RE: https://wandering.shop/@proprietor/117463514849459992

If you are someone who keeps a quiet alternate account as a bolt-hole, be aware that a number of long-established instances are taking actions such as the one described below.

A very broad and ongoing malware operation has unattended Fediverse accounts being compromised and repurposed by malicious actors. More Admins of actively and responsibly managed instances are needing to take more steps to mitigate risks.

Log in to your secondary accounts every so often, please.

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/117457406697043745

Also, many of the accounts posting this link appear to be established (as in, not recently created) fediverse account that have "zombied", resuming activity after a long period idle.

This is likely happening because someone has obtained compromised password lists from somewhere, and has scripted trial-and-error email/password combinations against various instances.

Please do not re-use passwords. Use a pw generator/locker, and 2FA if possible.

Shout out to the Fedi-net folk to find if I know someone who is using Ghost in the context of a small non-profit org cultivating member growth and engagement?

I'm wondering if the available APIs and integrations could sufficiently replace an ageing stack built on a wobbly, free-tiers Wordpress+G-Suite plus some commercial member management plug-ins. As yet, I'm a volunteer with no budget, I'm scoping out "does this use case exist with this framework" to build out candidate systems & comparison

o hai, @Iconfactory ... I finally got around to giving Tot a good runthrough having downloaded it months ago when I was too damn busy. Just paid for it as soon as I got started, it's that good. Have a question though .. it is a completely separate purchase for each device, or should the purchase sync with the icloud account?

I'll consider it, but $25 each for 2 macs, iPhone, iPad and watch is where I need to discuss budget with my household partner.

Fediverse, tell me about Open Source options for a CRM system for small/medium non-profit enterprises.

I'm considering pitching another project for a sovereign/local tech stack review for non-tech small enterprises. Seems really hard to pry them out of cloud-hosted enterprise software.

I'd love to find a way to be a fractional Technical Services&Implementations analyst for 3-4 small orgs, rather than sell my soul for a corporate paycheque forcing 100's of clients onto one commercial system.

Chapmans: "Elbows Up!" Ice Cream & Cones.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/chapman-s-ice-cream-ontario-shifting-from-u-s-suppliers-9.7322487

This is an example of business systems solving. Not just a "oh, we can't get that in Canada, guess we'll keep buying US". Not EVEN "Oh, we can't get that in Canada, lets find an overseas supplier even if it costs more". Chapmans went with "Oh, we can't get that in Canada. And it's not really part of our own core product line, it's a supply we need. SO LETS HELP A NEIGHBOURING CANADIAN BUSINESS BUY THE EQUIPMENT THEY NEED."

I have been having really expansive experiences this past week with the https://reimaginefestival.ca, and I see we have others engaged from CoSocial - @dawn is co-hosting a session.

The Festival is still open for participants, and cheap seats are still starting at "free" though I'm sure they can also use whatever registration fees people are able to contribute. One thing I've sussed out over the week is the platform itself is a co-creation experiement and is not just a static tool being used.

Devine is now open to all.

https://divine.video/video/iMnmDH6PEvv

Mastodon has been the Kleenex of Activity-pub framework products for a long time, and that is actually harmful to the rest of the fediverse, all the other great platforms, our communities and our *potential* community members who cannot wrap their heads around something named "Mastodon" or cannot get over that one lousy experience they had in 2022 that had the name "Mastodon" connected to it.

There's a lot of feathers ruffling over Mastodon-the-corporate-entity updating and publicly clarifying their trademark "fair use" criteria.

You know what would be really really great for the Fediverse? if we all went "yah, OK, good idea" and seriously stopped co-branding all our servers with Mastodon anyway (beyond the usual/common "powered by ..." footer byline that is both expected and required of most open source licensed platforms)

Promote YOUR COMMUNITY and YOUR SERVICE on the timelines.

Still bummed to be missing #fedicon, but this wedding has an open bar.

As "finishing school" is about to transition into "and still unemployed" in 2-3 weeks, I've gone ahead and lined up another round of my absolutely-not-career-track side-hustle.

Are you in KW or SWOnt and get cold feet in the colder weather? Unplug from the matrix and come knit socks!

Doing 2 repeats of a Sixty Minute Sock (everything you need, but tiny) then a full 3-session Sock school between mid Sept-Mid Oct.

https://flyingsquirrelfineyarns.com/products/a-sock-in-sixty-or-so-minutes-with-johanna-september-20-10-00

One of the biggest, possibly THE biggest challenge of the Open Social Web is funding its operations. This place is built largely as a labour of love by volunteers who have an hour or a few free in a week, and possibly not on a regular basis.

It's more than just your personal Mastodon login, too.

Whether you know it or not, IFTAS is among the services that you benefit from, even though they don't offer a Mastodon server for your posting shenannigans. Consider donating.

https://about.iftas.org/2026/07/30/deprecation-notice-cariad-domain-observatory-transition/

Kid is of the opinion that you can add chonk to what is already borb and get chonky borb; I feel more that borb implies chonk because borb without chonk is just birb.

Kid and I did lighten up on the walk home, getting into a set theory and language discussion on the interrelationships of birb, chonk, and borb after passing a dozen or so fat robins having a field day on a wormy lawn in the rain.

I was told I have to ask the fediverse: is borb a special case of chonk, implying that all borb are chonk and thus “chonky borb” is redundant, or does chonk remain a valid additive to borb thus implying that “chonk” and “borb” are distinct but have an intersection?

Particularly if you cannot actually report a post they've made - there's nothing a moderator can do about an account just existing if it is not presenting a technical, security, or community threat.

I usually tell users "if in doubt, report it, we'd love a chance to check it out" but I think I finally hit my line on that after a whole heap of reports with no content because someone has just discovered this and thinks it is something it's not.

Please don't report accounts for just existing.

I've been here almost 9 years and am fiiiinally starting to feel the burden of "moderation" work. At least for the moment there's a rock vs. hard place situation for people onboarding new users. It's almost impossible for even experienced admins to examine a request for account and know for sure that it's a real person or not.

But the knee-jerk reporting of *identified* automated accounts is just layering it on, badly.

We probably don't need reports of accounts that SAY they're bots.

We need to understand something: automation has been developing for years and much of it is live and much of it is *good*. Everything from trends cataloguing to fedi-wide search to things like tags .pub, which I think suffered from an unintended loss of guardrails when it interacted with something else, not any malicious intent.

The latest one seems to be automated boosting of publicly trending posts. Not new, not problematic, just recently noticed amidst the other anxiety.

So this wave of LLM-based agents trying to sign up for Fediverse servers then abuse them is bad. Fucking dismal, particularly for small and intentional community servers moderated by 1 or a few people, who are trying to be welcoming but have to manually approve every sign-up.

But it's having 2nd and 3rd order effects on other admins, too, as people are now super-sensitized to this and not distinguishing one type of behaviour from another and reporting everything they think is a "bot".

Hey Fedi-fam, I dragged my old friend and colleague out of hibernation long enough to log in for the first time in a while.

Say hi to @DerekWong ... I'm trying to convince him to help us run the Canadian corner of the 'verse.