I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, Kbin is the Jamaica of the Fediverse, a land of special people where champions grow.

@PugJesus weren’'t you looking for a spot to perform baptisms?

Kevin McCarthy and the GOP right now

It is on Kbin. Lemmy doesn’t have that capacity yet as far as I know. It’s one of the main reasons I recommend the former - Kbin bridges the gap between Mastodon and Lemmy, and includes functionality from both types of instances. Following users increases your feed content here exponentially.

Great username. Worth a follow.

"I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Spezymandias, Admin of Kings;
Look on my Reddit, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Whatever happened to Saturday Night?

The news here is that, contrary to popular belief, 5% of NFTs actually still hold some value.

I think the Fediverse.observer stats for the 19th are off - it’s showing that drop across all software categories - Mastodon and Kbin show the same dip.

Silently hoists the Jolly Roger…

It’s always wise to satisfy the requests of time squirrels. Keeps them away from one’s nuts.

Damn, this is so good I had to translate the lyrics:

The red trail leads into the forest
White snow

The red trail leads into the forest
White snow

Somewhere there, my fiance got lost
He met the devil even though he was baptized
The red trail leads into the forest
White snow

We were walking with him for about a month
He was completely white

Like a mysterious face in the sky
The moon was white

She wove a periwinkle into his wreath
And he asked whom I loved

Oh, we walked with him for a month
He was completely white

He hugged me so tight
Although I didn’t want to
He hugged me so tight
Although I didn’t want to

Those hugs are like the claws of a beast
And was it my fault
Who hugged me in spite of that
What I didn’t want

The red trail leads into the forest
White snow

The red trail leads into the forest
White snow

Somewhere there, my fiance got lost
He met the devil even though he was baptized
The red trail leads into the forest
White snow
White snow

Had a feeling this is how the political dynamics would play out.

Trump made a lot of enemies in the GA GOP when he first dragged Raffensberger through the mud and then cost GA a senate seat by telling his supporters the special election was rigged. I’ve said it before - those good ole boys down south never forget a slight. Hell, they’re still pissed off at Sherman down there, and that was 170 years ago.

Kemp knows that stepping in now to disqualify Willis would give the Dems a lot of ammunition for turning GA blue in 2024 - I can’t see him sticking his neck out for Trump here.

Abandon society - yes. Commune - JFC no. Vagabond gypsy caravan? Possibly, but only if there are werewolves and mysteriously sexy tarot card casters involved.

The instance owner determines what’s on their “public” tagged activity feeds. If they remove the “public” tag from a post or user account, it’s restricted from non-authenticated requests from outside servers. You’re correct that this shouldn’t grab user IP addresses, but they could if an instance owner is including that information in what they mark as “public” profile feed data. I should reiterate that I know of no instance that does this, but the capability is there in theory (and I do know that certain forum software packages outside the Fediverse collect and publish this level of information, although it’s a dying practice).

I’m not advocating instance owners turn everything private, but it’s clear they’re going to have to examine what they’re providing through their feeds to Threads if they’re serious about their users’ security and privacy. The safest bet is to defederate from Threads until it’s clear what Meta’s intentions are (aside from their rhetoric, which is always deceitful when it comes to user privacy).

As to what Meta will do, they absolutely will scrape that activity data for marketing use, if they aren’t already. It’s what their entire business model on Facebook is built around - targeted ads based on user activity. Anything they say about protecting that data is lip service at best given their past performances and lawsuits. It also very likely that they’ll merge it with their existing data hoards, and do their best to de-anonymize accounts so that they can increase their data accuracy and thus their profit margin.

Looks like there’s a lot of FUD around this, so I decided to jump into the ActivityPub spec and see exactly what they can and can’t get with the spec as is.

First off, they cannot get a users individual IP unless the instance owner publishes it in the profile data as part of a “public” activity stream. I don’t know of any instance that does this currently (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong).

It looks like what Meta is looking to do is scrape the information in the “public” tagged activity streams:

In addition to [ActivityStreams] collections and objects, Activities may additionally be addressed to the special “public” collection, with the identifier https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public.

Activities addressed to this special URI shall be accessible to all users, without authentication.

This is similar to what most instances do to show the posts of a user or community - they send a request to get “public” tagged data to publish to their end users. Within this data is all the activity information on that post - who upvoted what and who, and who commented. Again, this is the same way federation works now - your server has an activity stream of all your followed and followers that it can make available to view by tagging their activity as “public”. Many instances have this information tagged as “public” as a default.

Now, this system works fine if you’re dealing with small actors that don’t have nefarious designs on the network, or the resources to dominate it.

When you have a digital behemoth with grand AI designs that’s already embroiled in lawsuits where it was grabbing your medical data and regularly allows law enforcement to stroll through its records, it’s an entirely different situation. Meta has the power and capacity to not only engage in an “embrance, extend, extinguish” campaign against the Fediverse, but also to seriously threaten the privacy and well-being of Fediverse users in a way no single instance owner can.

I think the solution here will be for individual instance owners to harden their security and if not outright de=federate from Threads, ensure that posts are private by default and that their users are made well aware in the TOS that following a Threads user will result in sharing data about their profile that could (and most likely will) be matched back to their Facebook account.

Instances that don’t allow visibility control on posts, like Kbin and Lemmy, should look at adding an option to post only to the local server, or have the capacity to block threads.net outgoing publication based on user profile settings.

Instances that don’t allow follow request filtering probably should look at adding it (Mastodon has it implemented - Kbin and I think Lemmy would need to catch up) - otherwise users could be unaware that they’re sending their data to threads.net when someone from that service follows them.

I think it goes without saying that any data Meta gets will get the AI treatment - both to identify users and to sell your activity to marketers. That activity is the real goldmine for them - that’s a stream of revenue for marketing that rivals what Meta tracks on its own platform.

As such, it may be worthwhile for instance owners to look at removing voting and boosting counts from the “public” activity feed. This would mean more fragmentation for communities whose populations span instances (vote counts would be more off than they are now), but it would prevent bad actors from easily scraping that data for behavioral analysis.

All in all, though, I don’t believe it’s going to be a positive event when Threads does start federating. One of the nice things about the Fediverse is that the learning curve is high enough to keep the idiot count down, and I don’t really see our content or commentary here improving once Meta’s audience enters the space.

Loving your Mongolian metal collection - keep posting!

Lyrics to this one (machine translation from Mongolian):

The dream went back and forth along a familiar street
The loan of the eastern cape is clearly visible
I am waiting for my monthly salary
After all, it’s been six months

My poor country
It was a difficult time
My poor country
It was a difficult time

When it’s time for spring, the storm will slap you on the cheek
All cooperative stores went bankrupt and closed their doors
It’s winter time, so it’s going to be snowy
Drunkards who are not afraid of death roam the night streets

My poor country
It was a difficult time
My poor country
It was a difficult time

Actually Kbin is great for tracking shitheads, which is why I’m able to call this guy out. Downvotes are visible on the activity tab of each post and comment, and this troll loves downvote spam - as you can see, he downvoted my comment above. He’s the kind that will stalk your account and downvote everything to try and get your attention.

In general, 99.9% of the community here is awesome, and there’s a lot of support between users here. It’s actually the best experience I’ve had online in many years (and I’ve been online since the early 90s). One of my goals in calling out the trolls when they decide to target me is to keep the community enjoyable, as I’m quite certain I’m not their only intended victim.

Good ole mass media, telling you something big is going down, and giving you absolutely no clue as to how to get involved.

The FCC has made the comment process extremely difficult to navigate, but it looks like the hearing is on docket 23-293 (commenters, please correct me if I’m wrong). You should be able use the form here to place a comment on the proceeding. Use 23-293 in the proceedings field to bring it up for selection.

Here’s a more detailed view of the Media and Democracy Project’s petition, which includes a supporting filing from Jamie Kellner, former president of Fox Broadcasting.

You’ve got one on kbin too - @some_guy - a racist, bigoted fascist who likes to obsessively troll people and try to dox them.

It took me a moment to determine whether or not you were the same person, but unlike him, you can speak in complete sentences. As such, I thought I’d give you and @someguy3 a heads up that your good names are being dragged through the mud.