arborelia @arborelia@computerfairi.es

FACTS ABOUT MASTODON

If you are curious about leaving the cooked turkey site and going to the elephant site, here are some important tips:

1. It sucks. But then, so does every site.

2. You can still shitpost. Take great glee.

3. Picking your server is super important.

Ideally you should start at a large instance, and leave because it's full of white suburban NIMBY shitheads who joined in November because they were promised 0 uncomfortable experiences in their lives and lash out when this turns out not to be the case.

Then you move to a smaller server where suddenly you can't talk to your friends because your admin is feuding with the admin of their instance. Then you wait a month before you can move again.

In this regard, the feudal structure of Mastodon instances is very like early 2000s message boards, whenever the admin got drunk and deleted the site.

4. You can work around the feudalism by running Mastodon yourself. It's the size of a mastodon and costs a fortune.

You can run Pleroma, which is smaller, and is also favoured by Nazis for unfortunate historical reasons. Pleroma is perfectly good software that fulfils a need for something smaller than Mastodon, but also the devs are definitely not Nazis but are the other ten guys at the table.

There was a hilarious moment where the guy behind Spinster was so obnoxious he got kicked out of Pleroma and did his own fork called Soapbox/Rebased. He is now known as Soapbox Terf.

The nice people went to Pleroma fork Akkoma, which Soapbox Terf calls the "tr***y server", a review I understand they were delighted by. Try that.

There's also Misskey, which is a bit weird and Japanese, and supports cat ears right there in the protocol.

5. Any bozo who makes assertions about the Fediverse that assume it all runs on the rules of mastodon.social is one of the suburban NIMBYs and invariably joined in November. Block and don't look back.

6. If anyone annoys you about your posting, you can improve their feed for them by blocking them from ever seeing your posts. The blocking tools are marvellous.

7. There are NO QUOTE TWEETS on Mastodon and anyone who wants QUOTE TWEETS is an invader, pollutant and corrupting influence despoiling the suburban vistas of Mastodon who only wants quote tweets to wreak EVIL.

So quote-tweeting is well supported in Akkoma and the Calckey fork of Misskey, is in live trials in the Treehouse fork of Mastodon, and will be coming to more Fediverse software soon.

8. In Mastodon, Eugen Rochko has achieved the creation of something greater than himself. And he will *never forgive it*.

9. The Fediverse interprets Website Boy as damage and routes around him.

10. Mastodon is yet another demonstration that worse is better. So come onto Mastodon, and *be* that worse.

“Fancy autocomplete scares self-declared geniuses into a doomsday cult” could have been a mid TNG episode if it wasn’t real

Since there's an article from “Future Life Institute” being circulated in the media I want to share this article explaining some of the very frightening ideas behind “longtermism” and their leaders

https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo

@bflipp

Black people are still there.🤷🏿‍♂️

There's a thing where people are OK using a thing when it only hurts Black folk, but when it starts hurting non-Black folk too, they're like "How could you?!" and expect Black folk to stop it ASAP.

Almost every system in the US that Black folk engage with is already genocidally hostile against us. The US education system, criminal justice system, hospitals, etc.

More folk try to get Black folk to stop using Twitter, than try to make Mastodon welcoming.

INTERNET RATIONALIST: Consider the following thought experiment. Imagine a hyperintelligent artificial intelligence–

ME: No

INTERNET RATIONALIST: What

ME: I am declining to imagine the hyperintelligent artificial intelligence.

INTERNET RATIONALIST:

ME: I'm thinking about birds right now

INTERNET RATIONALIST:

ME: Dozens of crows, perched atop great standing stones

can we talk about how chatgpt fabricates idyllic cishet families right out of the town in Edward Scissorhands? For both myself and a friend, neither of whom have kids, it decided we each had a heterosexual spouse and 2 kids.

It’s just really difficult to get excited about generative language models when you believe things like “there is such a thing as the truth and it matters”.

I don’t feel like that’s an unreasonable position.