Tootfinder

hello my #fuckaas friends in my phone
you know about mastodon. you may have heard of lemmy, the fedi equivalent of reddit, or pixelfed, the fedi equivalent of Instagram, or bookwyrm, the Goodreads equivalent.
but did you know there's like 8 bajillion other things in the fediverse that you can check out and start using in place of corporate-captured platforms? it's true!

delightful-fediverse-experience
A curated list of server applications supported on the ActivityPub Fediverse and related standards.

RE: #Fediverse are being remorselessly crawled by mindless brute-force bots. If your instance…

Day 8 (a bit late): Timnit Gebru
Academic authors are authors too, and there are a bunch of people I deeply respect both in my fields and adjacent.
Gebru is someone I have huge respect for because she stood up for her (mild, completely reasonable) principles to the point of losing her job on Google's AI ethics team (since disbanded entirely), and then went ahead and founded an independent research institute to continue doing AI ethics research.
Why was she fired? Because she insisted on publishing her "Stochastic Parrots" paper after it passed Google internal review only to have extra nonstandard scrutiny applied at the last minute. Why did Google want to suppress her paper (which included an academic co-author)? Because it expressed valid criticisms of the large language models fad, and Google was planning to make money off that fad. Personally, I don't think I'd hire an "AI ethics" team only to then try to suppress their publications, and Google seems to now agree, having scrapped the team (during the initial furor, Timnit's boss also effectively quit to support her).
That "Stochastic Parrots" paper? Indeed, it predicts the core underlying problems with large language models that lead to so many of their user-side harms today. You can read it here: #20AuthorsNoMen

Does anbyody know about an instance of @…, that is open for registration and federated? I would really like to try it out in the wider #Fediverse.
#Bonfire

"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

There are a couple of anonymous cowards on Mastodon telling people that all Palestinians you see here are fake and that the Internet there doesn’t work at all and spamming the #fediblock hashtag to get my Mastodon instance defederated so they can silence me and the work we are doing with @…

Gaza Verified
We’ve personally had video conversations on Signal with the people from Gaza whose Mastodon accounts on the fediverse are listed here and we verify that their accounts are genuine. – Joy & Aral Balkan

A different, not only technical look at the technology behind the #Fediverse:
"What if instead we thought of the federation protocols (e.g. ActivityPub and friends) as something that could be added to most websites and make them interoperable with other sites?"
Talk, video & slides by @…
https://www.sfscon.it/talks/from-the-fediverse-to-the-open-social-web/

#Mastodon #Fediverse #Outreach #Ottawa #OttawaPlace #Media #politicians
I was reading this funny story about a Jeopardy! question that featured Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/who-is-mark-sutcliffe-ottawa-s-mayor-stumps-jeopardy-champ-9.7013496
It features a link to his X where he (manually) recorded the Answer/Question. So then I ended up on his X profile.
He has 33,000 followers.
He posted 12 minutes ago.
75 engagements - 0 likes - 0 boosts - 0 replies
1h ago
313 engagements - 0 likes - 1 boost - 1 reply
another 1h ago
354 - 3 - 1 - 0
another 1h ago
669 - 3 - 1 - 1
another 1h ago
570 - 1 - 0 - 0
2h ago
461 - 7 - 1 - 2
———
Like... what good is 33 000 followers if less than 1/3rd potentially see your post and you get nearly no real engagement?
My Theory: While Politicians think they are using X/FB because “that's where the people are”, the data shows that the "people" beyond clicking ‘follow' never actually see them or engage with that person. Instead, what the profile is actually used for is self promotion. A known place where the *media* can pick up the relevant happenings of a politician.
Which then begs the question. Would said Mayor of Ottawa be able to do exactly the same thing, and engage with the same or more constituents on ottawa.place?

My post traveling through the #Fediverse got another push over the weekend (thx @…), motivating me to have another look. And surprise: After adding the software of multiple instances,

"To realize the vision of a truly digital commons in the European Union – one built on openness, participation, and resilience – we need the active support of public institutions, civil society, and developers for the #Fediverse."
Talk & video by @… :
https://www.sfscon.it/talks/from-open-source-to-open-spaces/