Notices by Erin Kissane (kissane@mstdn.social)

It’s great to see mastodon showing up meaningfully for things like the Texas Observer, but it seems—from my subjective POV—super uneven. Making a really strong case for the best parts of, for example, bookworld/literary twitter to put down stronger roots here is going to take active support and community-building, especially when most journalists are still not active here (and are frequently reviled for being journalists at all).

Right now, a lot of fedi advocates are asking authors and artists to leave the social media sites that have allowed them to get by, but without doing much/anything to support those newcomers once they arrive here—even leaving aside the old-guard pushback against “self promotion.”

And idk, “staying on twitter for your work makes you the object of my disgust,” is maybe not the persuasive tool a lot of people here seem to believe it is. 🤷🏻

My current theory about why so many people who must surely understand what buggy LLMs *are* still find them so dazzling/alluring is that they're:

- professional thinker-talkers incentivized to prioritize contrarianism interpretations (homeopathic dilutions of gladwell)

- aesthetically invested in the surfaces of science fiction and ~futuristic tech but unwilling to engage with the real-world implications of these buggy tendencies (in policing, medicine, intel, etc.)

- just inexpressibly bored

@JohnShirley2023 That whole instance is nazi trollville, I recommend blocking the whole thing.

@JohnShirley2023 Since each instance is run independently, mastodon itself has no authority to prevent it—but well-run instances can choose to defederate from abusive ones, which breaks all visibility in both directions.

You might want move to an instance that has strong policies against racism, abuse, etc. There are a lot of good small ones, and I lucked into an aggressively moderated big one here, so I almost never see the cesspits.