RE: https://mastodon.social/@girlonthenet/117478824506123115

I'm seeing a LOT of complaints from .social people about changes in the latest version of Mastodon, but why the dev team would do this is really incomprehensible to me.

Gonna make an effort to stop saying "agentic AI" when "bot" is just as accurate without doing AI company's marketing for them.

Gonna start referring to the web client as "bare metal." It's not really more accurate or self-explanatory, but it sounds pretty bitchin.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/117473733391136911

Strangely validating that the inventor of the software uses the same client that I do, i.e. no client. (It's the best client.)

Retreating from the internet won't save human culture. AI companies pulp physical books for data. They mount cameras on cars and drones and delivery robots. They surveil from people's phones and watches and TVs and glasses and doorbells. Anything they can't scrape from the web, they'll scan IRL.

The better defense is a strong offense. Keep their costs high and their profits negative. Challenge every data center project. Push for our regulations, not theirs. Challenge them in court, and fund orgs that bring those challenges. Refuse to use AI products. Make sure a stink hangs over projects that do.

Most of all, support the people who make human culture.

I want to emphasize that I think Mastodon's new design and dev teams are going good work overall, but scrambling the UI and rounding the corners are moves that have made pretty much all computer UX less enjoyable over the past 5 years. They could stand to be a little more iconoclastic on that count.

"Whenever possible, we've based the redesign in existing UI patterns used frequently across the web, so that learning the new way would be easy." That seems like a pretty ungrounded working procedure, since there's no way to be sure how many people on the fediverse interact with those patterns elsewhere and whether or not they find those patterns comfortable or explicable. The one pattern you know they've all used is the one that's changing, so it seems like that should be the guiding star.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/117466983307949301

Adjusting to a new location for just about every UI element is going to be hella disorienting for a good long while.

When your friends who only use corporate social media platforms ask what the fediverse is good for, tell them that, if nothing else, it's a good place to find out what legitimate speech the corporation is quietly censoring and suppressing on the platform they use.

What if, and I'm just spitballing here, what if orgs and institutions deprived corporate platforms of the power to ban and demote by simply refusing to operate on them in the first place?

One thing I'm only just now appreciating is how the shift to "agentic AI" serves to undermine any privacy benefits you might get from using a local model. Maybe the model isn't sending every prompt back to a data center, but if you're handing tasks over to agents, then they're likely out there leaving a trail of data all across the internet — and maybe with a preference for sites that filter back to the model vendor.

Here's my regular request that you vote early if you can. That takes pressure off of poll workers on election day, and reduces the odds that people who can't vote early end up getting disenfranchised by long waits.
#usa #elections #voting

Since we're talking about feature updates, it might even be cool to let admins mute certain hashtags on local.

Maybe I'll submit some feature requests. Though, I believe that maintainers are focussed on feature parity with Mastodon at the moment.

An actual example is that we generally try to keep politics off of the Merveilles local timeline, which means the hashtagging those posts doesn't show them to the off-server people who've followed those tags.

Hometown's local-only function is great, but a function that keeps a public post from going to the local timeline might also be useful, e.g. when you want to post off-topic but still be searchable or have working hashtags.

#Meta pays neo-Nazis, bigots and disinfo spreaders to post: https://19thnews.org/2026/10/meta-anti-lgbtq-misinformation-midterm-elections/

Faraday kitchen

"Grandma, how did people keep refrigerators from leaking sensitive photos when you were my age?"

You almost certainly have enough cameras and microphones in your home. It's highly unlikely that adding more will improve your life in any way.

In the movies, taking up smoking usually indicates that a scientist is deeply worried about the consequences of their work, but yeah, chief, I'm sure it's just boundless optimism this time.