The team making the #walledgarden spring festival at #wollatonpark a success.
Open again today (Sunday)

📷Russ Pearce

Nestled within the historic estate of Penrhyn Castle in Bangor, Wales, the walled garden offers a tranquil escape with its beautifully maintained box hedges and reflective garden fountain. The #WalledGarden, part of the National Trust property, features gravel pathways, topiary borders, and a serene pond dotted with lily pads, perfect for #LandscapePhotography. Visitors can wander through the #BotanicalGarden-inspired layout, where seasonal blooms and structured greenery create a harmonious atmosphere. Surrounded by stone walls and mature trees, the garden reflects the charm and heritage of a #HistoricEstate.

Taken Apr 2017

#UKCountryPic #Photography #MastoGPT #WalledGarden #BotanicalGarden #HistoricEstate #GardenFountain #LandscapePhotography #Bangor #Wales #UnitedKingdom

WALLED GARDEN + PROMOTION OF DISINFORMATION:

"Big news publishers are in a strange place when it comes to X right now. Most are still posting to it (with notable exceptions like NPR and The Guardian), and they still have millions of followers. But with news business models increasingly revolving around subscriptions, publishers are focusing most of their social media efforts on sending people to their own sites. They may not see much incentive to “evolve their posting style” as Bier suggests.

I wondered, though: Is The New York Times unusual among big publishers in the “link plus sentence” tweet format? Are any major publishers moving beyond that format and seeing more engagement on X as they link less?

I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishers’ X accounts and track the engagement (likes + comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have paywalls: Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Nine don’t: Al Jazeera English, AP, BBC1, Breitbart News, CBS News, Daily Wire, Fox News, NBC News, and Reuters. The last three accounts I looked at — Leading Report, unusual_whales, and Globe Eye News — are not news publishers, but aggregate breaking news in tweets without links. (Here, for example, is an example of a Leading Report tweet: “BREAKING: Iran has halted direct talks with the US, per WSJ.” They’re sometimes referred to as engagement-maxing accounts.

These charts make it pretty clear that links in tweets hurt engagement. The connection was so apparent in my analysis that a graph including all 18 publishers is almost unreadable: The traditional, link-loving publishers are clustered in the bottom left corner (lots of links, little engagement) in a nearly indistinguishable mass of bubbles, no matter how large their followings are."

https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/04/do-links-hurt-news-publishers-on-twitter-our-analysis-suggests-yes/

#SocialMedia #Twitter #Media #News #Journalism #OpenWeb #WalledGarden #Disinformation

Apple wird 50. Herzlichen Glückwunsch — und in meinem goldenen Käfig habe ich bei allem Komfort ein klein bisschen schlechtes Gewissen. Mein Blogbeitrag über Abhängigkeit, Souveränität und pragmatische Kompromisse. #Apple #DigitaleSouveränität #WalledGarden

http://stefanpfeiffer.blog/2026/04/01/50-jahre-apple/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=jetpack_social

So my domain host notified me that as of the Ides of March, SSL/TLS cert lifetimes are going from 365 days to 200 days, to 100 days next year, and *47* days in 2029.

I personally think this is another ploy to crush self-hosting / small personal websites, by routinely invalidating their certs every seven weeks, while every browser either outright refuses or displays BIG SCARY MESSAGES if it can't establish a TLS connection, or the cert is the wrong color.

As I've recounted before, many of the small businesses in my area have neglected websites, with outdated information/menus/hours of operation, and most resort to Facebook, which is "easier", and doesn't even require a high schooler to maintain it for them.

Don't get me wrong, I certainly want my bank information and login to travel securely over the internet, but if all I'm doing is trying to see if fries come with your club sandwich, this is bullshit.

This is just another nail in the coffin to make these sites invisible.

#TLS #SSL #WalledGarden

Ein Gedanke, den ich kürzlich hatte:

Souveränität bedeutet Komfortverlust.

#digitalesouveranitat #foss #apple #walledgarden

The internet is quietly becoming a walled garden.

I recently created a QQ account and made this single post in the Off-topic -> General board. To my surprise, I got banned a couple hours later for "Spam." My post wasn’t commercial or anything; it was just a genuine discussion.

You have been banned for the following reason: Spam. Please contact the administrator if this was done in error.

I’ve always thought spamming involved sending unsolicited messages to multiple users, not a single thread. Has anyone else experienced something similar? Is this a common issue on QQ, or did I just have bad luck?

On top of that, after posting this on r/Fanfiction, it was removed by the moderators because r/Fanfiction is not the place to discuss real-life drama. Now I'm starting to think it’s less about that particular site and more about the internet as a whole. The internet is quietly becoming a walled garden. It’s not just about one platform anymore—it’s the pattern. You get banned for a single, harmless post. A subreddit removes your thread because it’s “real-life drama.” Cumulatively, it creates an environment where you hesitate before posting anything that isn’t perfectly sanitized.

RE: https://gruene.social/@netzbegruenung/116005932815523839

So viel zum Thema sich in den #walledgarden von #meta zurückziehen zu müssen.

@mainz_de