okay fedi reporting back from my trip to bluesky

I’d just like to say some of these interactions were genuine while others I believe to be more paranoid. It’s one of the reasons why I do personal reviews of problematic instances even from trusted sources. I like to make an informed decision.

I think by the time I noticed these things being an increasingly common pattern and how fedi can be a place️ I had already become used to using fedi as my preferred choice and I didn’t really wanna go anywhere else.

it’s actually a miracle I stayed around after the first week lol

fedi sometimes be like

*interact with a post, someone dms me shocked*

"why are you interacting with that person"
who
"that person"
oh $X
"yeah, I can’t believe you would knowing what they did"
what, what did they do
"Oh, you didn’t know?"
no?
*gives me an entire filing cabinet of obscure fedi politics, lore*
how the fuck was I supposed to know that…

(This hasn’t happened recently thank god but when I first came here a decent chunk of interaction was like this).

@[email protected] yeah I find it a waste of time to focus on the ~15-20 million voters lost between Biden and Harris. What about the 71 million red voters?

I didn’t want to write a callout post… but I’d just like to take a moment to give my gratitude to someone in our community. Someone who I wouldn’t be able to run this instance without and someone who I wouldn’t have bothered coming to fedi (or, at the very least wouldn’t have established a wide variety of connections without). That person is @[email protected] who goes by @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @hazelnoot @[email protected]

While she isn’t very public with her administrative actions like I am (she doesn’t post about them much, nor does she really talk about them) I would like to take the time to thank her for several things.

Hazel has contributed the following:
* She made a bot that attaches to sharkey’s database and helps keep my instances safe. It uses a regex filter to "scan" (it doesn’t actually interpret context) for slurs and euphemisms used for hateful ideologies. It’s called modshark, and she works on this for free without a penny.
* She made a suite of Postgres queries to perform various maintenance tasks. It’s open source because she wants it to be available for everyone. https://github.com/warriordog/fedi-admin-scripts/ in fact, in order to "fix" instance search I relied on this. I used https://github.com/warriordog/fedi-admin-scripts/blob/main/src/full-text-index/create-full-text-index.sql and it would not have been possible to fix search without it.
* She has networked so many people together for various things. One of them was getting me in contact with several upcoming AP instance implementations so that I could talk about my grievances with fediverse moderation and the problems instance software should anticipate
* She has stood up for me time and time again, from standing up to Amelia (which I did back) to standing up for me during meta when I felt nobody else had my back
* She is involved in several mod channels when it comes to administrative action. I often preemptively ping her in my threads regarding moderation because she has a very fair judgement and I highly value her input.
* She has spent time drafting, revising and reviewing various announcements and rule changes. It’s hard to emphasize this enough, but between her and I we are able to make a lot of things formal sounding and without much left to the imagination. A highly valuable skill when it comes to making things like a terms of service and a code of conduct.
* She has spent so much of her time finding potential vulnerabilities in AP implementations. Without her, there would be 22 CVEs of various degrees bound to be exploited in the wild and without much way of knowing. I am extremely proud of her for disclosing these to not only sharkey’s team, upstream misskey, iceshrimp, firefish and several other forks that were vulnerable.
* She has worked on a C# library in combination with @[email protected] for ActivityPub & ActivityStreams, providing valuable insight and information to how these can be implemented and how they are implemented and used today.
* She has worked on several upcoming AP implementations (although I am going to refrain from listing them as I do not know which ones I can talk about and which ones I’d be announcing to the public for the first time)

I would so much appreciate it if everyone could give Hazel a thank you. Her work is invaluable to our community. She might not see that (very humble, she pretends like she’s just nobody) but I can and I hope y’all can too. Big round of applause for Hazel, an awesome person who keeps us safe.

Hazel I know this is going to bring you to tears, I mean every word in this. You should feel proud of what you have accomplished and what you will accomplish

i am actually upset at that, like "you know how your sacred place was shut down and how you're desperate for a new one? how we offered you one? yeah haha funny story we're going under now too bye". gave instance users literally 1 hour of notice before turning off the instance permanently that's fucked up, and before that spent the time "joking" about it shutting down in 2 weeks.

this is also just even more fucked up that ggf knowingly accepted eepy.zone users and then shut down

don't tell them chat

Ouch. seeing eepy.zone users with "migrated to grimgreenfo.rest" in their handles. Yikes.

@[email protected] As a member of several marginalized groups I applaud this post and as someone who is in charge of drafting and ratifying code of conducts for various communities ​:neocat_floof_explode:​

@[email protected] Where else will i have my reactionary discourse for shits and giggles? Gotta kick them while they're down

(i really wish people would leave us the fuck alone instead of entering a debate especially with how emotional things are rn)

@[email protected] May I add one? I haven't exactly been staying off the internet but what I have done is make several posts to comfort those around me and to reassure them.

One last thing... I promise. Please do not refer to the people voting red as "psychopaths" or "lacking empathy". People who struggle with feeling empathy are stigmatized enough, and psychopath isn't really a medical term. Do not make people struggling with mental health feel like shit. Do not say that it's because people do not have internal monologue or because people are inept. This country suffers from a lack of available mental health resources, and it struggles with a lack of proper education. It does not fall all on the uninformed or the mentally unwell. I have known people who struggle with empathy, and while they can't understand their friend's hardships they can see the pain on their face. They still try to take care of them and it's not like they become a complete asshole with no regard to anyone in the world.

​:neodog_pat:​

@[email protected] what part of the US are you in? I am assuming somewhere near US Central?

@[email protected] so whatcha doing with your free time now that everything is disrupted (I'm personally just chilling out waiting for the next wave of storms. doing some misc sysadmin stuff)

@[email protected] lol. i woke up this morning 4 minutes before my alarm by my weather radio going "TORNADO WARNING". I was taking a shower when the sirens went off and then I got dressed and ready for work after they stopped. I was then texted "work is closed for the day"

@[email protected] @[email protected] have i ever had a positive conversation in regards to AP or misskey