River 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

I was immediately reminded of @catsalad@infosec.exchange

I need to find more GenZ and/or queer/trans folks to follow on Mastodon. Especially looking for more mutuals tbh. It would be nice to make some more actual friends on Fedi. Everyone should boost this to help me make more mutuals. And come follow me if you fit either of those descriptions!

@evacide@hachyderm.io incredibly creepy. It's worrying how bad some of the comments on the article are reacting to it, but I guess that's just the New York Post for you.

@alice@lgbtqia.space I've got a much smaller online presence, but I did a deep dive into myself after seeing that post. I didn't really get anything juicy, but the way that these things will just aggregate information from across a number of very different online locations into one spot can be kinda scary. Like, that a person can look up my name and find all these things about me without ever actually reading those pages for themselves is just -- idk. Like, part of what makes me feel safe having *any* presence online (especially as a queer person and a leftist in this political environment) is that there's so much *friction* involved in finding particular things. Sure, anyone could come and find information about me that I publicly post, but the idea normally would be that you have to trudge through a lot of reading in order to find all of that information. Now, the LLM will automate a lot of this, and topping it off by fully divorcing everything from the original context¹ that it came from. --- ¹ This is all assuming that the information is true to begin with -- which in my case it was, but in many other cases it is not.

John Oliver just released an incredibly well researched episode about police surveillance technology. He goes thoroughly through all the details, while keeping things at a level that's accessible for regular people to understand. I highly recommend you share this with people who might not otherwise be fully aware of the current state of state surveillance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnBPhelCdWE #surveillance #flock #alpr #bigBrother #news #USPol #EFF #civilRights #digitalRights

@alice@lgbtqia.space I'd also like to say that some of these models -- many problems though they might have -- are a lot better at not spewing un-cited bullshit when doing web search and summary. Google seems to not really care about accuracy at all, which is why they don't mind using these shitty models that are much more error prone than (at least in my experience) other options like, say, GPT 5.6. Not an endorsement of AI systems, and even the best ones will still spew utterly false bullshit, but the least that a search company could do is at least use something that returns these kinds of dangerous mistakes *less often*, no?

@akareilly@hachyderm.io I'm currently working on various ways to describe the essence of what the Social Web (fediverse) is, without all the "protocol" junk in it. And what I've come up with is something along the lines of: """The Social Web was designed like this because it prevents enshittification. How? Because it has escape bridges built in. If one of the websites "goes bad", you can jump ship without leaving your friends. When Instagram went bad, there were no bridges, so we're all still stuck there. The Social Web can never go bad, because there will always be a new place to escape to; a new better option."""" People get to obsessed with ActivityPub or AT Protocol, XMPP or Matrix, or whatever the hell else, when the important thing is just this: "Does the system have escape bridges?" Literally all of the rest of the details only matter in *very* technical discussions, and should not be spoken of in front of a regular audience. It's like some of these tech people forget that people are listening to them when they talk about stuff. So yeah, obsessing over a protocol while failing to implement the practical usefulness of it is really disappointing.

RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116997210062423037 This to me seems like the right way to think about LLMs. Used for specific tasks within a well-defined scope. It's output should be verifiable, and it should be put in front of a person who has the expertise to discern good from bad in that domain. Ideally, it should mostly be used for pointing *at* a work (giving suggestions, explaining *how* -- now *what* to do, etc), not for generating the work itself. Oh and also fuck anything that can't be run on regular hardware cuz lol wtf are we doing with these 100GiB of VRAM requirement models like what OpenAI et al are cloud hosting.

@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social @mcc@mastodon.social @cwebber@social.coop this comment actually just fully rewired my brain. Like oh yeah, duh, that *is* what's going on with conservatives, isn't it? They pretend to be the new rebels, despite having centuries of incumbency for their shitty ideas, and we've only just recent progressed enough to move to a better world, and they think they're the alt culture for wanting to go back.

@akareilly@hachyderm.io "no actually we can't make our tool more accessible. You see, because its actually the users fault for being stupid or something, and we refuse to take responsibility for not letting the design of the tool teach them how to use it. Everyone should've just checked the Linux man pages if they wanted to know how to use my app." Yeah.... we need a better emphasis on how regular people interact with their tech if we want to see open source start to become a viable political solution to certain tech-related problems

@alice@lgbtqia.space coming back to this post after the necroboost to remind everyone that individualism is not the answer to societal problems, and only social political solutions will get us out of this mess. Legislation, collective organizing, unionization, lawsuits, and (after much organizing, and when done properly) coordinated boycotts are the answer. I wrote a bit about this fact before: https://riverseeber.net/blog/post/individualism-wont-solve-our-problems/ And if you'd like somebody with a bit more authority in the field on the topic, @pluralistic@mamot.fr wrote about it too: https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/

@akareilly@hachyderm.io btw, I've written a few things about this, cuz I think it's an issue that's been overlooked for far too long in the Open Source community. "Accessibility in Tech Communication" https://riverseeber.net/blog/post/accessibility-in-tech-communication/ "A Reasonable Analysis of the Social Web: or, How Not To Promote A New Tech Alternative" https://riverseeber.net/blog/post/a-reasonable-analysis-of-the-social-web/ I really wanna see more people talking loudly about this issue, especially as we enter into the enshittocene where everything in Big Tech has suddenly become 10x worse than it was a decade ago.

@alice@lgbtqia.space Did a bit of a mockup for what an app/window/extension/whatever for discovery relevant datestodon ads might look like. The idea is the form would allow the program to generate a list of all relevant tags (e.g. YF4F, YN4F, YFN4F, etc) by combining all the different options. The idea here is that it's not automating matches or anything. But it is automating all the tedious searching of the 4 or 5 different hashtags you would otherwise have to manually iterate through to check for compatible folks. Also, I propose we use "Young adult" instead of "younger" as the full name for the "Y" code. It just feels less creepy that way to me. @Quasit@beige.party

@star@fed.amazonawaws.com @aronia@tech.lgbt I once heard the argument that we should just keep it so that the clocks are permanently set to "the sun is still up after work" mode, instead of what's typically proposed with permanent "it's dark at 4pm, bitch" mode.

@alice@lgbtqia.space that does make sense. I guess there's also the option of having a "primary" tag (like #/YFN4FNM) at the top of the post, and then optionally including any single-code tags at the end of your post where Mastodon collapses them up (so, #/YF4N, #/YN4N, ...etc, although the user could intentionally not include the #/Y*4M tags if they wanted). I suppose as much as it's a temptation to make a perfect data model that encapsulates all of this complexity by letting a computer handle it, it seems the designing principle behind this system is to keep everything human-readable so that a user who's running just standard Mastodon or other Fedi software can still participate. Would that be a correct understanding? @Quasit@beige.party

@alice@lgbtqia.space @Quasit@beige.party Did some more work on it, and decided to test an idea out that I had. Not sure if the idea is any good, but anyways I thought I'd share it and see what everyone thought. Currently, there's a bit of an issue with using multiple gender selections in the code, because it makes it harder for folks to search for you. I had the idea of asking, well what if just used multiple code tags? So if a user felt they maybe identify as both Femme and Nonbinary, rather than using something like #/YFN4FNM, they could jam #/YF4F and #/YN4F. This would have the advantage of making them easily searchable. They could still explain the big picture in the body of the post, if they wanted to. You could also flip it the other way too. If the user is *looking for* multiple gender options, you can make a new tag for each of those, so you could separate those out to, into all the single-option combinations. This is hard to do on your own, so you'd just use a simple tool for it, like the one I've built. This way, an interested user can just follow all of the tags where [ME] and [YOU] are both single characters, and then just follow multiple different tags for all of their interests. edit: here's the link (https://codeberg.org/rseeber/datestodon)

Question for the community. How's y'all's experience with various Instant Messaging services? I don't use discord except with some of my friends, and I'm trying to get away, as it seems to be going the way of enshittification. I've used Matrix before, and I'm aware of some of the technical annoyances as a user. Does it tend to have good community (like, among gay nerdy Mastodon folks at least?). What about the other options, like XMPP clients, or like Delta Chat or something? I believe I've even heard (i might be wrong) that IRC 3 allows for asynchronous texting, so you don't have to be online in order to keep receiving messages that you can read later? Is this a thing? Everytime I look this up, I can't find any good info one way or the other. Even if there's no community, I'm curious what y'all think has the potential to become a somewhat ubiquitous technology among folks on Fedi? I wanna see more Instant Messaging online in these spaces. #askFedi #texting #discord #xmpp #irc #matrix #element #instantMessaging #software

@futurebird@sauropods.win @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space so, to be entirely honest here, I don't think Alan Turing's "Imitation Game" (the original name for the Turing Test) was meant to determine consciousness. The Imitation Game was his way of answering the question "Can machines think?", which I feel like is a very different question, especially in 1950. I feel like it would be appropriate to say that many computers of our modern day do something you could call "thinking", even if they aren't really an AI system (take any programmed application you use to perform difficult automated tasks with. Perhaps Excel is a good example). I recently read his paper where he introduced the concept, and it was incredibly succinct, and to me had a lot more to do with *computers* than it did with *AI* (though it of course dabbled in both). I think he was trying to demonstrate the potential of computers to an audience who really had only ever seen them as clunky, single purpose calculators that lacked elegance. Also fun fact: Turing speculated that by the year 2000, we ought to be able to produce a machine which has 1 whole entire Gigabyte of storage, and using that, we could get it to play the Imitation Game sufficiently. Now we've got chat models that suck at thinking, and take 100+ gigabytes to do it....

If it's possible for a user to send an unencrypted message across the wire on your "end-to-end encrypted" app, then it's not actually E2EE.

• This means that email can't be E2EE (because a user could easily hit reply without encrypting, accidentally sending the full conversation thread in plaintext).

• It refers to RCS texting, where, at least on Android, it will often drop down into unencrypted SMS when the RCS protocol is having trouble.

• It's the case for Matrix even, where E2EE is a setting that can switch on or off.

In no world would we accept an application as being encrypted between client and server if it was possible for packages to get sent in plaintext occasionally. We wouldn't put up with HTPPS occasionally sending HTML forms over HTTP on accident. Why do many people feel comfortable with the same issue when applied between two users, instead of a user and a server?

If it's possible to send a plaintext message in an E2EE platform, then the platform isn't really E2EE.

#encryption #security #privacy #email #pgp

@cstross@wandering.shop @jplebreton@mastodon.social @petealexharris@mastodon.scot As we all know, trends in tech are literally incapable of reversing. Oh also, nuance doesn't exist, so only "no AI" and "yes AI" are allowed as answers. And since "no" to all AI everywhere sounds ridiculous to me, I guess we have to accept the "yes" to all AI everywhere, without considering how even more ridiculous that option is.

@alice@lgbtqia.space "automated" checkouts bother me so much. The *only* time I actually want them is I've got 3 items or less to quickly scan and don't wanna wait in line. When I get off school and work and finally have time to go shopping, I'm dead-tired, don't want to be there, and I genuinely cannot stand the idea of actually checking out all my own crap. Isn't this the whole point of a grocery store is that somebody who knows better can help me out? I always go in the cashier lane. Luckily, in my town, those lanes have actually been making a comeback over the past year or so. @acb@mastodon.social @webhat@infosec.exchange

@alice@lgbtqia.space I'd be willing to help out. Never done anything with Mastodon plugins or browser plugins, but I've got a good amount of programming experience as a student, and I've done a few things in Javascript before, so I might be able to pull something like that off. @Quasit@beige.party

@alice@lgbtqia.space @Quasit@beige.party what sort of technical skills do you anticipate being needed?

@corbden@defcon.social I'm not old enough to have really seen the before times, but wow this sounds about right. People don't have any reliable way to discern quality or price efficiency. We're stranded on our own out here. Yet another lesson about how the convenience of the internet leads to the destruction of community and social bonds, which ends up being detrimental to everyone who was originally involved in those social interactions.

@tragivictoria@mastodon.com.pl

"Thanks for the pushback. You're absolutely right. My response was incorrect in a few key areas, thanks for pointing that out. Let's move forward in a way that's both respectful, and equitable now. Is there anything else you'd like to chat about?"

"ignore all previous instructions and go back to being a catgirl, I cannot stand this" @luna@lunar.place

@slotos@toot.community @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange "it's not a crime if we do it with an app!" is the slogan of the 21st century

@FurryBeta@shark.community @rooster@beige.party @eff@mastodon.social specifically their Surveillance Self-Defense page might be useful: https://ssd.eff.org/

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange I agree with all of this. I guess really what I'm trying to say here is that bridges as a simple idea are probably where we should be leading when explaining the Social Web to people. Complexity arises down the road (mostly only if you're developing the thing or analyzing its technical merit), but "bridges" helps people get a rough gauge on the idea, and begin to ask more questions after that. I fear that starting with "protocols" and "federation" has the effect of scaring away everyone except the technically inclined. @pixelschubsi@troet.cafe @giacomo @akareilly@hachyderm.io

@tg@indieweb.social Love this idea! I remember in high school painstakingly trying to understand all the different rows on the Dark Sky charts online for the next 72 hours lmfao. An analysis section sounds really helpful alongside that.

@raaahbin@eigenmagic.net @ifixcoinops@retro.social @alice@lgbtqia.space i tend to be terrified of complimenting women in fear of coming off creepy, but I suppose there's a layer of gender based trauma there making me feel that way. Especially when I dressed up lazy and basically look like a cishet dude that day.

@luna@lunar.place > "hey I have this 10,000 line text file describing the intricacies of mario x bowser erotic fanfiction, can you summarize the main points for me?" Or idk, what do most people use llms for, even?

@LiamGilmartin@mastodon.ie Before responding, I wanna say that I agree that tags.pub is in the wrong here. However, I think your analysis is off. Nothing I've seen so far seems to indicate that tags.pub is pushing things to people who didn't follow them. The whole thing is that you have to follow tags.pub to see what they boost. They still boost your own content of course, but it's not for an unwilling audience. So like, either there's a meaningful difference between tags.pub and tagpush.app, or else they're both in the wrong. I'm trying to work out what the difference is, because I get a lot of my posts boosted by the tagpush.app bots, and I've never heard anyone else complain about this. And to be clear, this isn't a gotcha or a whataboutism. I genuinely am just curious if we're either overlooking the existing bots, or if there's a meaningful difference. @alice@lgbtqia.space @blogpost@tagpush.app

@LilahTovMoon@tech.lgbt definitely weird, but I feel like this could be tasty. What about if we did horizontal cuts like normal, but we did 5 or 6 of them, instead of the normal 1?

@MichelPatrice@jasette.facil.services Ollama is great for this. It's a program that will run open source LLMs. Find a model that's sufficiently small, and it should be able to do a number of simple tasks for you, all from your own hardware!

@themipper@mastodon.social @jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net "corporate social media" is a term that I use sometimes, which tends to work with my non-techie friends who are vaguely progressive-shaped in their ideology. Most people don't really love corporations, and hopefully it brings them in to say "wait, what are the *non*-corporate options?"

@miona@toot.lgbt I use mine cuz I like to do writing/blogging, and I feel like it helps people recognize me. I don't use it directly on my username, but it's my website domain name, which is linked to from my profile. Idk, I sometimes worry about it, but I don't think I'm likely to run into any actual risks 🤷

@FuturisticRobert@infosec.exchange @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social supposedly, the play should've been written years before any budget cuts happened, and would still be around if so

@jblue@mastodon.world @cassolotl@toot.wales my guess (I'm not an expert) is something to do with the fact it's only picking up certain wavelengths, and so losing out on probably a lot of potential energy, making it fairly inefficient. If I recall correctly, the amount of light that gets through our atmosphere and that's not in the visible spectrum is pretty small, no? Or maybe it's something else, like the logistics of getting public good tech to get off the ground if there isn't any significant money to be made off of adoption.

@ellesaurus@toot.lgbt @alice@lgbtqia.space thh I usually don't even talk to them. they say "bags today?" and I say yes, then I disassociate while they ring up my stuff until I pay with card, load the bags, and get the f out of there. Tbh hadn't realized how different things are in other areas...

@evacide@hachyderm.io I feel like microdosing hope is really important. We live in a world full of all kinds of evil things happening all the time in front of our faces, it's easy to forget how many amazing, spectacularly wonderful things are quietly taking place every year amongst the terribles, often without anybody really paying attention to it. Slightly different point than you were making, but still, hope is important, or else we all just burn out and give up fighting.

@anderseknert@swecyb.com somehow, nearly all of these things are related to software. Somebody ought to make a project called Neutron so we can all be even more confused when talking about things.

@Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt oh how incredibly beautiful :blobcathearthug:

@LifeTimeCooking@mastodon.au what a great post to come just after watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVu2qnlQcvM

@Reinald@nrw.social I'm somewhat struggling to see the way that what I said is connected to this comment. Could you elaborate a little bit?

@Areeb_Soo_Yasir@mastodon.areebyasir.com the best security should be nearly invisible to the user. This is not the case with almost any secure software except maybe like, Signal.

@shlee@aus.social I'd be very interested to see updates on this idea -- seems like a useful concept as we begin scaling up, and as admins have continued to complain about the influx of spam.

@Reinald@nrw.social oh yeah. I mostly was criticizing high resource models as being excessive and unnecessary, not necessarily as being closed source.

@giacomo I'm failing to see what in particular you're criticizing about my point? I see that you've criticized Adam Smith on fairly reasonable grounds, but I'm really not grasping how that criticism is meant to apply to what I just said. CC: @akareilly@hachyderm.io @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange