Scott Madin @smadin@mastodon.social

it is impossible to have a pleasant social space without putting in the dirty work and enforcing a few rules. i'm sorry that you were lied to. i do not generally rage against liberals but here i'm gonna have to - this is something liberal ideology teaches us, that if we just be kind and get along everyone will act in good faith, and it's wrong

when you post about not wanting nazi dogwhistles in your spaces you are 100% guaranteed to get people concern trolling you in bad faith being like "uhm aren't you overreacting a little???" no i'm not

ok so i hate to be That Guy but is anyone else weirded out that everyone is using fucking white supremacist 4chan cartoons of "Nordic" and "tradwife" ideals for generic meme characters?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/yes-chad
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/trad-girl-tradwife
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/time-travel-is-invented-men-with-a-time-machine

Turns out, we know a lot about dinosaurs and it's not just from their bones.

https://andrewducker.tumblr.com/post/658798471787233280

Well, when I say "we," I mean "paleontologists." Another thing I learned here is how hostile regular people are to updating our mental ideas of dinosaurs. Which is interesting in a different way: sociological rather than paleontological.

There is a really bad privacy bug in the new “official” #mastodon #ios app. If you reply to a dm it defaults to totally public. This is honestly a really awful bug that has already resulted in mistakingly posting publicly something I meant to be private.

honestly, the main reason we compared fediverse instances to web forums/BBSes is because you don't join a web forum because you want to be on phpBB

you join a web forum because you want to join a community that you have friends on, or a community associated with something or someone you like

we spent a /lot/ of the mid-oughts on phpBB forums, and if there was ever a flagship phpBB forum, we never heard of it

why would we have? we wanted to talk about our webcomics

- Packbat 🎒

there were exactly three reasons i joined this website after using twitter: no nazis allowed, it didn't manipulate my attention with abusive psychological tactics, and i was sick of having to moderate my opinions for a pseudo-professional sphere. that's literally it. the idea that i would ever actively desire to act professional on a social media website ever again is a fucking joke to me

I think @gargron is making a big mistake here by signaling his intent to phase out the local timeline : https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ios/issues/221

Besides debates about what "diverse" means, it's taking away a major incentive for people to start and maintain an instance.

Starting an instance to host a community is appealing to some people.

Starting an instance to do free IT for a distributed server farm of homogeneous instances seems like a hard sell.

And this, kids, is why blocking alt-right-tolerating instances and moderating alt-right bullshit on sight is necessary:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/15/theres-a-new-tactic-for-exposing-you-to-radical-content-online-the-slow-red-pill

tl;dr the playbook is:
1. create an account reposting popular conservative content
2. every once in a while drop-in a far-right meme, take it down after backlash (this measures the temperature)
3. once the follower numbers and temperature are right, go all-in on far-right stuff (and get banned, but also redpill a bunch of normies)
4. rinse, repeat.

so much fantasy reads like a pale imitation because lord of the rings was the decades long nerd side project of a massive mythology dork who could read several dead languages and was single handedly responsible for renewed scholarly readings of myths like beowulf. similarly i think leguin succeeded at writing fantasy because of her well developed feminist/anarchist perspective. you need to have interests outside of "i think elves and dragons are cool"

I've heard so much about how terrible it is that brands whisked away their pride month logos, this is a great example of what they should be doing instead. :)

@cicatriz_jdr

thinking about that post going around on twitter earlier in the week where some terfs made a global heat map to show worldwide engagement with their posts, and it was effectively just a world map with the UK lit up like it was made entirely of burning phosphorous.

LOL, looks like I'm getting some new followers due to twitter making terrible UX changes again.
Welcome! In case they're interesting, here are two of my ongoing mastodon-exclusive threads:
No Man's Sky visual travelogue, going since summer 2018: https://mastodon.social/@jplebreton/100920861813591323
My trip through Doomworld's 100 Most Memorable Maps, currently paused at #65: https://mastodon.social/@jplebreton/104765559869626072