Finding people to follow

My biggest “beginner” suggestion is to find and follow a few fairly active accounts, and then when they “boost” someone interesting, follow those people as well. If you’re trying to “migrate” from Twitter, there are a bunch of tools to try to find the people you follow there, including Fedifinder and Debirdify, but the one I found to have the cleanest interface, and the most useful (and allows one-click following) is Movetodon.

If you’re looking for new people to follow around a particular subject, there are a variety of lists out there, including Trunk, Fediverse.info, Fedi.Directory, and PressCheck.org (which verifies journalists, specifically).

A very cool tool I only recently discovered is Followgraph. You put in your Mastodon handle, it looks up all the people you follow and all the people they follow, and then recommends to you the people who lots of your followers follow, but you don’t… It’s pretty useful in surfacing people I might want to follow (though it also surfaces some people I know about but deliberately don’t want to follow).

I also, generally, recommend not cross posting between Twitter and Mastodon, but there are perfectly good reasons to ignore this suggestion. My thinking on it is that this is somewhere different, and you should learn to use it “natively.” Also, it feels like many people set up a cross-poster and then go off and ignore Mastodon, so their accounts are sort of zombie accounts.

Over the last few years, we kept being told that “big tech” companies had an impossible-to-close lead in artificial intelligence. We were told that only Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft could possibly “lead” in AI, because they had access to the best talent, and the most data, and no one else could possibly catch up. We were told over and over again that antitrust had to look at these big companies and how they were going to control the AI world.

And yet, by far the most interesting AI developments this past year came… not from any of those companies, but from OpenAI, a for-profit entity that is owned by and started as a non-profit. Earlier this year it unleashed DALL-E 2 on the world, showing just how powerful and creative one could be with AI generated art. And almost immediately we saw a bunch of similar offerings (many building on OpenAI’s initial work) popping up, such as MidJourney, and the open source Stable Diffusion. And while Google and Meta have previewed their own versions of this technology, both are playing from (way) behind, rather than leading the way.

Just as the year was coming to a close, OpenAI’s ChatGPT got the world excited about advances in generative text as well, to the point that some are even talking about how ChatGPT could actually eventually challenge Google’s core search business. It’s way too early for that, and ChatGPT is nowhere near in a position to make a dent in Google’s search business… but, there’s an opening. An opening that just a year ago many people insisted was impossible.

There have been some other fun surprises in the hardware world as well. While it launched in 2021, 2022 is when the Framework laptop seems to have really started to take off, showing that a brand new laptop company can enter what had felt like a mostly closed market with an innovative take that is focused on (yet again) putting more power in the hands of the end users: shipping a laptop that not only is designed to be modified by the owner, but where the user is specifically encouraged to repair and modify their own laptops. In an age where the big companies are still fighting a right to repair, we’re seeing smaller companies step in and see the right to repair as a market opportunity to come in and beat the big guys.

DEFCON.social is open!

From the first DEF CON announcement over 30 years ago inviting all to attend our first gathering:

"We cordially invite all hackers/phreaks, techno-rats, programmers, writers, activists, lawyers, philosophers, politicians, security officials, cyberpunks and all network sysops and users to attend."

That's still our core audience, but we welcome artists, musicians, infosec, privacy professionals, journalists, and everyone genuinely curious about how things work.

Name: DEFCON.social
URL: https://defcon.social/
Support Site: https://www.defcon.social/

Location: USA
Languages Supported: English language posts, more languages as we add moderators to support them.
Tor .Onion: Coming soon
Topics: Technology, hacking, privacy, policy, infosec, music, art
Moderated: Yes
Infrastructure: Self hosted for privacy & security reasons
Funding: Community supported

Related Sites: defcon.org, media.defcon.org, Reddit.com/r/defcon, discord.gg/defcon,
DMCA: https://defcon.org/html/links/dc-dmca.html
Privacy Policy: https://defcon.org/html/links/dc-privacy.html
Code of Conduct: https://defcon.org/html/links/dc-code-of-conduct.html

NOTE: We follow the Mastodon Server Covenant.

DEFCON.social provides for open discussion where different viewpoints are welcome and a high degree of skepticism is expected. However, insulting or harassing others is unacceptable. It’s not about how you look or how hard you meme but what’s in your mind, your ideas, and how you present yourself that matters.

DEF CON grew from the Underground BBS scene of the late 80's into the giant conference of today, and DEFCON.social is another way we seek to support the global hacker community.

We are building a community where you can explore serious issues, ask dumb questions, and make friends along the way. We have a strict Code of Conduct and enforce it. We hope you enjoy yourselves and be kind to others.

Join us at DEFCON.social.