#Technically I do have a Mastodon account. But it's the kind of account where you post the opposite of old man yaoi. So nah.

[cartoonsinthemorning]

I have spent maybe 2 hours trying to figure out how to view your stancest art on Twitter without an account and it's a struggle. Someone mentioned 6 fingered handprints and I want that uncropped version so bad 😭

Mmhh you aren't the first person who had this struggle. I'd like to help, but there's so few places allowing NSFW nowadays, I'm out of options to make these drawings accessible to you guys.

I may post my spicy Stancest drawings on Pixiv, what about that? Are you willing to make a pixiv account?

Otherwise, I'm open to suggestions, but I'm putting forward I'm not making a bluesky account (not until Twitter dies) or a Mastodon.

Lmk! And thank you for appreciating my art!

[an-alexa-k]

On Yellbot Dot Online

Over on @lazardotsocial I’ve gotten into the habit of writing essays about each generation, discussing generally thoughts on the project. I've been enjoying it, so now I’m going to do that for Yellbot.

Yellbot obviously was inspired by the classic Endless Screaming bot, but also because I had an ActivityPub idea and the yelling was an easy way to try it out. A neat technical detail of Yellbot is that there aren't any accounts or users. I have database tables for posts and follows but nothing for each individual bot. When someone looks at an account, all the information is created on the fly. When I’m making new posts, I look at all the letters people have followed and make posts for them. Until someone looks at or follows a letter, it doesn’t exist and it doesn’t need to exist.

This enables behaviors that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. You couldn’t make Yellbot on twitter - you’d have to create over a billion accounts or get permission to create as many accounts as you wanted, whenever you wanted. Neither option is realistic. But by having my own server and connecting to the larger ActivityPub network, it’s easy. A centralized service could never.

Now, yelling isn’t very valuable but I think this basic structure here could be applied elsewhere. You need two things:

1. Something that can be reference just through a username, like a name, definition of behavior, a start state, etc.

2. A behavior that happens occasionally – those are the posts.

So, you could have

Each account is a zipcode that posts whenever there’s a dangerous weather alert.

Each account is a wikipedia page that posts whenever the page is edited.

An account for every book on Project Gutenberg. When someone follows one it starts posting the book, sentence by sentence (in the style of Bedtime Story Bot). When it finishes, everyone gets unfollowed and the account is deleted, until someone follows again and it restarts.

Something like Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain’s project The Good Life – an account for each e-mail address and it posts each e-mail in real time.

Each account's username defines the rules for a cellular automata and each post is a generation.

Thinking up examples and possible applications lead me to thinking about what kinds of information ActivityPub is suited for. For example, here in Chicago every bus station has a 5 digit code on the sign. You can text to a number to receive schedule updates. So you could make a server with an account for each bus station.

Like this. Image from the Chicago Transit Authority

But what would it post? Nobody wants to know every time a bus arrives at a station. That’s too many posts cluttering up your timeline and all but the most recent one are irrelevant. Similarly, you wouldn’t want to receive the temperature through ActivityPub, because you only care about the current temperature, not all the past temperatures.

When you make a post on Mastodon, your server sends the messages to all the servers of accounts who follow you and they’re responsible for storing and displaying them. That’s the “publish” in ActivityPub. This makes it suited for activities where having the entire history is desirable - you don’t want to know just what your friends said most recently, you want to know everything they said. For cases where only the most recent version counts (like temperatures or buses), you’re better of letting the client request the data when they want it.

(I have loose thoughts here about Robin Sloan’s Spring ‘83 protocol, which is a person-to-person social communication system that doesn’t maintain any kind of history and (if I’m understanding the protocol correctly) doesn’t guarantee that you see every board from the people you follow. You couldn’t build Yellbot (or something equivalent) in Spring ‘83 due to key limitations, but the board format would be well suited for a dashboard type application.)

If your behavior doesn’t happen too often, you could still use ActivityPub and it wouldn’t be too annoying even if you don’t care about history. And it would have the benefit of putting the information someplace you’re already checking. If you’re already checking your the timeline daily, if a piece of info is added in there, you’re guaranteed to see it. That’s a big advantage and in many cases it'll be worth the clutter. I think daily is infrequent enough but exact amount of time would vary by person.

This project was an extension of the ActivityPub implementation I did for Lazar gen 7 and it takes the implementation a couple steps closer to totality. I have another project, which I put on hold to make Yellbot, which requires a complete implementation and it seems a lot more manageable now. So there may be more ActivityPub in the future, although no guarantees about how far in the future.

[crossfoxbuns]

I’m in the midst of reinventing how I deal with social media.

Right now I got 3 social media accounts. (I don’t count chat apps since they aren’t “one-to-public” kind of things) I’ve got this tumblr account, a mastodon/fediverse, and a bluesky. And none of them have been all that satisfying to use, both as a reader and as a poster. (Mostly as a reader. I don’t wanna brag, but my posts have been read by at LEAST seven people worldwide.)

So I’ve been rethinking. And it comes down to posting certain things on certain accounts, and being deliberate about what is on my feed in each place. Here’s what I’ve got so far.

Bluesky

This is the place where the people I actually, personally know are. So I’m going to keep it that way. I’ll pare back who I’m following to just be friends. I’ll interact with them and post stuff that is a bit more personal, but okay for the public to see. Bluesky ain’t private after all.

Mastodon

The server I’m on and contribute to is focused toward furry technical engineers. As such I’ll probably keep it to that - that is to say, mostly work stuff or stuff a technical crowd would find interesting. I’ll trim down my feed to include that sort of thing to match. By trimming that list and by taking more advantage of mastodon’s awesome feed control I can get a feed full of techno-juiciness without the political, doomscroll-y stuff that’s also pretty common there.

In paring down the bluesky and mastodon feeds it means unfollowing a lot of artists and creators that I do actually want to keep up with. There’s an idea for that though - later

Tumblr

Tumblr’s in a weird place. It’s the old kid on the block but also somehow the freshest? The big thing that Tumblr has going for it out of these three is that there’s no real limit on the posts. I can ramble.

I like rambling.

So that’s why you’re seeing this post here. I got the room to express a whole idea, something I can’t do with bluesky’s 200-something characters or mastodon’s 1000-ish characters. (And that’s after using a forked version of mastodon that lets you up the limit from the usual 500)

Long form posts will go here, on Ye Olde Blog Platform. I think there will be more ways of defining what gets posted here, but I don’t know what that is yet, since I just started. I’ll figure this out as I go. As for the feed here I’m kinda ignoring it honestly. The idea eventually is to automate a thing to grab the posts from this blog (and my other socials if I can figure it out) and drop them into a big repository of “things I posted online”. Then I can use that repo when I eventually redo my personal website. Why build myself a CMS when every other platform already has, and with a way I can share my stuff built-in?

Let the corpos do the coding and heavy lifting, I’ll just nab my content as I go and keep it in my little box. :3

RSS - Really Still Something

Yeah, RSS ain’t dead yet. Oddly enough, it’s more alive than ever! Every tumblr blog has a feed. Same with every WordPress blog, every mastodon account, and oh, how about EVERY PODCAST IN EXISTENCE.

RSS is going nowhere. Which is why my main reading feed of choice isn’t any of these socials, it’s my dang RSS reader. Almost a hundred webcomics, and almost a thousand more blogs, artists, news sources, YouTube channels (yup they got RSS too), and more, all sorted into different feed flavors, ready for me to read through, chronologically, without ads or scripts that slow the site down, whenever.

That is where the creators I’m no longer following on socials went. Somewhere where it’s impossible for them to get lost in the feed, because the little badge will nag at me that there’s something to read until I’ve seen everything. No algorithm to satiate, no firehose to get drowned in.

The downside of course is that if you’re an artist who doesn’t post on anywhere with an RSS (looking at you, FA), then I can’t see you. Sorry. There’s feeds for like almost everything out there, and if you’re only on FurAffinity and Twitter and that’s it, then I can’t help you, sorry.

Maybe that’s another post for the future. Some of these service’s RSS feeds are pretty well hidden, but they’re there. A post for a later date, though. This one has dragged on enough.

That’s what my social media use kinda looks like at the moment. I post and interact lightly but deliberately, though most of my reading/following is done over RSS.

Enjoyed the TED talk? There’s plenty more where that came from. Leave a note or a blaze or whatever it is tumblr does nowadays. I don’t mind shouting into the void, it’s pretty therapeutic, but it is nice to be heard now and then, especially with word counts like this. Anyway, until the next one!~

[super-secret-anon-blog]

I don’t do public forum and I haven’t for years, but I know some exceedingly good public forum-ers and we sometimes brainstorm arguments together. The other day we had a very, very loose mock debate where we essentially just pitched arguments against each other and tried to break them down.

Is that important? No. Is that relevant? I guess a little, but I just thought it was a fun story, mostly. What I’m trying to get at is that I came up with a quite strong point for getting rid of section 230, and that is that we can technologically recover very well.

(I’m writing this based on memory, and I’m always at least a bit afraid that I’ll get something really wrong, so I will fact-check this in due time, but not right now, I’m tired. Also, feel free to take from this anything you need)

Section 230 came about because the new-fangled forums that people had made were being regulated as paper media, which was a problem because they weren’t. Because of this, at the time you had two options: regulate everything or regulate nothing. This was a big problem because it’s not always feasible to regulate everything, so section 230 was written. It made it so that internet publishers were not held liable as long as they did reasonable moderation. This is what allows big platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to work. But it also leads to harms, blah blah blah, you’ve heard this before.

A very strong argument against section 230, however, is that we’ve essentially moved past a broad need for it. Federated platforms like Mastodon can easily handle the moderation of all content due to their inherent encapsulation; ideally, a moderator might only have to manage a dozen or so accounts. This would allow discourse to still happen at scale, while still allowing people to sue over improper moderation.

—

What about blog comments? I don’t visit many blogs, but I personally doubt that blog comments are helpful on a scale beyond that which is easily able to be moderated.

Can federated platforms scale to the same degree as current ones? This is a purely technical problem; if they can’t now, they could be made able to with enough manpower and weird optimizations.

What about user privacy? Improved, the federated platforms that I’m familiar with allow you to easily move if your admin is acting wrongfully.

What about forums? I’d have to look into this one. It’s not immediately obvious that they would be incompatible with federation, but I’m not sure if it’s yet been done.

What about echo chambers? This is a tricky one. From what I kind of remember, a big thing that tries to break echo chambers is how social media algorithms try to incite engagement. I don’t know how much federated platforms tend to do this, so here’s a fun time for a statistic if you want it, but whether this is good or bad is up for debate.

—

Places to draw statistics from: growth of federated social media, lawsuits blocked by section 230, effects of social media algorithms on mental health, etc

Guys does anyone know what to do for the new PF topic. I’m actually struggling so hard wtf are we supposed to do for statistics.

I spent like 2 hours trying to find any amount of statistics on how it could maybe impact those who work for social media companies but I couldn’t find anything.

Resolution: The United States federal government should repeal section 230(or something like that)