Decentralised social media platforms are increasingly being recognised as viable alternatives to their centralised counterparts. Among these, Mastodon stands out as a popular alternative, offering a citizen-powered option distinct from larger and centralised platforms like Twitter/X. However, the future path of Mastodon remains uncertain, particularly in terms of its challenges and the long-term viability of a more citizen-powered internet. In this paper, following a pre-study survey, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 Mastodon instance administrators, including those who host instances to support marginalised and stigmatised communities, to understand their motivations and lived experiences of running decentralised social media. Our research indicates that while decentralised social media offers significant potential in supporting the safety, identity and privacy needs of marginalised and stigmatised communities, they also face considerable challenges in content moderation, community building and governance.

What could be more serious than the future of humanity in the stars? Once we reunite with our glorious reptilian creators, we will ascend to the stars!

The dinosaurs want us to be successful and join them, that’s why they keep helping us!

Be strong for Elwood.

When the dinosaurs send arks to bring us home to glorious Planet 9, I’ll make sure to save you a seat.

It’s going to be glorious.

Wait til we discover the launchpads in the geologic record.

I have it on good authority that the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct, they predicted the Chicxulub collision and escaped the Earth on arks. Of course they realized that their warm blooded servitor species would survive the impact and evolve sentience much like their own (they created our genomes, so it was easy to predict), so they hid the launchpads until we would be ready to see them.

The arks landed on Planet 9 (the big one, not the lil one), since it was less likely to be hit by similar events. They hollowed it out, helping to create Pluto and Ceres, and have been living in there ever since.

Discovering the launchpads will show them that we’ve achieved sufficient technological prowess for them to reveal themselves to us. I can’t wait!

That’s good enough for the AI.

Remember when you just needed to count teeth to detect AI images? Those were good times.

But it gets the spirit right

/s

Some examples

In this example, the speaker said, “as the um, the, her father dies not too long after he remarried….” while the program transcribes that as " It’s fine. It’s just too sensitive to tell. She does die at 65….”

In this example, the speaker said, “and after she got the telephone he began to pray” while the program transcribes that as “I feel like I’m going to fall. I feel like I’m going to fall, I feel like I’m going to fall….”

You could have seeded nonsense into Google any time in the past nearly 3 decades because that’s how all of this works

That’s the SEO arms race. Ad peddlers have been creating sites to bump up their Page Rank, and Google has been adding secret sauce to detect and deprioritize them.

The difference is that Google over prioritized Reddit pages, trusting Reddit’s updoots. Google now needs to find other signals to determine if a Reddit post is as valuable as the updoots suggest.

If there were any doubts that this image was supposed to reference the Blade Runner movie, the lawsuit said, Musk “erased them” by directly referencing the movie in his comments.

“You know, I love Blade Runner, but I don’t know if we want that future,” Musk said at the event. "I believe we want that duster he’s wearing, but not the, uh, not the bleak apocalypse.”

…

But producers argued that defense is “not credible” since Tesla explicitly asked to use the Blade Runner 2049 image, and there are “better” films in WBD’s library to promote Musk’s message, like the Mad Max movies.

There’s also the stuff that “you get to know before it becomes news”, which also won’t be on Mastodon because it lacks the “gossipers” and the mass of users that is needed for having people “everywhere”

It’s not the gossipers, it’s a trending view. Mastodon doesn’t tell users about active conversations as they happen. That makes it really hard to get breaking news, because you need to be following someone who is posting about it AND you need to recognize that it’s breaking news.

Maybe that has improved in the year or two since I used Mastodon.

Yep, same problem Lemmy has vs reddit. Only the nerdiest tech nerds got on here. Not many communities from reddit or just in general here. For example, I had to go back to reddit for a good sized general anime community.

I’ve had the same experience. I still post here because I want the platform to take off, but Lemmy doesn’t fulfill my needs.

This will include … ads that refer to US elections, their processes or outcomes.

Google is expecting Trump and co to publicly contest the election. They’re trying to stop the ad platform from being used to spread election misinformation.

Props.

The headline does not make this clear at all.

we’ve been seeing these “twitter’s in biiiiiiiiig trouble now!!” headlines for how many years now?

this time it’s for realsies.

yet people refuse to just delete it

Many journalists want to feel connected, and since many politicians have a presence on Twitter, they feel like they can’t. That means Twitter gets referenced way more than necessary in news stories, which feeds its popularity.

The reasons mentioned in the article:

One reason is that it seemed tech-savvy users heavily dominated the platform, making it difficult for regular social media users to find their way and feel comfortable on the platform.

I think that’s saying the content tends to be very niche and it’s hard to find people with similar non-tech interests.

and

Users have described their timelines (and even the explore tab) as “stale” because there’s often not much interesting content to consume or engage with.

This lines up with my experience: it’s hard to find people with similar interests. Even when you do, people aren’t saying much of interest.

Still plenty of nature to kill before humanity cannot survive

I think there may be debate on this point. Climate change may be self perpetuating soon (if it isn’t already) due to thawing meant reserves, etc.

I’m not sure if anyone in the scientific mainstream thinks that’ll push the climate to a point where we can’t survive, but that probably depends on our behaviour over the next few decades.

On May 24, the same day that Mr Swenson’s device was hacked, a Deebot X2 went rogue, and chased its owner’s dog around their Los Angeles home.

The robot was being steered from afar, with abusive comments coming through the speakers.

…

Late at night, an Ecovacs robot in El Paso started spewing racial slurs at its owner until he unplugged it.

The future is stupid.