While the study itself is a good read and I agree with the conclusions—Mastodon, and decentralized social media need better moderation tools—it’s hard to not read the Verge headline as misleading. One of the study authors gives more context here https://hachyderm.io/@det/110769470058276368. Basically most of the hits came from a large Japanese instance that no one federates with; the author even calls out that the blunt instrument most Mastodon admins use is to blanket defederate with instances hosted in Japan due to their more lax (than the US) laws around CSAM. But the headline seems to imply that there’s a giant seedy underbelly to places like mastodon.social[1] that are rife with abuse material. I suppose that’s a marketing problem of federated software in general.

1. There is a seedy underbelly of mainstream Mastodon instances, but it’s mostly people telling you how you’re supposed to use Mastodon if you previously used Twitter.

I’ve been using wefwef, but I might check out Connect if that’s a feature. Thanks for the tip!

Not terrible thus far. Getting over a cold and am already sick of hearing about the Twitter rebrand, but otherwise better than the past few days.

Really starting to wish that Lemmy had a way to block entire instances. It feels silly that my choices are to either block everything labeled as NSFW (including discussions, comics, etc that aren’t necessarily sexual in nature but not appropriate for work), or have to block an endless sea of furry porn on the “All” timeline, one community at a time (no judgement, just not what I’m on Lemmy for).

Ah, so they’re blaming the people responsible then? Good good, carry on.

On the one hand I’ve gotten a lot of reading time and have been enjoying my current book (Children of Time) much more than the last book I tried (The Dark Forest [yeah, I know it’s a modern classic of the genre, I just really didn’t like the translation]). On the other, I was with my wife all day in the ER because she developed a kidney infection. Everyone’s fine now though so… pretty mixed so far?

I’ve been reevaluating what a real vacation is recently. I travel a lot, but at this phase in my life that mostly means figuring out how to childproof and do childcare in a new area. It’s not a bad thing per se, but it does require a reframing of what a vacation means, because it no longer means a time to relax and unwind. If we’re going by the definition I’m working into life now, then it’s only been a few weeks, otherwise, about 3 years or so.

One of my big life stressors was time limited, and that time expired today with everything getting done that needed to for said stressor to go away, so the week is starting our pretty well.

They got off surprisingly easy for doing so, too: https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-york-lawyers-sanctioned-using-fake-chatgpt-cases-legal-brief-2023-06-22/. The $5k they were fined amounts to roughly 14 billable hours if they’re at the NY average of $357 an hour https://www.attorneyatwork.com/solo-and-small-firm-lawyer-hourly-rates/#h-the-top-10-states-for-lawyer-hourly-rates.

As you said, it’s exceedingly unlikely that Google would just disappear one day. AOL still exists. Yahoo still exists. These large companies don’t disappear generally, they just become shadows of their former selves and reasonably attractive acquisition targets. And in that event, there’d be ample notice for everyone to switch to alternatives. If, for the sake of argument, Google were to actually disappear immediately, it implies something very bad has happened in the world.

Just one person’s opinion, but I switched to an Apple phone last year after several years using top of the line Android devices, and I’ve been really happy with it. The features are all rock solid, and their particular brand of walled garden is one that I don’t tend to mind much.