packetcat reads 2022 Week 49 – Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Pages: 369
Purchased from: Kobo

For the first time this year I decided to try reading a short story anthology instead of a full novel. It was pretty good! A bunch of very thought provoking stories by Ted in this one. I especially liked the one about the “digients”, very interesting.

This was a nice change of pace from all the full length novels I’ve been reading this year.

packetcat reads 2022 Week 48 – The Flight of the Aphrodite by S.J Morden

Pages: 347
Purchased from: Kobo

A rather depressing hard sci-fi novel. This one definitely leant into the psychological horror aspects of hard-scifi. I am not sure just how realistic the mental breakdowns depicted are but it certainly was a book where there’s no respite from the onslaught of the terror of being in deep space far away from any help.

I only recommend this one if you are up for a psychologically grueling read.

packetcat’s Guide to Moderating in the Fediverse: The Basics

So you have decided to run a instance on the fediverse. Welcome! But also I’m so sorry.

Jokes aside this post is intended to be a guide to the basic principles I keep at the back of my head while moderating Ten Forward since 2017.

I have been meaning to write a post like this ever since the November 2022 wave of new users and fediverse admins started happening. Now more than ever there is a new wave of admins and moderators who may be completely new to moderating a social space where they do not personally know the people in it.

Yep, that means this guide is targeted towards multi-user instance administrators and moderators. Single-user instance folks, some of this stuff may apply to you but this isn’t meant for you!

So before we get into the details, I am going to break down this guide into a few key points:

  • Separation of concerns
  • Proactive vs Reactive moderation
  • Transparency. Accountability, and Responsibility

I intend to keep this post at a 101 high level overview level. Some of the things I mention can be entire topics of blog posts on their own and I may write more about specifics later but for now we stick to the basics.

Continue reading “packetcat’s Guide to Moderating in the Fediverse: The Basics”

packetcat reads 2022 Week 46 – The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley

Pages: 391
Purchased from: Kobo

One of the review quotes for this book described it as a “powerfully disturbing space operas” and I agree with the disturbing bit but I don’t think I would describe it as powerful. To be quite honest I found most of it fairly tedious, especially the middle section of the book. The writer also seems obsessed with the concept of birthing in a way that felt just a tad bit weird (and not in a good way).

The premise/world of the book is interesting, the rest of it is…meh.