Martin Ruskov @mapto@social.cleverlibre.org
- Research
- https://www.zotero.org/mapto
- Games
- https://mapto.itch.io
- Account in Bulgarian
- https://masto.bg/@mapto
Studying how people interact, in the past (#CulturalAnalytics) and today (#EdTech #Crowdsourcing). Researcher at @IslabUnimi, University of Milan. Bulgarian activist for legal reform with @pravosadiezv. I use dedicated accounts for different languages.
My profile is searchable with https://www.tootfinder.ch/
Joined Nov 2022
Martin Ruskov
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"You have blood on your hands," Sen. Lindsey Graham told tech leaders during a Judiciary Committee hearing about large tech and social media companies including Meta and TikTok harming young users.
Martin Ruskov
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In Bulgaria we have seen this type of exaggerated punitive and demonstrative treatment in cases with little societal risk. Such gestures are acts of abusing the judiciary for political purposes and are clear signs of broken rule of law.
Martin Ruskov
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Today’s privacy and security tip involves lying.
The kind of lying that will keep you and your data safer 🙂 https://themarkup.org/gentle-january/2024/01/30/fake-your-answers-to-security-questions
Martin Ruskov
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Yes this is a major problem: "I realized that despite being involved in post-Soviet research for some 20 years as a student and then professor, no university or government office has ever given me guidance about how to detect or respond to hostile intelligence interest in me, whether it be from Russia or any other state." During my research training as a PhD, I took this https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/01/24/we-must-accept-the-truth-western-academics-are-russian-intelligence-targets-a83837
Martin Ruskov
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🇳🇱
@QOTO @mapto So our history with scholar is sadly a negative one, and it is in fact how QOTO came into existance very many years back. I'll give you the back story.
QOTO at the time was a single user instance or close to it. This was in the days of block-gab where servers were blocking gab and as "punishment" anyone who didnt block gab would often be blocked for not blocking gab. At the time at QOTO we held a public debate on our public forum as to what people wanted to do. Most of the server wanted to block gab but we had a small and growing group of LGBTQ+ activists who very vocally opposed it.
These activitsts, I find out, had recently migrated over from several servers int he fediverse (though a large part of the group were from scholar.social). They had fled other servers who were blocking gab for us because we seemed the most anti-hate speech that still allowed free federation. They were part of a group of people from the LGBTQ+ community who actively monitored accounts on GAB for doxxing and threats tot heir community nd then would disseminate that information to the wider community to help save lives.
The debate went on for some days with several alternative approaches being proposed (like RSS readers etc) but all of them were rejected for several reason, most of those reasons fell into one of a few categories, namely that it would either expose their ip address or other personal details, or it might put them at risk in some other ways. I wont go over every detail here but sufficive to say the conclusion was to priotitize the LGBTQ+ community's safety. We went on to implement several features (such as subscriptions) that would allow them to be even safer, and ultimately decided to maintain a fairly open federation policy with rather strict on-server rules.
After we officially made our stance clear that we would remain with open-federation and be a safe heaven for LGBTQ+ people in that regard the word spread around the fedi. Overnight we went from a single user instance to the center of the fediverse with people flocking in from all over in huge numbers. One of the servers most impacted by this was scholar.social as part of the huge exodus. This is because at the time Scholar.social took an abusive approach to their own LGBTQ+ community that argued against the defederation and ultimately migrated to QOTO. At first the admin of the system was just outright suspending users, often making up really nasty lies. This wasnt really good look at just accelerated the community leaving from scholar. Ultimately scholar wound up blocking our server entirely both as a punishment to the people leaving scholar, and because when you block a server people cant migrate accounts to it anymore. He even went so far as to block my account on scholar and started spreading lies.
In recent years we found scholar to be a very radicalized server so i am somewhat happy for the block in that sense. For example a few years back several of their users started promoting violance, and actively made posts calling people to be violent. May servers around the fediverse started blocking scholar, and the admin at first justified the violence, but after about 2 days of scholar getting on block lists he silently finally removed the post. So his violent extremist would have been enough to get a block on our end probably if we werent already defederated.
That said, yes your welcome to reach out to the admin of scholar and encourage him to remove the defederation, it is entirely on their end. But many **MANY** people have asked him to do that before, he usually just suspends such people. In fact in the past he has suspended people from his server simply for someone holding an account here at all. So you may get blocked if you do that.
@meredithlowry may I ask why would you be interested in posting these here? What relevance (or use case) do you see?
I hope this doesn't come across as criticism of any sort. It's pure curiosity.
@rwg @rra
Sure. In the EU we have GDPR which is quite explicit about this.
A nice constraint (from the perspective of privacy) about polls on Mastodon is that they don't give you a mechanism to know who responded (in theory one might try to trace back user exposure to posts and time of increments in votes to trace these back, but this is fiction for now). We don't even have a way to confirm that when we provide two polls (one demographics and one on the research topic), the same person would respond to both. So in terms of privacy, we have a conservative setup, which - as you say - is fair game.
However, my claim is that if we inform users about the way we want to interpret data and have similar response rates to the two, we can safely assume that the answers to the demographics question closely relate to the demographics of the respondents to the research question.
Thanks for this very interesting work. It's certainly only one of the first steps in a lot of research that needs to go into this. For examples, I've found out that when I added some information about the wider study, responses to my polls increased a lot.
But I am writing to ask you whether you've had any thoughts on one big issue: demographics. Any social research would need to frame its validity within the sample of respondents. Since on social networks participants are self-selected, it is useful if we have some data about demographics and representation. The polls provided by the platform are a great tool, because they are much more immediate to access, as opposed to dedicated survey links. However, the way they are currently implemented in Mastodon, individual posts with polls are not bundled to the demographics of their respondents.
One approach I've had in mind was a posting a series of polls in a short period of time, consisting of (necessarily brief) demographics and few questions.
Another, possibly better, alternative would be to have a platform that strongly encourages users to provide demographics data and that packages this with poll responses. It would be a hard sell in terms of privacy, so I wouldn't say realistic.
Did you have similar questions? Any thoughts?
Martin Ruskov
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The best 3 cross-platform text editors https://www.both.org/?p=3517 #texteditors #emacs
Martin Ruskov
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Privacy-oriented X front-end #Nitter is shutting down following changes to guest accounts
Nitter is dead after Twitter/X stops allowing guest accounts. Nitter was a front-end for Twitter that worked without JavaScript… @alternativeto
RIP.
@fasterandworse currently, the full picture would be:
"100 Posts | 100 Following | 100 Followers"
right? ...so is your suggestion is for:
"100 Posts | 100 Followers | Following 100"
I can see consistency and order also weighting in here.
PS: Sorry, had a mistake in the first response so I deleted and reposted
Martin Ruskov
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January 28th, 137 CE—Tesenouphis renews the registration on their three camels #OTD #OnThisDay (in case you thought the DMV was an exclusively modern inconvenience)
@openedtech We tried using ChatGPT as a teaching assistant. Would you be interested in this research? https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01540
I've just come across an organisation that has added this text to their profile information: "Our Avatar is <our name> written in black, with a white background."
Considering that <our name> is a redundancy that coincides with their profile name, would you consider adding the above text to be good usability for people with impaired vision?
Please expand any alternative responses in a comment.
@johncarlosbaez thanks for clarifying. As I've learned my English-language maths terminology in Germany, I had never before come across this explanation, and it has left me wondering on several occasions before. Your reference is much appreciated
@freemo for what purpose would this metric be useful? Isn't the per capita metric much more meaningful to avoid mixing wealth from population size?
@ProfKinyon @johncarlosbaez what makes you so confident you use the word correctly. I studied in Germany and don't remember ever hearing it used as in "educated guess". I see it more as "predisposition", "approach". Then the dictionary doesn't completely agree https://dict.leo.org/german-english/ansatz
Martin Ruskov
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How frequently do you use an RSS reader?
Please boost for more representative data.
Martin Ruskov
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@Daojoan sadly Apple's respect for use privacy is just a marketing gimmick that users want to believe. Here's three strikes (quite randomly collected from a single search) about it, and this excludes paywalled content (several articles on NYT for example):
https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/apple-just-traded-your-privacy-for-15-billion.html
@Daojoan sadly Apple's respect for use privacy is just a marketing gimmick that users want to believe. Here's three strikes (quite randomly collected from a single search) about it, and this excludes paywalled content (several articles on NYT for example):
https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/apple-just-traded-your-privacy-for-15-billion.html
- Research
- https://www.zotero.org/mapto
- Games
- https://mapto.itch.io
- Account in Bulgarian
- https://masto.bg/@mapto
Studying how people interact, in the past (#CulturalAnalytics) and today (#EdTech #Crowdsourcing). Researcher at @IslabUnimi, University of Milan. Bulgarian activist for legal reform with @pravosadiezv. I use dedicated accounts for different languages.
My profile is searchable with https://www.tootfinder.ch/
Joined Nov 2022
