Notices by Dmitry Borodaenko (angdraug@mastodon.social)

@markmetz Accurate. #TenetMedia

Friday evening is a perfect time for a timeline purge. I am now going through #MastodonForHarris and blocking every account spamming that tag with mutual aid requests. It's been a while since I've seen such a block target rich zoo of postliteracy TikTok leftist cosplayers.

For those who have money to spend on actual #MutualAid, please give it to someone who aids people at scale, for example @abcbelarus who these assholes shunned over their support of #Ukraine: https://abc-belarus.org/en/2024/04/16/when-ideology-gets-in-the-way-of-solidarity/

@hrefna @tchambers @thisismissem @fediplomacy Another important reason there can't be an apples to apples comparison is that moderators at Facebook have almost zero discretion, they are required to comply with the letter of hundreds of pages of instructions, and their quota limits the time they can spend on a single moderation request to less than a minute.

This makes Fedi moderation more labor intensive and higher quality, but makes raw numbers comparison meaningless.

Compare the outcomes.

@thisven Thank you for asking! As an individual, set aside a donations budget you're comfortable with, and divide it between large organizations supporting core infrastructure (e.g. SFC, SPI, Mozilla) and individual projects you rely on. Support admins of your Fedi instance. If you have time to spare, help with documentation, bugs triage, translations. As an organization, invest in keeping your entire dependency graph healthy, not just leaf tools you use.

It's ok to summarily block people spreading FUD and conspiracy theories about #systemd.

Still accurate.

Context of the day: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4

"openssh does not directly use liblzma. However debian and several other distributions patch openssh to support systemd notification, and libsystemd does depend on lzma."

No, systemd is not the root cause. The root cause is the sorry state of funding FOSS that leaves even core system components crumbling under tech debt.

We already had that conversation after Heartbleed. We still haven't solved it.

@dansup @pixelfed #Facebook made #WhatsApp block links to #Telegram in 2016: https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/09/09/whatsapp-is-blocking-telegram-links-in-the-android-app/

This was not a bug. It took getting caught and called out by tech press for them to quietly back this out.

@mike After a cursory glance, @ukraine-thenewsdesk indeed looks more useful. The sources you mentioned look good. I also recommend @timkmak and pravda.com.ua/eng.

@mike Ah, so Flipboard provides curated content discovery, but no integrated content consumption. I see now how it leaves it up to content creators to build and manage relationships with their audiences.

What do you think of the Scroll.com model? I don't know how much of a shot it had to become viable, but it was a huge disappointment when Twitter acqui-buried it. Wish I could have all my news under a single subscription and readable in Pocket/Ephemeral.

@caseynewton @dangillmor @Flipboard

@mike This is not surprising when you consider that Russia's state broadcaster VGTRK owned a stake in Euronews since 2001. The name they chose for their magazine about the invasion is just the most obvious example, as someone who follows the war closely I can see the same bias in their selection of stories, favoring topics that are divisive and dispiriting for Ukrainians, or encouraging for Russians. Please consider onboarding a Ukrainian news org instead, e.g. Kyiv Post.

@dangillmor @Flipboard

@mike While I hopefully still have your attention, can you elaborate on your plan for how writers and curators of the content shared via Flipboard are getting compensated?

How is this better than Arc Browser that @caseynewton rightfully called out as exploitative?

https://www.platformer.news/arc-search-quora-poe-perpexity-journalism-web-future/ (paywall)

@dangillmor @Flipboard

@mike Thank you for responding, and for your unambiguous position on Ukraine.

I know Euronews very well. I grew up in Belarus, and after Lukashenka regime shuttered independent press in early 2000s, Euronews was one of the handful of major news organizations that provided coverage of events in my old country.

Unfortunately their coverage was selective and biased to favor Russia then, same with their coverage of Ukraine now. Yes, even fact-based reporting can be skewed.

@dangillmor @Flipboard

@dangillmor @Flipboard @mike Lost me at "Russia-Ukraine Crisis." Can't take seriously, and especially trust content curation choices of someone who calls the Russian invasion of Ukraine a "crisis," as if it "just happened" and not a planned and deliberate decision of one country to invade and erase another.

Federating magazines is a great idea. I'll have to wait for someone other than Flipboard to try it. Someone who recognizes Ukraine's right to exist, and cares about compensating writers too.

@elilla On the positive side, weakening Putin will weaken autocrats everywhere, including Erdogan. Ukraine in NATO would also make NATO significantly less dependent on Turkey, once again weakening Erdogan's bargaining position.

@feditips @Gargron Still true: "#Facebook has grown large enough to be fundamentally unable to control a broad range of abuse on its platform. Facebook’s profitability comes from externalizing the cost of consequences of that abuse to the entire world." https://circle.lt/post/20201117-breaking-up-facebook/

Stop helping #FB* externalize its costs while corrupting and absorbing the few spaces still out of reach of the big tech.

* I refuse to comply with their rebrand away from #CambridgeAnalyticaScandal and #MyanmarGenocide.

@Gargron This false sense of skill or fitness for purposs comes from its incomprehensibility. Not because it's complex, although it is that, too. More because it is not designed to be comprehended. Only to be consumed.

The danger of AI is not in that it's not intelligent, it is in that it's unintelligible.

@thomasfuchs Ars Technica story: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/23andme-changes-arbitration-terms-after-hack-impacting-millions/

@arstechnica Your bot just dumped 19 articles into my and every other follower's timeline in a single run. Please don't do that: I follow hundreds of accounts and I don't want any one of them to crowd out everyone else. Post articles one at a time as they show up on your site.

This is not Xitter. There is no ranked feed. Reposting your own content over and over is not the engagement hack you might think it is. All it will get you is followers like me walking away.

@funnymonkey Not surprised by Thiel mafia reusing Zuckerberg playbook to undermine regulation:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-deliberately-caused-havoc-in-australia-to-influence-new-law-whistleblowers-say-11651768302

Disappointed by The Verge failing to recall their own coverage of it: https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/6/23059684/facebook-australia-news-ban-internally-praised-overbroad-nonprofits-government-organizations