My wife is looking forward to deleting her Instagram account once she can connect with the same folks from her Mastodon account. Being able to remain in touch with over 100M people who still use Meta products out of the comfort of an ad-free, privacy-friendly platform like Mastodon is a game changer.
It’s hard not to say “AI” when everybody else does too, but technically calling it AI is buying into the marketing. There is no intelligence there, and it’s not going to become sentient. It’s just statistics, and the danger they pose is primarily through the false sense of skill or fitness for purpose that people ascribe to them.
I may have ordered a Pentax 67 camera yesterday, because apparently I’m not financially ruined enough so I need to get into medium format too. Comes without a lens though so I’ll still need to get one of those. Probably 105mm?
Sometimes I think about how much media will be forever lost in decades to come because everything is now on streaming platforms that delete things on a whim instead of physical media.
I don’t think you can build a real-time conversation platform like Twitter without trending topics.
Trending topics allow people to participate in a conversation about what is happening right now which includes entertainment events (concerts, NFL games, the Grammies, etc), movements (#BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo) and breaking news (e.g. Hamas attacks in Israel).
The problem is once you amplify movements and breaking news, you get misinformation & culture wars. They’re like peanut butter & jelly.
I just noticed this GMail UI change, might have been around a while.. but educating the average user about the difference between Spam and Phishing seems like.. a lot? Must be a huge problem to put it at the forefront like this: 🪝
@thomasfuchs@codinghorror I think media literacy is important and people would benefit from thinking about what they see online instead of relying on technology to do it for them.
I'm still so pleased with the Mastodon 4.2 update that bumped hashtags at the end of post below the rest of the content. Great job, @Gargron and team 🙌
Twitter was once the go-to app for up-to-date news, first-hand accounts and quality journalism on the ground. But over the weekend, as users sought information about the Israel-Hamas conflict, they found platform X flooded with misinformation. So they turned to Threads, as Platformer editor @caseynewton explains.
Turns out that our statistics aggregator at joinmastodon.org severely undercounted Mastodon data between Oct 2 and today due to a network connectivity issue. This has now been corrected.
@Gargron An elementary school teacher told me her school tried Mastodon for a few days, and had to end the trial when parents called to complain of random porn in their kid’s local timelines. She thinks accounts should be forced to specify whether they will be posting “adult content” so that all or most porn can be filtered out with a single preference. It seemed a worthy idea for consideration. (But I’m sure it’s come up before.)
@shoq If elementary schools want to provide a safe social media environment for their kids, they can run a private, isolated Mastodon server for themselves. Kids below 13 are not allowed to use Mastodon as per COPPA.
Question! Is there a Mastodon app that lets you pre-write a few messages in a chain, and then post them all at once? I’m so used to doing that on Twitter for bigger ideas, and I don’t want to have to rapidly reply to my own message to then type the second part. Or, is that like philosophically not good on here?
@cabel Nothing wrong with that, it's on our roadmap for the official app. I'm pretty sure I've seen it in other 3rd party apps, but I couldn't say for sure which.
Ach Mist, das war's dann wohl mit meinen Statistiken zu #Mastodon als Trafficquelle für @heiseonline:
Hab gerade bemerkt, dass die schönen neuen Vorschaukarten den URL-Parameter abschneiden, über den wir überhaupt erfahren, dass Besuche von hier kommen. Je mehr Instanzen diese neue Vorschau nun anzeigen, desto mehr Einstiege werden darüber kommen und für uns nicht mehr erkennbar.
Weiß nicht, ob wir das überhaupt beheben können/wollen.
@mho@heiseonline@renchap Apologies. The link card respects the canonical tag on the page, but this has been a point of friction for scenarios such as this for a while.
Someone yelled at me for posting monochrome photos again.
That's kind of annonying, but this place still has fewer Nazis than that other place, so I'll be sticking around (along with my dreary monochrome photos, devoid of all color and joy as they may be).
@mattblaze I hope you don’t stop posting black and white photos. I myself am currently on my first ever roll of Ilford HP5. Those people should mind their own business.
Personally I'm quite pleased with the design of link cards in Mastodon 4.2, they finally feel on par with other types of media attachments. Links make the web go round!
@MikeElgan I have to wonder though, in the age of the Referer (sic) header falling out of favour, how do you measure where the traffic comes from anymore?
AI has led to interest in new hardware form factors. But do we really need a pendant that records everything you say and hear then emails you a summary of your day?
@Gargron@andypiper I am again not showing up in search consistently, when showing up at all. Even “from: shoq” produces erratic results. Is this a known issue?
Also, please note that the search examples don’t make it clear whether “from: user” should include space after the colon or not. Both produce results, but very different results. With the other failures considered, it’s hard to say which is correct.
@shoq@andypiper It's the same syntax rule as on Google, Discord, Reddit, and Twitter. You can't put a space there, how could we possibly know if you want to search for the words "from shoq" or filter only by posts from shoq?
Quarter-scale test model of Vladimir Israilevich Levkov's proposed 120kph "hovering amphibious tank". The inevitable cancellation can be attributed to the usual factors: insufficient political support, a lack of funding, and the cruel and unexpected whims of [checks notes] basic physics.
@MattBinder Waiting patiently for the day when people leave Musk to play on his new playground all alone. There is really no value to knowing what he thinks about anything.
