we were so worried about "malware" (software that deliberately spreads and causes harm) that we forgot to protect against "mallware" (software that transforms every single computing experience into a shopping mall) and it took over the world oops

The earliest major inflection point in Twitter's adoption was when
@aplusk
raced CNN to a million followers, and Oprah created her account. As of this week, the fediverse has 33% more active users than Twitter did at that point; Mastodon alone is larger. https://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/17/ashton.cnn.twitter.battle/index.html

Timnit Gebru (@timnitGebru) adds another nail in the coffin of effective altruism (EA) with her piece for WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/effective-altruism-artificial-intelligence-sam-bankman-fried/

For me, this follows »The good delusion: has effective altruism broken bad?« by Linda Kinstler: https://www.economist.com/1843/2022/11/15/the-good-delusion-has-effective-altruism-broken-bad

And »Against longtermism« by Émile P Torres: https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo

If you are running an instance of pleroma and want to change the favicon you can place your new favicon.png in the /var/lib/pleroma/static directory and it will override the default icon.

At a meta level, something I find mildly interesting is how many people are writing stuff on Mastodon about how it's impossible for Mastodon to scale up without using an ad supported model (b/c server costs), it's better to have ranked feeds because most people want them, etc.

The thing I think is interesting is that the people writing this stuff, implicitly, seemingly cannot conceive of a model where the organization is not growth and profit maximizing.

https://rarlindseysmash.com/2022/11/21/mastodon-quick-start.html okay wrote this up, there's some things I couldn't figure out how to screenshot but hopefully it helps folks.

Here is the thing you have to understand about VCs (and therefore, companies and websites that have accepted VC money), always and forever. Repeat it like a mantra.

--- Venture capitalists do not invest in the company. Venture capitalists invest in the exit. ---

Eventually any site, app whatever has a Sell Out Moment. They get bought by a big established corp, they go IPO, something. There is an "Exit". If you accept VC money, you are *promising* that Exit day is coming and it will be *big*.

Them: Faving posts on Mastodon is useless, only the OP sees it.

Me, when a post gets faved: awwww, little internet hug ✨

To accelerate 2023 planning each manager will receive 9 copies of "The Mythical Man Month"

Certain folks believe Fediverse self-hosting should *never* be recommended to anyone because only eggheads should run social media.

To which I say:

1. The Internet is for everyone
2. If you want the technical acumen to self-host, you can learn it
3. There are risks, but the risks won't kill you
4. Leaving things in the hands of "experts" is unsustainable -- it's why so many laptops are designed to be unrepairable!