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Ariel Millennium Thornton

Welcome to Computer Fairies, where the ✨​sparkles✨​ are lively fairy dust, not lifeless AI slop.

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Ariel Millennium Thornton

Don't blindly believe everything you read online, tempting as that is. Do your homework first. This video series will help you do it well: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8d

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Ariel Millennium Thornton

Remember to pop your filter bubble every so often. If you think you're not in one, you're trapped in one and in for a rude awakening.

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Ariel Millennium Thornton

uspol 

Headline someone other than the Onion just ran:

"Trump picks qualified, normal health leader to head CDC"

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Jess 🌺:itsfree: :eggbug: :therian:&

🦌 cucumber

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Rebane

135tb ram bitches

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Sinnamon (despicable arc 😈)

@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange It was about time to have a standard for some kinds of communication ​:blobcataww:​

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Rem

im sorry about this (not really, though)

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abadidea

it seems someone decided to prove you really can just publish any nonsense protocol draft with the IETF ietf.org/archive/id/draft-meow

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abadidea

if you have no idea what this is about: a very official-looking "IPv8" draft appeared that was an absolute fever dream of and-a-pony wishlist features for a censorious regime, down to using json web tokens at the hardware level for some reason

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Mike Sheward

I wrote up this cursed discovery with more details:

mike-sheward.medium.com/delete

#infosec

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dj chicken trouble

dj garage word

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Princess Pixel Light

ok which one of you is this?

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Gracious :loading: Anthracite

hi

welcome back to mastodon

we have:

:purple_fire: weirdos quietly talking to each other
:purple_fire: content warnings so you can let people decide if they want to engage in smut, ragebait, or anything else, and give them a moment to prepare themselves for it
:purple_fire: admins who are queer weirdos
:purple_fire: a switch that turns off everyone's reposts if you want to just see what the folks you actually follow have to say for themselves
:purple_fire: all the custom emojones you want

we don't have:

:burning_cop_car: techbro admins raving about how fast they can "improve" the site with their AI slop machines
:burning_cop_car: any centralized administration
:burning_cop_car: a system designed to replicate all the addictive behavior of pre-Elon twitter

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Jason Lefkowitz

Ideally you would give the new AI product a distinctive name that clearly articulates where it fits in your overall product strategy. Something like "Eyestab" or "Footgun"

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Jason Lefkowitz

Free marketing recommendation: do not give the AI platform all your users are inevitably going to hate a name that is easily confused with the name of the completely unrelated flagship email product that keeps the lights on

omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/04/mozill

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Sven Slootweg, low-spoons mode ("still kinky and horny anyway")

anecdote (in agreement) about keeping out fascists 

@pathunstrom A couple of years ago, I was brought in as a moderator to help de-fascist a community that had practically turned into 4chan, in one of the most fundamentally-abuse-attracting and difficult-to-moderate categories of community (privacy/security-related).

The policy was set as "no fascists, no alt-right, nothing that looks like it" and people would either get banned immediately (if clearly intentionally abusive) or get a warning otherwise that they were expected to take seriously (doubling down would be grounds for a ban). Every ban was permanent but revocable if someone showed genuine reflection and commitment to do better - this sometimes took minutes, sometimes months or even longer, sometimes never.

Randos complained for months. "You just call everyone a nazi", "how do you define fascist then", "you're being unreasonable", "the alt right aren't fascists", and so on, and so forth. Without exception, the ones complaining about it the most were the ones who already had a track prior record of being an asshole in different ways. A lot of the bans were the result of brigading attempts from, well, fascists who objected to being pushed out, pretending to be 'new users' and mysteriously immediately knowing about previous bans that happened before they joined.

It took a while, but they eventually gave up. The result was a pleasant community to be in, unusually pleasant for a privacy/security community. I haven't been around there for quite a while now, but my understanding is that it's still a nice place to this day.

"No fascists allowed" works, even under the worst conditions, and the "no, seriously, this is not up for debate, the moderator decides" is a critical component of making it work.

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Electric Gremlin

I haven't been able to check an event's official bsky channel for replies and stuff for 4 days because every time I think to do it bsky is down.

What the absolute fuck is this shitshow? That GtS instance running off someone's phone has better uptime than this because by my perception the uptime for bsky is zero.

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Kaye

BlueSky, the vibe coded venture capital website, has significantly worse uptime than the Fediverse - the bulk of which uses software written by a fussy man from Jena, is administered by a cabal of tech weirdos, and runs on scavenged smart watches and old toaster ovens and the like

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Ariel Millennium Thornton

And once you get the courage and confidence to dive in past the wading pool, developer.mozilla.org/ is a fantastic reference to keep handy when you get stuck.

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Ariel Millennium Thornton

Can't make a website without Wordpress or some other fully hosted browser-heavy application?

Learn HTML and CSS. They're just text markup code and styling code, not program source code; you can make it messy and still produce good pages with less jank than the HTML/CSS code emitted by polished applications.

htmlforpeople.com/ is a good enough place to start learning, but many more tutorials and guides exist.

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Frank Skornia

So someone made this post on Mastodon:
infosec.exchange/@catsalad/116

And that led another person to make this site: boat.horse/clock/index.html

This feels like some real old school internet stuff. For the younger folks out there, this is the kind of stuff that would pop up all the time on the internet in the late 90s and early 00s. No reason for it beyond it being cool and beautiful.

While the animated clock in the link sort of hurts my head, it still is beautiful.

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Ariel Millennium Thornton

Want something for sharing anything and everything where even Mastodon isn't decentralized enough?

Make a Web 1.0 website. All you need is a text editor, paint editor, file manager, FTP uploader, and old school website host. You already have the first 3.

Want federation for your Web 1.0 website, too? Adopt button badges for your favorite websites & join some webrings.

Yes, Wordpress-free website hosts & webrings both still exist.

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Computer Fairies

Computer Fairies is a Mastodon instance that aims to be as queer, friendly and furry as possible. We welcome all kinds of computer fairies!

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