@ryanc@jerry Yeah, the onboarding experience is definitely still a sore point. Like, I'd like to get my brother or the NFP I work with onto Mastodon, but I don't know what server to send them to. Mine isn't appropriate for them, mastodon.social isn't a good answer, and the alternative is... *citation needed*
@ryanc@jerry The spam analogy is very apt, I think, given Fediverse is often analogized to email.
And the wild-west-anyone-runs-anything approach is largely a failure there, too. I also used to run a personal mail server. It only worked if I proxied every message through my ISP's mail server.
A similar network-of-trust seems the only option here, give or take details.
@ryanc@jerry In the abstract sense, we're dealing with the scaling problems of the tit-for-tat experiment dynamics. Reputation-building approaches to social behavior only work when the # of actors is small enough that repeated interactions can build reputation. The Internet is vastly too big for that, just like society at large.
@jerry Sadly, I think the preponderance of evidence suggests that a "wild west libertarian self-organizing environment" (the dream of the early-90s Internet) will devolve into a Nazi troll farm 100% of the time with absolute certainty.
It's a wonderful idea, but doomed.
The barrier to the accept-list could be low (eg, do they have a halfway decent TOS/CoC), but I don't think we have an alternative.
@deadsuperhero It's uncommon these days, but that used to be quite common in PHP. It was era 2 in PHP history. (Era 1 was mostly using PHP itself as a template engine, which is how it began. Era 3 is using a dedicated template engine, which is where we are today.)
Its not something I recommend doing most of the time, but there are edge cases where it is at least reasonable.
Tangled Threads: How #Mastodon admins should respond to #Meta and #Threads in a way that protects our users best. Tip: It's not through proactive defederation.
@grmpyprogrammer "Netenyahu is an imperialist asswipe" and "Hamas targeting and kidnapping civilians is absolutely not acceptable, period" are entirely compatible positions to hold.
PSA: #Patreon just announced they're changing their privacy policy to default all of your account info, who you support, etc. to public. You need to go into the settings and disable that. (Check the two toggles at the bottom of the Settings page to off.)
And then send Patreon a nasty letter, because default-open is just a stupid model to begin with, period.
@alter_kaker@noracodes In his defense, almost all of that is tropes in European and Norse lore going back 1500-2000 years at least. Tolkien went the noble route with it, the fascists went a less-noble route with it.
The tropes themselves may not be the best in modern eyes, but they're not intrinsically fascist. Not anymore than Thor's hammer is, despite the fash adopting it. (No, the fash may not have Aragorn. NO!)
Anything worth doing is worth doing well.Anything worth doing well is worth teaching others to do well.Author of Thinking Functionally in PHP, now on LeanPub: https://leanpub.com/thinking-functionally-in-php#tootfinder