New thing I'm thinking of trying where I do POSSE syndication of my blog posts over to Instagram by putting the paragraphs into cute little text boxes in a fun retro nostalgia bate aesthetic. These aren't the final versions I'll be posting (font size is still […] [Original post on defcon.social]

So, after having spent a good amount of time actually interacting on Mastodon, I'm starting to identify kind of a structural rift between what we see on corporate social media vs here. It's not just the profit model or the federation or whatever else (although […] [Original post on defcon.social]

I've written a blog post about influencers, parasocial dynamics, and social media. I look at the way most social media props up monolithic, hugely influential accounts with millions of followers, and punishing anyone who isn't reaching for maximum engagement. I compare this to the way that the […]

RE: https://framapiaf.org/@davidrevoy/117043735577793210 I find this phenomenon interesting, so I thought I'd take a moment to share some of my thoughts as a hobbyist writer, to talk about the way I think about identifying writing that seems LLM generated. First off, I don't look for certain […]

Listening this morning: "Heavy Foot" by Mon Rovia 🎵️ https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=dKuKvfF9Q8Q

Kind of incredible to me tbh that it's basically a universal experience for Mastodon users to have their Bluesky bridge account get basically zero engagement from anybody, compared to their Mastodon account. This is despite the fact that Bluesky has a way bigger userbase, and has algorithms […]

So at what point are people going to start noticing that if a social platform is designed so that it's common to be used on a computer -- not just a phone -- people are going to be more likely to click links to your projects. This applies to anyone making content that doesn't live on the […]

I am BEGGING website creators to please just let your links be actual links. Stop hiding page navigation links behind javascript buttons. I can't right-click open in new tab a button. I can't preview the link of your button to decide if I want to go there. I can't right-click copy and share the […]

Rediscovering my love of Against Me! Their 'Searching for a Former Clarity' album is heart-wrenching. In particular I love 'How Low', 'Unprotected Sex With Multiple Partners', and the title track for the album. https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kaeZTsQUPJ4Onq9Ks_nFZ2sOjk4ZubhGU

So, after having spent a good amount of time actually interacting on Mastodon, I'm starting to identify kind of a structural rift between what we see on corporate social media vs here. It's not just the profit model or the federation or whatever else (although […] [Original post on defcon.social]

Infinitely upsetting to me that a post about ice cream can't show up on my feed without getting locked behind my custom politics CW filter because the fascists decided that the agency they would use to kidnap our neighbors would be called "ICE"

I actually love Python so much tbh. I used to pride myself on being like, a True Developer for liking C and C++ --which are great languages, don't get me wrong -- but man, there is something incredible about being able to express something in incredibly plain English syntax, yet still […]

Got bored yesterday, decided to start writing a whole "game engine" around the python pygame library. It's actually working fairly well. I've got OOP with loop() functions that get called once per frame on every GameObject. And I have a working camera, sprite customization, and I'm currently […]

John Oliver just released an incredibly well researched episode about police surveillance technology. He goes thoroughly through all the details, while keeping things at a level that's accessible for regular people to understand. I highly recommend you share this with people who might not […]

I wish we would bring back the social register of the handwritten letter sometimes, ngl. I'm really glad that we have instant messaging and that enables us to engage casually over a text medium, but I also think it would be cool friends would occasionally send longer-form messages in that […]

I wanted to take a look at some of the differences between the way IRC does decentralization as opposed to the way the Social Web (fediverse) does decentralization. I think both approaches have their place, but I've never really heard anyone talk about them before. IRC does what I wanna call […]

This morning I am thinking about how regionally based friend/date-matching might work on the Fediverse/Social Web. (This is separate from my Wingbot project, I'm trying to brainstorm alternate approaches to handling the same endgoal). The main concern is of privacy. We don't Big Tech or […]

Morning listening 🎜 Chearleader - by Porter Robinson "She's got hearts, in her eyes / and she draws me kissing other guys." https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=u6m94T-myQs

OpenAI: we put our evilest AI in a sandbox that did in fact have an internet connection but mediated through a proxy that was only supposed to allow downloading python junk. It circumvented the proxy and we failed to notice for FIVE DAYS that it was going on an interstate crime spree with the […]

Wait, is Dutch easier to learn for an English native than German is? I've been (passively) trying to learn German for a while, but seeing some passages of Dutch (which is still of a Germanic root), I mean, it looks a lot more similar to English than German does. I feel like there's a lot of […]

> Wake up > Log on to the internet > 18 hours of psychological torment and brainrot > Go to sleep I'm beginning to think this might not be healthy...

Curious if anybody on here knows anything about this: Are there any blogging apps for the fediverse, that allow a user to get the fulltext of their blog post to be posted as a thread? Not just a title with a link and maybe a preview. I want full syndication of the entire blog post, readable […]

A discarded #SpaceX rocket is on a high-speed collision course with the #moon The rocket’s upper stage will unintentionally slam into the moon Wednesday, carving out a crater & sending up a plume of dust & rubble. #Space tracking expert Bill Gray predicts an impact of 5,400 mph—7X the speed of […]

I think it would be cool if Mastodon had like, folders for saved posts. I wanna be able to organize them like I organize my web browser's bookmarks: - "Reading list" - "Cute stuff" - "Soulful stuff I wanna gaze back on from time to time" - "Memes I wanna save to my phone later" - "The cellar I […]

‼️ New blog post ‼️ "A Reasonable Analysis of the Social Web: or, How Not To Promote A New Tech Alternative" Wherein I discuss the promise of the Social Web (fediverse), ask some questions about what all it could be become as it matures, and throw some modest criticism at the ways that our […]

The more time I spend thinking about open source and the future of the fediverse and the free and open internet we're trying to build, the more I realize that nearly every important problem in tech is a problem requiring *humanities*, not just STEM. We can't program our way out of social […]

Saskia makes some incredibly great points in her blog "The 'normal' response to the Social Web", where she talks about how damn confusing some of us are being when we try to describe what the fediverse actually is. https://forbetter.ghost.io/the-normal-response-to-the-social-web/ I agree with […]

Started reading "Good Friends" by Priya Vulchi on my car trip to see my sister. Only one chapter in and she's already discussing queer theories of relationships, questioning the patriarchy, and discussing race. And surprisingly to me, it seems she's even […] [Original post on defcon.social]

If it's possible for a user to send an unencrypted message across the wire on your "end-to-end encrypted" app, then it's not actually E2EE. - This means that email can't be E2EE (because a user could easily hit reply without encrypting, accidentally sending the full conversation thread in […]

Feeling very burnt out about politics right now. The trade-off for feeling very called to actually try to Make Things and Write Things to try to Improve Our World is that you get this vested interest in the world that often results in a lot of anxiety when you spend too much time thinking about […]