Thank you to @Flipboard and @mike for having me as a guest on your podcast!
I’m loving the word that #Flipboard is doing, and their @surf (currently in beta) is one of my favourite apps. Not just social media app, but my favourite app.
Actually, dark patterns do exist on #Mastodon. We don’t recognize them as dark patterns because we’re too politicized to see what’s obvious in plain sight.
But here’s an example of a #darkpattern on Mastodon: harassers being able to send you abusive messages as “followers only”. This renders the message invisible from public view while being visible to everyone who follows the abuser – followers who are likely to have the same toxic affinity as the abuser.
Let’s not pretend this is not a dark pattern. It clearly is.
San Francisco used to be the land of counterculture. Of anti-war demonstrations, of freeing your mind, of experiments in creativity, passion, and love. Of ripping up the old order and starting anew. Of music and poetry. Of bare feet on concrete.
Now, San Francisco is a place of vampire CEOs, transfusing the blood of the young to increase their longevity. Of robotaxis that will never come. Of Harvard dropouts getting Brazilian jiu-jitsu makeovers, then crying about masculinity.
Of blonde-haired, blue-eyed women in turtlenecks, lying about the prick of a finger, then playing on your heartstrings. Don’t you know they are mothers now? Or at least, soon to be. Would you drag this mother to prison?
Of Wario, once married to a pop star, blathering on and on about Shiba Inus, bitter because his ex-wife left him for a trans woman who served her country—and that bothers him because his daughter, who’s also trans won’t speak to him. So to cope, he lies about his fantasy avatar’s success in a virtual world then promptly kills that avatar due to sheer incompetence me—and if he can’t manage a video game, how does he manage anything? And you just know that Wario thinks about Luigi, and Luigi makes him nervous—because no one loves Wario but they love Luigi, and it’s not enough for Wario who have his money—he wants to be loved too.
And now, San Francisco is about preserving the old order, because new things are scary.
And what about the current children of San Francisco? Well, I don’t know. I hope there will be a San Francisco.
Mutual aid spam is becoming a problem on the Fediverse.
And to be sure, I’m not against mutual aid. What I am against is spam.
This person has not verified who she is – or even if the profile picture is hers. Additional research on her name states she is a scammer with a record of grifting. I am therefore skeptical that any donations will help anyone in need.
Folks, please be cautious with mutual aid requests. Yes, people sometimes need help. But people also lie.
And keep in mind, this does not count data from servers that have opted out of indexing, which accounts for another 2M accounts (which may or may not be active)!
It’s so bloody funny how people on both #Mastodon and #Lemmy are hostile about interacting with each other, yet often don’t realize they’re actually interacting with each other.
I mean, that literally just happened in this thread about how to use Mastodon to interact with Lemmy. 🤣
FediDB respecting robots.txt has resulted in appr. 2M Fediverse accounts no longer being counted.
Prior to this change, #FediDB counted 12,923,233 accounts. Now it counts 10,868,233 accounts.
Now let me be blunt: respecting robots.txt is a good thing. But now when we look at #Fediverse accounts, it must clearly be seen with the acknowledgement that these only count services that haven’t opted out of tracking.
So when people compare user counts of #Bluesky vs. the Fediverse, remember that Bluesky has the luxury of a more complete count because they host all accounts there. In contrast, the Fediverse is actually decentralized, and a good many services simply do not want to be tracked – and are therefore not counted.
Just discovered Emissary. It’s a social web toolkit that’s “designed for end users, app creators, and hosting admins”. It’s a highly customizable and scalable ActivityPub-enabled server software with few dependencies.
Only two known servers currently use #Emissary, but one of them is highly prominent: bandwagon.fm.
This has lots of potential if you want to build federated social web software with a specific use case scenario in mind.
A nice feature for @surf would be support for group actors. This would allow people to more easily follow posts from #Lemmy, #Mbin, #Piefed, and #NodeBB.
Groups are also way more deliberately topical than hashtags, which assists greatly with social discovery.
Putting the sauce in awesome! This is my own self-hosted single-user Akkoma + Mangane server. I primarily talk about the Fediverse, movies, books, photography, video games, music, working out, and general geekiness. I’m a proud husband and father.