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America needs independent social media

Throughout our history, we’ve cherished the freedom to share information and opinions but often felt that “freedom of the press belongs only to those who own one”. The Internet changed this by providing inexpensive publishing options — first webpages and blogs, then social media. Social media is now central to how news spreads in our society, including health-related science and the rallying cries of politicians.

But instead of guaranteeing a voice for everyone, the social media revolution resulted in a handful of big tech companies acting as publisher for the entire nation (and world), while disrupting the traditional newspaper industry. Many important public discussions now take place within walled gardens, where each social media service not only provides the technical means of communicating with others, but also controls access to the audience they have gathered. These service provider can bury or amplify our messages as they see fit, for whatever purpose, and typically without explanation.

The power of these opaque and monopolistic companies threatens our ability to act as informed citizens and consumers. By tying the community of users to a specific platform, the dominant companies severely limit our ability to choose better service providers. This allows them to act as middlemen for our social interactions online and consequently reap monopoly-like profits while wielding immense political influence. Despite much hand-wringing about “social media bias” from politicians and billionaires, their proposals don’t promote fairness, freedom, or honesty on social media; instead, they’d simply amplify the voices of their own allies and increase their own power. The only real proposal for letting regular people shape their own social media has been in the form of federated social networks like Mastodon. Mastodon is a micro-blogging platform (like Twitter) that is built according to an open standard managed by the World Wide Web Consortium, called ActivityPub. This open standard not only empowers anyone to set up their own Mastodon server, but to build any type of software for sharing messages with Mastodon accounts.

ActivityPub is already being used to share media (writing, photos, videos) and organize discussion boards. This collection of interoperable services is known as the “fediverse” (a portmanteau of “federated” and “universe”) and even includes Meta’s new “Threads” service and the Ghost publishing platform. BlueSky is another micro-blogging platform that likewise embraces federation, but it only works with ActivityPub platforms indirectly. Federation opens up countless opportunities for innovation, letting software developers create new services that work with the existing social network rather than needing to build a critical mass of users before the software has any value.

Many organizations and individuals have established Mastodon servers for their own communities, but all of them work together to connect users from different communities. Some servers aim to be general-interest services, but most are focused on specific communities, such as the Atlanta region (theATL.social), the medical profession (med-mastodon.com), or art lovers (Mastodon.ART). These servers may be hosted by community nonprofits, by membership-based clubs, by start-up businesses, or by large established institutions such as universities, corporations, or government agencies. Despite all this variety, they can all interact and share information, like websites and email servers do.

This variety of organizations and motivations is essential for establishing integrity in social media, just as it is for journalism. We must support a variety of media groups, who act independently and have real connections to the communities they serve, rather than relying on a few giant corporations and billionaires to spoon-feed us information. Social media is now part of our society, with all its advantages and disadvantages. Mastodon does not automatically solve the problems with present-day social media, but it creates choice that is currently missing from social media and creates the option for continual improvement of social media in which everyone can participate.

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Active journalists on Mastodon

Tim Chambers established a list of journalists on Mastodon. It currently has 1400 names on it, added between 11/4/2022 and 12/27/2023. Many of these accounts are dormant, so I filtered them down using standard Mastodon tools — I loaded the list, removed ‘dormant’ accounts (no posts in the past month), and was left with 303 active journalists on Mastodon. I then exported that list in case anyone wants to play with it:

This could probably be done more elegantly with the API, but I have not worked with it. The original list is below.

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comments

I’ve confirmed that I can send comments from my Mastodon account to this blog by responding to the blog post. That’s cool. The comments still go into the same moderation system.

The main limitation is that only public comments show up from the WordPress side. That makes sense, because WordPress doesn’t have a way to receive private messages. However, no feedback is given to the sender… so they send you any non-public message and it will just disappear into the void (unlisted, followers only, tagged only)

Also, I tried tagging my Mastodon account from here, and it did not work.

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Back, and in the fediverse

I’ve been participating in the fediverse for about the past year with the Mastodon community at mstdn.science. Microblogging has it’s benefits, but it’s not really my favorite way to write out my thoughts… the full blog is really more my style. So I think I’m going to write out at least a few posts here to organize my thoughts regarding the fediverse. Conveniently, WordPress recently released their v1 ActivityPub plugin, so I’ve activated that and confirmed that I can follow this blog from my mstdn.science account. It’s a start!

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Thought for the day…

In describing a new HIV evolution paper in Science, Dan Graur (aka “Judge Starling”) writes:

“The only thing “novel” about the analysis was the use of a Bayesian method for phylogeographic inference. Interestingly, as in all examples of its use that I have seen so far, the method tells you nothing you do not know or cannot infer by much simpler means.”

I haven’t looked at the paper in question, but I have noticed this common infatuation with pointlessly (even recklessly) complex statistical methods.

 

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Mock reports

From the world of PoliSci, comes this discussion about the use of preregistration of studies and mock reports. It’s on my ever-lengthening “to read” list. My impression of this strategy (without reading the articles) is that research can be more informative if we openly specify our theory and predictions prior to collecting data to test the theory. This avoids the bias towards statistically significant results and the implicit post-hoc nature of current scientific publication practices.

 

 

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Is anything truly random? RANDOM.ORG

I just learned of this web service “RANDOM.ORG – True Random Number Service” via a python module (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/randomdotorg/).

It’s clever, but I have to wonder about this distinction between “true randomness” and pseudorandomness. I understand the non-randomness of pseudorandom algorithms, I’m just not sure that I buy that a natural process can be truly random. I don’t know if they are relying of the complexity of the process, or quantum theory.

Either way, I think I’d prefer a pseudorandom algorithm on my own machine over a supposedly random value sent to me over the network. Even if my intention is to have a neutral arbiter in some game of chance, I don’t see the benefit of “true” randomness over pseudorandomness from some public server.

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update: A good discussion of this issue at the SuperUser site. I love the StackExchange Network. Two important points stand out:

1) Pseudo-random number generators can become more random by constantly incorporating additional external information into the system. I assume this is what Random.org is doing.

2) For some purposes, pseudo-random numbers are more appropriate than truly random numbers. For instance, a stochastic simulation requires frequent bug-hunting, which would be nearly impossible if its “random” actions were not generated purely by the internal state of the system.

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This is what happens when you dismiss recombination in bacteria

Here is the abstract from PubMed. Right now, I have no comment except to say that this does not change my previously published opinions about the importance of recombination in the evolution of E. coli. More later.


Evidence of non-random mutation rates suggests an evolutionary risk management strategy.

Martincorena I, Seshasayee AS, Luscombe NM.

Nature. 2012 May 3;485(7396):95-8.

Abstract

A central tenet in evolutionary theory is that mutations occur randomly with respect to their value to an organism; selection then governs whether they are fixed in a population. This principle has been challenged by long-standing theoretical models predicting that selection could modulate the rate of mutation itself. However, our understanding of how the mutation rate varies between different sites within a genome has been hindered by technical difficulties in measuring it. Here we present a study that overcomes previous limitations by combining phylogenetic and population genetic techniques. Upon comparing 34 Escherichia coli genomes, we observe that the neutral mutation rate varies by more than an order of magnitude across 2,659 genes, with mutational hot and cold spots spanning several kilobases. Importantly, the variation is not random: we detect a lower rate in highly expressed genes and in those undergoing stronger purifying selection. Our observations suggest that the mutation rate has been evolutionarily optimized to reduce the risk of deleterious mutations. Current knowledge of factors influencing the mutation rate—including transcription-coupled repair and context-dependent mutagenesis—do not explain these observations, indicating that additional mechanisms must be involved. The findings have important implications for our understanding of evolution and the control of mutations.

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