Jeremiah Lee @jeremiahlee@librem.one

I like how many instances are bothered by the prospect of the defederation.

They often make the erroneous claim that it will create an isolated experience for instances that do this, which is ridiculous because this assumes more instances will not be created.

What they are really worried about is their instances being isolated, and they are protecting that fear to the rest of the fedi.

They are terrified of the prospect of there being consequences for bad behavior. Choosing to give bigotry and hate space will be relegated to its corner of the fedi where all they have is access to each other.

And this is what bigots fear the most—lack of access to us.

@davetron5000 I have noticed a pattern more and more often the past several years: programmers routinely overestimate how complicated someone else's code seems and underestimate how complicated their code seems. From this, I have concluded that many programmers say "complicated" when they truly mean "unfamiliar".

A well-designed and unfamiliar code base looks complicated because it is unfamiliar.

Actual conversation I had…

Me: Billionaire philanthropy is nothing more than PR. Tax billionaires.
Troll: Lol you trust the Govt to spend our money?
Me: Yes, the Govt is elected by We the People, and therefore is accountable to us and can be voted out.
Troll: Govt is bought.
Me: Bought by who?
Troll: By billionai—...😳
Me: ...🤔
Troll: Ok, Tax billionaires.

For the holiday, a thread on how to befriend crows.

--

Befriending crows is a wonderful thing.

I have many crow friends at home and at work. They bring joy at unexpected moments and can rescue a miserable day even without shaking down the dust of snow that Robert Frost described.

This thread is an updated version of one I posted at the bird site in July 2019.

#birding #birdwatching #birds #urbanbirding #crows #corvids #crow #corvid #crowfriends

The copyright lobby likes to use emotive comparisons, to compare copying to theft, but the reality is that copying is self-evidently not theft, no-one is deprived of ownership when something is copied.

On the other hand, copyright itself is a mechanism which deprives us of our history, our culture, even our childhood memories, and it's copyright itself, the very concept of intellectual property, which should be described as theft.

me: popcorn button doesn’t work on the microwave

him: what happened

me: it’s still broccoli

▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ 98%

The problem with social media is people. Pundits and the media have created a narrative that only specific sites or specific features (algorithmic feeds, quote tweets, etc) are toxic but this is easily debunked by visiting any online forum without those features and paying attention to the patterns of toxic usage.

Every family has an uncle Bob. You know, the one who goes on about “socialism” and “freeloaders”.

Here’s your guide to dealing with them this holiday season.

This holiday season, give your family the gift of Mastodon

@MrBerard @Quinnae_Moon I'm beginning to think that "are QTs bad, yes or no?" is the wrong question. A much more interesting question is "how can mastodon implement quote shares that is technically feasible, facilitates the desired use cases, and discourages the undesirable effects?"
Because I don't think that's a super hard question to answer. We can start by looking at how QTs on Twitter differ from "reply/quote on main" implementations on most other social networks.

Every time someone points to new technology and says “wow this will revolutionize the [whatever] industry”, I am reminded of the realization that most industries would see radical improvements applying the best tech of 15 years ago too, and still haven’t. In other words, there is more to the story of change than tech alone.

This post from Tumblr's Ghostonly is the best social media advice I've ever read:

How to have a good internet experience in 8 easy steps

https://www.tumblr.com/ghostonly/667966959023996928/how-to-have-a-good-internet-experience-in-8-easy

@tokyo_0 @smorreel @taylorlorenz A lot of people here think Mastodon and the Fediverse are one and the same.

Anyway, @Gargron already said he's not going to implement quote boosts:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/309

Point is, if someone really wants to use quote boosts, apps that have that feature exist on the Fediverse. And they're *not* workarounds.

Here's the answer to my question: an extensive (and inconclusive) GitHub issues thread discussing the idea of making quote-posts an opt-in feature https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/20673