I hope my #mastodon fam all across the #fediverse will celebrate #JohnMastodon day with me on 16 December. It was one year ago that John burst onto the scene, and the web has never been the same.
What do people use for #bittorrent on #Mac? I am currently using Vuze, but it's so super spammy. The only reason I manage to use it without it installing all sorts of spammy features is that they all appear to be blocked by my pi-hole. Nothing seems that great.
I finally got enough confidence to post a video of me playing #bass. January of this year, at age 50, I decided to start learning. I'm not much to watch, but this is halfway decent. Obviously the bass is pretty loud in the mix, because I'm sharing it the way I hear it. I have a long way to go.
I just learned about https://learn.makemytestcount.org/ for positive #COVID19 tests thanks to @violetblue ‘s newsletter. I haven’t had a positive test yet (hoping to keep doing prudent things like #MaskUp and keep avoiding it). But we are having to step up as the #CDC gives up and tries to find something else to work on.
@killyourfm You are awesome. I’m about the same age and did something similar. I started on bass guitar in January. Too self conscious to post videos of me playing yet. But hats off to you. It’s never too late to rock!
I wanna share one of my frustrations as a #mastodon#moderator. When a person from another server reports someone on infosec.exchange, we get a copy of the report, but we can't see WHO. We might know that SOMEONE at mastodon.social reported this person, but we don't know who. So the person reports it to us. We might make notes. We might have a conversation amongst the moderators like "That's pretty close to the line, but we're not gonna take action on a first offence". We have the ability to make notes and actually follow through on decisions like that. But we literally lack a mechanism to reveal any of that to the reporting person.
When an infosec.exchange person reports something (whether here on i.e. or elsewhere), we get a copy telling us which user reported. If I'm the mod handling it, I literally always send a DM to that person and explain what decision we reached and why. (when you have 10 moderators handling 3-4 cases a day, you can afford the luxury of artisanal, hand-crafted responses).
I'm especially keen to send that DM when the visible action we are taking is nothing. If we're not going to take action I want to explain why. At least one person pushed back on my explanation and changed my mind. I didn't follow what was so bad about the reported post and I changed my mind and I took action.
When someone off-instance reports one of our users, they get a sub-optimal experience. I literally can't tell who it is and I can't send a message to them to explain. All they can tell is that nobody took action. They don't know whether 6 mods had a deep, soul-searching debate about it, or whether a single mod just closed it and nobody else got involved. they can't tell that we made notes or maybe even changed how we plan to handle similar things in the future. All they know is that they reported something and nothing happened.
Everyone's expectations on moderation are calibrated to big tech: Facebook, Twitter, etc. Giant faceless corporations who don't care. We are here. We read EVERY report. We think about EVERY action. But when we end up taking no action, it can be hard to see whether that was thoughtless inaction, or thoughtful inaction. It is hard to prove, but I swear we think long and hard about the controversial and difficult moderation decisions.
My teenage son is helping me code some #python for some mastodon-related projects. I gave him some sample #code that works to get started. He immediately gave me shit about my formatting and redesigned the whole module. I code like a #sysadmin. He codes like a developer.
@btanderson The opening set was decreed by @jerry. We are working on some transparency reporting tools to start publishing how many reports we dealt with, what actions we took, etc. there’s no publicly available tool for that yet. So we are coding it by working on the APIs.
Amateur professional #selfhost sysadmin. Professional amateur #cloud #security at #AWS. Also fond of #cats, #cigars, #whiskey and #pipes. I like board games and some video games. I am #covid cautious and I still #wearamask. Opinions are my own, but they can be yours too.