The problem is: I have yet to find a person in the fediverse that interests me. I like to read tweets from accomplished people. Successful startup founders for example. Is there anybody out there? Any links to people of significance in the fediverse?
Drew DeWalt is there and a number of others, especially the creators of the fediverse like Eugene and others ;-)
FWIW you can also use an account on i.e. Mastodon to follow twitter users. I suddenly realized because I was following a twitter users through a gateway, probably because someone had boosted a tweet from that account sometime and I had followed based on that.
I didn't realize this was a feature, and I haven't been able to find any information on how to follow Twitter users in this way. How do you go about doing it? If I can follow select Twitter users on Mastodon, that would really incentivize me to use it further.
Maybe the real problem is people of "significance" have no simple way of duplicating their posts there? Many seem to desire the biggest audience possible.
Drew Dewalt. Richard Stevens (Diesel Sweeties) and wait ... why do you give a shit? Why do people have to be famous to be relevant? Follow random people. Remember 90s AOL chatrooms?
Given your tone, I'm going to guess you're not asking the GP a question in earnest. You should try to think about why they might "give a shit".
Twitter's userbase is its primary feature. Not its shitty UI, not its awful character limit, and none of the stuff mastodon's various UIs are copying. Its userbase.
If you want the fediverse to succeed, you need to understand that. And you need to stop being so accusatory of people who don't use the internet the same way you do, FFS.
(And for the record, I want the fediverse to succeed, but I also use Twitter because userbase)
I don't want the fediverse to "succeed", frankly its the only space for us LGBTQ+ to not be harassed, reply guyed, and screen-capped online that isn't a corporate hellhole.
Edit: "Success" in our current world seems to be defined as the transition Reddit has gone through, where the userbase has exploded, its eaten Facebook's lunch to a fair degree, but the quality of discourse and interaction has dropped like a rock.
I've stopped using Reddit, and such a change would kill my use of the fediverse.
You can ban people, from instances that you disagree with, from replying/following people on your instance if you like. You can also completely isolate your instance or only federate with a whitelisted cluster of instances.
I don't understand why that's not okay, though. I get people get attached to communities they're a part of, but just like people, they change and/or die.
If you think about it, it's absurd to expect them not to: Even if the community keeps its member list exactly intact forever, and the members remain at their exact same activity level forever, those very members will change over time. Hell, you will change over time and get to appreciate different qualities of that community.
Same reason my guild's forum feels completely different today than it did 5, 10 years ago.
The person your replying to explicitly states that you should follow random people off main (the federated timeline) and have a sense of wanderlust rather than following a handful of #thoughtfluencers.
Because the whole point is that I get insights from people I admire, man. I want to listen to John Carmack, not some random fool. _I'm_ some random fool and if I wanted those opinions I can cook them up myself.
Avoid the fediverse please, the point is to have a more humane environment, not follow #thoughtfluencers.
If you do join choose your instance wisely, beware that many instances block mastodon.social, freespeechextremist.com and similar for being hot messes that have no moderation. The latter instance in particular has a very persistent hellthread spambot problem, where bots sling nudes without content warnings at people constantly.
What would you recommend to start with? Joining the fediverse is like picking a javascript framework; There are a myriad of instances connected to a multitude of networks which are implementing a bunch of protocols. See https://fediverse.party/
It’s due to crypto scammers using it. From the founder’s post:
At some point in the past crypto scammers used JSFiddle to host pages with a wallet code and posted links to that on Twitter.
Due to the nature of JSFiddle, anyone can post anything, so wallet codes are ok – we did implemented a content filter to shadow-ban these.
I asked Twitter if they they could help out and ban twitter accounts that were posting scam tweets that included links to the rouge fiddles.
Twitter just went the easy route and blocked all jsfiddle.net links instead of blocking spammer accounts on their platform.
Tried to contact Twitter many many times, with no reply whatsoever. They most likely have no-explanation-needed-policy, which is why they never replied.
There's nothing that can be done here unless somebody has contact to a higher op at Twitter who has the decision power to help out here.
I don't understand how posting a "wallet code" is dangerous. Is it mining coins while you are browsing the code? Then it just a minor annoyance. Also, browsers should block cryptominers when they are in the background tab.
I assume they mean a mining script - so that the person running the jsfiddle would be mining cryptocurrencies, and the proceeds would go to the scammers wallet address.
What I find strange how this is presented as an either-or option between banning and not banning. You can also have an intermediate warning page. YouTube does this to any third-party website for example. Something like "Warning: JSFiddle has been abused by spammers to run crypto mining scripts. We recommend that you that you do not continue to this JSFiddle page unless you trust the source of the link" should work just fine, no?
Twitter doesn't exactly target the kind of demographic that understands what "to run crypto mining scripts" even means, let alone how to assess whether they "trust the source". I mean, it was retweeted by someone I follow and it has a funny picture of Trump with a dancing turd emoji on his head, what's there not to trust?
It's extremely hard to coach non-technical users into making the right call when presented with a security warning box.
That said, if Twitter can assess whether a posted video contains "sensitive material" (i.e. exposed body parts), they can also assess whether a jsfiddle link (or any link, really) likely contains crypto miners.
Thanks for clarifying that you misread, but please keep the text or at least enough contextual information so we know what the replies to you are talking about. Which link did you edit out? Because I missed it.
Per the text, the screenshot you are seeing is what happens when someone links to a jsfiddle using a url shortner but posts linking directly to jsfiddle are rejected.
>Twitter is rejecting posts with JSFiddle URL inside.
>If a URL shortener is used the unsafe page warning is displayed[1]
Out of curiosity, I went onto Twitter and tried to post a link with one of the similar sites as JSFiddle. It seems that CodePen URLs are still allowed. This seems very strange to me, as unless I'm missing something, CodePen has the same inherent faults as JSFiddle.
Twitter clearly has taken the easy way out here, and instead of addressing the problem and tried to tackle it, just blanket banned JSFiddle with no regard to their users, or to the variety of similar services that provide the exact same functionality. If I was a crypto miner, I would simply copy paste into CodePen and continue on my way.
> Twitter just went the easy route and blocked all jsfiddle.net links instead of blocking spammer accounts on their platform.
This is a huge problem with all the tech giants that needs to be addressed. I don't expect them to be perfect but I expect them to be open to communications on any level.
I also think Twitter is the Twitter today just because of the bots and fake accounts they have since those accounts were creating so much content and movement on the platform. I know people whose spending days by reading those fake accounts while they have no idea what's fake and what's real. So maybe -just may be- they may not want to get rid of all those fake accounts and bots.
I just don't agree with this sentiment. I don't work for twitter or any social media company, but it strikes me as their prerogative to ban content deemed unsafe if they don't have the means or wherewithal to properly police the content. From an engineering standpoint, how exactly do you propose to scan fiddles for objectionable content. With an image link, you could throw a neural net at it and at least tag it as nsfw (or scan a few images in a linked page).
And this isn't related at all to the bots and fake accounts (which I think is the bigger problem). But in the context of your argument, this is just non sequitur.
At what point is the tech community going to abandon twitter?
From my perspective it is just bots, "influencers", and propaganda.
I see very little social utility for using the network, especially when compared to the damage it is causing through the spread of misinformation and outright lies.
Twitter is crazy. Recently I tried to change my gmail account to a more secure encryted email on my Twitter account but they never let me confirm that email to my account. It always remained pending even though I clicked confirmation links several times. When I went ahead and reverted the email to original gmail account, everything was done seamlessly within seconds. I've had many similar problems with Twitter for years. The Spam Accounts, getting locked for apparently following 'too many' people in a short period of time, clicking confirmation links multiple times, etc and now this.
Given the nature of the product, there is no way for the maintainers of Js fiddle to prevent it from being used to run arbitrary code, because that is what it's meant to do.
It's also impossible for both jsfiddle or twitter to scan the code of each fiddle and determine if it's legitimate or an attack, so this looks like a good measure from Twitter.
What is surprising is how this was even allowed so far and still is in many social networks, as its such an obvious way to deliver exploits.
Given the nature of the product, there is no way for the maintainers of Js fiddle to prevent it from being used to run arbitrary code, because that is what it's meant to do.
There are things they could do though - such as limiting the execution time of a fiddle to a couple of minutes, or limiting the size of the code, or blocking certain calls, and so on. Users are running code that's been saved to the JSFiddle server, so it's not unreasonable to suggest JSFiddle have some responsibility to their visitors. They could make it so the code runs fine if you're the owner or if you've explicitly said it's OK to take up more resources, but defaults to running with these limits if you've just browsed to a Fiddle from a link. They could block common mining scripts (which would only work against 'scriptkiddie' attacks rather than anything sophisticated, but whatever).
There are things the JSFiddle maintainers could do. They don't have to, and in their position I might not do anything either, but the cost of inaction in this case is Twitter blocking links to their site.
By the nature of the product JsFiddle also can't do anything more than what any website set up by an attacker could do. The only thing making JsFiddle unique is that it is lower friction. Any attacker could also set up a github pages link, or use any free webhoster, or rent webspace for $5/year under a false name.
It makes sense to ban a website that is 100% mining, but blanket-banning jsfiddle is like banning the whole internet because there might be a crypto miner on any website. Probably 99% of jsfiddle links are not miners.
There are tons of other websites you can host a crypto script. If Twitter really wants to keep users safe, they should implement a mandatory warning (I've seen this being referred as a "cushioning" page) instead of having a questionable blacklist.
Except they will now use github pages; and if they block all github pages (github.io) they will use codepen or repl.it or tumblr (custom templates), and so on until thousands of page are blocked.
It troubles me that something as well known as JSFiddle can't get a response from Github. I understand they can't reply to every question from Johnny Developer but JSFiddle must have thousands of users.
Please just join the fediverse. It's broken too, but if you get banned, at least you can open an alt on another server.
Force Twitter to be irrelevant.
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