Notices by Benjamin (benjaminnelan@mastodon.social)

@_elena Whenever I see it written like 'Mastadon' I think of Sacha Dhawan's delivery of "Spy.... Master" in Doctor Who.

Which doesn't mean anything except that I definitely belong on Mastodon.

@killyourfm I helped a friend recently with their new Windows 11 laptop because their email account (Outlook) was no longer receiving emails. It said they'd run out of space and needed to upgrade even though they have hardly any emails.

Turns out when Microsoft gets you to enable OneDrive to 'Backup' your computer, it chews into the free space they've given you for email. Their desktop had a bunch of photos and documents that had filled their cloud storage up, so now their email didn't work.

@atomicpoet (Looks pretty good)

@atomicpoet The "how much of the day you've wasted on here" counter is a bold move that I wasn't expecting. Additionally the year percentage must be wrong since there's no way it's.. oh geezus it's May already.

@atomicpoet @kainoa @fediversenews Whats calckey like to self-host compared to mastodon?

@atomicpoet I agree with you, I'm just communicating my experience explaining it to folks.

I've asked people what email service they use and they've said, "what do you mean?"

"Well how do you get emails sent to you?"

"Just on my phone,"

And it often ends up being Gmail or .me and they've typically signed up for stuff by pressing the 'Sign in with X' button. Or they have it written down somewhere because they type it in so infrequently it's not important to memorize.

@atomicpoet @j_bertolotti I personally love the design here by the way.

It would be interesting to hear from folks who aren't familiar with the Fediverse whether or not this kind of stuff makes sense though.

As I was saying before, it's harder to market the network.

'Connected to the Fediverse' I imagine would be ambiguous to people who don't know what it is. It could be easy to draw the conclusion that you can 'Log in with Mastodon, PixelFed, etc' rather than what it's really describing.

@atomicpoet So many people just see 'the app' - ie. the Gmail icon for so many people is 'email,' they don't necessarily know or care what's going on under the hood or the 'fediverse' of other email servers.

Whether it's bluesky, cohost, spoutible, t2 social etc. a lot of these places are 'one thing' - 'Join the Fediverse' is a far more taxing decision.

@atomicpoet Yes of course! That website's fantastic.

Unfortunately as I've discovered though everyone doesn't understand email.

@atomicpoet Are you suggesting there isn't a massive difference of user experience between using Linux vs using GNU/Linux? WOOOW. 😬😉

Definitely trickier to market the "network" though. Every time I've brought up Mastodon/Calckey etc. it's been as an entry-point to discussing the Fediverse. By which point their eyes have glazed over and they're doing that nodding thing that indicates that they wish to walk away now.

@killyourfm @markmcelroy @thunderbird I can't wait for *Silent Uprising's *next album. ? Where is it even getting this from I wonder? I thought maybe there's another Jason Evangelho it's getting mixed up with but google doesn't seem to turn up anything.

On the plus side, Bing AI plays it a bit closer to the chest:

@killyourfm @markmcelroy @thunderbird Wooooooow. ?

Can't wait to employ this in future footnotes: "The information in this sentence was completely fabricated (maybe)."

@killyourfm @markmcelroy @thunderbird Here it is with the GPT4 model, how'd it do?

@thunderbird I personally wouldn't mind something like ChatGPT in Thunderbird or even in #ObsidianMD - being able to ask a more natural question of my own data, such as, "What is this email thread about?" or, "Can you give me a summary of last month?" I feel would be incredibly useful.

However, my main contention would be that a solution like this would have to be:
- On-device, no cloud processing
- Transparent, explains where it got that information from

@thunderbird It's scary to think of the unintentional chaos it'll cause when used be people who put too much confidence in it - not realising the limitations it has, the biases it has and what it's actually outputting. *(For example, someone getting AI to code a website that handles personal information. Many examples of insecure AI-generated code floating around.)*

@yuril Venus doesn't twinkle? Um excuse me sir I happen to have astigmatism, it is most certainly twinkling.