Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

Twitter folks: Unless you are actually a displaced person, please stop referring to yourselves as "refugees".

You didn't live on Twitter. You were not forced from your home.

You've just switched your preferred microblogging platform. Realistically, you shouldn't have any plans to go back to Twitter, so it doesn't even work as a metaphor.

Call yourself a "migrant". That gets the point across without being insensitive.

@robertomurta I use this trick regularly when I'm dealing with a VPS that's basically scratch space. Servers that don't do any damage when they break beyond annoying me personally.

It's definitely not in-production advice.

@TheGentYYC “The only way we ever have a Republican president is the Electoral College”

Admitting that their party is democratically unelectable...

@emmatonkin I run a personal Asterisk server, and until I had the good sense to set up fail2ban, I had a cronjob that would wipe out most of the oldest rotated log files, since it would be literally gigabytes of failed logins.

The job was modeled on what I'd have to do every time the drive got full and my phones stopped working.

Unprofessional Protip:

Keep a 1GB file full of random numbers on your #Linux server's disk so that when you neglect it and let the drive get full, you have 1GB you can delete right away to get things less broken.

Having deep conversations with #ChatGPT.

@compuguy If people need both, they can use both apps, or use an app like Twidere that connects to both Mastodon and Twitter accounts into one feed.

At least then they can't boost Twitter content to the timelines of other Mastodon users, and can actually reply to Twitter accounts instead of to an ActivityPub bot.

@compuguy Relays don't seem like a short term solution, they seem like a impediment to a long term solution. Mastodon may be a lot of people's Twitter replacement, but it itself isn't a Twitter replacement. It's its own unique set of communities.

If people aren't happy here unless they can follow Twitter accounts they should just use Twitter. If people want to leave Twitter, they shouldn't need to follow Twitter accounts elsewhere.

I would rather see slower growth than a spammed timeline.

@jay I think people get cold feet about switching to Mastodon because they have more followers on Twitter and feel like they're starting over, and they wrongly assume that by crossposting everything they do on Twitter, they'll earn followers here over time.

Really they're just spamming Mastodon with irrelevant content, not using CWs, and not engaging with anyone who responds to them because they aren't here.

@compuguy I will add that I support using alternative frontends like Nitter to link to Twitter content, I just don't want to see it become ActivityPub compliant where relayed content appears on my timeline indistiguishable from organic Fediverse content from real users I can interact with.

@compuguy Twitter is now fully tolerates hate speech, so I see zero positive value in these bridges/relays. They're going to be one-way by design, so it's not like you can meaningfully interact with relayed Twitter users here anyway.

I'd expect a net negative effect on the Fediverse. I recommend admins find and suspend every relay/bridge they can find.

Mastodon has enough federated users to generate good content without importing content from elsewhere.

I love Bob's Burgers, but I will never understand the writers' decision to turn a gang of self-proclaimed "white power movement" bikers into minor recurring characters that the main cast is consistently friendly with. I can't watch those episodes without feeling gross.

A deep stain in a show with an otherwise excellent reputation.

@bigzaphod I'm generally anti-quote-post, but I like this idea. Maybe even call it an "endorsed" post, that way people are given an extra layer of deterrent against giving abusive posts more visibility.

The deterrent would be pretty important, as moving the quoted content front-and-center would be even worse if people were still compelled to hate-quote.

This would solve for the "I can't share posts with added context" problem and would make hate-quoting hard to actualize.