Mastodon Feed: Posts

Boosted by adam@social.lol ("Adam Newbold"):
surprisetalk ("taylor.town") wrote:

Boosted by adam@social.lol ("Adam Newbold"):
gabz@social.lol ("gabz :verified_pill_bottle2:") wrote:

Yes, anxiety https://beep.town/@zion/114707556507021735

Boosted by adam@social.lol ("Adam Newbold"):
plut0nian@jorts.horse ("plutonian 2.0 🪲") wrote:

feels appropriate to post this today for this #WIPWednesday .... not done though

isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:") wrote:

It's funny how little things can make your day. Like pouring a generous amount of salt into a cooking soup, completely eyeballing it for a whole pot, and then realizing you were exactly on point :-)

Boosted by bcantrill ("Bryan Cantrill"):
ahl ("Adam Leventhal") wrote:

On the heels of @bcantrill’s blog post about the similarities between aspiring college athletes finding a team and entrepreneurs raising a round of capital, Robert Bogart joined us to discuss his own experiences with both, and the life lesson accrued along the way. https://youtu.be/3z%5FTQxe9jx4

Boosted by bcantrill ("Bryan Cantrill"):
catsalad@infosec.exchange ("CatSalad🐈🥗 (D.Burch) :blobcatrainbow:") wrote:

Yeah I'll have the uh.. EFI Shell with a diet coke

jwz wrote:

adam@social.lol ("Adam Newbold") wrote:

Yep, that did the trick! Take that, caches!

adam@social.lol ("Adam Newbold") wrote:

I’m guessing everyone sees a different population figure in the OpenGraph preview image due to local fediverse instance caches or whatever.

I suspect I can force a fetch of the latest by slapping a query string on the URL... https://url.town/?1750293566

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

Tuesday was a big day for #Mastodon

#Threads released its partitioned Fedi feed

Mastodon released its new #ToS

And v4.4

And an update to its 2025 strategy

All on the same day. What are the odds?

adam@social.lol ("Adam Newbold") wrote:

https://url.town/ just got its 400th URL! 🥳

adam@social.lol ("Adam Newbold") wrote:

When I worked with an attorney to draft the omg.lol terms of service, we spent some time discussing dispute resolution. I had zero interest in binding arbitration.

I went with a simple mediation agreement instead, where everyone still has a right to pursue legal action if things can’t be resolved through a neutral third party. It’s a simple and fair option, and I hope Mastodon gGmbH will consider it.

https://social.lol/@pluralistic@mamot.fr/114706885706684642

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

Someone just told me (via email) that it's "unbecoming for a professor" to use language like "bullshit".

Now that's some bullshit right there.

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

Infrastructure— servers, data centers, deep sea fiber optic cables, the cloud, GPUs, gigawatts and flux capacitors and— all becoming consolidated into the hands of a few giants.

Full-stack sovereignty. Preach.

From: @franklinlopez
https://kolektiva.social/@franklinlopez/114705462714586000

Boosted by mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze"):
mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

@superball @CivilityFan @BlueDot No skin off my nose.

Bullshit is bullshit. That's as "nice" as you're getting from me.

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

There is no faster way to get me to never visit your site again than to email me a reminder that I've abandoned my shopping cart. Extremely reliable way to scare me off.

Boosted by mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze"):
mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

@CivilityFan @BlueDot I DON'T CARE IF YOU FIND ME UNKIND. STOP REPEATING BULLSHIT.

Boosted by adam@social.lol ("Adam Newbold"):
digitalsnow@social.lol ("Kerri :usad: :prami_pride_bi:") wrote:

So, um, I just finished writing my novel (!!!)

This thing started way back in 2013 when I was an MFA student at Lesley University. It’s gone through ups and downs, and while it still needs some pretty massive edits, I AM DONE.

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

I realize I'm probably pissing people off here, but actual reality matters.

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange ("The Nexus of Privacy") wrote:

More on mastodon.social's new Terms of Service:

Here's a thread on the odious binding arbitration clause from @pluralistic -- https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/114706885462760813

And, there's a bunch of discussion in the github issue at https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/35086#issuecomment-2982642642

#mastodon

Boosted by mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze"):
mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

@CivilityFan @BlueDot Suggestion: Rather than reposting any old bullshit you read on the Internet, just don't.

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
franklinlopez@kolektiva.social ("Franklin López") wrote:

Yo, real talk—what the fuck are we gonna do when the internet gets shut off?

We've seen it in #Gaza, in #Iran, and when Elon “I-play-God” Musk blacked out Starlink in Ukraine. Every time shit gets heavy, the state or some oligarch clown just pulls the plug. It ain’t just a glitch—it’s strategic, it’s repression, and it’s a fucking reminder that most of our comms infrastructure is in the hands of fascists, corporations, or both.

I’ve been working with indigenous comrades who rely on #Starlink to stay connected in remote areas. And yeah, it’s wild that you can be deep in the bush and still shitpost from a mountaintop—but that signal still runs through a pipeline owned by a Nazi tech bro.

We need to be talking more about mesh networks, autonomous infrastructure, all that good shit that anarchist tech nerds have been yelling about for years. Decentralized, resilient, community-controlled comms aren’t just cool—they’re necessary for survival.

Let’s keep this convo alive and start building the lifelines before the next blackout. Shit’s coming fast.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/activists-are-designing-mesh-networks-to-deploy-during-civil-unrest/

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

@Gargron Also, I saw your note on the Github issue about using pro-bono counsel. If you'd like me to ask EFF's lawyers about helping Mastodon come up with fair and user-rights-preserving ToS, please email me at cory@eff.org

Boosted by pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow"):
mirrorsandstuff@hachyderm.io ("Mirrors And Stuff") wrote:

@pluralistic @mcc has a GitHub issue on this with a pretty strong write up of the issue: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/35086

Boosted by pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow"):
lispi314@udongein.xyz ("LisPi") wrote:

@pluralistic Binding arbitration should just be illegal.

What's the point of being a citizen if some random contract can completely cut off one from the local legal system?

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

An important clue (aside from basic common sense and logic) that these nutso claims about 2024 don't deserve your attention is who *isn't* repeating them: The candidate from whom the election was supposedly stolen.

If there were convincing evidence that Harris had the election stolen from her, she'd be *all over* it. But nope.

Do you think they got to her, too?

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

And since mastodon.social is the flagship instance, which sets the moral example - and the workaday template - for most instances in the Fediverse, this catastrophically bad clause is likely to proliferate far and wide throughout the Fediverse, rendering most of this new, better internet unfit for use.

Please, @Gargron, reconsider this. It is a very bad look - and worse still, it's a very, very bad example.

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

I am trying not to be dramatic here, but this is a deal-breaker for me - literally. I changed dentists because I wouldn't sign binding arbitration. I changed solar installers because I wouldn't sign binding arbitration.

I could never, in good conscience, recommend that someone use a service that required binding arbitration as a condition of use - which means that as of July 1, I would no longer be able to recommend that people get an account on mastodon.social.

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

I am very shocked to see this in the ToS for the flagship Mastodon instance, promulgated by the Mastodon nonprofit.

To be clear, I think this is *much* worse than, say, requiring users of mastodon.social to agree to have their posts used to train LLMs. The harms of having your work fed to an AI are mostly hypothetical and relate to moral qualms.

By contrast, a binding arbitration waiver would literally allow the management of mastodon.social to cause your DEATH and face no consequences.

pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

No one, and I do mean NO ONE, should ever, ever, EVER agree to a binding arbitration waiver.

These are the most grotesquely unfair contractual terms in routine use today. The potential for abuse is literally unlimited.

Remember when a Disney World visitor died of an allergic reaction after being assured that her food order was allergen-free? Disney argued that her family couldn't sue because her husband had clicked through an arbitration waiver when signing up for a free trial of Disney Plus.