Mastodawn

We've upgraded to Mastodon 4.5, which includes some great new features

Some Mastodon clients already had built-in support for quote posting. Existing quote posts will remain unchanged, but Mastodon has added support for consent-respecting quote posts. You can disable quoting for all of your posts or individual posts in your account settings.

To learn more, please see the Mastodon blog post covering quote posts: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/09/introducing-quote-posts

We are also excited for automatic reply fetching! Replies from other instances will be automatically fetched when you visit a new thread, and continue to be updated every 15 minutes. This will help fill in all of those missing posts from other instances.

We're also updating our default landing page to be the local feed so new visitors to SFBA will get to see all of your wonderful public posts!

Learn more about Mastodon 4.5 on the JoinMastodon blog: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/mastodon-4.5/

Introducing quote posts

Over the years, we’ve learned just how essential quoting is to many of you. Here's a deep dive on how quote posts will work on Mastodon.

Mastodon Blog

seb Aug 10, 2025

SFBA Announcements Aug 10, 2025

You may have noticed that sfba.social looks a bit different, and that's because we just upgraded to the latest version of the Mastodon software. You can read about the changes here: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/07/mastodon-4.4/

If you have any questions or encounter any problems, please reach out to us via @announcements, @moderators, or via email ([email protected]).

Mastodon 4.4

Improved profile features, enhanced list management, refreshed navigation, and the initial part of our Quote Posts implementation. All of these and more, in our latest release.

Mastodon Blog

seb Apr 29, 2025

Neil Brown Apr 28, 2025

How far can a toot travel in the fediverse?

I chatted recently with someone who complained that the fediverse lacked "reach".

So I'm curious: if you are up for it, could you please reply to this toot (which started life on single user instance on a tiny computer in a garage in the United Kingdom) saying which country you are in?

Edit: 12 hours, 74 countries: https://neilzone.co.uk/2025/04/a-toot-travelled-to-fediverse-users-in-53-countries-in-12-hours/

A toot travelled to fediverse users in 77 countries in 12 hours

A little over 12 hours ago - yesterday evening, at around 20:07 UTC +1, I tooted:

seb Mar 19, 2025

Ian Brown

Mar 18, 2025

Hey there #fediverse, I’m looking to hire a senior engineer to work with some awesome folks on #Netflix’s build tools & test infrastructure. If you are interested please apply online! (see link in Toot)

My DMs are open if you have any questions about the role or if you want to let me know that you applied.

#Java #JVM #Gradle

https://explore.jobs.netflix.net/careers/job/790301668836?utm_source=LinkedIn&domain=netflix.com

Senior Software Engineer (L5) — Build & Dependency Management Team (JVM Ecosystem) | USA - Remote | Netflix

Common Languages and Tools: Java & other JVM languages, Gradle, Nebula, Spring Boot, JUnit, GraphQL, Kafka, PostgreSQL. Implement and manage build solutions that enhance the efficiency and reliability of software delivery. Develop and maintain backwards-compatible tools for dependency management and analysis. Integrate internal and vendor-provided build and test infrastructure into engineering workflows, focusing on reliability and ease of use. Design and develop tools and infrastructure to automatically detect, quarantine, and reproduce flaky tests. Create and maintain tools for analysis of distributed tracing tools for test runs. Develop and integrate software solutions that provide high-quality synthetic test data generated from captured production traffic and API schema registries. Correlate test coverage data with code changes, runtime execution, and trace data for comprehensive reporting. Maintain a strong focus on scalability, usability, and reliability in platform design to support a growing cohort of engineers. Be willing and able to showcase our team's offerings to internal audiences Consult with other teams about how to best collaborate, integrate, and/or set up solutions for their needs A skilled software engineer with experience in developer platform or productivity teams. A meticulous software designer who researches and documents technical tradeoffs clearly and concisely. A self-motivated and organized individual who can independently drive engineering-wide solutions. A proactive communicator who engages effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders. An advocate for strong build, dependency management, and testing practices, with familiarity in popular build tools, test frameworks, code coverage tools, continuous integration systems, and post-deployment verification methods (a healthy contempt for flaky tests is a plus). You have shipped and maintained Java code in production. You have worked on various technology stacks and are familiar with a variety of ways that software could be designed for different optimizations. You have designed and implemented build and dependency management solutions. You have built (and tested) custom Gradle plugins. You have assembled JVM Spring Boot applications using Gradle. You have experience with Nebula, Gradle, Maven, etc, for dependency management. You have experience with using and explaining Develocity dashboards. You are comfortable working with Zipkin or similar tools in the tracing space. You have implemented advanced log, metric, or error stacktrace analysis.

seb Mar 18, 2025

Juanan

Mar 18, 2025

Researchers at Harvard Business School and University of Toronto used unique data to quantify the value of open source.

Takeways:

* Supply-side (cost to recreate) is ~$4.15B, but demand-side (value to firms) is $8.8T. Shows massive cost savings & productivity boost from OSS.

* If OSS didn't exist, firms would need to spend an estimated 3.5 times more on software than they currently do. OSS provides a massive, often invisible, productivity boost.

* A tiny fraction of OSS developers create the vast majority of value. Only 5% of developers are responsible for over 96% of the demand-side value

* Firms should not just "free ride" on OSS but actively contribute to the ecosystem, as this is far cheaper than recreating the software themselves.

Source:
https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/24-038_51f8444f-502c-4139-8bf2-56eb4b65c58a.pdf

seb Mar 17, 2025

Carl T. Bergstrom Mar 17, 2025

The New York Times just discovered parallel computing.

seb Mar 17, 2025

GIMP Mar 17, 2025

GIMP 3.0 is released, check it out!

https://www.gimp.org/news/2025/03/16/gimp-3-0-released/

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who contributed in any way - from testing and submitting bug reports through to designing, coding, fixing, packaging, testing some more, translating, documenting, hosting, administration, so many people, so much work, so much to be thankful for!

Welcome to GIMP 3.0!

GIMP - GIMP 3.0 Released

Release notes for GIMP 3.0

seb Mar 14, 2025

Adrianna Tan Mar 13, 2025

Come work with me!

#Monterey #MontereyBayAquarium #Security #GetFediHired #Jobs #Hiring

https://candidateportal.creativecircle.com/job-detail/796730

seb Mar 8, 2025

Charlie Stross Mar 8, 2025

A well-funded Moscow-based global ‘news’ network has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda

An audit found that the 10 leading generative AI tools advanced Moscow’s disinformation goals by repeating false claims from the pro-Kremlin Pravda network 33 percent of the time
https://www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/a-well-funded-moscow-based-global

A well-funded Moscow-based global ‘news’ network has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda

An audit found that the 10 leading generative AI tools advanced Moscow’s disinformation goals by repeating false claims from the pro-Kremlin Pravda network 33 percent of the time

NewsGuard's Reality Check

seb Mar 3, 2025