Owen Arden @owenarden@types.pl
- https://twitter.com/owenarden
CSE faculty @UCSC, ex-Fed, progressive Mississippian.
security / PL / distributed systems
Please boost if you’re still masking indoors (in public places)
Jumping off what @blaine is saying here:
https://mastodon.social/@blaine/109400462722746600
I work in professional fact-checking and content moderation for my day job at https://meedan.com and I have begun conversations about ways to do content moderation as a federated service that admins can pay to subscribe to (where moderators are paid a living wage, maybe in worker owned coops even, as opposed to big social media companies using basically sweatshop moderation labor)
People telling folks what to do and not to do on Mastodon kind of reminds me of the phone company in the telephone's early years telling women not to use the phone for social purposes. #useragency #history
There's A LOT of discussion about content moderation right now and very little of it touches on the fact that we've all lived on the big social sites for the last decade-plus thanks to the massively exploitated labor of mostly-invisible moderation workers. The social web at scale wouldn't have happened without these laborers, who in addition to shit wages, have been exposed to literally every imaginable horror.
If we're remaking this world, let's do better on that front.
7 things all kids need to hear
1 I love you
2 I'm proud of you
3 I'm sorry
4 I forgive you
5 I'm listening
6 RAID is not backup. Make offsite backups. Verify backup. Find out restore time. Otherwise, you got what we call Schrödinger backup
7 You've got what it takes
For the youngsters here, the Max Headroom TV hijacking was, I believe, the greatest hack of my lifetime. I hope it’s never solved. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_signal_hijacking
This is a big problem for Mastodon.
Canadian journalist Erica Ifill just had her mastodon.online account suspended without explanation. She's been sharing stuff critical of Mastodon re: intersectional issues.
I get the decentralized structure and idea that each server has its own rules. But this Reddit-style moderation, where moderators with god-complexes make mysterious and arbitrary decisions, is going to cause people migrating to Mastodon to flee in droves.
@thepacketrat @ncweaver @metacurity I think it's generally true that, at small scale, the hard problem is reliable storage, but at large scale, the hard problem is reliable deletion.
I've been tinkering with Stable Diffusion and made A #projects Thing.
Color Anything
https://color-anything.com
It's a ridiculous use of something as powerful as SD but my son's super into colouring at the moment and I've been struggling to find new stuff for him. The colouring pages sites all steal each other's images so there's not actually that much variety out there. I thought I'd try throwing SD at it and... it sort of works! The results are occasionally mad but quite often fun.
I just wrote an article to help Mastodon Admins to scale up their servers while so many people are still migrating from Twitter. 🌍️ It explains how to setup an S3 storage solution with any Mastodon Instance running on Digital Ocean Droplets. 💾 Please share with other admins.
An Incredible Day In Internet History
It started with the Twitter lockout. 10,000 new users per hour. A QUARTER MILLION people migrated to Mastodon in one day. The servers struggled. Remarkably, admins all over the world built up capacity in real time. New users were patient. The system held.
It's running better now. There will be more hard days ahead, but people powered social media has arrived.
So many new people are joining Mastodon, I recommend using Fedifinder every few days to find all your Twitter follows who just showed up. And put your Mastodon handle somewhere in your Twitter name/description/url so these tools can find you! https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
UPDATE: Here's the latest chart.
We're now at 14,000 new users joining per hour.
By the end of the night, we might have 7 million Mastodon users.
Does joining a small instance affect your reach?
Will less people see your posts if you self-host your own instance?
No and no.
On my small single-user instance (atomicpoet.org), I sent this post 2 hours ago. As you can see, it now has:
* 784 boosts
* 354 favorites
* Too many replies for me to count
As I've now shown, size of an instance is no obstacle to spreading your message!
- https://twitter.com/owenarden
CSE faculty @UCSC, ex-Fed, progressive Mississippian.
security / PL / distributed systems
