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Concerned about TikTok accessing and selling personal information, and using it to manipulate you?

Wait until you hear about credit rating companies, HR companies, real estate verification companies, online mental health companies, direct to consumer DNA companies, the trackers on just about every news web site, and FB, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Snap, and Pinterest.

—@funnymonkey

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NVDA 2023.1 is now available! New paragraph options, link destination & annotated web content keystrokes, new Braille tables, fixes for Kindle, Windows 11, Office, Chrome, Firefox, web, java and more! Read the full what’s new & download from: https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2023-1/ Note: This release breaks compatibility with add-ons made for NVDA 2022.4 and earlier. The majority of add-ons have been updated, but please check https://addons.nvda-project.org/addons/nvdacompat.en.html for the status of your favourite add-ons.

—@NVAccess

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Hey we have @yoyoel with a new guest post on Techdirt about one of the possible consequences of walling off a US-only TikTok: it might actually be *worse* for national security, not better.

This is what happens when the people making the rules don’t understand tradeoffs.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/24/how-forcing-tiktok-to-completely-separate-its-us-operations-could-actually-undermine-national-security/

—@mmasnick

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It occurs to me some of you may have no idea what this is like.

Lemme tell you.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, they all have beaucoup millions of dollars and can spend that on paying full-time moderation staff.

That’s…not happening here.

On top of that, they can afford to build or deploy Minority Report level systems that can flag and do some natural language processing and identify users who might be saying things that should get them banned.

Some of these things might even ban a user pre-emptively if the filters identify something bad enough, and then flag it for moderator review.

There’s none of that here.

Moderators are not watching every conversation of every user on every server for problems.

They are, largely, either going to stumble across problems like any other user, or they are going to respond to reports.

I’ve heard people in the past scoff at this. “I shouldn’t have to file a report,” they will say, in the exasperated tone of someone who wants to speak to the Manager of the Fediverse.

Well, fine, don’t file a report, but your mod doesn’t even know what happened.

Similarly, the time defederate a server is after a report happens, and you get no response. Or a non-response. Or a shitty, entitled, “up in their feelings” response.

You can certainly distance yourself because everyone from a certain server seems “of a kind”.

But there are big servers out there, and they can’t watch all their users, and it’s possible one of those users is a hateful bigot.

While I’d like to say it should be impossible for anyone to face discrimination or racism, it can still happen on those servers.

Mods run off reports. Reports create a record for a user–whether that user is part of your server or not–and your server’s mods can suspend or limit that user, regardless of their server of origin.

Moreover, mods and admins will often reach out directly to mods and admins of other servers to report an abusive user.

Again, this is all driven by reports.

If it’s just a personal grudge, fine, block or mute. But if someone is being actively harmful, the mods (many of whom literally work for free, after their day job) will benefit from you identifying anything they need to be aware of.

Report early, report often. Mods generally only act based on reports.

—@oliphant

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Tony Stark (@TonyStark@progressivecafe.social) (Progressive Cafe)
I don't want to hear any Republican ever again complain about cancel culture or being shouted down when someone doesn't like their opinion. They're only against it when it happens to them. See the Stanford takes if you don’t believe me. The Republican motto: I got mine, the rest of you can f*k right off. Parkland dad detained in DC after being removed from hearing on gun regulation- https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-ne-parkland-father-detained-20230323-kba4gxcq25hhzd7frpttjvnkqm-story.html
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McNadoMD (@mcnado@mstdn.social) (Mastodon 🐘)
When some news-grabbing death disease like ebola gets rolling here in the US, and we can’t quarantine, vaccinate, or mask, just remember — conservatives sued for years to get to that outcome. They changed state laws to undermine the authority of governors to shut down the state. They sued to block vaccine mandates in high-risk work forces. They sued to block mask mandates. They legislated the freedom to spread pestilence.
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“Mastodon doesn’t have a search tool.”

It has a search tool. ElasticSearch. Lets you search your own posts, any mentions you’ve received, anything you’ve favorited or bookmarked.

“No, I want it to have a more robust search tool.”

Well, we’re adding a search tool to Mastodon that will let you search everything your site is federated with.

“That’s not enough, I want to search everything”

So you want to search every server, even servers which you might not be federated with, you want to do a lookup against all their content and do you have any idea how much data that is?

Like even when we’re all given the magical “everything” search we keep expecting from our days of searching a single database for all the tweets that exist it’s not going to work the way you want because of the tech involved, and because–primarily–NO ONE HAS ALL THE DATA.

—@oliphant

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Summer has a great start on a banner day.
She chased the doves that encroached on her acre until they decamped for the neighboring property.
She talked my husband into grass fed, organic ground beef mixed in with her kibble.
She got all manner of hugs, scritches, and belly rubs.
Today is the grandson coming over day, too!
Summer says it really, really is a good morning, Mastodon.
#DogsOfMastodon

—@norcalgrandma