(Sorry, there doesn't seem to be a way to notify just the local instance)
The server is already running out of disk space! I'm swapping out the object storage from DB to an object store, which should fix the problem and probably be snappier. The site may run a bit slow during the migration but it seems to be a transparent process.
This is super exciting for me. I'm still wearing a Pebble Time Steel with the Rebble firmware and this can only do good things for it.
Lady Heatherington likes this.
Attention Troubleshooters:
If you ever feel stressed out, overwhelmed, and helpless, just take a breath and find one thing you can do to make another Citizen's day just a little bit better.
But don't take too long, or you will be terminated for neglecting your assigned mission.
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@dshan
How wonderful.
4BTC is almost exactly the fine for tampering with Computer property.
Thank you for confessing your crime. Your loyalty has been noted.
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like this
Today I went to a freecycling party hosted by a friend! We all brought clothes/books/art supplies/etc we didn't want, perused everyone else's stuff and took what we wanted, and then divided any remaining items into categories to donate (e.g. one person takes all the art supplies to our local used craft supply store, another person takes all the clothes to a local thrift store, etc).
It was very fun! And I never would have thought of throwing a party like that, so I'm posting about it here to pass along the idea to others :)
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As someone who is totally blind, the Fediverse is the only place where I have ever been able to follow people such as photographers, artists, or even those who post pictures of their cats or the food they ate. The reason is that most of them use alt text. They take the time to describe the images that my screen reader can't recognise. Some write the descriptions themselves, and others use tools such as altbot. Some worry that their descriptions aren't good enough, especially when they are new at this. Let me assure you, not only are they good enough, they are extremely appreciated! If the rest of the world thought as you did, it would be a much better place. Don't hesitate to ask if you're unsure of something, but never think that we don't notice your effort.
#appreciation #accessibility #altbot #alttext #blind #blindness #fediverse #gratitude #images #inclusivity #peoplewhocare #pictures #technology
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@Nat Oleander It's just a pity that if you post about an obscure enough niche topic like I do, it's the more difficult to make image posts perfectly accessible to everyone, the more obscure the topic is. For the more obscure the topic is, the more you have to describe, and the more you have to explain. (Caution: Never put explanations into alt-text! They must go where everyone can access them.)
I currently write the longest image descriptions in the whole Fediverse by a wide margin. But they may not actually be accessible enough, even though I describe all my original images twice.
The short descriptions in the alt-text don't always contain text transcripts, especially not all of them, and being only short descriptions, they aren't full, detailed visual descriptions either. The long descriptions for the same images in the post regularly end up with a five-digit character count. They may not be accessible because they're way too long. But sometimes they're the only place where all text transcripts can be found. And they are the only place where explanations can be found.
So the consequence should be that I quit posting my original images because they're impossible to make perfectly accessible to everyone, at least as long as there is no rock-solid definition for what's actually required in image descriptions in my obscure edge-case. But there isn't even any consensus on whether text that's illegible or that's so tiny that it's basically invisible must be transcribed if it can be sourced.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Public Social Media
The choice is clear.
Mastodon
Owned by: No one and everyone
Structure: Public non-profit
Number of distributed nodes: Thousands
Post length: 500 characters and more
Can edit? Yes
Bluesky
Owned by: Venture capitalists
Structure: Corporate for profit
Number of "distributed" nodes: One
Post length: 300 characters
Can edit? No
Daniel Lowe likes this.
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Today's #DynDNSHistory brought to you by @jtk , who asks about early or interesting abuse-related issues.
There's lots here so this one will be a thread...
The first one that jumps to mind is credit card fraud. This isn't really surprising/interesting in the later days, but what surprised me was that people used stolen credit cards even when we were just taking donations.
Like, really? You're going to abuse some kids who are just trying to run a free service? Not cool.
1/?
Daniel Lowe reshared this.
Once we started doing paid services, the credit card fraud really picked up - in some cases it just seemed like they were using us to check stolen cards before using them for something bigger, other times they were really trying to get services.
I never quite understood the logic of the second one - you have to know it's not gonna last for long when you're using someone else's card. But maybe people don't notice and report the fraud?
4/?
This one led to some of the most interesting things about abuse - getting surprising new domain names! When someone bought a domain with a stolen credit card, there was usually no way for us to cancel the registration (eventually we could if we caught it fast enough, but by the time there was a chargeback it'd for sure be too late).
So, we figured - we paid for these, I guess they're ours now! I don't remember any specifics, but there was definitely some weird ones in there.
5/?
I don't remember if we ever turned any of them into actual customer domains for our free services - I don't THINK any of them happened to be good for that purpose.
Credit card fraud was a huge pain back then (not that it isn't now) - there wasn't nearly the range of intelligent analysis and risk assessment that's out there today. And as I recall we got chargebacks via fax (or had to respond via fax, maybe both). The bad old days...
6/?
Next time on #DynDNSHistory I'll talk about credit card processing - it was so much more complicated than just getting a Stripe account those days.
The hoops and shenanigans we had to go through as a small start-up doing online card processing in those early days were wild.
7/7
we’re they using you as a registrar / reseller?
I never knew that DynDNS was in that line of business.
I think your "latest" only applies from the time you started following, but if you go to my profile, you can see everything you have access to. Some of this is probably bound by federation etiquette - if you were to follow someone on another server, the system wouldn't download everything they'd ever posted.
The bullseye icon also shows all the conversations on the server you have access to.
I've been trying to settle in a bit on Friendica. Grouping my relationships into "Circles," reminiscent of G+. Unlike Mastodon, there doesn't seem to be any hashtag lists, which I miss. The interface would accommodate them though, I think.
Losing nearly all my followers is kind of tough. There's no Mastodon -> Friendica migration. On the other hand, maybe it's like a mark-and-sweep gc. The followers who actually wanted to follow me still are.
I'm still intending this to be a public instance, but I want to do some theming and policy work before I start putting it on directories.
I created this Friendica instance to be my new home now that octodon.social is shutting down in a bit. I was hoping some people would follow me from Facebook but you can guess how that's going.
I think I actually prefer the Friendica interface for my Fedi content. That was unexpected.
Huh, Octodon is shutting down? Weird, but I guess I haven't heard anything from them in quite a while.
Guess that's my backup account out, then. Not that I've really used that one since setting this one up.
Susan Rati Lane
in reply to Daniel Lowe • •Daniel Lowe
in reply to Daniel Lowe • •- Battery lasts ~7 days on a charge
- Sunlight readable screen
- Button-based interface without touchscreen
- Comparatively very cheap
- Comparatively slim reasonable size
- Great app distribution
- (before the company went under) you could live-program your watch on the web. When you clicked upload on the website editor, it would send it to your phone, which would then relay it to your watch.
These days, what tech _doesn't_ do is at least as important as what it does do, and it really does exactly what I want and really well.
Lady Heatherington likes this.
Susan Rati Lane
in reply to Daniel Lowe • •Hmm. OK. That does sound interesting.
I have spent the last several years trying to find an attractive analog-digital watch that is sized to look good on a (not even that fine-boned) woman's wrist. This doesn't seem like it ought to be a big ask, but it's been incredibly hard to find. The one I'm wearing now is the form factor I want, but it is old, and the digital window is hard to read.
So, I'm figuring that maybe it's time to give up and just get a smart watch and put an analog face on its default screen. But @Lady Heatherington received and early Android smartwatch while she was working there, and I found it incredibly uncomfortable to wear. That's unjustly colored my perspective on smart watches.
So the practical stuff is really appealing -- long battery life, sunlight-readable screen, and particularly slim size.
But I don't know how close Repebble is to having a product to market, so a lot of this is just exploration.
Daniel Lowe
in reply to Daniel Lowe • •Susan Rati Lane likes this.
Susan Rati Lane
in reply to Daniel Lowe • •