Notices by Ted Gould (ted@social.gould.cx), page 50

@Jairus @rysiek @Gargron @sophia in an earlier discussion I was talking with @scott about people's perception of social media. He gave some interesting results that Pew had published here:

https://vis.social/@scott/99853142253879638

What I think is interesting there is that users are using on average 3 of the major social networks, and most think that they wouldn't be hard to give up.

@Canageek over the years I've used a couple variants of this incantation. It doesn't do the deps, but gives you a good idea of the big packages.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/40442/which-installed-software-packages-use-the-most-disk-space-on-debian#107039

@Jairus @rysiek @Gargron @sophia I think it would be interesting, I'm just not sure how it *should* be represented. I think competing with FB on MAU actually doesn't represent what it is, or the value that people get from smaller, more tightly knit networks.

I'm not sure how you measure it, but it seems like to me that the health of the Internet depends on what would happen if those went away. If FB went away I'd have to move some org pages, but meh, hassle.

@Canageek I do that some, but generally I like to look at which one is pulling it in. Sometimes it's a recommend or optional package that I wasn't really using.

Of course anytime you do a distro upgrade you notice the package names running by getting upgraded. Then you inevitably think "Why do I have $pkg installed?" So you look. You say "Uhg" a few times. And you trust that the package manager is correct in how it handled everything.

Upgraded to Ubuntu Bionic (what will become 18.04 LTS) and it all went smoothly. Seems to be working fine. Congrats to everyone working on Ubuntu on what looks to be a really nice LTS.

@Gargron @sophia Oh, wow, I did not know that.

For those following along at home, that includes the number of status, number of logins and number of registrations per week for the last 12 weeks. (as strings)

$ curl https://mastodon.social/api/v1/instance/activity | jq .

@danrabbit get a black turtleneck. That seems to help.

@rysiek @Gargron @sophia I get that, and by the nature of things we have little control of what numbers people make up to try and track the Fediverse.

I think that we need to be careful not to play into the metrics that advertising-based networks have decided to measure themselves on. Things like MAU isn't important unless you're selling ad impressions. Easy to measure but doesn't show whether people are valuing their interactions (which is incredibly hard to measure).

@Gargron @sophia only for the instances you're admin on, no?

We could give public toots as well. But there's always the possibility of someone who just watches. Or toots entirely privately.

@sophia probably because the Fediverse can't give them a statistic on MAU. Which is precisely the point of the article to begin with. If anyone can give you precise numbers on MAU, they're probably part of the problem.

@brian @tinker it has an API that can do just about anything, I used to make a Newsblur App for Ubuntu Phone that used all that.

http://newsblur.com/api

For posting on Mastodon I'm using the IFTTT integration and IFTTT's web hook support to post it. I hope to move that to something more open eventually though. Here's the cURL line to do a post (which is basically how you do an IFTTT webhook):

https://social.gould.cx/@ted/99395343262542356

What I learned from this article is: ICQ still exists in Russia! It was apparently purchased by Mail.ru.

https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/google-amazon-drawn-into-telegram-ban-as-russia-blocks-1-8-million-ip-addresses/

The client is kinda Open Source:

https://github.com/mailru/icqdesktop

As the first part of the instructions is "download this large binary blob." No, thanks.

@tinker I have a bunch of RSS feeds all going into Newsblur. I like it. Good mobile apps. OSS. Paid for by cash not ads. I have scripts to share posts here if you go that route.

https://newsblur.com/

@david_ross 3b, not the 3b+ mind you, they haven't ported over the software to it yet.

https://community.mycroft.ai/t/mycroft-with-google-aiy-voice-kit-disk-image/2607/60

@sri if only we knew someone at System76 who could fix that problem in their social networking... if only...

@david_ross built a Picroft (Mycroft with a RaspberryPi) with my kids over Easter using the Google AIY kit. Lots of fun and only about 40$USD.

Might be something fun to bring to a global sprint location!

Wow. Gonna have to go on the TODO list for later this summer. — https://www.dallasnews.com/news/frisco/2018/04/12/million-dollar-traintopia-exhibit-coming-together-friscos-railroad-museum

@scott it would be interesting to see a long term sentiment analysis on social networking in general. I imagine that it overall correlates with the various large news stories that have come out about abuse.

There's probably also interesting generational based attitudes that are different. Perhaps older people didn't understand it, so assumed it was a good change more?