• 6 Posts
  • 394 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • sbv@sh.itjust.workstoTechnology@lemmy.worldTwitter is dead. Long live BlueSky.
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    21 hours ago

    it’s on us the fediverse for really failing to communicate the value of instances as well as making them easy

    A bunch of people came over to Mastodon when Elon bought Twitter, but they left because it was missing features. The big ones I saw were

    1. a lack of “trending” list - that means journalists and other people who want to know what’s happening right now didn’t have a way to find events
    2. no suggestions for follows. As a new user, how do people know what to follow?
    3. no suggested posts. Once I scroll through all the posts from the people I follow, the system doesn’t provide me with new posts.




  • Decentralised social media platforms are increasingly being recognised as viable alternatives to their centralised counterparts. Among these, Mastodon stands out as a popular alternative, offering a citizen-powered option distinct from larger and centralised platforms like Twitter/X. However, the future path of Mastodon remains uncertain, particularly in terms of its challenges and the long-term viability of a more citizen-powered internet. In this paper, following a pre-study survey, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 Mastodon instance administrators, including those who host instances to support marginalised and stigmatised communities, to understand their motivations and lived experiences of running decentralised social media. Our research indicates that while decentralised social media offers significant potential in supporting the safety, identity and privacy needs of marginalised and stigmatised communities, they also face considerable challenges in content moderation, community building and governance.







  • Wait til we discover the launchpads in the geologic record.

    I have it on good authority that the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct, they predicted the Chicxulub collision and escaped the Earth on arks. Of course they realized that their warm blooded servitor species would survive the impact and evolve sentience much like their own (they created our genomes, so it was easy to predict), so they hid the launchpads until we would be ready to see them.

    The arks landed on Planet 9 (the big one, not the lil one), since it was less likely to be hit by similar events. They hollowed it out, helping to create Pluto and Ceres, and have been living in there ever since.

    Discovering the launchpads will show them that we’ve achieved sufficient technological prowess for them to reveal themselves to us. I can’t wait!




  • Once upon a time we thought that inviting people to join the Information Superhighway would bring them together and herald an age of unity and shared purpose.

    We didn’t realize that we were opening the noosphere to subversion and attack.

    It wasn’t long before weaponized memes were deployed to deepen societal divisions. Old antagonists brought their wars to the digital frontier. Commercial entities outcompeted their FOSS forefathers and to reshape discourse. Engorged vectors emulated human creativity and threatened to forge new underclasses.

    Was the utopian dream wrong? Were we naive to believe technology could unleash humanity’s potential? Or are these mere birth pains of the future we were promised?