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:
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
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.
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. https://infiniteconversation.com/
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.
@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.
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.
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.
JPEG-XL
The more I follow the Chromium thread announcing Google's giving up on JPEG-XL (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1178058#c84), 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.
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. https://pxlnv.com/blog/oh-the-places-your-apple-id-will-go/
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.
“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”
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.
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
Scrappy queer