Welcome back to another episode! I was still on holiday this week as well, but enough has happened that I wanted to give you a shorter overview of the most important news. It’s been interesting to experience the fediverse as a regular user that doesn’t try to keep up with all the news however. That’s why this episode is still short, focusing on a few highlights that stood out for me. Next week this update will be fully back, including some upgrades!

Mastodon and CSAM

The most important news is the release of a report by Stanford about the proliferation of CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) on Mastodon. The report looked at the public timelines of the top 25 Mastodon servers and found 112 pieces of actual CSAM, as well as over 1200 text posts mainly used to coordinate offsite trading of CSAM, all which is absolutely horrifying. The researchers also share detailed directions for future improvements that are worth reading.

The Washington Post is reported in detail on this as well. In the article it is not super clear that some servers such as Pawoo, a known bad actor, are commonly blocked. The Stanford report understandably is super limited in providing information on where exactly the information is found, but servers like Pawoo and some of the large Japanese Mastodon servers are the most common suspects. This lead to people voicing their frustrations that they felt like they were getting lumped in for a description of fediverse that does not match their view of fediverse (since they’ve blocked the server).

There are multiple frames of analysis here: the direct response by the community, the secondary response by the community by working on better safety features relating to this, and how this impacts the larger public’s understanding of Mastodon. I have not been available enough the last week to give a proper analysis of the direct response of the community, I’m regret to say. Responses seem to have varied wildly, from ‘the Washington Post article is a hit piece’ to large concerns about the findings. Personally I feel uncomfortable with some more negative responses that focus on mistakes and framing in reporting by news outlets, when in the end, there is a goddamn CSAM material on Mastodon and limited moderation tools to deal with it. I’ll be writing more how different community initiatives are being worked on to improve Trust and Safety and moderation tools, as well as how this report impacts the public’s perspective on Mastodon.

What turned people off Mastodon

Erin Kissane has done excellent research by asking people on Bluesky what turned them off Mastodon. Its an extensive look at 350 people who tell in their own words what turned them off Mastodon. Erin’s work is deliberately structured in a way that resists easy summarisation, so I’ll refrain from that with the urge to simply read it all, it’s worth it.

A few things stood out to me: Eugen Rochko’s responds to the line in the article ‘If I were Eugen Rochko, I would die of stress.’ with ‘Not that far off the truth!’. The Mastodon post for this article got a massive amount of attention, virtually all of it positive. Considering the amount of critiques of Mastodon culture that are in the post, it is nice to see how open people are to the feedback. Thats not to say that everyone is open in all context, and the scolding behaviour that Mastodon is known for is certainly real. However, it shows there are ways to format structural feedback and criticism that are acceptable to the community.

Calckey rebrands to FireFish, with new forks.

Two weeks ago, Calckey rebranded itself as Firefish. An impressive part of this rebrand is how the main server calckey.social got transferred to a new domain, firefish.social, without impact on the users. For example, my new username is now laurenshof@firefish.social, but old posts that are still tagged with laurenshof@calckey.social properly refer to my account. Firefish has put in significant effort in individual account transfers as well. WeDistribute has a writeup on how to transfer from Mastodon to Firefish, which includes a full transfer of your posts, lists, blocks and mutes.

Arguments between the main developer and other contributors of Firefish lead to the creation of the hardfork Iceshrimp. Hajkey, which is run by the admins of blahaj.zone server, was originally a soft fork of Calckey, with several safety features merged back into Calckey. Lead Hajkey developer @supakaity announced that they will not rebrand, and go downstream from Iceshrimp instead. In the announcement post she mentioned that she recently got overruled when trying to implement a feature which was intended to improve the safety of a minority group. As such, she felt that Hajkey aligns better with Iceshrimp, and as such will position Hajkey instead as downstream from that project.

The flagship server for Misskey, misskey.io, is experiencing rapid growth, adding 90k users in the last 2 weeks. Uncertainty around GDPR compliance has led them to discourage signups from European users, @darnells writes. https://darnell.day/misskey-io-20-000-new-users-daily-discourages-europeans-from-signing-up-over

Mastodon client Mammoth has added an algorithmic For You page. TechCrunch has a review of it. https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/26/twitter-rival-mammoth-adds-a-personalized-for-you-feed-to-make-its-mastodon-client-feel-familiar/

Mastopoet is a tool to share Mastodon posts as images, and specifically focuses on the design and visuals. https://mementomori.social/@rolle/110787810442832467

A blog posts by @renchap, one of the Mastodon developers, on a vision for the future of Trust & Safety for Mastodon. https://oisaur.com/@renchap/110742748852023343

The podcast Looks Like New talks about some of “Open Social Media’s origin stories from three speakers who have been involved in the development, culture, and communities of their platforms: Christine Lemmer-Webber (co-editor, ActivityPub), Evan Henshaw-Plath (founder, Nos), and Golda Velez (early participant, Bluesky).” https://news.kgnu.org/2023/06/looks-like-new-how-did-open-social-media-platforms-originate/

The Podcast Moderated Content has a new episode with an extensive discussion on “safety issues with the Fediverse, how Meta might deal with them, and some potential solutions to get ready for the challenges without Meta effectively calling the cops on a huge number of instances.” https://cybervillains.com/@alex/110771803391825598

PCMag has a review of Lemmy and Kbin. https://www.pcmag.com/news/reddit-alternatives-lemmy-kbin

The EFF writes about the FBI raid where the server of kolektiva.social got seized. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/07/fbi-seizure-mastodon-server-wakeup-call-fediverse-users-and-hosts-protect-their

"The Fediverse has a Mental Health Problem”. https://medium.com/@thisismissem/the-fediverse-has-a-mental-health-problem-4cb4845dfee1

Lemmy has had a massive inflow of bot registrations in the last months. @kersploosh has a writeup of their work on getting admins to delete these suspicious inactive accounts, leading to a drop of 900k registered users for Lemmy. https://sh.itjust.works/post/1823812

Lemmy.world still discussing if they want to defederate from an instance taken over by exploding-heads.

An instance that includes such gems as

Strange pattern emerging from lemmy.world with an admin advertising their business in the adhd community, allowing virulently Islamophobic atheistmemes community and now repeating the exploding-heads (we have to patiently discuss blocking the instance) course of action instead of a preemptive defederation, it is their last resort though.

The post on lemmy.world discussing it as well: https://lemmy.world/post/2680147

As of this post the blocked instances are here

spoiler

Hello and welcome to the ultimate Fediverse admin guide with all needed knowledge to run your very own Fediverse instance.

An update:

• fmhy.ml is gone, due to the ongoing fiasco with mali government taking all their .ml domains back
• As such, lemmy.fmhy.ml is also gone, we are currently exploring ways to refederate (or somehow restart federation entirely) without breaking anything substantial
• We have backups, so don't worry about data loss (you can view them on other instances anyway)

Currently, we have fmhy.net and are exploring options to somehow migrate, thank you for your patience.

https://lemmy.ml/post/2286939

Lemmy discussion

https://github.com/WardPearce/Purplix.io

Purplix.io is a open source end-to-end encrypted survey system & warrant canary manger / viewer.

And hexbear.net is not even included!

Current breakdown at the time of this post sorted by the number of monthly active users:

1. lemmy.world: 101,013 total users / 27,472 active users
2. lemmy.ml: 41,972 total users / 4,905 active users
3. beehaw.org: 12,270 total users / 4,178 active users
4. sh.itjust.works: 17,509 total users / 3,381 active users
5. feddit.de: 8,675 total users / 2,935 active users
6. lemm.ee: 10,348 total users / 2,751 active users
7. lemmynsfw.com: 22,967 total users / 2,310 active users
8. lemmy.fmhy.ml: 8,777 total users / 1,704 active users
9. lemmy.ca: 5,072 total users / 1,656 active users
10. programming.dev: 5,058 total users / 1,242 active users

Source: https://the-federation.info/platform/73 https://lemmy.world/post/1303827

FediRedirect is a browser extension that redirects you to your favorite instance.

It currently supports:

• Lemmy => Lemmy
• Mastodon => Mastodon
• Mastodon => Lemmy
• Lemmy => Mastodon

Why would I want to know my colors?

I feel like I should start with an important disclaimer: I am not here to tell you what colors you are and aren’t allowed to wear. Many people don’t care about PCA, don’t “believe” in it (as if it’s some variant of astrology), or just aren’t interested in taking their natural coloring into account when they dress. That is completely fair and valid. This is intended to help you understand the concepts of PCA and use them if you want.

With that out of the way, there are a lot of reasons to want to wear colors that harmonize with your natural coloring:

It can make you look younger and healthier

It can put people visually at ease when they see you, helping to garner subconscious trust and respect

It can give you a framework for building a wardrobe of colors that all harmonize with you and therefore also with each other

Knowing your season can help you avoid buying things that you later feel like you don’t look good in

Knowing your season can suggest to you colors that would look great on you that you haven’t thought of before, or don’t tend to stumble across in stores

Characteristics of color

Let’s define some terms that will help us put colors into groups for the purposes of PCA.

First, a color can be light or dark. This refers to how close it is to either white or black. Pretty straightforward. Also, a color can be warm or cool. In PCA, this refers to how much yellow (warm) or blue (cool) is in it. You may be familiar with this concept from shopping for red lipstick.

Finally, a color can be bright or muted. This refers to how saturated the color is compared to gray. Brightness/mutedness is not the same as lightness/darkness. Muted and bright colors can be either light or dark. When you think “muted,” think “more gray.”

Why are you talking so much about colors? Tell me my undertone.

Ok, so you may have heard the term “undertone” or taken a quiz online that tries to match up your hair, eye, vein and jewelry color to a particular season. I don’t think this is particularly helpful, for a lot of reasons including the following:

You can’t “see” undertone. Even if you try to guess by examining your veins, there are a lot of factors that will make them look blue or purple or green (green compared to what?) aside from your undertone. Like how light or dark your skin is, where on your body you’re looking, and what you’re comparing them to.

By all accounts, most people’s undertone is neutral, leaning very slightly warm or cool. So if you examine your attributes (blue veins, brown eyes, tan easily, look good in gold, WTF?) you are likely to get a pretty mixed bag.

Arbitrary attributes are hard to set boundaries around in words. What is blonde hair? Obviously this is blonde, and so is this, but is this? How about this? If you try to determine your season solely by your attributes, you may get frustrated just defining what those attributes are.

How your attributes look varies based on what colors are surrounding them right now. That’s kind of the whole point! So it’s hard to look in the mirror, or look at a photo, and see objectively where your personal coloring falls on the three scales described above.

Though there are certainly common patterns in the attributes of different seasons, the attributes are not the definition. Every season contains a wide variety of different hair colors, eye colors and ethnicities. The best way to talk about types of personal coloring is in terms of what colors look harmonious on them.

So how can I determine my season?

It sounds kind of tautological, but the best way to determine which colors look good on you is to test which colors look good on you. You can either do the above, many many times, with a huge array of different colors,

https://www.truth-is-beauty.com/what-season-are-you.html

Forgive me I have posted cringe, i beg your mercy black clothes wearing people of hexbear