Phillip Winn @pwinn@social.cleverlibre.org

@jeffjarvis @malwaretech Well said, Mr. Hutchins. I think you've captured the full range of pros and cons in one piece.

There will absolutely be moderation-related drama in the future, possibly forever, because that is a human problem rather than a technical one, and requires human solutions, not technical solutions. But you're right, that drama will be completely different than the sort of drama that most people are used to seeing, and the responses will be dramatically different, too.

On twitter, it seemed like the biggest problem (for me, a cisgender white man) was the presence of people devoted to hateful trolling. On mastodon, so far the biggest problem for me is the tendency to too-quickly defederate without due process, a problem caused by the people most likely to have been targets on twitter. I assume some of it is post-traumatic, in fact.

The incentives are completely different, and so far they seem to be pointing to better places. I think things are going to look radically different a year from now, but I definitely have no fear that mastodon will still be active a year from now.

@emilygorcenski You've convinced me, at least! If I ever run a server, all languages will be welcome, and I'll just deal with moderation issues as they arise.

Also, yes, it would definitely be racist for a grocery store manager to disallow a language! I guess my only caveat would be that, unlike a grocery store conversation, posts and comments here are public forever, and can be directly linked to. So that does put a tiny bit of extra pressure on things. But I think presuming the worst for non-English posts is obviously racist, so presume the best and deal with issues if they ever come, IMO.

Another pair inspired by @LeviKornelsen, also using a single added phrase: "in front of stained glass." The MidJourney v4 prompt text is mine, based on descriptions Mr. Kornelsen gave his processed images.

I hope readers appreciate how much effort I've been putting into the descriptions for these images!

#AIart #midjourney #StainedGlass

@trinsec Yes! I first tried the term because I was trying to build up prompts to replicate photography, and "magic hour" is a common term in outdoor photography. It's the hour before the sun sets, and the light is nearly magical. Turns out that it's a common enough term that the training data for MidJourney was tagged with it, and it works really well.

I find myself intrigued more and more by what just one added phrase can do to AI-generated art. In this case, the phrase is "in front of stained glass," and this entire series was inspired by @LeviKornelsen

As usual, these were generated with the MidJourney v4 model, and the complete prompt text is in the image description.

#AIart #midjourney

Thanks to the just-released Mothership Companion app, I have a new Mothership character!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mothership-companion/id1606212377

#ttrpg #mothership

When generating art with MidJourney, one of my favorite things to put in a prompt is "magic hour." Here are some results with and without that phrase; see if you agree!

In both cases, this is MidJourney v4, and the only addition to the prompts was ", magic hour"

#AIart #midjourney

@freemo Yes, that is an important point! But again, at the risk of belaboring this, that's on the "exit" side of things, and I'm not seeing much on the "enter" side of things.

It's nice to know I can't easily be kicked out of club UFI, but that doesn't answer why I'd want to be in club UFI in the first place.

Put another way (and now I really am starting to think this horse is dead), people have been falsely accusing qoto, and therefore you, for a while now. But Eugen removing qoto from joinmastodon pushed your buttons big-time. It incensed you in a way that being on a blocklist or three did not. Why? Because it was Eugen, and you care about his opinion more than others? Or, as I recall you stating, because being removed from joinmastodon cut off a supply of users unexpectedly?

I guess I'm thinking it's mostly the latter, which is why I'm saying that I think the UFI needs to deliver some value like that. Be a better joinmastodon, not subject to arbitrary whims, but with a covenant and process.

@freemo I guess what I'm getting at is: in terms of outreach, I hope there's something more. A UFI site to point people that makes onboarding much easier than it currently is, for example.

Right now the choices are joinmastodon, which was weirdly limited and unhelpful even before they cravenly booted qoto, or something overwhelming and unhelpful like instances.social or fediverse.observer.

Perhaps UFI could deliver a better index site? That could be an attractor, at least for admins open to more users, and the "safelist" (I hate the terms "whitelist" and "blacklist") would then be a bonus.

@freemo ...which is appealing to people who suspect they might be soon on the chopping block, but nobody ever does! Or rather, those who expect to be defederated generally deserve to be, and the zone of protection would do them no good.

You feel strongly the need for a zone of protection because you are in the middle of being unjustly targeted. Most admins are not.

So if I'm running a server, decentpeople.socialbutintroverted, or whatever, and I see there's a proposal, right now it seems like it amounts to: If you're just starting out, or suddenly dealing with a big influx of users, and would like some guidance or advice on moderation, here's a minimal code of conduct that you can use. As a bonus, if you affirm that code of conduct, you'll be able to advertise on your About page that you are part of the United Federation of Instances, which lets people coming to your server know you're not a haven for nazis or pesos or whatever. And if there's any accusation against your server, other UFI servers will stand with you--so long as you're still actually following that code of conduct.

Does that seem like a fair description? Because I'm not entirely sure how appealing that is as I wrote it, but then, I don't run a server.

@freemo I don't want to go through the trouble of creating a GitLab account, nor use my work GitLab account, to ask there, so I'll ask here:

I think I get why you're doing this. UFI seems like it should emphasize positive association rather than the negative association of FediBlock, for example. The question is: why would another server admin want to join UFI?

@MichaelPorter This seems completely broken, and reminds me of the strange behavior I started to see around iOS 7. That was rumored to be when Jony Ive took over. Before that point, every element on iOS had a Z-position, and things that were pulled up or down or over all layered in a predictable order, with UI affordances that made the order clear. That was deemed (apparently by Mr. Ive) to be too skeuomorphic and unwelcome in an all-digital world, and so the layering disappeared, and the coloring the indicating depth disappeared, and it stopped being possible to figure out what was tappable, and... whew! Bad memories.

This feels like more of that. Coloring the tabs correctly would be suggestive of the real world, and skeuomorphism is out, so instead you just have to guess that in this app, and maybe only this app, the blue text indicates the active tab. Are there only two tabs? You have a 50% chance of guessing correctly, then!