Notices by Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis (siderea@universeodon.com)

Is there a term that is the parallel of "latinate" that means the equivalent for Greek?

Like in the phrase "a preference for latinate and [Greek-ish?] naming conventions".

@futurebird So, I'd been asking people "does Google search seem less good to you?" since about the turn of the millennium, and largely stopped bothering as of 10 or 15 years ago. The problems you are noting now are ones I have had for two decades or more.

Look, a major mental health agency here wound up getting in trouble to the extent the case wound up before the Supreme Court. I learned of this when a friend emailed me a link to the Boston Globe story. Within two years, all the news coverage had basically disappeared from Google Search.

Maybe they hired a firm to erase it from the internet. Or maybe Google Search just sucks that way.

I knew someone who was murdered. Made headline news. It was never solved. Searching her name no longer brings up the news coverage of her murder. Don't think anybody paid to scrub the internet of her name.

There was a profile, I think in the NYT, about an MD with a novel approach to treating a neurological condition...

@futurebird There's a reason Google Search sucks that most people don't know about. (Actually I think there's several, but one that is not remotely on the radar of people like the sort on Mastodon is...)

There is a profound class divide in internet users. Originally this was framed "digital haves and have nots". While that is still there, it has been eclipsed by another dichotomy it's morphed into: People of the Desktop and People of the Phone.

People of the Desktop are people who learned to use the internet on an "actual computer". This population winds up understanding the internet very differently than the other. The socioeconomic factors of who gets access to desktop/laptop computers mean that this is also a filter for other things like likelihood to have a college education and being comfortable with abstractions.

People of the Desktop tend to retain access to desktops, because they find phones wanting, and know what they're missing.

People of the Phone don't.

@futurebird Also! While I am complaining about this:

There was a point where when I searched on my blog URL, I got N (a small integer) results, but if I searched on "[blog URL] site:WordPress.com" I would get N+M results, including, yes, WordPress blog results that really did mention my blog, and really should have been returned in the result set of the first search.

That's the point at which I knew Google Search had become useless.

@futurebird ...which entailed "microdoses" of melatonin. Well, you can no longer put "microdose" into Google search and not get a flood of results about psychedelics.

All this is why I am so hardcore about bookmarkers, and save every damn thing I might want to see again some day.

@santiago

Oh, hmm! So when mastodon.lol and mastodon.au are shut down, all the comments that have been transmitted by federation will also be deleted? Is this also true of people who migrate to off those to other servers? Are their comments re-attributed to their new accounts or orphaned and purged?

@santiago Thanks! So if a server goes down - this was one user on a large server, but we could imagine one person on a one-person server who also rage-deletes their instance - the residual toots might never be deleted?

Hey, #Mastodon usage/behavior question I don't quite know where to direct.

Scenario:

I was just having a conversation with someone earlier today, and I had a notification come in while I was at work that they had replied to me. I didn't have time right then to deal with it, but when I got off work, I went to my notifications (on the web interface) and found it. In preparation for replying, I went to review the original conversation and discovered that their comment to me, to which I was trying to reply, was gone.

I had thought they had maybe been moderated, or deleted their comment, but it turned out their *entire account* was deleted.

But their comment was still in my notifications.

So, questions:

When somebody deletes their Mastodon account, what residual traces of their toots are still out there in the system somewhere? Like this deleted toot in my notifications?

Will this notification I have be purged eventually or do I get to keep it indefinitely?

And...