💯 agree about the absurd harassment of #Fauci.
'"You have to be fluent in crazy conspiracy theories to start trying to answer.... But even to try to debate on the merits is to have already lost." from Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner
By @zephoria's definition of failure, I think Twitter does not, as of yet, appear to be failing. Most of the people I see active on here I still see being active on there (yours truly very much included). Yet I must admit that even if Twitter keeps going, and even aside from the Musk aspect, I hope that the boost the Fediverse has been given proves to have permanently put it on a growth trajectory. I really do prefer the model.
Hacking the WordPress ActivityPress plugin for fun and formatting.
The ActivityPub plugin for WordPress is a super-great way of integrating existing blogs with fediverse clients like Mastodon. Unfortunately, the way it displays posts is bad. Like… super-duper bad. Good news, with just a few quick, ill-advised hacks, you can fix it.
Who wants to do some not-extremely-hardcore backend mastodon coding (paid)? #getfedithired
Mastodon is amazing! @dangillmor makes a post about how he now sees Twitter’s failure under Musk as essential for democracy and three comments later people are talking about Gopher licensing.
As a security professional, not much scares me. I've seen my personal data stolen numerous times, watched nationstate hackers spray zerodays across the internet, and I'm a shameless user of TikTok. But now you have someone sitting on top of the personal data of several billion users, someone who has a long track record of vindictive harassment, someone who has the ear of the far right, and someone who has just shown us his willingness to weaponize internal company data to score political points. That scares me a lot.
Remember that Times story about how Musk’s politics were complicated? He might not really be “conservative” but might be “independent” or “part of the center”? That was yesterday.
How’s that working out? https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/12/11/elon-musk-tweets-my-pronouns-are-prosecutefauci-heres-the-response/
RT @jimmy_wales@twitter.com
Banning end to end encryption is impossible. Attempts to do so are idiotic. If you care about online safety then you need to embrace strong encryption. Anyone against strong encryption is against online safety. End of story.
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1601924568201003010
@koteisaev 💯 this!
That's how you get to conclusions like "Elon's Jet twitter account should be visibility restricted, but anti-vaxxers, far-right pundits, and anyone who pays me $8 should not"
There's no philosophical principle behind it beyond the guy in charge setting the rules based on his own interests.
You might disagree that he *shouldn't*, but the corporate and constitutional structure of America means he *can*, and that's what the site has become, and why it's unlikely to correct course in the future.
@toomas_ilves
As for Mastodon (or rather Fediverse in general), it's not a single big site, but thousands of different sites all talking to each other through a common protocol. Instead of one moderator crew dealing with 8-10 million people, you have people on smaller severs responsible for just their own site's users. (You also have better moderation tools for individual users as well.)
@toomas_ilves @apple @google@mastodon.social I mean, recent developments with the fowl site have only happened over the course of a month and a half, and that's not enough time to build a Twitter substitute.
Plus aside from YouTube Google doesn't currently have many social media properties, and IIRC Apple has none. It's well known that moderation of social media at the scale of Twitter is **impossible** to do well; why would these two companies subject themselves to that?
@SusanKraemer IMHO this is not the correct way to look at it. The real public utility that has gone unrecognized is Internet access, and we should have addressed that problem a decade ago rather than still have the issues we have with last mile connections today.
If anything we should be trying to replace centralized social media with decentralized protocols like ActivityPub (which is what Mastodon uses and is how I am able to communicate from this server to the one you are on) rather than trying to nationalize the former.
@davidgerard Looks lovely!
@gospelhouseshovedupyour @raynerlucas @lori Thanks for this!!!
@lori So several people have mentioned duck duck go...I should also mention marginalia.nu
Mathematics Ph.D. Likes hanging out with almost everyone regardless of political views or anything else.
Akkoma: @ML2