ML2 @mathlover@social.cleverlibre.org

I currently have no plans to start a Hive Social account. Its privacy policy is hugely lacking. It was allegedly created by a person named Kassandra Pop who now goes by Raluca—that's all I could find so far. And it has two employees (Raluca and a full stack engineer), neither of whom appear to specialize in security. Gonna roll the dice and hold out on this one.

And here is @Gargron addressing the moderation issue outlined above.

Some bigger questions about how these systems are set-up, but at least someone is stepping forward and showing accountability:

https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109383947978442853

Update: Good to see @Mastodon being responsive and I'm sure it was an innocent mistake, but these mistakes keep happening and they point to deeper issues with the approach to moderation over here that really need to be worked out. A lot of responsibility is left on the shoulders of volunteer mods. Things could be more transparent and less arbitrary.

I hope people take some of these concerns that have been surfacing seriously rather than just tell people to go find a different server or whatever

It’s about time we showed up here.

We’re The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that’s skeptical about Big Tech. And there’s a lot to be skeptical about right now.

Twitter's Monetizable Users, Not Human Rights, Matter Most Under Musk’s Rein, Leaving Behind Vulnerable Communities Who Made Twitter a Critical Platform For Speaking Truth to Power

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/twitters-monetizable-users-not-human-rights-matter-most-under-musks-rein-leaving

#ReadingAccessibility #ContentBlocking #SocialNetworks #FreeSpeech #Privacy

The first black child ever allowed to attend a white school is only 68 years old now.
White parents pulled their children from school. White teachers refused to teach her.
Ruby Bridges now works as an activist & public speaker
This wasn’t a million years ago. /1

Perfect introduction of Mastodon by @jeffjarvis. Worth reading. https://medium.com/whither-news/on-joining-mastodon-d539eed5e41a

Whom do I know at the US Digital Service? It would be good to have a mastodon.gov instance, as a way to verify that toots are actually coming from US government agencies. (Other countries should change the domain suffix appropriately…)

Like I was telling a friend, seeing folks scrambling for whatever social media life raft they can find, and it's painful to watch.

At first #mastodon was pushed, and many moved over, but for the rest, "iT'S ToO CoMpLiCaTeD".

So, yesterday #cohost was the new hotness.

Today it's #hive.

Tomorrow...?

Going from one ruined, disgraced centralized service over to ANOTHER centralized service so we can do this dance all over again.

Worse, they aren't actually vetting the sites. Zero thought goes into what these fly-by-night opportunity vultures are actually like. Who's behind them? How long they can realistically stay up? Any 4-bit asshat can boot up a pretty Twitter-clone.

At least with #Mastodon if the guy running your server turns out to be an asshole, you can just hit the bricks and move elsewhere. Good luck doing that with whatever flavor of the day you flocked over.

The beast will still be here, at least, when the next apocalypse happens

Wrote up something explaining just why Elon's latest actions on Twitter were so problematic. It's not so much the final decisions (even as those are bad), but the process that shows his lack of concern about anything other than himself. That's no way to do content moderation.

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/21/its-not-the-decision-but-the-process-musk-the-trump-decision/

Just read the interview that @Julia did with @adamdavidson. It was interesting to see Mastodon from a journalist's eyes. Even more importantly, journalists who understand what Mastodon is.

But I'm not here to give them applause.

I want to focus on this quote from @adamdavidson because it's the first time I've seen such a mainstream journalist admit this publicly, and it is truly shocking to see!

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/can-mastodon-be-a-reasonable-twitter-substitute-for-journalists/

Does your ISP offer IPv6?

boost for visibility, thanks

Surveillance Doesn’t Make Kids Safe. Tell your lawmakers and \@SenSchumer to keep #KOSA off must-pass legislation. https://www.fightforthefuture.org/actions/surveillance-doesnt-make-kids-safe

#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).