Daniel SusserOct 30, 2022

Has anyone found or spun up an STS/critical tech instance yet?

Seems like local feeds could be the best thing about this place—being able to experience communicative spaces without first having to connect with each member would give new entrants more visibility, make amassing high follower-counts/being at the center of dense networks less important

Show threadSeth LazarOct 30, 2022
@susser but yeah, I’d love to be part of an instance that was, broadly speaking, FAccT-y…
Show threadDaniel SusserOct 30, 2022
@sethlazar My sense is that it's pretty involved—would probably need a team of volunteers (though having some dedicated admins to coordinate would be great!).. Feels like something to explore after the semester ends :)
Show threadBrian C. Keegan, Ph.D.Oct 30, 2022
@sethlazar @susser Managing disciplinary-specific instances definitely should be the responsibility of professional/scholarly associations, but it seems like maintaining a website and listserv pushes the technical capacities of most.
Show threadMichael VealeOct 30, 2022
@bkeegan @sethlazar @susser I think it's going to be tricky moderating vis a vis external threat models, the challenge with open registrations is that you then need to moderate internally... and that's tricky... in the end, a crossdisiplinary community will have a lot of homes
Show threadDaniel SusserOct 30, 2022
@mikarv @bkeegan @sethlazar Yea, agreed. Asking tech policy people who think and talk a lot about content moderation to actually spend some time doing it could be good for the field though :)
Show threadMichael Veale
@susser @bkeegan @sethlazar that's exactly why i set up an instance (:
Oct 30, 2022 at 3:46pmWeb
Show threadDaniel SusserOct 30, 2022
@mikarv @sethlazar @bkeegan Oh nice, share what you learn!!
Show threadMichael VealeOct 30, 2022
@susser @sethlazar @bkeegan today I learned the initial instance I ran was about 2.5 years behind the current version, and that updating it requires grappling with a lot of weird dependencies. But it is done now.
Show threadSeth LazarOct 30, 2022
@mikarv @susser @bkeegan What’s the principle again about how hashtags work on here? I’ve definitely seen stuff come up from outside the instance I’m on, eg on the twittermigration one. That seems the simplest solution for having a common space with multiple homes if it would work…
Show threadSuresh VenkatasubramanianOct 30, 2022
@sethlazar @mikarv @susser @bkeegan there's a new eupolicy instance that some folks are creating. I wish there was a way to "follow an instance" - I'd love to kibitz on tbe discussions there but don't want to make a separate account just for that.
Show threadMichael VealeOct 30, 2022
@geomblog @sethlazar @susser @bkeegan The only reliable way I've found is a feature in the Tootle app where you can put the instance in search and see all of the posts from their people. Admins can disable it seemingly but only scholar.social seems to have done in my experience.
Show threadSuresh VenkatasubramanianOct 30, 2022
@mikarv @sethlazar @susser @bkeegan ah. I use Tusky on Android and don't see a way to do that here
Show threadMichael VealeOct 30, 2022
@geomblog @sethlazar @susser @bkeegan That's annoying — it's visible using the public API. eg hci.social's local timeline via the API here https://hci.social/api/v1/timelines/public?local=true
Show threadMichael VealeOct 30, 2022
@geomblog @sethlazar @susser @bkeegan (I think the reason you can't do this via Mastodon web is that the design philosophy of the Mastodon web client is that it should not have the user directly query third party servers. Apps do whatever they want, presumably.)
Show threadMichael VealeOct 30, 2022
@sethlazar @susser @bkeegan
Your server caches the "federated feed" - posts/boosts from anyone someone on your instance follows. These are searchable by hashtags. On some instances like mine, we can also search the toots we have in our federated database normally because we have installed ElasticSearch. But that uses computation so maybe the big .social instance doesn't use it.
Show threadMichael VealeOct 30, 2022
@sethlazar @susser @bkeegan So as long as your instance has enough people following enough other people to put a wide lens on the world, you can search that data, either through hashtags, or free text with ElasticSearch.