Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

I see the discourse about QTs is roiling right now, and just some food for thought:

QTs already exist on the Fediverse. Pleroma implemented it a while ago. Getting QT'd has lead to me having to play whack-a-mole with malicious instances telling me to unalive myself, because they weren't happy with my antifacist takes.

The most powerful tool I have here is the block function. This alone has halted dogpiles, and I never had to involve my followers in it.

Die Hard is a story about a cop that murders an unarmed 13 year old, and regains the confidence to kill again when a fellow cop's life is at stake.

Your friendly holiday reminder that the Whos in Whoville get freaky this time of year.

@CharmingDolphins@musicians.today The open source firmware and Linux optimizations are the big selling points for me. It's basically an open source Macbook Pro equivalent.

Core hardware is Clevo, which is less expensive if you buy direct, but it looks like the customizations and support are worth the premium. Plus S76 develops their own Ubuntu-based OS called Pop! OS that looks slick.

My new laptop has shipped!

I haven't had a *new* laptop in a decade. I always end up buying refurbished Thinkpads. My daily driver is a 2014 Lenovo T440p that I bought in 2018.

Before that it was a 2012 Dell XPS, my last actually new Laptop.

Decided to buy a fully spec'd-out System76 Lemur Pro for the New Year.

Excited to go from 2 CPU cores to 10. 8GB of RAM to 40. 1TB SSD to 4TB NVMe!

@bitboxer The two left on the list don't seem to be terrible places if their stated policies are enforced, but a review of their local timelines shows their active users consistently interacting with users of extreme-right and MAP-oriented instances, so I have defederated with them out of an abundance of caution.

Pleroma has terrible moderation tools, and is clearly designed for "free speech" communities, as blocked instances don't seem to be strictly blocked on any instance I've investigated.

With art, traditionally, once the artist finishes their work, the piece is complete. They can go on to produce less admirable art, and their past art remains static.

With software, a lead developer will remain involved to influence future versions of the software. They are an integral part of the project, tasked with informing those who develop and use it.

Their leadership attracts like-minded contributors who will remain even if they are ousted.

They have the power to control and corrupt.

The mantra “Separate The Art From The Artist” does not work for Open Source Software.

The philosophies that developers hold will always have a direct effect on the future of the software they develop.

This is why Codes of Conduct are so important.

ALWAYS research the people leading the development of FOSS products you use, and decide carefully what you choose to work with.

This overwhelmingly applies to social software, where people will be the most directly affected by the software.

Before: https://web.archive.org/web/20221219190200/https://pleroma.social/

After: https://web.archive.org/web/20221223051025/https://pleroma.social/index.html

lol, Pleroma just removed 4/6 "Featured Instances" from the project website - specifically the Nazi-friendly ones.

I'm not going to say that I'm responsible for this, but given all of the death threats Pleroma users keep sending me after I called this out, I think I deserve credit.

Hey, #Seattle outdoorsy folks. I recently found a nascent web community for hikers and nature appreciators in the area, and so far it looks like there's only two members: The admin, and myself.

I'd love to see this community take off. Despite the PNW being a hot spot for outdoors activities, there is a void to fill for this kind of thing online.

Give them a visit at: https://www.seattlenaturalist.org

Several years ago I made the decision to keep my portable storage drives formatted with NTFS "just in case" I wanted to plug them into a Windows computer. Did I ever need to? Not until this week when I had a 16TB drive get corrupted and I had to sit thorugh days of CHKDSK to get it working again.

Now I'm migrating 40TB+ of data to EXT4, and boy am I glad I only have to do this once...

@Okanogen @theintercept Glenn resigned from The Intercept more than 2 years ago.

I'm just waiting for Ken Klippenstein to join us here.