Month: 23 Iyyar 5783 (May 2023)

This Mother’s Day, get her what she’s always wanted; a cloak of protection from dark fairies, a little cabin that roams through the wildlands on giant chicken legs, and an enchanted dagger to call her own.

—@Edmonds_Scanner

I like to think of brunch as the purest form of anarchy. Want a burger between 2 waffles? Go for it. Scrambled eggs on a brownie? Heck yeah! Toss some onion rings in those Froot Loops, you are ungovernable. For 90 glorious minutes, all rules of polite society have been suspended.

—@UncleDuke1969

The size of mastodon.social is breaking the moderation story of the #Fediverse.

Moderation on fedi relies on:

1. instance admins and moderators being able to manage bad actors on their own instance;

2. instance admins being able to defederate from insufficiently moderated instances.

Mastodon.social’s size and the speed new accounts are set up there means that 1. is unworkable. The size of m.s. and the clout of some of its users means 2. is a hard decision.

—@rysiek

For those #mastoadmin who have to clean up the mess, this query helped a bunch – obviously replace Infosec.exchange with your domain. You can select all accounts and suspend at once, then jump to the end and you’ll see two accounts that are inadvertently swept up – just manually unsuspend those.

https://infosec.exchange/admin/accounts?origin=remote&status=&role_ids=&order=recent&username=&by_domain=mastodon.social&display_name=doge&email=&ip=

—@jerry

People were getting justifiably pissed off about what felt like a complete “whim” decision to defederate mastodon.social.

Not realizing that no one was announcing defederation, but a Silence. (Also known as a “Limit”)

Silence is infinitely less destructive, and doesn’t break follow relationships, and still allows you to follow people on the other server, it just puts the server in a more ‘restricted’ mode so that randos from that server don’t have the same privileges (to your eyeballs) that non-silenced servers do.

Suspend is what you do when you’re done with that server. When you’ve given up, and when you’ve informed users on your server that you’re defederating a server that has existing follow relationships you’re about to break.

Most of the time that is not a decision that is made lightly especially when there are already existing follow relationships between the two servers.

(This is another reason mastodon.social has little to fear from defederation, but I digress.)

—@oliphant

Boss: Why is your work only 80% complete?

Me: Oh, yes! There’s a very good explanation for that.

In my last performance review, you noted that I was exceeding all expectations, but that you were only giving me a 4 out of 5 because you “never give 5s” because “there’s always room for improvement.”

As a result, I’ve taken the initiative to deliver at 4/5 capacity to ensure I’m performing according to your expectations.

As we’ve already established, I’m easily capable of performing at and above 100%, so please let me know once you’ve adjusted my performance rating to a 5 and I will adjust my performance accordingly.

—@Alice

I don’t care if outsiders do full-text indexing on my toots. I am a public figure, and this is my public face.

I do VERY MUCH care if outsiders do full-text indexing on fedi nodes that have their “do not index/data mine” flags set. That’s a violation of consent.

The universodon folks say that fedi folks are creating cool content and should be discoverable. I absolutely agree that fedi folks are creating cool content!

Some folks DO NOT WANT TO BE DISCOVERED. Period. Their reasons are their own and best discussed over a drink. The fedi’s poor discoverability is a feature, not a bug.

The intent behind full text search might be good, but intent is irrelevant. Only impact matters.¹

And I’m saying that as a creator who depends on social media to survive.

Consent, and understanding consent, is important. I’ll be defederating from universodon.com this week, unless they stop this.

¹ No, I’m not quoting my orc stories. My stories are quoting me, who is in turn quoting any number of smart people.

—@mwl