William Pietri

Chicago-area writer, software developer, runner, and nerd wrangler. Very interested in online community and reducing the harm of tech. Creator of The Flip, Chicago's Playable Pinball Museum. https://theflip.museum/

Last Notes

2025-07-18 13:23:01 UTC

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I appreciate the explanation, and I see what you're saying about their theory of operation and local culture.
But just as a matter of actual implementation, the Fediverse is not closed to non-Fediverse software. Public things like profiles are public to the world. Intentionally, and as far as I know, right from the beginning.
If people want it to mean something different for them, I think that's a fine reason to have a new feature or a new kind of software on the Fediverse. But I think people expecting their local culture to dominate Fediverse-wide on this in spite of both the implementation and other cultures is, well, practically untenable to say the least.

2025-07-18 12:48:37 UTC

So there's a mini-tempest going on. The upshot as I understand it being that some users apparently want to have a public Mastodon account, but want to be asked before that account gets mentioned or linked to on other social media platforms.
I'm having trouble even making sense of the request. The way I think of the Fediverse is as a set of interlinked platforms with no clear boundaries. And the way I think of identity here is that the profile basics are published to the world, with that being an essential property of what an account is.
I'm also familiar with private forums, where users are vetted and everything is locked down, and it's a sin to leak anything.
But are there parts of Mastodon (or the Fedivese) with the latter culture but on top of an essentially public infrastructure? Or is there something else going on culturally that I'm missing?

2025-06-03 14:07:18 UTC

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Me too! A CO2 meter really shaped my masking choices. It's wild to me they aren't just everywhere now, like thermometers are.

2025-03-30 21:54:53 UTC

In the 15+ years people have been promoting blockchains, this flowchart remains undefeated.
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/114/253/598/367/502/929/original/3e0ad67267758ada.jpeg

2024-10-08 13:29:27 UTC

Women only, a quick question: How bad is the reply guy problem on Mastodon? (Please boost for a good sample.)

2024-10-05 19:23:43 UTC

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You should not confuse "can autocomplete in ways credulous people can mistake for spotting errors" with an actual ability to find bugs in code. As I explained, an LLM doesn't receive enough information to spot bugs. The best it can do is reproduce text from its training set in which some human described a bug sufficiently close to code that was buggy