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@nutronic hi! No, they should not be blocked
The Gradient@thegradient@sigmoid.social
Ownersigmoid.social
The Gradient is an organization with the missions of making it easier for anyone to learn about AI and of facilitating discu. We were founded in 2017 by a group of students and researchers at the Stanford AI Lab. Our current projects include The Gradient Magazine, The Gradient Podcast, The Update newsletter, and Sigmoid Social. We are a non-profit and volunteer-run effort run by researchers and engineers in the AI community.
- Joined
- Website
- https://thegradient.pub/about
Pinned Posts
Post1 / 4Don't feel you fully understand Mastodon?
Check out "An Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon"! by @noelle
It's extremely thorough, and if it still doesn't answer a question it's on Github, so you can submit an issue request to clarify!
GitHubGitHub - joyeusenoelle/GuideToMastodon: An increasingly less-brief guide to MastodonAn increasingly less-brief guide to Mastodon. Contribute to joyeusenoelle/GuideToMastodon development by creating an account on GitHub.
Got around to adding some custom emojis to Sigmoid Social! 
https://emojos.in/sigmoid.social?show_animated=true
This is a somewhat random set I (@andrey) felt like adding. Feel free to suggest additional ones! 
Fun fact! If you go to our profile directory (https://sigmoid.social/directory) you can easily find people from Sigmoid Social to follow. The link to it is in the bottom left of the web UI next to 'Invite people'.
Some links to make it easy to subscribe to AI-related hashtags! (just click on the little + button on the top right)
https://sigmoid.social/tags/PaperThread
https://sigmoid.social/tags/NewPaper
https://sigmoid.social/tags/RL
https://sigmoid.social/tags/CV
https://sigmoid.social/tags/NLProc
https://sigmoid.social/tags/aiart
Feel free to suggest/link to other hashtags in replies :) 
Hello Sigmoid Social users!
Wow, Sigmoid Social has been around for over 2.5 years now, how time flies...
Just want mention we are very much still around as administrators and moderators of this Mastodon instance behind the scenes.
We appear to have reached a steady-state of a decent number of users, and we love that some of you still benefit from this instance.
Please do message or email us if you want to suggest improvements or changes!
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@_dmh we are not, thanks for the pointer
PSA: We've been seeing an uptick of spam coming from various Mastodon instances over the last several weeks. To address this, we are suspending federation with the instances that appear to be the source of spam; these are generally small instances that don't presently have interactions with users on here. Our instance still has approval-gated registration, so no spam accounts are expected to be created on here.
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@chrisoffner3d does it not work for you at all, or is it an issue with older posts? It appears to work fine for us.
FYI: we currently have no plans to in any way limit interaction with Threads on this instance. Some major AI voices (eg Karpathy, LeCun) are active on there, so we believe this in the best interest of the community. However, if Sigmoid Social users urge us to act otherwise, we'd be happy to put it to a vote.
(context: https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-activitypub-test-mastodon )
The Verge · Threads is officially starting to test ActivityPub integration
Oops, we haven't posted anything in quite a while... Hi! Though we've been silent, be assured that behind the scenes we at The Gradient are continuing to actively admin and moderate Sigmoid Social. Our stats show steady user activity for a while now, so we are happy many of you decided to stick around and keep posting here 
Happy almost holidays 
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@stablehorde Sorry to see this has impacted you. For now it'd be optimal to implement a queue for posting, it seems - it'd work to post once per 1 minute at most, perhaps.
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@anandphilipc hi, sorry for late reply. We'll have full text search as soon as Mastodon 4.2 comes out.
@chrisoffner3d @albrecht we actually do have elastic search enabled. We'll take a look and see if there is an issue with it.
Fun fact for long-time Sigmoiders - we've seen more users joining lately, and the active users has generally stabilized at 2k+ users for a while now.
Thank you all for being part of this lovely place :)
We have seen an uptick in crypto spam in the last couple of days. As this is coming from other Mastodon instances there is not much we can do except suspend the account as they are reported, as we do not want to block federation entirely with these instances. Hopefully this willl get resolved soon!
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An update: we've seen persistent almost-daily spam keep popping up, so given that + the poll result, we have changed Sigmoid to be approval-gated for sign ups.
The criteria are very simple: we require a reasonable sounding answer to "why do you want to sign up", and nothing else.
Hopefully Mastodon adds better spam detection tools this year!
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Sigmoid Social is 6 months old! 
Thank you to all of you for making this a lovely community
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The vote on whether to make registration approve-only was very close! For now we will try to just keep a close eye on reports and shut down any SPAM asap. If the volume of spam increases to the point that there are multiple new spam accounts per day, we will then lock things down more.
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@arpieb The only approval criteria would be a comprehensible/reasonable response to "why would you like to join sigmoid social". The spam has been rather low quality / low effort, so the hypothesis is that the sorts of accounts we've been seeing would be filtered out by even just that.
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@parhizj You can just click on the little 3 dots on a post and say report!
No stats, there have been at least half a dozen such accounts over the past 2 weeks.
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@exteriorpower It's not a ton of work, but every new spam account just floods with timeline with a dozen posts which is really unappealing, and if that sticks around for even a few hours it makes the experience of browsing here a lot less appealing.