Amazing! Keep stepping on rakes, Reddit.
They’re really doing this right:
As explained above, the team started out with a shared view that Quote Posts can be misused. Many people simply do not want their content to be reframed by others; or they may find that if it is reposted, they receive unwelcome attention.
In order to mitigate these issues, we plan to include several features in our implementation:
You will be able to choose whether your posts can be quoted at all.
You will be notified when someone quotes you.
You will be able to withdraw your post from the quoted context at any time.
We also want to build a tight integration for Quote Posts with the reporting functionality, to help people to feel more safe.
They are indeed crap. The Reuters link isn’t even about this.
From SA’s perspective, this would be get in front of cameras and pound your chest news, not get an unnamed spokesperson to whisper about it to some unknown reporter news. Like, why would you want to dramatically punch back… but keep it low key? Makes no sense.
Yes. And the statute of limitations is a year into the next admin. This agreement is them acknowledging that they’re breaking the law.
Links or it didn’t happen
Mastodon.social has a “spam problem” because they’re the largest target. We’re lucky it’s them because they’re one of the few instances with the resources to take on the problem. They’ve also contributed a ton - in tools and strategies - to help other instances deal with the problem.
I’d be pretty skeptical of this. As you said, no one else is reporting what would be huge news. I can’t find the quote attributed to “a spokesperson for the South African government” anywhere else either. There isn’t a named person in the article. This source seems sketchy, though I can’t find any bias monitor info on them. That ‘from the desk of the president’ graphic is also just kinda weird.
The closest to this story I can find is this Feb 3rd story from a mining conference:
South Africa’s Minister of Minerals and Petroleum Resources, Gwede Mantashe, told delegates in his opening address that Africa should withhold minerals if funding is withdrawn.
Are you sure it’s appearance? You might sneeze with an accent.
Gotta love a silver lining.
I’m Hufflepuff or I’m NOTHING
The MAU counter at mastodon.social reset. It happened at about the same time they had an issue and had to recover data so I think it was related to that.
Definitely weird on first reading. New names often seem weird or dumb at first so maybe I’ll just get used to it. Anglicizing it might make sense? Fleamarkt?
Some truly heartbreaking shit going on.
In Uganda, the National Malaria Control Program has suspended spraying insecticide into village homes and ceased shipments of bed nets for distribution to pregnant women and young children, said Dr. Jimmy Opigo, the program’s director.
Medical supplies, including drugs to stop hemorrhages in pregnant women and rehydration salts that treat life-threatening diarrhea in toddlers, cannot reach villages in Zambia because the trucking companies transporting them were paid through a suspended supply project of the United States Agency for International Development, U.S.A.I.D.
Dozens of clinical trials in South Asia, Africa and Latin America have been suspended. Thousands of people enrolled in the studies have drugs, vaccines and medical devices in their bodies but no longer have access to continuing treatment or to the researchers who were supervising their care.
*smash cut to nine months later*
Agreed. It immediately went from being maybe the best app in the Fediverse to the 3rd best for its own service. I stopped using Pixelfed altogether until Pixelix got good enough to be a replacement.
I honestly don’t understand how getting the new app to feature parity with the old wasn’t maximum priority. It at least seems like it’s going to get there pretty soon.
I think it was more that he wanted to open source the app but had built it while he was learning so it was pretty messy and he felt insecure about it. So he rebuilt the app from scratch and open-sourced it. It just isn’t quite at feature parity to the old app yet. Pretty sure dark mode is coming in the next update though.
So far so good! Some very unscientific observations from spending an absurd amount of time scrolling local on pixelfed.social:
The people coming from Instagram and TikTok seem way less grumpy than the microbloggers. People are having a lot of fun and not complaining about much. It’s kind of a trip seeing happy, joyful people on the Fediverse to be honest. Everything in the world suuuuuuuucks right now, so it’s felt like a bit of a refuge. Sometimes I’ll accidentally bounce over to the global feed and oh man is the change in tone jarring.
People don’t seem to have a problem with servers like the Twitter migrants did. Folks are still talking about it a lot on Mastodon though. I’ve literally not seen a single post about Pixelfed being “too complicated” to succeed, whereas it was (and is) pretty common to see “this place is great and all, but…” posts in the microblogging neighbourhood. Not sure why this is but it might be because the people coming to Pixelfed are generally younger than Mastodon users. This is just a guess, but I’d estimate the average age of Mastodon users is maybe mid-40s. Most of the people pouring into Pixelfed appear to be in their mid-to-late-20s. Perhaps those folks are just more accustomed to servers through Discord and gaming? Though people are generally captioning photos and not writing out lists of things they’re unhappy about and they could also just be unaware of servers altogether…
Pixelfed is easily the most diverse “corner” of the Fediverse now. Fedi is very white but a large number coming over now aren’t. Pixelfed.social has probably gone from being 75% men to 75% women in the last few weeks. Diversity is the best possible thing for the social web.
I’ve seen a bunch of people on Instagram promoting Feb 1st as “Global Switch Day” so hopefully it’ll keep blowing up.
That’s literally what they’re doing: