@sonya @csilverman oh, m.s is blocking some instances? #til
@abackstrom @sonya Curious, how do you know this? On what grounds is he blocking them?
I couldn't find a Mastodon CoC anywhere. I found this (https://mastodon.social/terms) which, unfortunately, doesn't have anything close to a CoC at all.
I realize that they're still trying to get all their ducks in order and legal docs take time, but having a clear "no abuse" policy seems pretty important, especially given that rampant abuse is the reason why a lot of us are here.
@csilverman @abackstrom here's some background on this:
1) https://community.highlandarrow.com/notice/816385
2) https://community.highlandarrow.com/notice/807252
(partisan sources but still good for getting up to speed)
I didn't realize how much of the Fediverse was blocked from .social until I switched to Maly because .social was struggling with bear the traffic. Then I was pissed that this wasn't made clear up-front.
@abackstrom @csilverman IIRC the blocked and/or sandboxed instances are shitposter.club, freezepeach.xyz, gs.smuglo.li, and community.highlandarrow.com
but there may be more that are lower-volume so I'm not aware of them in general, or that I'm forgetting at the moment
@csilverman @abackstrom to be absolutely explicit, I think any instance admin should be able to block whatever other instances they want – but they should also be totally transparent about it with new users, so that people know what they're signing up for
@sonya @abackstrom Oy—sounds like a mess. I'll be honest, shitposter and freezepeach do not sound like sources of high-quality people, but blocking communities out of personal spite is not cool at all.
Obviously admins who want to play God will do whatever they like, and their communities will suffer for it. I think the benefit of a clearly stated CoC, though, would be that you can't just ban people you dislike—there's an expectation that you follow your own rules.
@csilverman it depends on your taste — I would be disappointed to miss out on posts like this :) https://shitposter.club/notice/2301547
@sonya ...hahaha what?
(Or maybe this is essentially performance art for the sake of art, and I shouldn't even be attempting to make sense of something on a site called "Shitposter Club".)
@csilverman that user has a Markov bot hooked up to their account, so it's like half auto-generated nonsense and half human-written posts
I love it
@csilverman it could be that a person curates the Markov output and only posts the best tidbits
I recommend playing around with https://ermarian.net/services/converters/markov/words
it's really fun! song lyrics, article snippets, whatever
@sonya That's hilarious. I love these things.
I'm trying to avoid any mention of Trump these days, but someone did a Trumpbot—powered, apparently, by a neural network—and the results are fascinating; basically what Trump would say if he was a lot more honest/self-aware:
http://bit.ly/2oeWoy4
http://bit.ly/2oOOHwl
http://bit.ly/2oOVRAC
http://bit.ly/2p7aGOh
Honestly, I'm not fully convinced these aren't written by a person. Or maybe I just don't want to admit AI's gotten that smart.