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Mastodon does not make social media any less toxic, apparently...
I don't think I can name a single non-toxic social media platform.
That's because it's not the platform that's toxic, but the communities.
And in the mastodon fediverse, it's very easy to de-federate from a community. So, toxicity might spread less easily in mastodon.
Correction: it's not the communities, it's the behaviors of those that when taken together make up the community.

User agents don't toxify social media communities. User's do.

It's not the communities, a certain percentage of humans is unfortunately toxic and they are hijacking any undermoderated community.
It’s the effect of letting people behave however they want without social consequences. People don’t talk this way in the physical world, they don’t even have the courage to.

Social media is an unnatural environment, there’s more time to cultivate replies.

It's so great we have the Internet as a source of clear, instantly-understandable-by-anyone examples of what McLuhan's most famous adage meant.

"The medium is the message? Dafuq does that mean?"

"You know how every social network is horrible?"

"Ah, now I get it."

Given that cable, talk radio and a fair fraction of books are horrible, I am afraid to say that the medium we're talking about may be language.
Ah, but it's precisely their different flavors of horribleness—and the kinds of non-horrible things they're able to convey regardless—that are the message. These differ even for things as similar as broadcast TV and modern streaming services—the way the message is conveyed, the medium, shapes the kinds of messages that tend to get through, or which are amplified and which are suppressed. An early example of this would be the role of the rising popularity of the codex, versus trunks full of scrolls, in driving the creation of a fixed "canon" in Christianity. The message of a pile of scrolls is flexibility—the message of codices is fixedness. Something's in, or it's out, and everything that's in is physically connected and difficult to separate. There's a decision to make, where there wasn't before.
We made a mistake thinking that everyone's opinion matters.

It doesn't.

We should go back to ignoring some people. That doesn't mean banning them, just ignoring.

Technology tends to magnify one dimension or another of the human condition and it's rarely just your favorite dimensions.
More, actually. The largest Mastodon node is essentially Nazi controlled.
Server not feeling well. Is that instance running on a literal Raspberry Pi?
I would hope it's at least two or three Pi's...
If true, then that's disappointing as a Pi 4 should be able to handle a full gigabit, and if the traffic's too much for even that, then Mastodon has a bloat problem.
While yes, you can saturate a 1GB link using the Pi 4, the 4x A72 core complex is not going to be blisteringly fast no matter how you slice it. If you're trying to stream encrypt with AES, you're going to be limited to at best half link speed since since the A72 manages only about ~50MB/s. This, of course, isn't just an encryption issue but really just that once you factor in everything else that it takes to host a complex software package like Mastodon, it's hardly surprising that a Pi 4 struggles under the weight of both HN and the rest of the fediverse slamming the tiny SoC.
I would not be surprised. On nov 22 they released a blog on how to run a mastodon instance on rpi
https://archive.ph/AM8OA

It was archived.

Apparently they hired a former police officer whose specialty was disguising surveillance equipment.

Which kind of tracks. If you want specialty cases for your Raspberry Pi units to blend with your environment, it's not a bad choice per se.

So many people believe he's going to be building backdoors on the silicon. That's not what he does.

Did he disguise surveillance equipment to spy on citizens without a warrant?
Possible, but it's also kind of irrelevant. Essentially there's nothing within his described skill set that would affect the Raspberry Pi boards themselves.
Pardon my ignorance, but I don't really see where the problem is? Is he spying on competitors for them? Is he doing something unethical for the Raspi foundation? Im a little lost on why this is important.
At heart, it might not be a big problem.

But the optics aren't great.

And the response to the criticism reads like Pi's social media person is trying to take them down from the inside.

Being that toxic to fans and customers on social media is - I'll put this bluntly - stupid. It's unprofessional and very, very off-putting.

Yeah I missed the comments until I saw the archive. For some reason they aren't loading on the actual Mastadon page. I agree, its pretty unprofessional of them. Never been a fan of the "edgy corporation social media" fad and I hope it dies soon.
It seems like the server may be feeling the effects of the HN front page but it was already down with only two comments. There was a new breed of ActivityPub-amplified DDoS attack a week or two back on other Mastodon instances, so perhaps we're seeing more of the same.
yeah the snarky responses aren't great.

Maybe a better play would be to let the responses roll, then do a blog post discussing the use of technology in law enforcement. They let the haters get under their skin and provoke an aggressive response... take the bait and you lose.

>And the response to the criticism

"ACAB" is not a criticism tho and that's all I see

Most of the issue is RPi's utter failure to read the room.
It seems to be common with "edgy" responses from corporate twitter accounts lately, I don't see the difference with this?
They're treating their mastodon audience as if it's a twitter audience and failing to read the room.

There's a lot more anti-cop folks on mastodon, so coming out right away with "We hired a policeman & it's going great" is probably not the best icebreaker. It's already gonna set folks on edge.

Then the quote is about hiding covert video and audio surveillance, which is also something that's not gonna be well received by the audience on mastodon.

They then doubled down in their responses to folks concerned with the toot. They started making edgy responses which simply shouldn't be how brands engage folks on mastodon. It's a different audience than twitter. Telling well-respected folks to unfollow and "chill" is unnecessarily combative, especially by saying condescending stuff like "bye bye now" and calling followers childish.

If they would have framed it as hiring a former security officer and then detailing what he's doing with the Pi, they would have been fine. But they framed it in just about the worst way possible, then doubled down with troll-y replies.

I agree. They hired a person who was a field tech for a police department focused on organized crime. That's perfectly respectable work that society needs. It's great place to get a lot of maker experience.

I respect Raspberry Pi for standing by their employee, and the need for technical skills in law enforcement.

(comment deleted)
More discussion here for those interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33907982

IMHO, it seems the only story here is that people are discriminating against this guy because he's a cop. They know nothing about him other than they don't like his typecast.

since the mastodon server is down and I can only read the archive, can someone identify who this person is? is it the founder of Raspberry Pi or something like that?

if this is an official voice of the company itself, then this is a super awful way to carry yourself in public. Your customers might be from "blue states" or "red states" but their money is all the same: green. Alienating customers == bad.

The introduction was unintentional bait for this type of response, and I don't necessarily agree with the knee-jerk negative sentiment about this person's previous employment. I think "spy" is an instigative editorialization of his responsibilities.

But, the edgy responses from Raspberry Pi aren't inspiring to this longtime customer. I've been following RPILocator this morning to source some CM4s for a project, but I'll look at alternatives after seeing their responses. "Bye bye now," indeed.

The archived post (linked at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33911670) worked for me.

Nowadays, "then doubles down" sounds as if they got a shitstorm and didn't cower.