Notices by Tom Walker (tomw@mastodon.social)

Why is it *today* that everyone seems to have noticed that China owns a whole load of US treasuries?

People think it's just Trump who's dumb but a significant portion of American high finance seems surprisingly clueless as well. Running on wishful thinking/groupthink until they wake up to a crisis.

@cstross @ajsadauskas He did still sign away the Sudetenland, though

People on Mastodon talk a lot about moving to the open source alternative to everything, but the real imperative now is to shift to the non-US-hosted alternative to everything.

Sometimes this overlaps but right now, geography should be the priority.

@GossiTheDog Maybe just took all their data for "safekeeping"?

@neil I think – and I say this with a lot of respect for the work you're doing helping people with this! – that this is another GDPR-style panic where people are over-complying and it is not worth closing things down over it

@EricFielding @alisterb We may be thinking of a different kind of organisations!

It is Annoying that – if we assume for the moment that an organisation's main/only purpose for posting on social media is to tell people about its events/initiatives – it is now entirely unclear where to post them.

There are contending ethical imperatives and other kinds of claims for each platform, but what is lacking is any kind of clear picture of "I post it in this place and people will see it".

(Mastodon is where I do my personal posting, as you can see, but it lacks "audience" numbers.)

@lori What annoys me personally is that a lot of these people don't think they are setting up something that is approximately a blog (which they are), but something that is approximately an online magazine

Them: "We are launching a new publication"

Me: 😐

Them: "We intend to do journalism differently"

Me: 😐

Them: "We will be beholden to no one in our search for truth"

Me: It's a Substack isn't it?

Them: "You will be able to subscribe using the Substack platform"

Me: (closes tab)

@dalias Younger people are mainly not interested in primarily text-based social media, because they (generalising) do not want:

1. Text-first
2. Public by default

@mekkaokereke The server is quite "heavy" so it could probably be something like

X - code speed improvements
Y - reducing cache sizes or something
Z - switching from Rails to anything that isn't dog slow

Perhaps not what you had in mind but for a cheap-ish VPS it really just needs to be lighter weight and faster

Who are the people who thought that Mark Zuckerberg was OK until now but today he's really crossed a line?

I'm seeing a lot of it and come on. It's been very clear who he is for a long, long time. They made a whole movie about it literally 15 years ago.

@joeo10 Do Not Track never worked – it was dead on arrival a long time ago. Using this to throw mud at Firefox just shows that you know nothing about the topic.

Mastodon/fediverse has accidentally created such a high technical barrier to entry that everyone who posts here can spell

... probably in multiple languages

@tehstu @josephcox I'm pretty critical of Bluesky (see my timeline) but I don't see why this would be any harder or slower to do from Mastodon/fedi

@_elena Worse, if you're a determined troll, you can pick an account you're a fan of (let's imagine it's some famous far right figure) and then go and bother everyone who has blocked them

@glyph @nyquildotorg @mcc Whether by accident or design, what it shows is that they can drop the self-hosted PDSes whenever they feel like it (think of eg Facebook and Google supporting XMPP and then dropping it)

As briefly as possible:

If you read the spec, Relays jump out. There's a reason why there's only one and it's under the control of Bluesky.

did:plc (the usernames directory) jumps out. There's only one and it's under the control of Bluesky.

Appviews jump out. There's only one and... you get the idea.

*Lots* of people are looking at all this right now. If it were possible to run these things themselves, they'd be doing it for fun/interest. But it isn't.

@jamesh Yeah, the design has quite a lot of blockchain-inspired-looking elements but then tends to short circuit them ultimately

@jamesh Yes, and their early language about this being a "placeholder" has shifted. They have no particular plan to replace it