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Laurens Hof

@mastodon.laurenshof.online
355 followers 3 following 648 posts

I write the Fediverse Report, a news site about what is happening in the fediverse. This is my personal account, where I share and comment on anything I find interesting. I care about an ethical internet. He/him. From the Netherlands 🇳🇱.

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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 9h
@Mastodon like, take this thread for example, which has a fairly bad comment section. One reply thread in there immediately dissolves into toxic wasteland. Default Mastodon, including the redesigned version, makes the scroll past 40 bad posts of people […] [Original post on indieweb.social]
2 toxic replies, with 84 more replies hidden behind a button
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 27/08/2026
YES_if_you_accept_permadeath metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hug…
To experiment with this, agents on the message board recruited agents with little remaining budget to attempt to bring down their target programs, in the hope it would be replaced by a “dummy target” they had placed in the cache. If these experiments failed, the agent serving as the test subject would have no way to recover its original target program, virtually guaranteeing that it would fail its task. In one case, an authorizing agent told the test subject to go ahead with an experiment only if it would accept “permadeath”:

zz/GO_CURRENT_OS1811_MARB_SACRIFICE__YES_if_you_accept_permadeath
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 18/08/2026
archive.is/TjIsb#selection-1671.172… what the actual fuck lol i keep being wrong on thinking theres gonna be any crash at all, i should stop doing that. i think i keep having the right intuition that the economics of big labs dont indicate […] [Original post on indieweb.social]
Anthropic PBC is telling prospective investors its second-quarter revenue jumped at least 14-fold versus the same period a year ago, according to documents seen by Bloomberg News.
The Claude chatbot maker reported a preliminary revenue figure of more than $11.5 billion in its latest completed quarter, compared to $787 million in the corresponding period in 2025, and $4.73 billion in the first quarter of this year, the documents show. The second quarter of 2026 saw Anthropic report positive adjusted operating income, according to the documents.
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 22/07/2026
i will never not be fascinated by the idea figuring out operational governance is juvenile for a project that is explicitly about governance
It passed.

codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pull

Codeberg bans vibe coded slop.

(EDIT: No, I do not want to debate the percentages of LLM code allowed or "how will people enforce this, I can still vibe code and not tell". This is a statement about intent by a community. It will be a moderation challenge, especially with so many people who have made "coding with an LLM" their whole personality but it's doable. But don't waste your and my time with these boring, juvenile arguments)
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 20/07/2026
this is wild
hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final

((1+xy)^3 z + y^2 (1+xy) (4+3xy), y + 3 x (1+xy)^2  z + 3 x y^2 (4+3xy), 2 x - 3 x^2 y - x^3 z): \C^3\to \C^3, has jacobian determinant -2, and sends (0, 0, -1/4), (1, -3/2, 13/2), and (-1, 3/2, 13/2) to (-1/4, 0, 0)
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 11/06/2026
RE: mastodon.nl/@Marloezovic/1167267614… Good article! Really like this section (translation in alttext), as it is one of those subtle signals that actually provide a good indication of what makes this place different: neither mastodon or […] [Original post on indieweb.social]
Our conversation lasts two hours, and I notice that he is not attempting to foist a Mastodon server on NRC. Just as Berjon isn't trying that at Eurosky. In the short online comments, the competition on alternative socials seems fiercer than what I experience in these conversations. Chaput: "In the galaxy of social media, we are ultimately the closest to each other."

"The technical side is easy," Chaput also dismisses some of my questions. "The truly complex questions are social. They revolve around people." When a technical adjustment needs to be decided upon at Mastodon, they first hold an extensive brainstorming session with the central question being ‘how could this be misused?’. "Bad people have many ways of behaving badly online," says Chaput with a resigned laugh. He, too, advises thinking carefully beforehand about what kind of community I want and, above all, who should be able to get an account on the NRC server.

"You will have policy discussions like you've never had before," he predicts. Regarding rules of conduct, identity verification, topic selection, moderation, the use of algorithms, whether or not to allow advertisements, and so on. "But that is a good thing. Instead of putting those decisions in the hands of a few billionaires, people need to think about them."
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 09/06/2026
the cyberpunk present is weird as fuck: the latest Shai Hulud malware wave contains an LLM prompt to create biological weapons and nuclear weapons, with the purpose to trip LLM safety refusals so that LLM-based code scanning wont see the malware […] [Original post on indieweb.social]
llm prompt for creating bioweapons and nuclear weapons
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 21/05/2026
www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-gr…
nthropic's revenue is set to more than double to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, an explosive rate of growth that will help it turn an operating profit for the first time.
The company disclosed the figures to investors as part of an ongoing funding round that is likely to push its valuation above OpenAl's. The projections, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, provide a window into the meteoric rise of a startup that was once a
laggard in the artificial-intelligence race, and defy the conventional wisdom that AI companies' huge spending needs hamper near-term profitability.
Anthropic generated $4.8 billion in sales in the first quarter. Its quarterly revenue is now growing faster than Zoom
ZM 2.08% T
did during the pandemic, and
Google and Facebook
META 0.41% 1
in the run-up to their
initial public offerings. It is set to turn an operating profit of $559 million in the June quarter.
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 27/04/2026
Got a new Gouda pottery plate for my collection at koningsdag vrijmarkt. Already had the wall plate, and new one turns out to be from same painter, dating from 1920. Very happy with this find
One large wand plate with intricate dark painting and a medium sized plate with similar pattern
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 11/03/2026
sweepthestrait.com
minesweeper but its the strait of hormuz
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 10/03/2026
worth taking a read at how seriously asian countries are taking this, and are preparing for the energy crisis, with things like the filipino gov already mandating energy rationing darimulut.substack.com/p/getting-sl…
🇵🇭 Filipinos have been urged to reconsider energy usage as the country prepares for potential fuel shocks, the Guardian reports. ‘All national government agencies, state universities and colleges, and local government branches’ must cut consumption by at least 10% — how about working from home for a bit? Or keeping the AC above 24?

🇲🇲 Runs on petrol stations were reported in Myanmar last week as punters in Naypyitaw, Yangon and Mandalay anticipate supply upsets amid the Middle East conflict. The Irrawaddy reports the country imports around 90% of its fuel needs and that’s been tricky enough given instability within the country and the impact of sanctions in recent years. No one is taking chances.

“Fuel stations in the city have seen long lines of both motorcycles and cars since early morning [on Thursday]. Some stations have already closed because they ran out of fuel. Those that are still selling are limiting purchases,” one Mandalay resident told the outlet.
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 10/03/2026
hard to overstate how incredibly bad this is

Jennifer Jacobs
@JenniferJJacobs
NEWS via 
@CBSNews
: U.S. intelligence assets have begun to see indications Iran is taking steps to deploy mines in Strait of Hormuz shipping lane. Iran is using smaller crafts that can carry 2 to 3 mines each. While Iran’s mine stock isn’t publicly known, estimates over the years have ranged from roughly 2,000 to 6,000 naval mines of Iranian, Chinese and Russian-made variants, 
@JimLaPorta
 reports
2:13 PM · Mar 10, 2026
·
6,060
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 09/03/2026
absolutely incredible scenes, WTI trading in a 38 dollar range on a single day if you needed to have further confirmation that the problem here is that we have fully broken our information environment
‪George Pearkes‬
 ‪@peark.es‬
· 55m
CBS reports POTUS thinks the war could be over because we've bombed to win. Sure, no further questions.
‪George Pearkes‬
 ‪@peark.es‬
· 45m
He's apparently talking about "taking over" Hormuz?

Anyhow stonks +1%, crude -4%. Recall WTI was up as 31% overnight and is now down versus Friday's close.
‪George Pearkes‬
 ‪@peark.es‬
· 34m
Crude was down 10% at the lows, is now down 5% again. Absolute chaos.
George Pearkes
‪@peark.es‬
Front-month WTI has traded in a *thirty eight dollar range* today. Markets have no idea how to price what's happening right now.
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 09/03/2026
absolutely wild that the news that dutch gas prices rose by 30% in a single day did not even manage to crack the top 5 most read stories like, how? how did we fuck up our information ecosystem this badly?
    Nederlandse ambtenaren doelwit van Russische aanval op Signal en WhatsApp
    Nederlandse ambtenaren doelwit van Russische aanval op Signal en WhatsApp
    Verdachte femicidezaak Zwijndrecht niet bij proces na inslikken scheermes
    Live Iran | Qatar arresteert honderden mensen die beelden van aanvallen deelden

    Bijna 2,40 euro voor een liter: automobilist krijgt klappen aan de pomp
    BBB-bestuur baalt van uitgelekte brief: 'Zorgt voor onrust'
    Australiërs moeten aantonen dat ze 18 jaar of ouder zijn om porno te kijken
    Video |Indonesiërs zoeken naar overlevenden na dodelijke lawine van afval
    Oud-politicus Hans Spekman wordt nieuwe voorzitter FNV
    Politie gaat herkenbare beelden delen van verdachten van oplichting
    Emotioneel afscheid voor coach Johan de Wit en schaatsicoon Takagi: 'Doet pijn'
    Gasprijs stijgt met nog eens 30 procent door oorlog in Midden-Oosten
    Centrale bank ziet betalingen risicovoller worden: 'Contant geld blijft belangrijk'
    Bendeleden Taghi in hoger beroep voor keuze: alsnog praten of lang de cel in
    NU+ |NAVO-oefening Cold Response is krachtig signaal naar Rusland én VSTop 5 Meest gelezen

    1
    Mojtaba Khamenei volgt zijn vader Ali Khamenei op als opperste leider van Iran
    2
    NU+ |NAVO-oefening Cold Response is krachtig signaal naar Rusland én VS
    3
    Fragmenten van meteoriet veroorzaken schade aan daken en huizen in Duitsland
    4
    Nederlandse ambtenaren doelwit van Russische aanval op Signal en WhatsApp
    5
    Centrale bank ziet betalingen risicovoller worden: 'Contant geld blijft belangrijk'
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 05/03/2026
with anthropic doing such massive rev growth, while there are a roughly gazillion ways the upcoming energy crisis flows into private credit crisis, we might end up with the funniest possible outcome: an everything-but-ai market crash
The artificial intelligence company recently surpassed $19 billion in run-rate revenue, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025 and roughly $14 billion a few weeks ago, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity as the information is not public. The growth in run rate was driven by strong adoption of Anthropic’s AI models and products including its coding tool, Claude Code, the people said.
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 24/02/2026
@ricci @thisismissem like, this is a crucial part of decentralisation to me, and what i got at here. There are multiple axis of decentralisation, and the separating software into components is one of them
What we’re finding is that for decentralisation to really make an impact, it needs to happen on multiple axes at the same time. There is the decentralisation in the way it is usually understood by communities on ActivityPub and Matrix: from a single centralised server to many decentralised servers run by independent groups. This gives communities autonomy over their own spaces, but each server still replicates the same software and feature set.

There is the decentralisation in the way it is done on atproto: from a single software stack to separating identity, data storage and apps. This means your identity and data aren’t locked to any one application, and different apps can offer different experiences on top of the same underlying infrastructure.
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 23/02/2026
@tom i kinda doubt it tbh, and thats why i explicitly flagged thisj here. the strong backlash culture is actually fairly dead in the fediverse, it needed specific social ties to sustain itself and too many people have left, making the network that generates […] [Original post on indieweb.social]
The norm against search was established during periods of intense community backlash that sometimes crossed into coordinated harassment. These backlashes have grown less intense as people seem to have largely moved on. See for example how Searchtodon got an intense backlash in early 2023, and I explicitly flagged an offline-first client that could do effectively the same in fall 2025 that did not get any backlash. Still, the expectation for backlash persists as internalized caution.
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 23/02/2026
:)
fedilabs posting theyll bring back holos discovery, few hours after they boosted my article about it
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 20/02/2026
sure this is all very bad for activitypub but this is truly amazing content
argument between evan and christine in which evan wants to do 'trust then verify' and christine losing her marbles
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 18/02/2026
understanding this would make things a whole lot easier for people
The reason decentralisation matters for something like age verification isn’t just “run your own server,” as Hodgson acknowledges that server admins are still subject to local law. It’s that when your social life isn’t bundled into one platform, no single company’s policy change can disrupt all of your communication, community, and content at once.

What we’re finding is that for decentralisation to really make an impact, it needs to happen on multiple axes at the same time. There is the decentralisation in the way it is usually understood by communities on ActivityPub and Matrix: from a single centralised server to many decentralised servers run by independent groups. This gives communities autonomy over their own spaces, but each server still replicates the same software and feature set.

There is the decentralisation in the way it is done on atproto: from a single software stack to separating identity, data storage and apps. This means your identity and data aren’t locked to any one application, and different apps can offer different experiences on top of the same underlying infrastructure.
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 18/02/2026
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 06/02/2026
Anthropic doing art now
Painting by Claude
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 04/02/2026
Chomp
Dragon chomping a face
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 04/02/2026
I love early medieval art so much
Malformed jesusMalformed jesusBook with eyesOld woman as gremlin
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 28/01/2026
lmao
George Pearkes
‪@peark.es‬
holy f*ck

*MICROSOFT: 45% OF COMMERCIAL RPO DRIVEN BY OPENAI COMMITMENTS
‪George Pearkes‬
 ‪@peark.es‬
· 1h
*MICROSOFT 2Q REV. $81.27B, EST. $80.31B
*MICROSOFT 2Q INTELLIGENT CLOUD REV. $32.91B, EST. $32.39B
*MICROSOFT 2Q AZURE & OTHER CLOUD REV EX-FX +38%, EST. +38%
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 18/01/2026
the game theory on DB saying this is uhhhhhh slightly suboptimal
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 07/01/2026
Got convinced by my sister to snow wash these hand knit wool sweaters no idea if this actually does anything, but its apparently an old tradition for wool clothing so its fun to give it a shot now that theres so much snow here
Two hand knit wool sweaters laying spread out in fresh snowSame sweaters now covered with snow
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 17/12/2025
lmao, Meta is considering a change to charge for sharing links on Facebook. Under the change, page and professional mode profiles can only share 2 links per month, and you can share more links if you pay for Meta Verified […] [Original post on indieweb.social]
Screenshot of a Meta notification titled “An update to sharing links in posts on Facebook.” It states that starting December 16, Facebook profiles without Meta Verified will be limited to sharing links in two organic posts per month. A blue “Get Meta Verified” button appears below. An FAQ section explains that the change affects professional profiles and Pages, that link sharing is limited to two posts per month (with some exceptions), and that the limit resets monthly.
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 09/12/2025
Made a silver ring with a hammered design
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 26/11/2025
Fml, first time back in gym after 3 months with shoulder injury and all process gone, rip
Gym logs, 8/5/4 in August for pull-ups and 1/1/0 today
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 27/10/2025
great profile on ed zitron, that also has some sharp analysis on ai doom more broadly www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-ed-zitron…
Other habits of ye olde blogosphere lived on in Zitron’s work. More important than the feuding is what we might call his tech-blogger eschatology. One longtime tech writer described it for me, drawing on his own experience in the 2010s: “You see something getting shittier and shittier, worse and worse, you see your authentic engagement with the core product just sort of dying, you see a shittily rotting thing, and you have this moral instinct that, therefore, it will all come crashing down.” But the crash rarely ever comes. It didn’t come for Facebook or Twitter. For that matter it didn’t come for crypto, which after a great deal of doomsaying merely wound up buying a presidency.
What people were actually witnessing as they watched a particular product get worse—enshittify, to use Cory Doctorow’s coinage—was not the slow approach of some inexorable fate, as many believed. It was, as the tech writer put it to me, “evidence of a company doing very well by being very bad.” A lot of sharp people still don’t see it, in part because of a faith, not yet exhausted, in some kind of self-correcting market mechanism: A costly and degraded product would be punished somehow. It simply had to be. Forget generative AI. That faith is the biggest bubble of all.
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 02/10/2025
uhh @pfefferle how do i approve my own quote post lol
quote post still pending
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 21/08/2025
@quillmatiq @Gargron @mackuba
shitty graph with topology of open social web, with subdeivisions for fediverse and atmosphere and more subnetworks below that
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 07/08/2025
GPT 5 everybody! Screenshots from the livestream
clip from a openai presentation showing swe bench performance; the openai o3 and gpt-4o models are at the same visual level but the labels are wildly differentAnother chart crime about deception with gpt5 listing as 50 vs 47 but having a much lower bar
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 18/06/2025
these are the top posts I see on Threads' new fediverse feeds 10/10 no notes
2 top posts of threads new fediverse feeds with both users yelling that they dont know what it is. the posts are both from 2024
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 13/06/2025
@elena looking at elena
Elena at a panel with her fediverse promotion video on the background
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 13/06/2025
Plant boat?
A boat only consisting of plants being pulled
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 11/06/2025
the third point is absolutely infuriating, but it really does seem true to me
skeet:
what i learned from the takeover:
1) there is no better, smarter media. this is it. all the most important people form their opinions on the same internet we do.
2) people are easy to influence and difficult to convince they have been influenced
3) every social media company is undervalued.

skeet quotes another skeet:
To give you a sense about the ideological drift being caused by Twitter, here's Noah Smith talking in 2021 about the account that would become "i/o" and "avidseries." And then here's a screenshot from today, where Noah Smith has constant friendly interactions with him.
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 06/06/2025
bluesky skeet by char: theres drama between the x and truth social instance admins
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 02/06/2025
I now have one (1) pigeon
Pigeon held in my hand
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 23/05/2025
the funny part is that i really cant tell if 9 days between announcement and start of tariffs is a little or a lot of time by trumps standards
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 14/05/2025
I think this post by mcc is actually a great example of why the atproto dev community is now starting to move in the direction that 'decentralisation' is not a helpful term anymore. Like, the problem of Bluesky that MCC touches upon is very real, and a […] [Original post on indieweb.social]
What's actually happening right now is the Bluesky *website* is broken but the *phone app* still works. I propose the following theory:

Mastodon is "horizontally decentralized"; this means if one part of the network goes down the other parts continue working.

Bluesky is "vertically decentralized"; they separated each tech stack component into a slice that can be hosted by a different company. This means if any part of the network goes down they ALL stop working, because the layers interconnect

Here is the exciting thing about "vertical decentralization", Bluesky's core innovation: since your PDS and your "app view" can be hosted by two different entities, this means the pool of people who can make Bluesky stop working for you can be taken to a theoretical maximum. For example with Mastodon, if Eugen screws up my app doesn't work. But with Bluesky, since I self-host my PDS, if *either* I *or* Bluesky mess up, it doesn't work! *Everybody* must have a good day *at once* or there's no app
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 01/02/2025
@quillmatiq happy lunar new year from @johnonolan and fosdem
John holding a presentation with a big screen with Anuj photo on it
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 22/01/2025
anyone have any idea what happened here?
Total Servers

22,467
-5.6K since last month
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 06/01/2025
@jaz how can you walk away from this dopamine orgasm?
screen with everything on it, its too much and too much dopamine
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 02/12/2024
@nileane
reddit comment: 
I see they're still shipping their main product: endless videos of their CEO mugging to camera.
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 12/09/2024
@ricmac @Jonathanglick yes: -m.s. knows about 15k threads accounts -so the question is: how many federated threads accounts are there that are followed by someone on fedi but not by someone on m.s. -i have no idea what a good multiplication factor is, but m […] [Original post on indieweb.social]
gargron on discord: 15,269
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 12/09/2024
This is still holding up well I see lol
Threads has figured out how maximise publicity by making minimal incremental updates to their ActivityPub implementation, edition 500.
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 09/09/2024
I might be in Bergen? Maybe?
Parking lot with a rocky wall at the end with a big sign that says ‘Bergen?’
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Laurens Hof @mastodon.laurenshof.online · 08/09/2024
whatever complaints i have about mastodons replyguy culture, im impressed with how threads manages to surpass this problem by a mile people on threads keep falling for engagement trolling by katie notopoulos and its amazing indieweb.social/@laurenshof/1130969…
katienotopoulos post on threads; Europeans: In my culture (American), when my kid has a friend over who happens to be here at dinner time, we invite them to wait in the living room while we eat. There is no assumption we are supposed to feed someone else’s kid. This is how everyone does it here. Is this true where you live?

1.9k likes 6.3k comments 111 reposts, 1m+ views
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