For Amusement Purposes Only.

Changeling poet, musician and writer, born on the 13th floor. Left of counter-clockwise and right of the white rabbit, all twilight and sunrises, forever the inside outsider.

Seeks out and follows creative and brilliant minds. And crows. Occasional shadow librarian.

#music #poetry #politics #LGBTQ+ #magick #fiction #imagination #tech

  • 2 Posts
  • 64 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • "I met a traveller from an antique land,
    Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
    Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
    And on the pedestal, these words appear:
    My name is Spezymandias, Admin of Kings;
    Look on my Reddit, ye Mighty, and despair!
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.”














  • Speaking as someone who ran a set of public forums back in the early days of the internet, the number one thing I can suggest is don’t do it alone.

    Alone, you’re one person arguing with hundreds of other people that your opinion is the right one. This burns out anyone but the most narcissistic assholes (I should know, being the latter). With a team, you get to deflect attacks that would be personally directed at you to the overall team while relying on their support to provide a unified front. Bullies generally target single individuals - they rarely go after groups.

    This can be hard to build, and it often relies on a third party in the admin role to encourage the creation and unity of the mod team until it gets on its feet, often becoming part of the team in the early phases until it runs well on its own. A minimum of three people is usually what it takes to really make a community thrive cleanly.

    Unfortunately, the fragmented nature of the Fediverse makes it difficult to build these kind of teams, as the mods have to be users on the same instance platform, and a small instance with only 20 users can end up with an enormous amount of content and commentary from users across the wider Fediverse. This, of course, ties into @hoodlem 's comment regarding bandwidth costs for instance owners - the speed at which your traffic can scale is exponential, and you need to be prepared for it from both a financial and staffing standpoint.

    One solutions that could help would be to have an ActivityPub login standard that would allow logged-in users from one instance to moderate a community on another when given permissions. A cross-platform private messaging standard would help here as well. Of course, both of these functions would have to be encrypted and secured to prevent cross-site attacks, but they could be steps in unifying the Fediverse without centralizing it.

    EDIT: as pointed out in the comments, you can mod across instances, but it doesn’t look like you can mod across platforms yet.



  • Wow - bit overblown all in all. While it sounds like the quinoa guy is kinda a jerk, I’m not seeing any proof of racism on his part. He just boosted a legitimate news article (the Fediverse servers being seized that popped up yesterday) posted by this Eris character, who had been flagged as a racist troll in the past. This isn’t confirmed or denied in the various posts aside from a profile link on thebadplace.com - which has no information aside from a few racist tags on that profile (can’t tell who the profile is for).

    This sounds more like the admins got snippy at each other in off-site discord drama and decided to take their toys and go home. Interesting for the /popcorn, but hey, if mastodon.art doesn’t wanna play with firefish, that’s their decision, regardless of the reasoning, end of story.


  • Lol - my family being on Facebook is one of the reasons I post here instead.

    I actually think the dynamic you speak of helps the quality of the Fediverse specifically. I’ve seen it in play with other emerging platforms, where the adventurous sorts leap onto the new software and start creating content, while the more social sorts like to hang on to what they’re familiar with because they value the community… up until the content begins to dry out, because all the adventurous sorts are usually the ones driving the creative soul of a platform.

    Then the real migration begins (which I believe we’re at the beginning of with Reddit & Twitter), and you see an influx of the social sorts. This is the point at which you and I chuckle and say “cool, you’ve got a new Fediverse account? I’ve been posting there for awhile - I’ll follow you - can’t wait to see what you’ve got”.

    Then you have that sweet spot where both the creative/adventurous sorts live in harmony with the social sorts and that’s what makes a vibrant internet community, until Spez spazzes or Elon buys it out, making the community miserable. That is until, like Leif Erikson seeking a warm land to grow grapes on to make wine to have a fuckin’ raging party, the adventurous sorts once again venture out into the great wide expanse of Open Source to find the next digital kegger.

    Such is the circle of life.


  • They didn’t eat it up, although they certainly want you to think they did, and it’s clear they convinced you.

    I’ve been on the internet since the BBS days. Centralized services rise and fall, and people said the internet was dead when AOL became the big portal, and then they said it with Yahoo, and Digg, and Facebook, and now Reddit and Twitter. It’s kinda like people who are always saying the world is gonna end - it never ends - it just changes.

    I’d actually argue that we’re at a point of an internet renaissance spurred by the combined failures of Reddit, Twitter, and Meta to maintain contributor trust. They can’t control the flow of human imagination that pulses through the internet, they can only channel it. If they try to dam it, well, it’s just gonna overflow into fuckSpezicles all over /r/place and carry the cream to the Fediverse and beyond.

    I’m not saying that big corporations aren’t a problem, I’m saying they don’t have to be our problem now that we’re here, and anyone who says the internet is dead isn’t looking in the right places.