Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 111

@LogicalDash I already had the script sitting around, so...

I just basically DM'ed every single one of my followers to let them know about my new main account.

In case anybody's curious about how I did that:

1. Make Python script that fetches all my followers and dumps it out as one giant line of mentions.

2. Copy and paste as much as I can fit into a toot.

3. Send as DM.

4. Rinse and repeat.

Zoosk is EXTREMELY full of dark patterns.

It sends you messages from fake users that suddenly "disappear" in order to get you to subscribe. It constantly nags you about subscribing and about paying for extra services. You can't delete your account, only deactivate it.

It's among the top apps in the Norway App Store, but no one should touch that thing with a barge pole. Stay the hell away from it.

Come to think of it, the graph I described earlier would easily permit you to run the PageRank algorithm on it in order to score accounts by popularity, since follows are essentially like links from one webpage to another. Again the sort of thing that has the potential to provoke the hell out of the Fediverse.

I suppose I could keep a crawl queue for each instance, and crawl multiple instances at once, but supposing I gathered all that data, the natural next step would be to create a search engine that covers the entire Fediverse. That sounds an awful lot like Google to me, and I suspect that it would be highly controversial, since it would essentially bypass Mastodon's limited federation and immediately allow users to view the Fediverse in a way that Gargron is deliberately trying to avoid.

It looks like instances only talk about mutually visible accounts to each other. For example, I can only see 14(!) of your 1.7K followers from my instance, even if I request that data via the API. The full data is only available via the public user page, 12 users at a time. To fetch all your followers, I'd have to execute 142 HTTP requests against your instance, slowly, to avoid flooding or throttling.

Praxis is for people who are too cool for practice.

@bsod I'm surprised the whites aren't bluer.

Zoosk is full of dark patterns. Don't touch it with a barge pole.

@frankiesaxx If that causes drama, people haven't understood how much information is possible to extract from Mastodon. In terms of access to social graphs, it's not really better than Facebook.

@frankiesaxx Oh, I know who you're talking about with the instances. I saw those. I think it would be more interesting if people could poke a bot and get back a graph of who's following who. If you used an algorithm that pulls followers close and mutual followers even closer, while people who don't follow each other are repelled, you'd get a nice graph, I think.

@frankiesaxx Time to code up a social graph bot?

@oliof

A ella le gusta la semolina (whatcha say)
Dame más semolina! (Hey)
Como le encanta la semolina (whatcha say)
Dame más semolina! (Hey)

https://youtu.be/5tIIo4VH4Ow

How would I graph my connections on Mastodon? I want to see if I'm part of a cluster. I get the feeling that I'm part of a cluster of people who all follow each other.

@sdm There's a small part of me that misses pigging out on large servings of junk food, but that urge is fading with time. The feeling of being filled up used to give me a great deal of pleasure, but that feeling is gone now, so even if I wanted to, what would be the point? Good food is still good, but it has to be in smaller amounts, and that's fine by me.

@sdm Post surgery, my appetite is reduced. I don't get hungry later because a meal wasn't large enough. Actually, I don't really get hungry at all. I feel queasy and then I know it's time to eat, and then I have a small plate of food, and that's sufficient. If I try to eat bigger servings or fatty foods, I get sick. It seems to be pretty effective at discouraging bad eating patterns.

@sdm I thought long and hard about whether I had emotional issues pertaining to food, and the answer was: Not more so than a smoker has emotional issues pertaining to cigarettes. Eating "enough" becomes an ingrained habit and something's amiss if there isn't enough food in your belly after a meal.

I opted for the surgery in the end, because I think what I describe above is pretty much the ideal case for bariatric surgery.