Hugops to every other #mastoadmin having to deal with this spam wave. We have been fighting is on mastodon.social for days, and were forced to close registrations yesterday until we could emergency-deploy countermeasures.
Unfortunately, this made them realise they are other servers in the Fediverse to target.
If any admin needs help fighting this, please ping me either on the server admin discord, or directly here, and I will gladly help.

@renchap

Great NPR article over the weekend on Gertrude Oforiwa Fefoame, the blind chair of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. I highly recommend you read it! Key sentence, “How do you define disability?
It is not the presence of the impairment, but it is the social and attitudinal barriers that are hindering our performance.”
Link: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/05/13/1174089463/when-getty-began-losing-her-vision-as-a-girl-she-was-told-her-life-was-over-wron
#blind #NFB #LowVision #disability

@NothingLeftOfMe

I was just notified of the @AppleVis hall of fame vote having reopened for another round. I was disappointed to find that @MonaApp was not included with the nominees. However, there is a selection “Other” in the list that then allows you to enter an app name of your choosing. So if you think Mona for Mastodon should be inducted into the hall of fame for outstanding VoiceOver accessibility, and you are a #VoiceOver user on #iOS, I encourage you to cast your vote accordingly. The page is here: https://www.applevis.com/blog/cast-your-vote-now-2023-applevis-ios-app-hall-fame-inductees

@Marco

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

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

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

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

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

ah yes, well it is that i remember the Good Samaritan story. after the Levite and the Pharisee left the injured man on the road, the Samaritan came and put him in a chokehold for nine minutes and killed him.

Jesus the Nazarene tells this story in the book of Money, as a parable to illustrate the virtues of strength and supremacy.

@dgold

I know I’m always on about this when cops or other folks kill some agitated person, but for real y’all — we in the ER see people who are angry, threatening, violent, and scary EVERY shift, and we kill zero of them. We don’t shoot them. We don’t choke them to death. Most of the time we talk them down and that’s it. Sometimes we restrain them, but we do it safely.

I have very scary people blow up at me. Often I literally pull up a chair and we talk it out. Please, we can be better.

@mcnado

timberwraith (@timberwraith@mastodon.social) (Mastodon)
"They have you fighting a culture war in order to stop you from fighting a class war." Those with power are exploiting bigotry and a widespread embrace of (violent) social hierarchy that is already present in the masses in order to protect a violent class hierarchy which favors their own interests. The hatred and violence that you, the average person, thinks is justifiable against your favorite hated minority also makes your own oppression and suffering possible.