Tootfinder

"What do you lose by using Facebook", asked a friend who is keen to keep his account there for some reason.
What made me leave was the manipulation. I mean: they started hiding your friends posts in order to show you adverts instead! Feeding you slop from their promoted posts and "viral" messages (that aren't actually boosted by anyone, just picked out by their megaphone to show to everyone).
If you let the algorithm determine what you see than you let it determine what you are, who you become.
Even if you think it's better at finding shiny things than you, even if you think it builds the parasocial relationships that you want, even if you think it's saving you time to let the robot manage your reading-list: if you are letting Facebook, or any algorithm written by advertisers, do your reading selection then you are letting Facebook decide who you are.
On behalf of the advertisers who bribe them the most.
This is why you gotta use RSS. You gotta use the chronological timelines not the "for you" feeds. You gotta build follow relationships that you choose and understand because otherwise, you are letting the corporation and it's systems determine these things. You are abdicating some control of your very self to the machine.
Not to mention that we have to stop feeding money to the evil multi-trillion dollar companies built to control and manipulate us through our relationships with our friends. They have enough money, they need less participation not more.
#fediverse #algorithm

Dear USians,
How about you don’t call a Middle Eastern guy “white” and go on to tell him he’s “no better than any other oppressor we encounter” simply for trying to warn his Palestinian friends to not take any unnecessary risks and to be careful on Mastodon?
Also, apparently Divya has blocked me for this, which sucks because it has made it impossible for me to keep boosting her fundraiser, which you should, of course, still follow and support (link below).
I’m not going to …

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #HuwStephens
K‐Klass:
🎵 Let Me Show You
#KKlass
https://dancemission.bandcamp.com/track/let-me-show-you-club-mix-edit

Let me tell you what I learned from putting a KKK leader behind bars.
I'm Shannon Taylor. I've been a prosecutor for over 30 years, and I'm running for Congress in one of the most competitive seats in the country. 𝗜'𝘃𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁. 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝗜'𝘃𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝘄𝗶𝗻.
Republican Congressman
Rob Wittman seems to think he can take away our healthcare,
give a massive tax cut to his billionaire donors, and then lie straight to our face away to it. …

Donate to Shannon Taylor
Show your support with a contribution.

And many of the people that support him, let me guess…white and rich? Shocking. https://mastodon.social/@jakelazaroff/115304688954799868

It's time to lower your inhibitions towards just asking a human the answer to your question.
In the early nineties, effectively before the internet, that's how you learned a lot of stuff. Your other option was to look it up in a book. I was a kid then, so I asked my parents a lot of questions.
Then by ~2000 or a little later, it started to feel almost rude to do this, because Google was now a thing, along with Wikipedia. "Let me Google that for you" became a joke website used to satirize the poor fool who would waste someone's time answering a random question. There were some upsides to this, as well as downsides. I'm not here to judge them.
At this point, Google doesn't work any more for answering random questions, let alone more serous ones. That era is over. If you don't believe it, try it yourself. Between Google intentionally making their results worse to show you more ads, the SEO cruft that already existed pre-LLMs, and the massive tsunami of SEO slop enabled by LLMs, trustworthy information is hard to find, and hard to distinguish from the slop. (I posted an example earlier: #AI #LLMs #DigitalCommons #AskAQuestion

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #HuwStephens
K‐Klass:
🎵 Let Me Show You
#KKlass
https://dancemission.bandcamp.com/track/let-me-show-you-club-mix-edit