Notices by ændra (aendra@hackers.town)

Usually feel compelled to reserve namespaces on any new platform but I don't with Threads.

Nobody can impersonate me on there. All my friends know I hate that shit.

But anyway tl;dr you can do custom algorithms on Bluesky and I just wrote one that only shows photos of asses but whatever nbd

@mentallyalex Nah there's some actual engagement due to The Hellthread. It's a lot of hornyposting (ergo, my Ass Algo, which people were joking about being a possibility a mere 24h ago), which, to the media types descending on the site, seems like really organic growth, but I've seen this before and it's dead compared to what Mastodon was like during its horntposting years.

@mentallyalex It's fun to watch them try to speedrun the growth pains Mastodon has had the last decade, I wish them well and I think there's totally room for both platforms, but I'm admittedly a bit sceptical.

@goatsarah It feels like Mastodon in the pre-Gab days, when people still posted "lewds" on main. It's so quiet otherwise, I see the same 12 people endlessly.

I've just come up with the mother of all shitposts on Bluesky and everyone's sleeping on it 🥲

Honestly I'm getting rather bored with the site. I've posted all manner of things and it's shouting into a void, I have nearly 100 followers but nobody even likes anything I post.

Very strong "guy wearing a hotdog costume" vibes coming from this Guardian piece.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/may/09/uk-hostile-environment-for-lgbtq-journalists-study-online-abuse-harassment?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

@evan It depends how you interpret the platform. If you see it as a place for "microblogging," and archivability is important because you want your posts available for posterity, then yeah, searchability will be a priority for you.

I don't. I see it as a way to talk to friends, almost like a big global chat room. I have auto-delete enabled everywhere. I'm trans and assume hostility by default if someone is digging into my previous posts. If I find an infodump I want to reference in the future, I'll bookmark it. Search holds zero benefit for my usecase.

@evan I'm so confused by the question, ngl. I'm staunchly anti-search, so voted "strong no," but the ambiguity of the question means that it could be interpreted as "Search is fine, disregard community values!" or even "Search is fine if it tracks with community values, but I'm strongly against the current community values."

Oh cool! Seems the discussion about norereferrer the other day has resulted in a PR — now merged! — that strengthens privacy by ensuring no-referrer headers are sent by every page. Love to see it! https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/23014

Noticed this on the Mastodon roadmap under "exploring".

How do I voice strong opposition to this idea? I can think of several ways this would put people in marginalised communities at risk.

Edit: the GitHub issue you're looking for is https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/21795

A plea to journalists covering the Fediverse:

If you want to pitch a story and the only people you can think of to talk to are Gargron and the Journa Host admin, please don't.

Instead, use the time you saved to learn more about how this network functions, who the people behind ActivityPub are (and what that even is), who the people keeping instances running are, who the people moderating instances are; you can even get your hands dirty by digging through the Mastodon GitHub issue queue and learning why exactly some design decisions ended up the way they did, it's all right there!

Mastodon is not off-brand Twitter. You do this entire community a massive disservice by painting it as such, and you do our profession a disservice by expressing a complete lack of curiosity about this community before you report on it.

Thank you.