Greco-Turkish War Aftermath, Google Search, Zoom, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 10, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Ekathimerini: A digital ‘atlas’ of the refugee imprint in Greece. “Anatolia Imprints… is an ambitious and labor-intensive project aimed at scientifically recording the economic, political and social impact of the decade-long wave of refugee arrivals in Greece that peaked in 1922-23. The website includes an interactive map that allows users to find out which part of Turkey their ancestors came from and where they settled in Greece – it covers all the refugees from agricultural communities and nearly half of those from cities – simply by inputting their full name.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Search Engine Journal: Google Search Major League Baseball “Recent Featured Highlights”. “Google has a new search feature titled ‘recent featured highlights’ for Major League Baseball players. It showcases stats for recent games, short video clips and more.”
Axios: Zoom CEO admits mistake as terms-of-service changes raise AI fears. “A change to Zoom’s terms of service left customers confused and worried that the video conferencing company was seeking broad rights to use images, sound and other content from meetings to train its AI algorithms.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
The Vinyl Factory: Rescuing records: Archiving the UK’s biggest South Asian vinyl collection. “Having your pick of 3000 records in a dusty backroom is a crate-digger’s dream, and it’s one that Faisal Hussain has lived. The Birmingham artist is the director of the True Form Projects vinyl archive–the largest South Asian vinyl collection in the UK. Rescued by Hussain from Muhammad Ayub’s Oriental Star Agencies– a Birmingham-based store that imported Indian and Pakistani music until its closure in 2017–the collection has spent the last three years being archived by Hussain and a team of volunteers.”
UC Riverside: Virtual reality headsets are vulnerable to hackers. “While Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are envisioned as the next iteration of the internet immersing us in new digital worlds, the associated headset hardware and virtual keyboard interfaces create new opportunities for hackers.”
The Verge: ‘Every single’ Amazon team is working on generative AI, says CEO. “‘Every single one’ of Amazon’s businesses has ‘multiple generative AI initiatives going right now,’ Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on the company’s Q2 2023 earnings call on Thursday. The company offers infrastructure and services via AWS that can help power many generative artificial intelligence applications, which Jassy did discuss on the call, but he also stressed just how important AI is across the company as a whole.”
EMS HeatTracker, Twitter, Classroom AI Tools, More: Thursday ResearchBuzz, August 10, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
US Department of Health and Human Services: Biden-Harris Administration Launches National Dashboard to Track Heat-Related Illness. “The EMS HeatTracker will be used to help state, regional, and local government officials, such as city and regional planners, determine where to prioritize heat mitigation strategies, like street trees, parks, and cool roofs. It will also be used to help mayors and public health officials prioritize interventions like cooling centers and outreach to at-risk populations during periods of extreme heat.”
Washington Post: Twitter gutted its policy team. Some of the band is getting back together.. “Over a dozen former executives who led Twitter’s public policy team on Wednesday are launching a new political advisory group, taking the practically unheard of step of reuniting en masse after the company, since-rebranded X, shed much of its own shop under Elon Musk. The newly minted Blue Owl Group, a nod to Twitter’s once-iconic bird logo, is stacked with longtime tech veterans looking to use the new perch to shape major debates about the internet, artificial intelligence and climate — while recapturing the company’s sensibilities.”
Make Tech Easier: 13 Tips for Using Live Photos on iPhone. “Live photos have been around on iOS devices for a few years, allowing you to capture specific moments in precisely 1.5 seconds of motion before or after snapping a photo. You can do many things with a live photo on your iPhone or iPad. You can convert it into a still image, change effects, edit it as you would a regular photo, and more. This guide serves up the best tips to use Live Photos on iPhone.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
ProPublica: How Social Media Apps Could Be Fueling Homicides Among Young Americans. “As shooting rates among the young remain stratospheric, evidence suggests social media is serving as an accelerant to violence. Taunts that once could be forgotten now live on before large audiences, prompting people to take action.”
The Hill: Hate-speech watchdog being sued by Musk says it will defend suit ‘vigorously’. “A nonprofit organization that tracks online hate-speech pledged to keep pushing forward with its goal of holding tech companies accountable even as the group fends off a lawsuit from the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Make Zine: 3D Printing Paganini’s Famous Violin. “The illustrious ‘Il Cannone di Paganini,’ once owned by the renowned Genovese musician Niccolò Paganini and now preserved at Palazzo Tursi, inspired the creation of a faithful 1:1 replica using 3D printing technology. The replica, crafted with meticulous attention to detail, features white resin and strings in the striking red nylon, evoking the colors of the San Giorgio flag.”
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: ICIJ Joins Global Initiative To Set AI Guidelines For Journalists. “ICIJ executive director Gerard Ryle, journalist Maria Ressa and other industry leaders have pledged to work together to develop a set of principles, rights and obligations regarding the use of AI-based systems.”
PsyPost: ChatGPT is much better than humans at accurately identifying emotions in fictional textual scenarios. “A new study found that ChatGPT, an increasingly popular AI chatbot capable of natural language processing, greatly outperformed humans in emotional awareness tasks in a set of fictional textual scenarios. It was much better than typical people at estimating the emotions characters would likely experience. The paper was published in Frontiers in Psychology.”
OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL
VietNamnet: Foreign travelers now can look up street names via QR codes. “Tam Ky built a database and digitized the names of streets and routes in the city in a plan to apply high technology to store, disseminate and explain the history of the country and localities. This allows locals and foreign travelers to learn about every street in a simple way, with their smartphones via QR Code.” Good morning, Internet…
Pakistan Laws, Google Search Results, Email Productivity, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 9, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
ProPakistani: This New Website Lets You Search All Federal Laws of Pakistan. “The Prime Minister of Pakistan has launched a new website that lets you look up all the federal laws, allowing for easy access. The website is called Pakistan Code and it also has Android and iOS apps. The iOS app is in the beta version for now.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Search Engine Land: Google reduces the visibility of HowTo and FAQ rich results in search. “Google will be showing fewer rich results in its search results, specifically showing less FAQ rich results across the search result snippets and limiting How-To rich results to desktop devices. Google said this update will roll out over next week globally.”
PCMag UK: Google Enables End-to-End Encryption for RCS Group Chats. “Group text chats between Android users should now have the same privacy as one-to-one conversations, courtesy of Google completing an upgrade to its RCS messaging service that extends end-to-end encryption to multiple-person chats.”
USEFUL STUFF
Lifehacker: Use Text Expanders to Email More Efficiently. “We all waste a lot of time writing out emails. Many of these emails say the same basic thing, too, when you’re following up on something, sending an introduction, or emailing a process explanation—and it can be mind-numbing to type it all out over and over again. But you actually don’t need to repeat common messages all the time, nor do you need to frequently copy and paste: Instead, try a text expander to quickly send out pre-defined paragraphs and get your day moving faster. You have a few different options, but in general, they work the same way: You type one word to trigger the insertion of another, pre-written sequence of words.”
How-To Geek: What Song is This? 8 Ways to Identify Music You’ve Heard. “You can identify just about any song you’ve heard using a smartphone, your computer, or a search engine like Google. It doesn’t need to be playing right now; if you can hum it or remember the lyrics you should be good. Here’s how.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
H-Announce: German Transcription Project: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Digital Archive. “Join our exciting project and transcribe the letters of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, an important 20th century German philosopher and key player in the post-Nietzschean religious revival in the Weimar Republic. This archival collection includes correspondence with influential figures like Franz Rosenzweig, Karl Barth, Martin Buber, and others. We also have included personal letters. German speakers [and Sütterlin readers] are needed to make this historical treasure accessible for researchers worldwide.”
The Register: Google, you’re not unleashing ‘unproven’ AI medical bots on hospital patients, yeah?. “Google is under pressure from a US lawmaker to explain how it trains and deploys its medical chatbot Med-PaLM 2 in hospitals. Writing to the internet giant today, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) also urged the web titan to not put patients at risk in a rush to commercialize the technology.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Carnegie Mellon University: Parenting a 3-Year-Old Robot. “The way babies learn and explore their surroundings inspired researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Meta AI to develop a new way to teach robots how to simultaneously learn multiple skills and leverage them to tackle unseen, everyday tasks. The researchers set out to develop a robotic AI agent with manipulation abilities equivalent to a 3-year-old child. The team has announced RoboAgent, an artificial intelligence agent that leverages passive observations and active learning to enable a robot to acquire manipulation abilities on par with a toddler.” Good afternoon, Internet…
WWII Alderney, Green Bay Estuary, Project IDX, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, August 9, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
BBC: Website set up for Alderney Nazi death camp review. “A dedicated website has been launched, external to share the latest research as part of a review into the number of deaths in Alderney during World War Two. The island – along with the rest of the Channel Islands – was occupied by Germany and housed four forced/slave labour sites, including the concentration camp Lager Sylt.”
University of Wisconsin Green Bay: Green Bay Estuary digital archives collection launch. “UW-Green Bay is the state lead for the designation of a Green Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR). As a part of that designation process, UW-Green Bay and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources partnered to create the Green Bay Estuary Digital Archives Collection, which includes original materials related to the region’s water history, science, and cultural impact from the UW-Green Bay Archives collections. The digital collection seeks to tell the story of the Green Bay Estuary through photographs, postcards, maps, oral history interviews, and historical records.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
TechCrunch: Google launches Project IDX, a new AI-enabled browser-based development environment. “Google today announced the launch of Project IDX, its foray into offering an AI-enabled browser-based development environment for building full-stack web and multiplatform apps. It currently supports frameworks like Angular, Flutter, Next.js, React, Svelte and Vue, and languages like JavaScript and Dart, with support for Python, Go and others in the works.”
Mashable: OpenAI launches webcrawler GPTBot, and instructions on how to block it . “OpenAI has launched a web crawler to improve artificial intelligence models like GPT-4. Called GPTBot, the system combs through the Internet to train and enhance AI’s capabilities. Using GPTBot has the potential to improve existing AI models when it comes to aspects like accuracy and safety, according to a blog post by OpenAI.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
Washington Post: Fleeing Elon Musk’s X, the quest to re-create ‘Black Twitter’. “Prominent Black users are now moving to other sites, attempting to re-create Black Twitter on a dizzying array of emerging services, from Mastodon to Meta’s just-launched Threads. Smaller apps also have cropped up or gained users, including the safety-focused Spoutible and Black-owned Fanbase and Somewhere Good. The latest entrant is Spill, a Twitter alternative launched in June by a Black Twitter executive — one of many fired by Musk.”
Mexico News Daily: The Herculean task of digitizing Mexico’s vast Indigenous history. “The challenge of the 21st century is how to convert over a century of audio, video, text and more into digital formats before it is too late. In the thick of this for Mexico’s National Institute of Indigenous People (INPI) is head archivist Octavio Murillo Álvarez de la Cadena and his staff, who say that their work is particularly important because ‘Indigenous peoples have been historically marginalized,’ not to mention that many Indigenous cultures are threatened with disappearing or complete assimilation.”
Gyrovague: archive.today: On the trail of the mysterious guerrilla archivist of the Internet. “Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can’t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, odds are you’ve already stumbled on archive.today, which provides easy access to these and much more: just paste in the article link, and you’ll get back a snapshot of the page, full content included.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
University of Maryland: UMD Researchers Uncover Privacy Risks in Cellphones Won at Police Auctions. “Their recent study found that many of the phones sold at police property auction houses—which sell devices seized in criminal investigations or that have gone unclaimed from lost-and-found inventories—are not properly wiped of personal data. The study, conducted over two years with cellphones bought from the largest police auction house in the U.S., uncovered troves of personal information from previous owners that potentially put them at risk of harm from identity theft to blackmail.”
New York Times: Eight Months Pregnant and Arrested After False Facial Recognition Match. “Porcha Woodruff thought the police who showed up at her door to arrest her for carjacking were joking. She is the first woman known to be wrongfully accused as a result of facial recognition technology.”
The Hill: Georgia Republicans eyeing legislation requiring parents’ permission for kids’ social media accounts. “A duo of Georgia Republicans have announced a legislative push to require children to have their parents’ permission to use certain social media accounts. In a news conference Monday, Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones (R) and state Senate Majority Caucus Chairman Sen. Jason Anavitarte (R) said they plan to introduce the bill during the state’s 2024 legislative session.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Financial Mirror (Cyprus): Digital reunification of Swedish Archaeological Mission. “Academics from Cyprus and Sweden intend to digitally reconnect the findings of the Swedish Archaeological Mission, undertaken on the island from 1927 to 1931, but the items are held in separate collections. According to the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT), half of the Cypriot archaeological finds are exhibited in Stockholm and the other half in Nicosia since the mission took place.”
North Carolina State University: A New Weapon in the War on Robocall Scams. “The new tool, SnorCall, essentially records all robocalls received on the monitored phone lines. It bundles together robocalls that use the same audio, reducing the number of robocalls whose content needs to be analyzed by around an order of magnitude. These recorded robocalls are then transcribed and analyzed by a machine learning framework called Snorkel that can be used to characterize each call.” Good morning, Internet…
Content Creator Management, Affordable Connectivity Program, Google, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, August 8, 2023
By ResearchBuzz
NEW RESOURCES
Tubefilter: This database helps content creators find managers. “The database–which is free to access–has information about more than 10,000 managers and agencies who work with content creators. Creators can filter search managers/agencies by dozens of content categories, like beauty, education, ASMR, gaming, narrative storytelling, podcasts, pets, food, and more. They can also search by general geographic location and by the size of the management company/agency.”
TWEAKS AND UPDATES
Ars Technica: FCC prepares $75 monthly broadband subsidies for “high-cost” areas. “The Federal Communications Commission is paving the way for $75 monthly subsidies to make broadband service more affordable for low-income households in certain ‘high-cost’ areas. The $75 subsidy will be part of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) that generally offers $30 monthly discounts to people with low incomes. The ACP was created by Congress in late 2021 and implemented by the FCC to replace a previous pandemic-related subsidy program.”
The Verge: Google Search can now critique your grammar. “The grammar check feature appears to have been available since at least last month, although Google warns its suggestions might not be 100 percent accurate.”
AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD
New York Times: A New Frontier for Travel Scammers: A.I.-Generated Guidebooks. “The books are the result of a swirling mix of modern tools: A.I. apps that can produce text and fake portraits; websites with a seemingly endless array of stock photos and graphics; self-publishing platforms — like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing — with few guardrails against the use of A.I.; and the ability to solicit, purchase and post phony online reviews, which runs counter to Amazon’s policies and may soon face increased regulation from the Federal Trade Commission.”
WCVB: Boston City Hall Plaza Playground’s ‘Cop Slide’ now appears on Google Maps. “‘Cop slide’ appears to be sticking as the unofficial name for the massive slide at Boston’s City Hall Plaza playground. The attraction, which earned its nickname for the viral video of a Boston police officer taking a ride that became a tumble, now appears on Google Maps.”
SECURITY & LEGAL
TorrentFreak: Z-Library Rolls Out Browser Extensions in Anticipation of Domain Name Troubles. “Pirate eBook repository Z-Library has launched browser extensions that should make it easier for users to find the site if its current domains are seized in the future. While the site doesn’t explicitly mention the U.S. Government crackdown, it likely plays a key role in the decision to make these extensions available.”
Bloomberg: India House Approves Privacy Bill in Boon for Google, Meta. “The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2023 that has been years in the making allows companies to export data to any country except those specified by New Delhi. The move is a boon for global enterprises such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc. as it eases data flows and reduces their compliance burdens.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Los Angeles Times: Column: A few sick days made it clear — Twitter is dying, and so is social media as we know it. “For over a decade, logging onto social media — especially Twitter — has been among the first steps of the day for countless professionals, students, and the very online; a way to instantaneously reenter the fray; get up to date on the latest news, trends and memes. Over the years, despite the chaos that tumbled down its feed, it became an orienting force; a way that we parsed and organized information for the coming day, or week. That force is, for all intents and purposes, extinguished.”
FedScoop: State Department shutters AI-based project that aimed to forecast violence and COVID-19. “The State Department is no longer pursuing an artificial intelligence project that aimed to ‘test the statistical relationship between social media activity overseas and activity by violent extremist organizations,’ an agency spokesperson told FedScoop. The shuttered pilot is one of several initiatives disclosed in the agency’s AI use case inventory and is still listed on the State Department website.”
Fast Company: Google Maps has become an eyesore. 5 examples of how the app has lost its way. “Google Maps still holds around 80% of the mobile market. But in recent years, I’ve found myself getting increasingly frustrated with the Google Maps experience, especially when it comes to general navigation and exploration of a map area. Here are the five main reasons Google Maps has become a cluttered, frustrating mess—and why I find myself turning to Apple Maps more often.” Good afternoon, Internet…
Scientific Data: ReCANVo: A database of real-world communicative and affective nonverbal vocalizations . “Here, we present ReCANVo: Real-World Communicative and Affective Nonverbal Vocalizations – a novel dataset of non-speech vocalizations labeled by function from minimally speaking individuals. The ReCANVo database contains over 7000 vocalizations spanning communicative and affective functions from eight minimally speaking individuals, along with communication profiles for each participant.”
USEFUL STUFF
Smashing Magazine: Designing Accessible Text Over Images: Best Practices, Techniques, And Resources (Part 1). “In this two-part series of articles, Hannah Milan covers the best practices when using various accessible text over images techniques for designing your web and mobile app content. These practices can help you to make the text over images more accessible while retaining an aesthetically pleasing look. Get ready to deep-dive through the subtle changes in your design, such as the text’s position, size, and background style, and explore the importance of using real text for accessibility purposes, as opposed to using images of text.”
WIRED: How to Automatically Delete Passcode Texts on Android and iOS. “IT’S NOT ALWAYS easy juggling digital accounts when you’re signed up to dozens of them—or perhaps even hundreds (you know who you are). While password managers can ease some of the strain, we’re also big fans of two-factor authentication, which helps those services make sure you are who you say you are. That’s where passcodes come in.”
Cabin Radio: Google and Apple aren’t sure if the highway’s open, either. “Head spinning from the number of recent NWT highway closures brought on by nearby wildfires? You aren’t alone. Major tech companies seem to be struggling to stay on top of the situation, too. Early on Saturday, several Yellowknife residents reported an inability to plan any Google Maps route to or from Yellowknife involving Highway 3.”
The Hill: Wisconsin judge orders release of records on fake elector. “A judge ordered the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) on Friday to release records related to one of its members accused of posing as a fake elector in a scheme to overturn the state’s 2020 election results for former President Trump.”
CBS News: Cyberattack causes multiple hospitals to shut emergency rooms and divert ambulances. “Cybercriminals attacked the computer systems of a California-based health care provider causing emergency rooms in multiple states to close and ambulance services to be redirected. The ransomware attack happened at Prospect Medical Holdings of Los Angeles, which has hospitals and clinics in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Texas. Prospect Medical is investigating how the breach happened and is working on resolving the issue, the company said in a statement Friday.”
RESEARCH & OPINION
Bleeping Computer: New acoustic attack steals data from keystrokes with 95% accuracy. “A team of researchers from British universities has trained a deep learning model that can steal data from keyboard keystrokes recorded using a microphone with an accuracy of 95%. When Zoom was used for training the sound classification algorithm, the prediction accuracy dropped to 93%, which is still dangerously high, and a record for that medium.”
Wall Street Journal: Why ChatGPT Is Getting Dumber at Basic Math. “But new research released this week reveals a fundamental challenge of developing artificial intelligence: ChatGPT has become worse at performing certain basic math operations. The researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley said the deterioration is an example of a phenomenon known to AI developers as drift, where attempts to improve one part of the enormously complex AI models make other parts of the models perform worse.”
OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL
Hackaday: Browser-Based Robot Dog Simulator In ~800 Lines Of Code. “[Sergii] has been learning about robot simulation and wrote up a basic simulator for a robodog platform: the Unitree A1. It only took about 800 lines of code to do so, which probably makes it a good place to start if one is headed in a similar direction.” Good morning, Internet…
Mastodon’s Search Limitations Are Good and Can Be Used For Good
By ResearchBuzz
I don’t know if it’s because it’s Monday or because it’s way too humid to exercise outside and I just exercised outside anyway, but I find myself especially irritated at all the complaining about Mastodon search I keep seeing. You can’t search Mastodon across multiple instances! It’s terrible to not have full-text search! Etc etc etc.
First of all, you can search Mastodon across multiple instances. I know this because I made tools to do it. More about them later. Second, it’s not terrible that search is limited to hashtags only. In fact, it’s good.
In this article I’m going to look at the ways Mastodon’s search is limited and why those limitations are good. Then, I’m going to look at Mastodon’s extremely-open API and show you some ways that I have used it to make useful search tools that abide with, and indeed make the most of, Mastodon’s search limitations.
Mastodon’s Hashtag-Only Search
If you’ve spent any time posting on Twitter, you’ve probably had this experience: You post something or reply to someone and a stranger enters your conversation. Sometimes this is a good thing – maybe they’re an expert or they have a similar interest. Sometimes, however, it’s a bad thing. The third-party has an axe to grind about a topic you’re discussing or worse, it’s a bot designed to attack/solicit/annoy any post with certain keywords in it. What started out as a conversation, or an attempt to make community online, ends in a lot of noise and probably lots of people/bots being blocked.
This happens on Twitter because until relatively recently there has only been one public post volume: loud. You could lock your account and interact only with your followers, or you could post to the world, have your tweets searchable, and leave yourself open to unpleasant interaction. It’s only been recently that Twitter has tried to create curated audience spaces via Twitter Circles; unfortunately the feature has had some privacy issues.
By limiting its search to hashtags, Mastodon makes public conversation opt-in. If you don’t use hashtags, your content is not findable in an aggregate. (I’m saying that to distinguish from the fact that your content is still available as an RSS feed, possibly via local instance search, etc.) You can choose to have quieter, instance-level or follower-level conversations in a way that makes them unknowable to the greater public of Mastodon.
And that’s good because it’s a much better allegory for public interaction. If you go to a bar or a party, it’s rare that everyone there is in one group talking. Usually there’s a bunch of groups, or one big loud group and several smaller groups, and so on. Searching for hashtags and hashtags only makes it possible to both cultivate groups of like minded people via an aggregate search and leave them privacy to create and maintain online community.
You might be surprised I feel this way about full-text versus hashtag search. After all, I’m a search engine and online information collection nerd. Wouldn’t I find hashtag-only search inefficient? Wouldn’t I want to full-text search all the things?
Well, no. Because Mastodon is not Google or any other full-text engine, nor should it be. It is a platform for community and conversation. Just as conversations do not echo in an enclosed space forever, conversation search should be somewhat ephemeral.
Mastodon Search Lets Conversations Live a Natural Life Cycle
Twitter has for a long time tried to position itself as the place where life happened. Where official accounts made their official statements – no need to visit their Web site, Twitter’s all you need. Where the famous people clapped back or sometimes got the worst of it from us unwashed masses. Where news happens in real time and gets repudiated or joked about or responded to by everybody.
Mastodon, as a distributed network, can’t take Twitter’s place as some kind of constantly-written history book (which, again, is a good thing.) Conversations start, they exist, they die, they vanish. Participants in conversations have the means to do personal archiving if they wish (via RSS feeds of participants and public instance feeds) but Mastodon makes more general, impersonal information aggregation difficult, as it should be on a conversational platform.
Remember, social media as a cultural phenomenon is less than 20 years old. Normalizing full-text search and retention on conversational platforms means confronting issues like the postdoc who doesn’t qualify for a grant because when they were fifteen they said on Facebook that so-and-so has a tonker like a pool noodle. Aside from that, people are different over time. They age, they grow, they change their minds. Do you really want to have to repeatedly check all your online conversations for opinions you no longer have out of fear that someone may ask you to support your argument that James Patterson is the greatest writer in the history of the world?
People say stupid things when they’re being mean, when they’re being ignorant, and when they honestly intend well and their brain misfires. Even on a conversational platform with ephemeral search, the mean statements can be held accountable. Mean people, when they are mean over and over and over, contribute nothing to the community and make themselves known as people who contribute nothing to the community and therefore can be avoided/blocked/muted.
On the other hand, people who make human communication errors and are allowed to have them expire can continue to exist within the community (or contribute to the community) without building a reputation of errors or of having one-off errors held against them.
(I understand that one person’s communication error can cause deep offense in another person. I don’t mean to trivialize that at all. By saying that I think the community as a whole should be more tolerant of communication errors via ephemeral search doesn’t mean I think the recipient of the error should be tolerant.
If someone says something awful to you on Mastodon – if someone says ANYTHING to you on Mastodon – neither you nor the people around you are obligated to assess their intentions before you mute them, block them, yeet them into the sun, or otherwise banish them from your social space. Doing so is neither aggressive nor an act of censorship; it is taking appropriate responsibility for one’s online experience andshould be lauded. Offense can be caused by one action, is subjective, and should have an option for immediate individual (muting/blocking/yeeting) response. Offensiveness, on the other hand, is a pattern of behavior (or a single particularly-outrageous act) that is more easily assessed and dealt with at a community (moderator) level. )
Mastodon’s hashtag-only search is good for the platform and I believe it will be good for developing online community as well. Further, Mastodon’s extremely open API makes all kinds of search tools possible. I have been having a ball for the last few weeks exploring that, and I’m nowhere near finished.
Making Mastodon’s Hashtag-Only Search Work Better
Mastodon’s search is limited by hashtags, but it’s also expanded by Mastodon’s open, information-packed API. Instead of complaining about what we can’t do with Mastodon’s search, a better tactic is to explore the API and start experimenting with the huge amount of material it gives you.
I have been using a combination of the Mastodon API and the Instances.Social API to create tools that make the most of Mastodon’s API and the hashtag search limitation. There are a dozen of them available, free and ad-free, at MastoGizmos.com . I want to talk about a few here and how, even when your search is limited to just hashtags, you can use Mastodon’s API data to get powerful results for your queries.
As I noted earlier, social media as a cultural phenomenon is less than 20 years old. But in that time period we as a culture have gained a lot of knowledge about how it works. We know about replies and reposts and favorites and shares.
Yet it’s rare that we’re able to apply that knowledge to a social media search. If we search Twitter we can get stories that are recent and stories that are “Top,” for some reason, but if we want to search specifically by retweets, likes, and favorites, we have to dig down into the advanced search. (Twitter’s advanced search used to be right up front, but it seems like Twitter’s making it a little more obscure these days.)
Mastodon’s API includes information about reposts, likes, and favorites, making it easy to narrow down your search even while using hashtags as queries. That’s what I did with Mastodon Social Signal Search.
MSSS lets you specify a hashtag and then filter the results by specifying that they have a minimum of up to 4 replies, reposts, or favorites. (I chose 4 because Mastodon is not a large network compared to other platforms and I did not want to offer a larger maximum and have people searching via filters that constantly return no results.) Further, the results show the number of replies, reposts, and favorites both via text and a green bar. (Results with the highest social activity levels are shown first.)
I had a little trouble with this tool because I wasn’t sure how to define the pool of instances to be searched. On one hand, I wanted to search enough instances that I could get results for a search for OpenSource with at least four reposts and replies. On the other hand, I didn’t want to produce an overwhelming number of results when someone’s looking for #beer posts with 2 replies.
How I handled it was by using the user preferences to determine the number of instances to be searched. (Basically, (number of preferences * 10) + 10.) That’s another advantage of creating search on a distributed network; you can generate data pools on the fly in all kinds of different ways. In this case I’m changing the number of instances I’m searching, but for other tools on MastoGizmos the instances to be searched are filtered by language, or by whether they’re open to new users or not.
Some users may find searching a limited number of instances to be unsatisfying because it isn’t “all Mastodon.” The thing is I’m not sure we can get “all” anywhere anymore. Is Google displaying every last result for your keyword search from every page they’ve ever indexed? I suspect the Web is way too big for that now. Like Google I want my search to focus ideally on quality results. By starting my search via the larger instances (and sometimes limiting it there depending on what I’m doing) I can use their activities and moderation to filter for posts with useful social signals.
But does every Mastodon search require that you restrict the number of instances you search for best results? No, you can narrow your results in other ways, like via verified users.
Mastodon’s verification system is different from Twitter’s. Instead of a centralized system that dispenses verification, users can verify themselves via placing a specially-formatted link on their Web site. (You can learn more about that here.) Though it’s not as thorough an identity check as, say, looking at a driver’s license, it’s still a method to filter our results away from fraudsters and toward expertise. Of course, this search only works as well as the number of people across Mastodon choose to verify themselves, but I find that even now I can get pretty good results with Madeline’s Mastodon Search, which searches across 200 instances.
Madeline’s Mastodon Search (named after Madeline Albright; 100 points if you get the joke) restricts its results to posts from users who have verified at least one link in their bio. Results are grouped by the domain of the verified link; users choose a domain from a dropdown menu to see search results.
Because everybody can get verified on Mastodon, verification becomes less about status and gatekeeping and more about a useful enhancement for your search results. As in the case above, where I’m filtering the #news hashtag by a known news organization (ProPublica), you can see how applying a verified-identity filter to a hashtag that might otherwise be fraught with disinformation can protect you and make your search results less misleading.
For my last example of how Mastodon’s hashtag search can be applied differently I want to focus on presentation, not filtering. Mastodon’s hashtag search, with its focus on meaningful, informative words, is an excellent candidate for a visual instead of a text presentation of search results. Like for example in a tag cloud.
KebberCloud is not so much a search tool as a Mastodon exploration tool. Specify a hashtag you want to search and choose from one of ten randomish instances provided by the Instances.Social API. KebberCloud will do a search for your hashtag on that instance and generate a cloud of all hashtags that appear in your search results. Clicking on a hashtag in the cloud opens a new tab with a search for that hashtag on that instance.
KebberCloud helps me when I’m not sure what hashtags would be most useful for my search. Even if hashtags in the results cloud aren’t related to my query in a way that’s immediately obvious, they’re still giving me ideas about how other people are thinking and talking about my search topic. Furthermore, the drop-down menu and visual presentation of the hashtags makes it easy to explore with quick glances and without slogging through a long list of words.
Conclusion
It is the case that Mastodon and its distributed structure looks different from the centralized social media we’re used to, as does its search. That doesn’t mean that Mastodon’s search should be considered inferior or even faulty. By limiting search to hashtags, Mastodon has created a way to clearly delineate a way to opt-in to public conversations while defaulting to more private ones. By offering an open, extensive API, Mastodon has created a vast number of ways to filter search results in meaningful, productive ways. We have barely begun to scratch that surface. Less complaining, more exploring!
August 8, 2023 at 01:24AM
via ResearchBuzz https://ift.tt/8kJdYHp
