Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

Analysis: If you’re rich, you’re more lucky than smart. And there’s math to prove it.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/analysis-if-youre-rich-youre-more-lucky-than-smart-and-theres-math-to-prove-it

@effy Here's what I got.

@effy This was extremely weird when I thought you had randomly chosen my single-user instance. Like, why did you choose me?

But now I see that this is some sort of clever trick, so that's actually pretty neat.

@hankg I dunno, admin gave up I think...

Still saddened that the Mastodon instance for cats is gone...

@therotund This is excellent news! Poisoning Pigeons in the Park is a valuable piece of culture that should be shared extensively without copyright enforcement.

@the_rabid_rabbit And I do agree with you that, in isolation, using the terms "instance" and "server" interchangeable isn't a particularly big deal and is pretty much ubiquitous in this community . It was definitely the least of my concerns, but it seemed relevant to bring up the specifics given how many interchangeable terms they injected into the article.

Ok, we're past whatever that was. I'm too busy looking through logs for work to look through my own logs right now, so I'm just taking another snapshot of everything in case this was a warning sign that things are about to fall apart.

@fyrfli I would love to see an Onion article explaining Mastodon. I can see it now:

"On English language instances posts are referred to as 'Toots', which is attributed to a mistranslation from German where they are called 'Fahrts'."

@the_rabid_rabbit And I'm a Software Support Engineer with a B.A. in Journalism, and I can tell you that the BBC article is awful and shouldn't have made it past an editor worth their salt.

I'm not optimistic that the BBC can doing any better than this, they've been going downhill for years, but I certainly won't accept this kind of reporting as normal.

They don't need to explain how Ruby, PostgreSQL, Redis, and ActivityPub works, they just needed not to make things up and spread falsehoods...

Oh yeah! Look at my poor server chug away!

Love getting intermittent 500 errors. Excuse me while increase the frequency of my backups.

@the_rabid_rabbit I also think that it's backwards logic to say that the BBC isn't responsible for accurately reporting on this because their readers won't fully understand it.

How are their readers supposed to fully understand it if the BBC is inaccurately reporting on it? A journalists job is to inform the public, not entertain them with dumbed down stories that don't reflect reality.

@the_rabid_rabbit I really can't agree that journalists should use incorrect wording to dumb it down for the general public. Tech reporting can be both understandable and precise.

If they want to use "instance" and "server" interchangeably, they owe their audience an explanation as to what they are talking about, and the fact that they are also using the terms "channel" and "group" here suggests they don't actually know what they are talking about.

They call Mastodon a "rival" to Twitter, which from a business perspective isn't true. It's like calling email and Facebook "rivals".

They claim Instances are separated by topic, which is partially true, but not even remotely the rule.

They refer to the flagship instance as simply as "Social", which is just the gTLD after the word "Mastodon", not the name of the instance!

It's embarrassing to see the BBC do this.

They refer to it as a "site". No, it is not a website, it is a piece of web software. Would you call all the WordPress blogs a "site"?

They refer to instances interchangeably as "channels", "groups", and "servers". Mastodon does not have channels or groups, and instance ≠ server. An instance could be a cluster of servers mixed with SaaS solutions.

Hey #Journalists that are joining Mastodon! 👋

Happy to have you here.

Now please, learn how Mastodon works, and start reporting on it honestly. Every mainstream source that writes about it gets things atrociously wrong.

I get that it's really different than traditional social media, but journalistic integrity means doing your research before you publish something, and some of these articles are just ridiculously incorrect. They're hard to take seriously. Like this: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63999452