---------------------- 5:37 pm: Twitter halts all non-critical business travel and events
Twitter has joined a growing list of companies that have suspended business travel and events amid concerns about the spreading coronavirus outbreak.
The social media company said it has halted non-critical travel effective immediately until the World Health Organization or the Centers for Disease Control clear companies to step back from pandemic precautionary measures, or when a coronavirus vaccine becomes available.
"Our goal is to reduce the risk that anyone at Twitter might contract or inadvertently spread the virus," said Jennifer Christie, head of human resources at Twitter. "It is important that we take these proactive steps to protect ourselves and others and minimize the spread of COVID-19." -- Kimball
5:26 pm: France's Louvre Museum closed
The spreading coronavirus epidemic shut down France's Louvre Museum on Sunday, with workers who guard its famous trove of artworks fearful of being contaminated by the museum's flow of tourists from around the world.
Almost three-quarters of the Louvre's 9.6 million visitors last year came from abroad. The world's most popular museum welcomes tens of thousands of fans daily in Paris.
"We are very worried because we have visitors from everywhere," said Andre Sacristin, a Louvre employee and union representative.
"The risk is very, very, very great," he said in a phone interview. While there are no known virus infections among the museum's 2,300 workers, "it's only a question of time," he said.
A short statement from the Louvre said a staff meeting about virus prevention efforts stopped the museum from opening as scheduled Sunday morning. -- Associated Press
Before ads about “no Nazis” brought harassers over from #Twitter and #Tumblr, the #Fediverse simply did not have this. It was get along or ignore (block) the person.
(No, simple mode does not fix most of the irritations of the multi-column interface. Though now that I've seen #Twitter's multi-column UI, I can see why people use it.)
Also, what bozo decided years later that Diaspora (at least the JD instance) should start sending notifications and e-mails about people's birthdays? I believe that most of the people that joined early on joined specifically because they did not want their personal information dispersed unnecessarily. IMO, this is a violation of their trust. (Maybe this should be *opt-in* ... if you want your contacts to be notified of your important days such as birthdays and holidays, click a box to enable it.)
@sean Evan was hugely focused on #Pump.io (instead of us), until his resources ran out and he got involved with a new start up. This is also when some of his Pump-related domains were lost. . It isn't surprising that he's active on #Twitter and #Facebook, just that Pump is still not compatible with anything else. (And that his personal Pump instance, E14N.com is gone.)
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Saturday, 14-Dec-2019 17:40:59 UTC
LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}To those people that are terrified that #Twitter will adopt #AP and come to the Fediverse and steal all our people back into captivity, there is nothing to worry about. I've been using T again the past few days and: 1. the main interface feels like you're squeezed into a box; there is not enough focus on the actual tweets; it is also slow and bloated. 2. the tweetdeck interface is better, but removing extraneous columns does not make the important one (your main stream) wider. But now I see where Mastodon gets its annoying and confusing million-column interface. 3. my account is non-public and subs are by approval, so I greatly limit my annoyance; or I would if T did not insist on putting tweets of people I don't subscribe to in my stream just because someone I sub subs to them (or likes one of their tweets). 4. I have more to say about T, but I'm going to have to make it a blog post. 5. Dishonorable mention to all the "promoted tweet" ads stuffed in between the real tweets; and also to the "suggested follow" garbage that also appears there. If you're ad-supported, at least put the ads outside the main content.
I'm down to about 200 old tweets, none of which are displayed for me to delete, plus twenty or so new ones. I'd really like to only leave the most recent twenty-five newest. I don't tweet anything of enduring or historic significance, so there's no need for any of them to exist longer than 90-180 days.
Note to #Fediverse devs: That 90-180 day lifetime should be an option in your software.* Not that there is any guarantee that a post that federates to other instances will also be deleted on all those other instances when your own instance deletes it.
* That is, delete in X days unless someone interacts with it or the poster marks it as worth keeping longer.
I don't think that having a different kind of discovery from #corpocentric networks means that the #Fediverse's discovery mechanisms are wrong. Having been a #Twitter user for over a decade, they don't have the greatest discovery mechanisms either. They try to fill that in with "who to follow" and trending tags suggestions that are almost always wrong, wrong, wrong.
No universal view is a positive feature, not a negative one. If your group is using the tag #abc123 for something in your local scope (your instance and the instances where your contacts are hosted), it doesn't necessarily collide with another group using #abc123 in their own local scope. This can reduce confusion and conflict. It also means that people can post in whatever languages they desire on instances where said language is the majority and not have posts they can read buried under a multitude of other-language posts.
Many existing Mastodon and Pleroma instances have shared announcement servers (that's not the official name, but I can't recall it right now) that collect public and hashtagged posts and distribute among the other instances using that server. So with judicious choosing of announcement servers, the advantages listed above can be spread over a larger subset of instances and users without as many collision issues as a global view would cause.
No, discovery is not perfect. But let me ask you this: How do you discover e-mail addresses of people you wish to contact? Outside of your organization's address list, you can't just search a directory. You have to ask them or people that already know them. That's probably a better solution than plugging "firstname lastname" or "usual_nick" in a search box anyway.
@moonman Did we need #Twitter to know that? Years ago, a family member repeated an easily debunked talking point of one of the political parties. I went to the state budget office's site, printed out the evidence, and the person still refused to believe it.
@lohang I use #Twitter so rarely these days that I don't use anything except the web site. I believe #AndStatus (for Android) was able to connect to Twitter. I do not know whether that is currently true. Same for #Choqok (KDE desktop client). #TTYtter (command line client) has a successor, but I've never tried the new one.