Show newer
Bobby Brown boosted
meph

youtube.com/watch?v=5nKk_-Lvhz

1+
Bobby Brown boosted
The research fairy

For other instance admins 

It's okay to say "we don't allow police on our instance"

Scholar has had that in our About for at least a year:

scholar.social/about

We also had a "no institutions, only individuals" policy for even longer

This has done us well

I just want to remind you that you don't have to provide volunteer tech support and hosting for agents of the government, for-profit companies, or other institutions

You can just, not

And it's bad for your community if you do

1+
Bobby Brown

Had-to-be-there moment for anyone who just fought with six people for a parking spot

Show thread
0
Bobby Brown

Just marching into Costco with a dense crowd, this woman asked a man beside her, arrestingly, "But why are we really here?" and after a beat, me and them and like three strangers all looked at each other and burst out laughing

1
Bobby Brown

After severely damaging my eyes with phone use this year, I'm going to be transitioning to mostly using a smartwatch and a laptop instead, and I would encourage you to do the same. Phones are so perfectly designed for eye strain that may not alarm you until you're seeing double. Don't just put up with it until it's too late and you're forced to swear off screens for a month like I did. There's a reason for the massive increase in youth nearsightedness in recent decades.

0
Bobby Brown

LB: Government agencies should run their own Mastodon instances so we can block them specifically, otherwise we will simply block the instances who make the mistake of hosting them. That an "infosec"-focused instance would welcome the Department of Homeland Security is truly ludicrous.

0
Bobby Brown boosted
NanoRaptor

Triangular USB connectors were soon abandoned after some users complained of needing to rotate them up to six times before successful insertion.

1+
Bobby Brown boosted
Ulf Akermo

A never-ending conversation between Bavarian director Werner Herzog and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek made by an AI. So called deepfake. This project aims to raise awareness about the ease of using tools for synthesizing a real voice. Right now, any motivated fool can do this with a laptop in their bedroom. This changes our relationship with the media we consume online and raises questions about the importance of authoritative sources. infiniteconversation.com/

0
Bobby Brown

Apple's "commitment to privacy" can be earnestly held as long as one's commitments are built on exceptional ethics entirely devoid of self-suspicion, which is an absurd prospect when the 'self' at issue is a corporation, especially one that finds itself compelled to negotiate and collaborate with authoritarian regimes like the United States and China.

0
Bobby Brown boosted
Mark

@matthew_d_green can be quite difficult to tell sometimes because they are one the least transparent companies in the space. Even in web standards bodies they have a terrible reputation for never sharing anything and just generally being a goddamned nightmare to work with from what I’ve heard (also second hand).

But for a while now I have strongly gotten the impression that they were mostly advocating for privacy in so much as it was a useful tool to beat Google over the head with but had zero qualms about say handing over any and all information on users in China which isn’t really compatible with a “militant on privacy” foundation.

0
Bobby Brown

My temptation to use screenshots to replace QRT functionality here is almost certainly already shared and acted upon broadly, and the resulting accessibllity problems alone may be sufficient to break the argument over whether to include the functionality or not. Otherwise, Mastodon is already socially doing better than Twitter for people with visual and other impairments, at least per anecdotes of many observing alt-text adoption here.

0
Bobby Brown

LB: Seriously, why tf is anybody still using Chrome? Firefox is right there.

Demand Firefox support from every public-facing web resource.

I don't understand the broad acquiescence by precisely those who should know better, like developers and tech activists concerned with privacy.

I don't even open Chrome for select websites, and I haven't missed out on anything meaningful.

0
Bobby Brown boosted
e(Ag)le

JPEG-XL 

The more I follow the Chromium thread announcing Google's giving up on JPEG-XL (bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/i), the sadder and angrier I get.

Companies have already sunk incredible cost and time into supporting this new format, and it almost looks like a single manager (with ties to WebP) all but unilaterally destroyed its chances of being a usable web image format.

This is the future that browser hegemony offers for us. The future of the web in the hands of very few.

0
Bobby Brown boosted
Matthew Green

A fairly reasonable point: as long as there’s only one supported way to install software on the iPhone, Apple doesn’t get to have a second “privacy policy” for the App Store that provides less privacy than the phone/OS policy. pxlnv.com/blog/oh-the-places-y

1+
Bobby Brown boosted
Andrew (Television Executive)

Here's your irregular reminder that:

Twitter was a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees.

Mastodon is a niche hobbyist product run by volunteers

The fact that we're being seen as a viable alternative to them is an admission that a federated, decentralized future is not only possible, but desirable.

Mastodon is not one thing, or one place. It's a network of many things and many places. We don't have a spokesperson (I mean, there's me. I'm the official spokesperson for 💯 of the fediverse, but beyond me there is no spokesperson) we don't have consensus on moderation or blocking or tools or what is good and what is bad. Some of us are professional SREs and Sysadmins, some of us aren't. Some of our instances have been around for 5+ years, some won't be here in six months.

And that's good! All of it, every last bit of it is good.

We're wrestling power away from the billionaire class, in real time, and reclaiming it for the People.

0
Bobby Brown boosted
Open Web Advocacy

“The data Apple surreptitiously collects is precisely the type of private, personal information consumers wish and expect to protect when they take the steps Apple sets out for users to control the private information Apple collects”

techcrunch.com/2022/11/14/appl

0
Bobby Brown boosted
nixCraft 🐧

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

0
Bobby Brown boosted
mcc

If you see people alarmed at a Twitter replacement "taking VC money", this is the reason that's alarming. A company might have the most well-meaning, nice people running it, but those nice people will have to deliver an Exit. We are no longer in the era you can even really hope that Exit will be an IPO. "Well, now the cruel hand of the market rules us" is too much to ask. We've now established the most profitable Exit for a social media company is to sell to a Musk/Murdoch/Trump style oligarch.

Show thread
1+
Bobby Brown

I heard Tootle for iOS allows a lot of interface customization, and I'd love to check it out, but it doesn't appear to support single sign-on. I suppose I'll try it with my .social account for now

0
Bobby Brown boosted
★ Amy Star ★

re: meta defederation 

@0xAFAEBABE it's giving the same people who put leftist trans women on mass blocklists on birdsite for being "kinda sus" admin control over people's entire social media experience for the low price of $30 a month in VPS costs

0
Show older
Hellsite

The hell site

Resources

Developers

What is Mastodon?

hellsite.net

More…