Joshua Nozzi @joshuanozzi@appdot.net

Hi, all - please welcome @keir, a former ADN lurker like me, and current coworker. He’ll fit in with the likes of Steve. 😒

😋

Many thanks to Hugo ( @mastohost ) for his patience and especially for his swift and masterful handling of our migration, free of charge.

Follow that account for service announcements that affect our community, and keep him in mind if you ever encounter the question, “where to host an instance?” 😋

Welp - welcome to our new home! Media attachments are still being transferred (including appdot.net-hosted accounts’ avatars and banners), so you’ll likely still see some missing stuff for a bit, but all should be well! Please let me know of any non-missing-media-related issues you notice.

I like to think Jones and Cleese would appreciate this humo(u)r.

Friendly reminder: 3 hours until we start the migration (11AM EST/4PM GMT).

Hello, all! We're (finally) ready to move to Masto.host!

Tomorrow (Wednesday, January 22nd) starting at 4PM GMT (11AM EST; 8AM PST), Hugo from Masto.host will begin. He anticipates up to an hour of downtime.

Once his part is complete, I need only change a DNS record to point the appdot.net domain to the new instance. The TTL value was set very low more than a week ago, so that change should propagate very quickly.

// @emery

Hi, all! I've started the process of changing the authoritative name servers for the appdot.net domain so it'll have a chance to propagate and have a low time-to-live so when the instance is migrated to Masto.host I can minimize downtime. I don't anticipate a service interruption, but @emery and I will watch it during our waking hours to make sure I haven't screwed up a zone record entry. 😋

Wonderful night with a wonderful witch. Nathan and I spent some time with a friend of ours. ❤️

With their help, @emery and I should be able to make a smooth transition and solve some software update and database management difficulties all in one.

As to community ethos, nothing is changing. This is and will remain a safe space. ❤️

Thanks, @emery, for creating such a wonderful community! I hope to be as hands-off and benign a community admin as you’ve been. ❤️

All: Emery and I have already taken the first technical steps and must wait for domain propagation to start moving things that need moving. This will be a multi-step process but I hope to minimize downtime. I’ve decided on Masto.host’s managed plan to minimize tech overhead and have opened dialogue with them about migrating.

LOL: “Forever 21, Dead at 35”

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/30/765699885/nothing-lasts-forever-21-discovers-another-clothing-chain-files-for-bankruptcy

Yeah? Well they’ve been adding sugar and fat to children for YEARS and nobody’s trying to save adults from eating THEM, are they?! 😡

LOL, holy shit.

Tomorrow’s headline: “Fox News’ own Neil Cavuto died adulterously last evening in a tragic homosexual accident involving Satan. We go now live to Sarah Sanders. Sarah?”

https://twitter.com/teamcavuto/status/1167182406278889472?s=21

Overall, if it's thought out well and takes an effort to become a trusted contributor to the system (and the score is maintained by "most recent activity"), it should empower users to engage their own filters so the Fediverse can Fediverse and the client apps can simply ignore toots from low quality / filtered sources.

Win/win.

Meanwhile, client apps can simply support polling (and contributing to) the rating system, rather than sticking their necks out and getting rating-spammed by angry bigots ranting about "muh freedomz!" by maintaining a list of singled-out instances. The system is then opt-in and the data maintained by the community. This also means we don't have to rely on - ahem - a stubborn code owner to adopt the standard within Mastodon itself.

The tags would be curated by users with moderator-level karma, which itself can be based in part on the "accuracy" (agreeing votes) of your tagging activities.

It may even be beneficial to add a time window to the scoring system, so that only the past-so-many-months are considered. This can both eliminate bad actors (spam accounts to affect vote) as well as give a Fediverse member a chance to clean up its act and recover.

What I envision is a rating system that lets established accounts (like those with a minimum karma and public identification) up/down-vote a service, or tag a service with a topic ("General", "Techies", "Artists") or label ("Bigotry"), and vote on those tags (which would help avoid unfair labels being attached to a service), showing the tags only if they reach some threshold.

Interesting. Looking at the ActivityPub documentation, there seems to be top-level built-in support for Likes and Dislikes being two separate things (as well as Undo actions for a dis/like). That means the protocol underlying the Fediverse could support a StackExchange-like voting and tagging system for a service to rate domains/services in the Fediverse.

Imagine a scoring system Mastodon clients could use to auto-filter low-quality/specific-tagged origins... Hmmm...