Notices by Rysiekúr Memesson 🇺🇦 (rysiek@mstdn.social)

Remember Facebook's "10 year challenge"?

You know, tagging yourself on images of you, and you 10 years ago? Wow were people silly, getting conned into cluelessly helping train some corporate AI like that:
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-10-year-meme-challenge/

Nobody would ever fall for that kind of a ruse again, right?

Right?..

#ChatGPT

Story time! 🧵

Years ago I was doing digital human rights activism in Poland.

At a meeting on some legislative proposal, law enforcement rep kept arguing for more data collection and retention. NGOs (one of which I was representing) argued for less. Our argument boiled down to "this data will be misused, eventually."

After couple of hours of back-and-forth, the vice-minister of justice, presiding over the meeting, blurted out at us:
"why do you imply that I would abuse that data this way?!"

@mmasnick this is basically what many fedi old-timers had been experiencing for the past 5y or so. :blobowo:

@aab hullo!

@darnell @atomicpoet @axbom you might not believe me but this image is 8 years old and refers to the previous attempt at making a federated social network.

Fun fact, Friendica is still with us here on fedi, and GNU Social might join us soon:
https://www.gnusocial.rocks/v3/milestone-activitypub.html

MediaGoblin was started by @cwebber, who then went on to work on ActivityPub, the protocol powering fedi (and Mastodon) today.

There is a *lot* of history here.

@lauriehaley as someone has already noted, #JohnMastodon 's full name was "John Federik Mastodon", and went by his middle name. "Fedi" for short. :blobcatthinksmart:

@axbom

@giraffeslava @axbom "why so many servers" used to be the go-to "freaks out the normies" thing, I am glad we moved up the ladder here a bit, then!

Also, "normies" seem to be joining in droves and doing just fine. So let's give them a bit of credit here.

We could also maybe stop calling them "normies", you know. :blobcatthinking:

An irregular reminder that calling this place "Mastodon" has a bit similar energy as saying "I just sent you a GMail."

"Fediverse" (or "fedi") is a better term.

Mastodon is just one of many software projects that talk to each other to create this multi-instance social network:
https://axbom.com/fediverse/

(kudos to @axbom for this fantastic infographic!)

There are blogs, Reddit-like communities, video instances and many more, all part of fedi.

#TwitterMigration #NewHere

Consider how suddenly there is a spike of #TwitterMigration as soon as Elmo bans several journalists, and their media orgs complain publicly.

Clear indication that if media orgs decided to move away from :birdsite:, others would follow.

And sure, these media orgs are now between a rock and a hard place, having to potentially leave their presence there built over a decade. But they put themselves there, by promoting walled gardens for a decade.

They have some reckoning and introspection to do.

I was reading @aral 's blogpost about ActivityPub's scaling issues:
https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed-or-why-every-toot-is-also-a-potential-denial-of-service-attack/

And that got me thinking: if the problem is that this post will generate one Sidekiq job *per server used by my followers*, would it not make sense to create "batch" Sidekiq jobs between popular servers that would put multiple actions in a single job?

The overhead would go down. But I guess that would require a change in the spec.

Also, yeah, we should use smaller instances.

@jpmens :fediverse:

sham poo running out is the real shit

what, you all thought I'm all just cuddles and wholesomeness and thoughtful posts on here?

Nope.

#TwitterMigration #FediAdmin

#Introduction time! I'm rysiek. On fedi since before it was fedi ­— I see you, old StatusNet guard!

Did information security and infrastructure for #PanamaPapers journalists, fought #ACTA on the streets and in meetings, helped write the book on #NetNeutrality, started a hackerspace and a half, and wrote a bunch of code.

Media literacy is a human right. Protocols, not platforms. Communities, not customers. User-Authored Works, not user-generated content.

#Privacy #InfoSec #FreeCulture #FLOSS