queries by users to it.
kemuri 🦀
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Remember: trans rights are human rights
kemuri 🦀
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Red Cross seeks digital equivalent of its emblems to mark some tech as off-limits in war -- via The Register https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/07/red_cross_digital_emblem/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=auto&utm_content=article
The beginning of this wave. Wonder how long it lasts.
17,623 accounts +2 in the last hour +91 in the last day +148 in the last week
kemuri 🦀
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Hey, so, we've hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today. 1,124 new Mastodon servers since Oct 27, and 489,003 new users. That's pretty cool.
kemuri 🦀
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As of this evening, ALL TinyNES units have now been shipped out to Mouser Electronics for final order fulfillment. Everything. One hundred percent. Nothing’s left to do. That’s it. Amazing! Amazing. tinynes.com
kemuri 🦀
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After sleeping on it, I think #Mastodon should rename ‘instances’ to ‘Communities.’
Instances feels too technical and I see even savvy people struggling to understand it.
I argue communities would make much more sense. It denotes much of the purpose behind _why_ this service has different instances, and many people will already be familiar with the concept from Reddit (the, what, sixth most popular site on the net?).
kemuri 🦀
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A quick note of something that may be important for people to know: I already noted that DMs here are a bit sketchy security wise, but (THIS IS THE IMPORTANT BIT): if you mention someone else's account in a DM, Mastodon, yoinks them into the conversation.
So, you know, if you think you're talking about someone behind their back, you might be doing it to their face.
I can only have 10 Favorite domains. Where to fit all the other domains I am interested in?
Account settings > Follows and subscriptions > Domain subscribes > ADD NEW DOMAIN SUBSCRIPTION
I can choose to merge the feed from the domain into my Home feed, or any existing List feed, or add a new List feed for it. The new List option will create a List titled by the domain.
At first nothing will show, because this only subscribes to future toots, not past toots. To see past toots I still need to add the domain to your Favorite domains, or go to the site directly.
The Federated feed is a feed of domains chosen by my mods. With domain subscription I can build my own "federated feed" with domains I choose.
kemuri 🦀
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musk, twitter
The ongoing braindump by mr musk over on tw has illuminated aspects of conservative ideology. They think that:
-Journalists don't earn the mantle of truth-tellers, but are granted it by the powers that be
-Blue checks confer power, and those who confer checks do so to keep their own power in place
-The "mainstream media" is an interlocking conspiracy of self-perpetuating "elites" whose main goal is to block conservatives from getting power.
kemuri 🦀
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Exclusive from me: I spoke with the top Ukrainian official on the plot to take back Crimea from Russia—and she shared details on next steps:
-Some European officials have been warning her taking back Crimea could trigger Russia to retaliate, asking for compromise. She says that's a no go
-She's eyeing battlefield aspects of takeover, as Russia hints at possible retreat in Kherson
-Intelligence suggests a spring/summer takeover timeline, but she thinks it may be sooner
kemuri 🦀
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I made a Spreadsheet with tech policy, cybersecurity policy, defence policy [including scholars, practitioners, etc] names!
Add yourself here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc98dUe1u_hVUQTGQX2-P-n5g-XHXI9dIHa3xSGlXWx6SjEgw/viewform?usp=sf_link
The list is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iAMJN3X6WHTmvkKxSVRYl8UAD_dxbIuDAjJ_q0VzNIg/edit?usp=sharing #cybersecurity #defence #technologypolicy
Joined Nov 2022
