Flipping.rocks Admin

So, about this thread from @CiaraNi@mastodon.green (@CiaraNi@mastodon.green) about a fake wildlife image that's either AI-generated or Photoshopped: a few people in replies linked to the account that posted it, @Adrenochrome@mastodon.social. I checked in mod dashboard and I suspended this account just shy of *three years ago* for being a #PicSpam/viral repost bot.

When you come across these accounts, preemptively suspend them (if you are a mod/admin) or report them (if you are a regular user) and you'll save people a lot of headache.

I wrote about this a while back: https://out.flipping.rocks/blog/why-picspam-and-repost-accounts-are-bad

In the next post I'll explain why this account immediately stood out to me as inauthentic.

#FediBlock #MastoAdmin #FediAdmin

Another nature/wildlife #picspam account to block: @tangledwing@ohai.social.

Most of their animal photos are taken from Pixabay (which lets you use photos without credit: https://pixabay.com/service/license-summary/) and are, as far as I can tell, mostly accurately identified. However, they also:

- link LLM-generated articles (@tangledwing@ohai.social, @tangledwing@ohai.social)
- link LLM-generated articles on scammy sites (@tangledwing@ohai.social, a degree mill)
- post AI-generated videos (@tangledwing@ohai.social, originally from https://www.instagram.com/wildanimalverse/reel/DW31A1Mj389/)
- get stuff wrong which could have been avoided or easily checked by linking to the source (@tangledwing@ohai.social, wrongly identified as a purple finch [a North American bird]; original photo https://pixabay.com/photos/natural-outdoors-wild-animals-bird-3283205/, as indicated in the tags, a long-tailed rosefinch [a Eurasian bird] photographed in Japan)

In general, accounts that only post other people's unsourced/uncredited photos because they look cool or make people feel good are vulnerable to posting misinformation and AI-generated content, whether they intend to or not.

#fediblock

A few more #PicSpam accounts I recommend limiting/blocking:

@globalmuseum@mastodon.online: while there does seem to be a human at the wheel, primarily posts ~*~viral/cool~*~/engagement-farming content indiscriminately scraped from other networks, including other content scrapers. This leads to them posting fake AI-generated videos, incorrect/misleading descriptions, etc., which only gets addressed when *other* people point it out.

@dbattistella@mstdn.ca: more of an edge case; she does post plenty of links to actual news articles and her own genuine commentary, but also posts quite a lot of populist and engagement-farming stuff copied verbatim from other networks with cursory credit (e. g. handles with no indication of what platform they're on and no links to the original posts), if any. As a result, posts regularly include misinformation, a surprising amount of conspiracy theorist-adjacent libertarians, uncredited text and media that readers may take to be her own work, etc.

Basically, these are accounts where you should double-check literally every single thing they post. Personally I think this is more work than people should have to put in, and therefore such accounts are worth blocking/limiting server-wide.

Also, a must-block: @Rainmaker1973@zpravobot.news, one of the most prolific scrapers/picspammers, if you haven't already.

#FediBlock

Announcement: as you may notice, our host has upgraded us to the latest Hometown version, based on Mastodon 4.5.7!

The biggest change is the addition of the Quote function, which appears in a drop-down when you click the Boost icon ( 🔁 ).

In Settings > Preferences > Posting defaults (https://flipping.rocks/settings/preferences/posting_defaults), you can set whether new posts can be quoted by anyone, your followers, or just you.

⚠️ It is set to "everyone" by default! Change this if you do not want everyone to be able to quote your posts going forward.

You can also change quoteability for an individual post with the "Visibility and Interaction" controls, which are now at the top of the post compose window.

Keep in mind that you (and everyone else) can also still simply paste a web link to individual posts.

Instance business non-money update: I'm in the process of revamping the external website (https://out.flipping.rocks); the new version is built with Material for Mkdocs, which is better suited for documentation. Mostly what's left is properly resizing and copying over the custom emoji which is kind of annoying so I've been putting it off. However it should be up soon!

@dbattistella@mstdn.ca Hi, is there a human at the helm here? I'm checking because many of your posts are scraped from other sites without credit.

Instance business: quick money update!

I've upped our contribution to our host (fedi.monster) from €27 (~ $43 CAD) to €37 (~$60 CAD).*

I've also set up a recurring expense for $5 CAD/month to Hometown dev @darius@friend.camp's Patreon.

__
* I *think* that for it to show up in the OpenCollective budget (https://opencollective.com/flippingrocks) I need to separately make an Expense for it as well? If anyone knows an easier/better way to do this, let me know.

We're back after some weird downtime where people could post, but federation was backed up! Posts and notifications from other servers are coming through now, albeit a bit delayed.

If you made a post in the past 24 hours or so that you really wanted people to see, you may want to boost or repost it!

@terryaki OK. Babka.social may be a good fit, or larger servers like mstdn.social or mastodon.social. Migrate at your own leisure, I'm not going to delete your account or anything.

@terryaki admin hat on: if you'd like a space where conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism is uncontroversial, this is not that space. Slow your roll and strongly consider editing or redrafting your post.