Joshua Crawford has moved @jlcrawf@librem.one

I'm generally against instances blocking and muting people, but I'm 100% in favor of doing it myself.

The difference between me and the typical #fediblock #fediblockmeta stan is that if there's content that's offensive or hurts my feelings, I block the account. If one of the stans comes across objectionable or controversial content, they'll demand that the entire #fediblock #fediblockmeta community block the instances or account.

My experience on free speech instances is wonderful specifically because of the blocks I've instated. And I forgot how wild and reckless the federated timeline on the free speech portion of the #Fediverse is until I convinced a #Fediverse user to try out social.teci.world in order to test #Soapbox lol

I wrote a blog post about the dangers of focusing too much on hardware specs to predict performance when choosing hardware. In my experience many other factors (such as the software the hardware will run) have much more of an impact. Focusing on specs alone incentivizes bad practices like planned obsolescence and disposable hardware.

https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/

Dear foss freelancer, what do you use to bill your clients ? I would prefer a local only tool but a self hosted solution would be okay. Something simple and minimalist. Without Javascript as much as possible. Ideally GPL

repeats appreciated

If your instance is blocking an instance with folks you'd like to still read, you can add any Mastodon account to your feed reader (I like NetNewsWire myself) by using the following formula:

https://instance.name/@user.rss

#feditips #rss #mastodontips #feeds #fediverse #twittermigration #migration

If you or some one you know are looking at secure #tech alternatives, Made in USA electronics and/or alternatives to the Big Tech companies, do put in a recommendation for us. Protect your bits!

If you're @-ing someone on here, it's really important to check that you've chosen the right person.

Account addresses on Mastodon and the Fediverse always have two parts, the username and the server. Both these parts have to be correct for it to reach the right account.

This is similar to email addresses: you can't just put the first part, you need to include the server at the end too.

To see someone's full account address, look at their profile page. More info at https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-basic-tips/#WhatsMyAccountsAddress

Turns out that Adobe is collecting all of its customers' pictures into a machine learning training set.

This is opt-out, not opt-in so if you use Lightroom, for example, it defaults to adding all of your photos to the set.

If these are unpublished pictures, work-in-progress, etc. they'll still be analysed as soon as they're synced.

I've been using Lightroom to sync photos from my Windows desktop to my iPad. Now I need to reconsider that.

Looking for people who know something about early computing, especially in the Netherlands. Please boost and help me solve the mystery of this custom made plate that used to belong to my grandfather Bram Jan Loopstra, one of the pioneers of Dutch computing. What do the pictures mean? #computing #history

@jlcrawf @cyrilpedia @amymaxmen
You are exactly right. It was a big deal because it seemed to have come out of nowhere. It will now be just like the flu, with yearly vaccinations and seasonal cycles of return. Although, I don't think it was leftwings that created the panic - it was the media in general, looking for a big story and causing mania instead. Media is the driver of a lot of what happens in our world! Thus - mastodon for people who actually think instead of reacting.

As long as I've been alive, more poor people have died from the effects of obesity than starvation. Poor people have televisions, smart phones, electricity, running water, sewage. They can go to elementary school and high school and have a chance of going to college. As long as I've been alive, people haven't had to worry about agricultural output, they were going to eat. They didn't need to worry about how many houses were being built, they'd have a place to stay. they didn't need to worry about how much wood was being cut, they'd have enough heat for the winter. It doesn't matter how dry the well gets, they'd have enough water.

They're insulated from the reality of how their life is maintained. That's why they start to act as if they don't need to worry about a lack of food, where our grandparents had pantries packed with canned food. That's why they start to act as if work is just a nuisance that should be abolished rather than a mandatory contribution to the society that benefits them. That's why they start to act as if we can shut off the biggest forms of energy, rather than a genocidal and insane proposition.

"You want to support the right of others to speak because you want your right to speak protected as well. You might think that your ideas and what you have to say is completely innocuous and therefore only the bad guys should be silenced. The problem is, somebody else thinks you're the bad guy. If you don't support others right to speak then that person won't be there to support your right to speak. The only way we can protect our freedoms is together. So what does harming someone else's right to speak look like? Well often, this means going out of your way to cause someone harm for their words. At this moment in time, the biggest websites in the world are all going out of their way to find people who are saying things that they don't like and they are shutting that speech down. They're kicking people right off the websites for saying the wrong thing. In addition to that, even when they keep the people on the websites they are editing the posts and adding little things to them. I've never been kicked off of any social media site. Honestly, most of the opinions that they're going after aren't opinions that I hold. However, those people are our canaries. If the people saying things that we detest our band and go away then we are always next. We are always next. After the people that you disagree with are silenced, you are always next." - The Graysonian Ethic (first draft)

The Journalist class whining about freedom of speech after shutting it down and vilifying it for years didn't get the memo.