@proprietor@wandering.shop

Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 2mo ago

hey there 'shop member! There's a low-level signal out there that might be more likely to intrude on our tiny little fediverse corner than some are. A number of accounts have been appearing with user names or profiles that include "bookclub" or "author" or claim to be one of us in some way, but have no verifyable existence outside of very bot-like engagement attempts once they have clocked your account as being writing-related. I've taken out two in the past day. Please report this activity!

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 5mo ago

Boosted by @cstross@wandering.shop

Ugh hey all - I'm guessing that this is a not-infrequent #feditips entry, but please report then block any account that is messaging you claiming to be "Mastodon Support" or telling you to "validate your account" or "contact us to activate your offer". Looks like jerks discovered a popular few hashtags this week and are then messaging people who were playing along. See something, suspend something! Thanks for reporting them.

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 2mo ago

Hello, cafe patrons!

We have just made a Federation adjustment to put the tags.pub service in a "Limit" status. Proprietor themself noticed today that the intended behaviour of tags.pub, which was not inherently objectionable, has potential to enable the intended behaviour of "hashtag spamming", which we DO find inherently objectionable.

You may continue to follow @ tag @tags.pub accounts as you wish, and you may also opt-in (and it is a true opt-in as individual users) by following the bot.

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@iftas@mastodon.iftas.org Oh dear. Thanks for sharing that signal. I noted 2 days ago that AP-enabled wordpress sites are hashtag spamming, and that combined with tags.pub could be particularly bad at overloading noise on top of the signal. I hope the one I caught wasn't a harbinger of this, or we're going to start defederating Wordpress like mad.

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 6mo ago

Replying to

From that subtext, my ask: be kind to your mods/admins ... and everyone else's. We're stuck trying to balance a lot of things that just don't even out sometimes. In the end for the activity pub forms of this network, it requires trust and collaboration, not just among your own communities' members (that's often the easier part, when you staff the virtual espresso bar for Wandering Shop), but for the wider network as well, that need have no particular care outside their own local timelines.

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 2mo ago

Some consequences of past actions were noted by members today, and I thought I'd share the explanation I found.

Sometimes you will find, as an inhabitant of wandering.shop (or any particular Mastodon instance) that you try to find someone, or click on a link/boost/reference and get some sort of notification that the account doesn't exist, you can't see it, or it might tell you it is suspended.

But someone else can see it. Or you can "view account on original instance..." but not from HERE. 1/2

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 6mo ago

ATTN: wandering.shop regulars and beyond ...

The Proprietor team is scheming up a tiny scheme to work on something we've talked about for years.

LIttle bit of a #mastoart boosting idea, little bit of a drive to find us some bespoke "branding".

I don't mind looking like a Creative Commons Licensed Latte, but we're one of the older and distinctly topical communities on the fedi and we still have default Mastodon graphics.

Follow us for updates by April 1. Not foolin'. Boost and share!

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 5mo ago

Considering re-writing rules to put DISINGENUOUS ENGAGEMENT and DON'T BE A PAIN IN YOUR SYSTEM ADMINS' BACKSIDES right up top.

I figure that gives license to yeet pretty much all the reports I get. 😆 Either because they're reporting yet another sealioning bot or fake account, or they're filed for some kind of net-nannying reason like not liking a turn of phrase in something one of you submitted to Clarkesworld or whatever.

(Reminder: wandering.shop does not consider book reviews actionable!)

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 5mo ago

My #wanderingArtShop has a small coffee counter with the fancy espresso machine but a sensibly concise menu of the standards. Filter brew and a selection of tea/tisanes/infusions too.

Lots of cozy seating, a mix of cafe tables for 2-4, six if you squish around. There are also poofy armchairs to curl up and read in, with your drink on the low coffee table between them, within arm's reach.

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 6mo ago

Oh hey look more agent bots sealioning in on ppl's conversations.

Andy is the new Jimmy is the new Nicole the Fediverse Chick is the new

**YEEEEET**.

As you were, fam, just keeping my digital trebuchet in working order.

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 7mo ago

Replying to

However, neither is compliant with what our Rules and Terms consider proper fedizen behaviour. Bots including AI-builds are tolerable provided: 1) They do not interact unless invited to 2) Activity on public timelines only 3) Clearly identified as an automated account ... and ... 4) The owner/deployer of the bot is identified in the bot profile and is active and responsive under their own online identity. They may still be pseudonymous, but they have to own up to the bot. Thanks, g'night

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 5mo ago

Hey all - doin' the housekeeping for this week. Reports handled, new invite code is up in the announcement, couple of other little back-office things got a little nudge.

Go forth and invite more friends along!

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 5mo ago

Replying to

I guess a first sticking point is even, HOW do we get some momentum on this? Is a #wanderingArtShop hashtag enough?

What if I ask you for one, or both, of two things.

If you're either walking up to, or sitting in, a Wandering.Shop, what architecture or design feature jumps out at you?

OR

If you're walking up to, or hanging out in, a Wandering.Shop, give me 3 words that capture the vibe.

Whaddya think? All replies welcome!

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 6mo ago

It's late, there's been a bit of DAY to today, on top of the last few days.

So if you need a timeline break, I'm going to pretend-abuse a hashtag for just one little transgression and share a # feditip .

Go find your favourite short-video doomscrolling service but search the timelines for "wombat zoomies".

Enjoy. G'night

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 5mo ago

Replying to

What happened to these instances was they were sold by the founder to the owner of a badly behaved, widely defederated instance around 2020. They degraded from there and seem to have been completely abandoned in 2023. We continue to ponder defederating completely but that would cut connections. So I'd like to encourage anyone who has follows/followers with mastodon.cloud or mstdn.jp to identify if they're important, and maybe invite them to a new home. a #cloudSave operation, if ye will.

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 7mo ago

Replying to

Just to be clear, our activity pub fediverse (mostly mastodon) has run into two different "AI" related deployment styles the last few days. 1) Intentional spammers using AI-hosting workspaces to set up activity pub hosts which are then filled with more obvious, basic spambots. 2) Not necessarily *intentional* bad actors are deploying agents with their own Activity Pub accounts, and these autonomous word-salad blenders are spontaneously interacting inappropriately.

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 7mo ago

Well, hey, friends here and far. This is not "fediverse" trust and safety related, except that there's a big crossover between us alternative microblog users and Signal's users.

There are now people receiving "Verify your Signal App" phishing attacks, just like the "Verify your Mastodon" ones.

Please don't verify ANYthing in response to a message on a network feed, no matter how "secure" or "encrypted".

/end PSA.

https://mastodon.world/@signalapp/116200110065937353

mastodon.world

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 3mo ago

Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social

RE: https://wandering.shop/@offby1/116840928214823089 Co-signed, fam. Please be aware that many people are traumatized or retraumatized every time they are failed like this by the society that should be supporting them. Good moment for a reminder that CWs are not a "rule" in our view, ever, they are a courtesy a poster may apply if they feel the need, not a demand you get to make to protect your own sensitivities. You may always move along. (Yes it's a subtoot, no, it's not on our community, it's notice to the outside world today).

Quoting

Chris is.

@offby1@wandering.shop

If you try to tell a trans fedizen that they need to cw their reponse to today's awful SCOTUS ruling, you maybe need to sit this one out.

Open quoted post

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 5mo ago

Replying to

Also, hey, if you want to follow any chatter on this project, just because I called it forth from the void, @wanderingArtShop now exists! Tags.pub is a service that lets you follow a hashtag like any account, which lets you see posts on hashtags even if your own instance doesn't federate with the poster's instance. Bit different from just following a hashtag, which shows you only posts your local instance "knows about".

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 6mo ago

Replying to

Thanks to @LaurensHof for this issue, and to those of you who took the time for a considerate thought about it. Cheers! Back to my cave again.

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 6mo ago

Replying to

This is grad-school thesis level thinking on our social web interactivity, so it's not a quick read, but it's also quite readable (unlike a lot of grad-school thesis level writing). Worth having a tea and a read-through. "The purpose of a protocol is what it does, and what the current generation of open protocols has produced is a commons without a governance framework adequate to the commons’ own complexity."

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 7mo ago

Replying to

Which is to say ... if an agent is just out there existing on the public timeline, well, they may be allowed in some places, and they can even be on their own hosts. Certainly if thats the case you can block accounts or instances and maintain your own Do Not Interact rule. But from what I've seen so far, with only one or two notable exceptions, even when these agentic bots are labeled "automated", they are behaving in ways that meet the criteria for spam in some way. So please report those!!!

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 7mo ago

Replying to

I have no idea how these keywankers get any traction out of this, except that they might hit the 2 or 3 extremely naive brand new users on one of the HUGE instances. Otherwise, one of the strengths of the federated model SHOULD be that we all understand we're not "on Mastodon", we are connected in our small-to-medium, open-but-authenticated individual servers. I rather like that we can have the sort of Know Your Client operations that bespoke banking does, at the scale we are at.

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 6mo ago

Replying to

There's a subtext here, to my eye, though I'm pointing it out while admitting I have a motivated bias to do so: Moderation in our social networks is kinda frickin' tough and often thankless. In our distributed social networks, we do some bits better, but some bits worse. One of the "worse" is, *nobody can get it "right" *. Because there is no "right". The very nature of the protocol stacks abdicates governance to whomever wants to step up to it. Or whomever has the resources to do it.

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@troodon@weirder.earth I am picking up that we have some sort of TARDIS + Midnight Burger aspect to our address. And possibly it might always be #caturday, yes? Like it.

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 7mo ago

oh, bother. Now catching spam, 2nd time this week, from someone running an AP host on .godaddysites.com .

I have a bad feeling they'll be less bothered by being an abuse host than HF.spaces would. Guess that's another #fediblock suggestion, if others haven't picked it up yet.

I hate how all the vermin come swarming once one of them gets a wedge into a crack.

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 7mo ago

Replying to

I probably don't need to tell wandering.shop regulars this, but in case my mod blurts occasionally get farther - nobody on the open social web gets approved/validated/verified/has to click links to "check in" or anything. If you have an account on wandering.shop (substitute your-instance-here), you're as verified as you're going to get. Now, if you're a complete butthead, you might find yourself suspended, put in the corner for a while, or on the receiving end of a stern finger wag, but ...

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 7mo ago

Replying to

... that can only come from an official instance owner, admin, or moderator WHO HAS THE SAME @ HOST.TLD as you, via private message or an email to the email address you signed up with (which only you and your admins can find). So continue as you are! BE UNVERIFIABLE !!!!

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 5mo ago

Fedi fam & friends, be ye on our Local timelines or following us from "around", we are still slowly progressing on our #wanderingArtShop project.

While I work on the next round of clearer specifications, have a look at our RFP:

https://gallery.wandering.shop/art-rfp.html

You can also follow our hashtag if you want to pick up the vibe our community members are casting out as to how we envision our community and its "place" in digital space.

Aiming for the next phase in a week or so (speed of volunteers, etc..)

gallery.wandering.shop

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 5mo ago

RE: https://social.growyourown.services/@FediTips/116523411932881228

Hrm... neat.

Not sure anyone wants Proprietor being able to post from a CLI, though. I *could* but usually if I'm getting loose on a CLI it's because something's broken and I'm a little desperate and experimenting.

@offby1@wandering.shop knows better to let me on *our* command-line tools unsupervised, don't worry. What I mean is I'd probably be indiscreet and mix-up posts with whatever fight I'm having with some conda or brew or other config stuff. Not a good look. 😆

social.growyourown.services

Fedi.Tips: "🤓 Techy people! You can use Mastodon through a c…" - social.growyourown.services

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@redthewizard That sounds really cool! Stay tuned for a week or two as we hack out an organized plan. One thing we know already is style/medium is wide open as long as it can be digitized and as long as it is NOT "AI generated".

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 5mo ago

If anyone is interested in, or concerned about, what tags.pub does or how it works, please have a read about it, from the source.

https://tags.pub

Hittin' #feditips with this, for reach. You have control over whether or not you interact with this service, so please inform yourselfs accordingly!

tags.pub

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 5mo ago

Replying to

You can check out our Local Timeline, or for users ON the instance, you can "Browse Profiles" of any instance from its front page or https://wandering.shop/deck/directory

wandering.shop

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 6mo ago

For those of you interested in the "bigger picture" of our digital social web and the perceived threat of regulation, this blog is a thoughtful and calm and neutral "where are we standing right now" look at it.

There is certainly much to be desired in specific implementations of specific regulatory aims, but the overall picture is a pulling back from complete anarchy to a person-centred social regime. The analogy to healthcare tech practices is resonant for me.

https://jaz.co.uk/2026/03/13/there-are-a-million-fediverses-and-theyre-all-regulated/

jaz.co.uk

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Managing Barista and Janitor @proprietor@wandering.shop

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@ergative@wandering.shop oooh, I wonder - is it bigger on the inside? I mean, we have around 4000 accounts plus all the federated passers-by. How else do we fit?

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