§ @lawremipsum@mspsocial.net

Revised #introduction / #introductions post I can pin:

I'm the https://mspsocial.net admin. Contact me if you have questions about the instance or adjusting to mastodon generally.

Other things I do are bike, play volleyball, and get cancelled #onhere for being a pragmatist.

I am selective about allowing followers so I can be comfortable posting privately.

"Require follow requests" and "followers-only" default posting privacy is a powerful combination. It gives per-post control over what can get boosted to hell and back that the other site wouldn't allow.

I use it to manage when I want to share what I want to say with "anyone" versus when I want to share a thought with people already connected with me in some way. It means I don't have to worry that *every post I make* could go viral.

Try it! It can shift how you think about using social media.

I don't think I've ever seen someone ask "should I [transition/take this transition step]" who doesn't already, to some degree, know the answer. They just want permission to want it.

Usually they claim to be unsure or conflicted because they're ambivalent now, yet wanting something else.

That's it. You have the answer. Because we learn to cope, dysphoria often feels not like self-revulsion, but ambivalence. Their question amounts to "should I pursue euphoria?"

Yes. You have permission. Do it.

I thought you might like to know that, according to the extremely unscientific methodologies I have at my disposal, MSP Social is really

Algorithmic trend information is like the developer deliberately putting a microphone too close to the amp and saying "that squealing is how I know my idea is working."

We observed a thing, talked about it, and moved on.

Trends trap communities in a form of collective social rumination—keep focusing on a thing because they're already focused on a thing.

And they snap from one Thing to the next Thing because the natural ebb and flow of diverging and unrelated posts that can pad these tides gets crushed.

But, you know, programmers know how to make computers do math so we gotta do that and let our interactions be influenced by self-reinforcing signals. I guess.

I'm no scientist but I think that not having trends on MSP Social kept the temperature and duration of discussion of a topic—which dominated the federated timeline for much of the day—to a sensible, humane level. Instead of artificially provoking prolonged rumination.

Revised #introduction / #introductions post I can pin:

I'm the https://mspsocial.net admin. Contact me if you have questions about the instance or adjusting to mastodon generally.

Other things I do are bike, play volleyball, and get cancelled #onhere for being a pragmatist.

I am selective about allowing followers so I can be comfortable posting privately.

There's apparently a bug in mastodon: when you suspend an instance and then change the suspend to a limit, it fails to unsuspend the individual users from the suspension.

If anyone wants to help by drafting me the sql necessary to unsuspend individual users from a prior instance suspension, I can fix that on MSP Social. Otherwise I need to wait until a solution is published.

(I am more apt to destroy the place with a malformed SQL query that I think "should work" than any other fatal mistake)

Hate-herding clout-farmers are SCPs and should be handled as such—contained and subject to handling only as-needed and by professionals.

7 MST3k episodes to know me:

Space Mutiny (820)
Superdome (K15) - I saw this when it aired
Time of the Apes (306)
Fugitive Alien (310)
Crash of the Moons (417)
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (321)
The Final Sacrifice (910)

So proud of how much D everyone on MSP Social is getting

Transit posting on main

I think a lot of other admins follow a similar approach. We're all independently making decisions for our communities. There is a lot of overlap where we easily wind up in broad agreement, and edge cases or specific reasoning where not everyone makes the same call.

To me, that's a working system—not everyone's interest and values are the same. The biggest shortcoming is that publishing blocklists becomes its own vector for abuse—abusers obsess over being denied access to victims.

There's a sort of implicit trust rating I apply to admin posts: "I agree with this person 99% of the time," etc. Judgment calls or marginal situations still have to be weighed in light of our community's unique composition. In those cases I often take a little longer to decide to act, to let information continue to develop, see other admins' reasoning to help inform my own.

One way I keep up to date on bad actors on the fediverse is to follow other admins, and to keep my eyes open for admins announcing moderation actions that I don't already follow. The fediblock hashtag is sort of a double check sometimes but not my main source of info.

There are admins out there that I agree with on virtually every call they make. Though at this point there is probably no other server out there with 100% overlap; I'm never blindly copying another admin's actions here.

Gonna ride the D today!!

Seeing that mas.to and possibly other servers are having issues because someone created "thousands" of bot servers.

Haven't noticed anything here, and not sure what effect there will be, if any. But hopefully more information becomes available cause it seems like an obnoxious problem.

Egg nog is just delicious scrambled eggs

"Require follow requests" and "followers-only" default posting privacy is a powerful combination. It gives per-post control over what can get boosted to hell and back that the other site wouldn't allow.

I use it to manage when I want to share what I want to say with "anyone" versus when I want to share a thought with people already connected with me in some way. It means I don't have to worry that *every post I make* could go viral.

Try it! It can shift how you think about using social media.

Some people log in here and it's like they've just woken up from a bad dream. Others are still having the bad dream and it shows.

I don't think I've ever seen someone ask "should I [transition/take this transition step]" who doesn't already, to some degree, know the answer. They just want permission to want it.

Usually they claim to be unsure or conflicted because they're ambivalent now, yet wanting something else.

That's it. You have the answer. Because we learn to cope, dysphoria often feels not like self-revulsion, but ambivalence. Their question amounts to "should I pursue euphoria?"

Yes. You have permission. Do it.

I just want to say that it's kind of fucked up that you and I are expected to continue performing at high levels through a pandemic, but in the last six months I've watched various bedrock foundational systems including federal education and public health systems fail and basic routine stuff like home sale transactions get botched.

Things aren't great!