ML2 @mathlover@social.cleverlibre.org

#Tumblr posts that they will be adding #ActivityPub to connect to the #Fediverse ASAP... #Mastodon

My employer’s mission statement: Rakes all over the ground

My employer’s behavior: Sideshow Bob

This from @pluralistic on the NYT article on universities aligning themselves with sports gambling outfits. Full post here: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/21/rah-rah/

Learning about the costs of running a Mastodon instance for even <1000 users highlights how Twitter also wasn't free, even though users thought it was. There were enormous costs, and we paid for them.

Did we ever pay for them.

Stop gaslighting the public.

Boris Johnson did not build 40 new hospitals, neither did he or his government ever intend to.

We (and interviewers) need to challenge this lie whenever it comes up.

Widespread droughts across the US this summer have reduced crop yields by as much as one-third. The scenario is likely to become more common in the coming decades. Is hacking photosynthesis the key to allowing plants to thrive in hot and dry environments, thereby increasing crop yields? (12-min read)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/is-hacking-photosynthesis-the-key-to-increasing-crop-yields-180981144

#science #biology #photosynthesis #genetics #botany #food #farming #sustainability #climateChange

I pushed a few fixes and improvements to instances.social this night and it is now tracking about six times more instances than it was before (2200 => 12800).

Autodiscovery of instances had been broken for some time now, and obviously with all the new users from the last weeks, came many new instances.

See the full list on https://instances.social/list/advanced an https://instances.social/list/old (the latter being the "legacy" list, a plain html table, which is quite... heavy for browsers).

@cadey @karolherbst @mastodonusercount Well, yeah, actually, instances.social had not been discovering new instances automatically for a long time and I fixed it a few hours ago.
While most big instances were already known (and that's why the user count did not increase by a lot), instances.social went from tracking ~ 2200 instances to almost 13000.

I'm not sure how this relates to the "active instances" count on this bot though.

@TheKinrar Never mind. I found your recent note on the matter.

This is awesome, by the way. We had way more instances than we knew about, it seems. :)
https://mastodon.xyz/@TheKinrar/109381797042523890

@mastodonusercount

Instance spike explained here: (Bugfix on instances.social)
https://mastodon.xyz/@TheKinrar/109381797042523890

@mastodonusercount Well let's hope that this doesn't end badly.

I'm not sure which would be worse, bots creating a temporary downtime, or actual users creating long-term slowdown on instances.

There's some takes about the open social Web that I'm realizing are results of the trenches of centralization in how people think people should interact. Globalism (or at least forcing _everyone_ to be subject to a set of approved communication standards) wasn't the way. It erased dozens of cultures and forces us to reintroduce them through a colonial lens. If anything, we should focus on building region-specific networks, overlayed with topic-centric ones and simplify the ability of us to form (and disband) groups. From there, it's golden, IMO. (https://jacky.wtf/2022/11/BJS8)

@mathlover @mastodonusercount Looks like a chunk switched on at 11am and then a whole *stack* at 12 GMT. Very peculiar.

There is far too little recognition of the fact that the US Intelligence Community’s ability to discover Russian invasion plans and share them with Ukraine is one of the greatest intelligence successes of the last 50 years and has had a critical impact on thwarting Putin’s imperialist ambitions.

They knew the Russian war plans better than most of the Russian military executing the invasion (who mostly had no idea they were going to war) and even members of Putin’s Security Council! Remarkable!

After using Mastodon for just one day, I gotta feeling this platform is going to give Twitter a run for its $8.

A battery filled with algae is somehow managing to power this computer for months: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2319584-computer-powered-by-colony-of-blue-green-algae-has-run-for-six-months/

No-one's quite sure what's going on. Possibly the algae is serving as the medium catalyzing the interaction between the anode and cathode in the battery.

Except research shows the anode isn't degrading, which suggests ...

... the *algae* is producing the electrons.

Some thoughts on this in my blog post here, item 6: https://clivethompson.medium.com/lavaforming-ai-writes-heavy-metal-and-drones-that-deliver-hamburger-helper-59b9bcfda9a8

https://www.ft.com/content/028e0109-6e87-42ed-8480-996cf645ce04

Throwing this into the void.

One might make the case qoto.org could use a brand renewal, due zombie issues that are haunting it a little.

So let's interrogate the current state of satisfaction with #QOTO. Let the #fediverse know what YOU have experienced.

Under the hashtag #HappyWithQOTO? (with the❓mark), let us know what you like about the instance AND what you DO NOT.

Perhaps we can crowd-source a gestalt.

#HappyWithQOTO❓

Since the holidays are coming up, I’d like to remind everyone who is thinking of getting a #pet to please consider #adoption from a local shelter. Most of them are likely already at capacity and they usually receive an influx in strays and take-ins once the “cuteness” wears off and people realize just how much of a responsibility it is to take care of them.