J. Nathan Matias @natematias@octodon.social
Building public interest, independent research on online safety & fairness. PhD Candidate, MIT Media Lab. Harvard BKC. http://civilservant.io natematias.com
Impressed by @CobaltVelvet's work to expand and keep the Octodon.social infrastructure going. Not an easy task!
Just in case you didn't see it, I finally made a Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/CobaltVelvet
Finally got that NFS working, I'll move web servers to a dedicated VM. The load-balancer should stay as is and make the change very smooth.
Okay, time to get off mastodon and go back to actually writing my dissertation, which is about all of this 😂 #OneWeekMore
Early adopters are in the infosec, SV, and internet culture worlds, which are notoriously demographically skewed. I have great respect for those worlds, but but if those are the folks who accrue the earliest/greatest following & power, then we'll see many of the same old problems all over again.
As a #mefite, fascinated to watch people from the community find each other to seed our networks. Patterns like this make sense; it's wonderful to know that I can find others, and it also bodes poorly for the future network diversity of the Mastodon network.
If you click "report this user" who gets the report? The admin of the server I'm on? The admin of the server the person has an account? The king of Mastodon? It seems unclear.
Ten years ago, platforms bragged that they were hosted in countries with minimal content laws. Fascinated to see a server advertise that they are hosted in a country with strong laws against hate speech. I guess that means we need to trust instance operators to have the resources to handle reports of illegal material, protect users from overreach, and keep their instance going. That's a big ask.
