It really took me a minute to get it, comming from the system of DSA, where 1 is best and 20 is worst... 😉 So it looked like evil sarcasm on first glimpse.
It's for anyone whose gender (or lack thereof) isn't described by the M/F binary. It's short and easy, and results are useful in academia, business and self-advocacy.
Today is Red Dress Day, in honour of missing and murdered Indigenous people. In Canada, Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people are six times more likely to be murdered than their non-Indigenous counterparts.
“However, nearly four years after the release of the Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and two years following the release of the National Action Plan, only two of the 231 Calls for Justice have been implemented, while an implementation timeline has yet to be released.”
I have received threats against my life for my solidarity with land defenders. One of my friends, an elderly Haudenosaunee woman, was sitting by a fire when she was shot at by police. The violence is systemic and must end.
It’s not exactly a secret that it’s been increasingly difficult to find good, research-based information about COVID from any public health institution these days, so people who are disinclined to go straight to the research themselves have struggled. But that makes the latest campaign by the Yale University School of Public Health all the more exciting! They’ve shared a series of messages (based at least in part by the fabulous Akiko Iwasaki, herself a Yale professor). Here they are, in a 🧵 /1
The focus is on COVID’s effects on the immune system. I love that they’re making it clear right from the start that by now we actually know a lot, but we don’t know everything. /2
The takeaway here: vaccinations are helpful (IP’s editorial: probably more often than your jurisdiction allows 🙄). Infections are harmful. Try to prevent them. /3
This one is more complex and will probably go over some people’s heads, but I’m glad they included it. It gives the four main findings from the research on COVID’s impact on the immune system. /5
I appreciate here that they give a range, reflecting different findings from different studies. Research is always messy, but the key message that COVID causes damage frequently and to a large percentage of the people it infects is becoming ever clearer. /6
This one is a two-fer: information on the research into the way a COVID infection can reactivate latent infections already in your body, and a plea to avoid infections so as to avoid suffering this. I’m pleasantly surprised that they include the latter point! /8
Here I love that they’re spelling out why it’s important to take precautions even if you or the person you’re spending time with don’t actively feel sick at the moment. That message has been so unclear from other public health sources! And the range of precautions mentioned and the emphasis on layers is great too. /9
And at the end, coming back around to reminding people that we don’t know everything yet, and ongoing research is essential. So much public health communication deemphasises this, so I find it exciting to see here even if most people will gloss over it. /10fin
P.S. if you would benefit from a pdf with all the images from the campaign plus a full bibliography of all the research cited, someone on Facebook apparently put one of those together for download!
@IPEdmonton@mstdn.ca
Ah, yes, thanks!
Someone on FB also made a pdf file of it, with all the resources, very handy as well:
https://pdflink.to/yale-covid-19-immune-system-impacts/
Sadly RIVM is a public health misinformation machine... Mostly concerned with providing excuses for the government policy of encouraging everyone to get sick and make one another sick, so that capitalist exploitation can continue at full speed
@HannahCelsius it’s a social media campaign, so any social media run by the Yale School of Public Health would have these images. Can you see the Facebook link that I shared in response to another question about this?
A common complaint I hear about anarchist proposals for collaborative decision making—direct democracy, consensus building through dialogue, federations of councils, etc—is that they would be grossly inefficient.
God, can you imagine sitting through so many interminable, insufferable *meetings*?
For most of us, our only point of comparison is life under the authority of the state and capital. Superficially, decision making in this context might seem very efficient. We are allowed to make vanishingly few decisions for ourselves—mostly about which brand of commodity we’ll purchase or which of two elite candidates we might periodically vote into office.
Beyond this, our choices are heavily constrained—you might choose which employment offer to accept but certainly not whether to participate in wage labor—or non-existent, when it comes to our participation in a community. Take a look around at, say, the built environment around you: the roads, the sidewalks, the schools and school districts, parks and police stations, and ask yourself, what say did you have in any of these decisions?
The answer is invariably “virtually none.” Most decisions are made for and imposed on us. By bosses, managers, bankers, bureaucrats, politicians, technocrats. Do you like having a job and feeding your family? Too bad if Jerome Powell decides to raise interest rates in an attempt to slow inflation, driving up unemployment and turning your life upside down. Do you like your town and community? Too bad if some finance bros halfway around the world make a bad bet that crashes whatever industry was anchoring your local economy. Do you want your community to stay out of violent conflicts in the Middle East? Good luck with that!
What say do you have in these decisions? What say could you possibly have?
The anarchist alternatives seem inefficient only in comparison to a system that has streamlined decision making by confining the vast majority of choices and decisions to a tiny elite. We might think of the status quo as efficient only because it enjoys massive subsidies—subsidies of violence.
We have so little say because our elites have interposed themselves into the organic processes by which we’d otherwise make decisions together. And that interposition is enormously, incredibly expensive.
The armies. The police. The surveillance. The cadastral surveys and property records, the courts and legislatures, the tax assessors and tax collectors, bureaucrats and the technocrats, schools to teach obedience.
More than a million Americans are employed as police officers or support staff. The US spends well over $100 billion each year on coercive policing and then another $40-50 billion on jails and prisons.
All of this is immensely costly, both in terms of the resources involved and the harms imposed on us, and incredibly brittle. Centralized, top-dow
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The anarchist alternatives seem inefficient only in comparison to a system that has streamlined decision making by confining the vast majority of choices and decisions to a tiny elite. We might think of the status quo as efficient only because it enjoys massive subsidies—subsidies of violence.
We have so little say because our elites have interposed themselves into the organic processes by which we’d otherwise make decisions together. And that interposition is enormously, incredibly expensive.
The armies. The police. The surveillance. The cadastral surveys and property records, the courts and legislatures, the tax assessors and tax collectors, bureaucrats and the technocrats, schools to teach obedience.
More than a million Americans are employed as police officers or support staff. The US spends well over $100 billion each year on coercive policing and then another $40-50 billion on jails and prisons.
All of this is immensely costly, both in terms of the resources involved and the harms imposed on us, and incredibly brittle. Centralized, top-down decision making only feels more efficient because it is bought at the price of gold and blood.
It’s not just that we’ve grown so used to having decisions imposed on us that we’ve lost a sense of proportion. An immense amount of that subsidy of violence goes into suppressing our innate inclination for dialogue, consultation, and collaborative consensus building.
In her book “The Unthinkable,” Amanda Ripley conveys an anecdote by a survivor from the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Louis Lesce was on the 86th floor of the north tower when it was struck. Encountering five strangers on the same floor, Lesce and his group *sat on the floor for 30 minutes* to discuss what to do. Another stranger eventually joined them and encouraged them to evacuate, which they did.
This anecdote has always stuck with me: their response in an emergency was not violent panic, but rather spontaneous community and almost instinctual assembly to discuss solutions. They were perhaps a bit *too* invested in discussion and probably should have evacuated immediately, but I can’t fault them for doing what humans do: talk to each other to reach mutually
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It’s not just that we’ve grown so used to having decisions imposed on us that we’ve lost a sense of proportion. An immense amount of that subsidy of violence goes into suppressing our innate inclination for dialogue, consultation, and collaborative consensus building.
In her book “The Unthinkable,” Amanda Ripley conveys an anecdote by a survivor from the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Louis Lesce was on the 86th floor of the north tower when it was struck. Encountering five strangers on the same floor, Lesce and his group *sat on the floor for 30 minutes* to discuss what to do. Another stranger eventually joined them and encouraged them to evacuate, which they did.
This anecdote has always stuck with me: their response in an emergency was not violent panic, but rather spontaneous community and almost instinctual assembly to discuss solutions. They were perhaps a bit *too* invested in discussion and probably should have evacuated immediately, but I can’t fault them for doing what humans do: talk to each other to reach mutually agreeable solutions to shared problems.
Over and over again in the historical and archeological records, we find that the oldest form of democracy was not any kind of election or selection of representatives or officials, but rather the *assembly.* Urban assemblies probably predate kingship in the oldest Mesopotamian cities. We find popular assemblies in classical Mesoamerica and classical Greece, Iron Age Germany and burning buildings.
I don’t want to use the term “natural,” because I don’t think that concept has much use when it comes to human political organization. But it seems like there’s something universal about the experience of the assembly. When humans are free, when coercive order breaks down or is otherwise absent, meetings and dialogue are what we tend to do.
Can we test whether anarchic decision making really is inefficient, in a way that poses actual harms to people?
David Harvey, a Marxist economic geographer, has proposed that “tightly coupled systems,” such as air traffic control or nuclear power plant management, require top-down authority:
“There are many aspects of contemporary life that are now organized in what you might call 'tightly-coupled systems' where you need command and control structures. I wouldn't want my anarchist friends to be in charge of a nuclear power station when the light started blinking red and yellow and all that kind of stuff.”
However, we find that the IAEA has been recommending precisely the opposite approach to improve nuclear safety, recommending less management, decision making pushed to the lowest level, and the operation of “self-guided teams”—precisely the sort of decentralized, consensual, consultative, and deliberative decision making anarchists propose.
The reason? The worst nuclear disasters in history occurred *because of* ce
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Can we test whether anarchic decision making really is inefficient, in a way that poses actual harms to people?
David Harvey, a Marxist economic geographer, has proposed that “tightly coupled systems,” such as air traffic control or nuclear power plant management, require top-down authority:
“There are many aspects of contemporary life that are now organized in what you might call 'tightly-coupled systems' where you need command and control structures. I wouldn't want my anarchist friends to be in charge of a nuclear power station when the light started blinking red and yellow and all that kind of stuff.”
However, we find that the IAEA has been recommending precisely the opposite approach to improve nuclear safety, recommending less management, decision making pushed to the lowest level, and the operation of “self-guided teams”—precisely the sort of decentralized, consensual, consultative, and deliberative decision making anarchists propose.
The reason? The worst nuclear disasters in history occurred *because of* centralized, top-down decision making. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the investigatory committee found that the disaster’s “fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’; our groupism; and our insularity.”
An industry-specific response to David Harvey's popular claim that anarchists can neither run nor combat 'tightly-coupled systems', specifically nuclear power plants and air-traffic control.
Another “tightly-coupled system” we might consider is vehicular road traffic. Traffic involves lots of people, often strangers, operating multi-ton blocks of metal and glass that are capable of rapid acceleration to high speeds in close proximity to each other. Done poorly, this is a recipe for disaster.
We might conclude from this that traffic requires fairly extensive and intrusive regimes of rules for managing this process: markings on the road, road signs, traffic lights, traffic police, traffic cameras. This is the kind of driving that many westerners are familiar with. But, in the US at least, this kind of hyper-managed driving is enormously, absurdly deadly: drivers there kill more than 40,000 people each year with these machines.
Maybe they’re just not managed *enough*?
But we discover that, when we start to reduce that regime of top-down rules and management, driving tends to get less dangerous, not more. It turns out that when people can’t rely on cues from road signs—that is, constant instructions from authorities—th
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Another “tightly-coupled system” we might consider is vehicular road traffic. Traffic involves lots of people, often strangers, operating multi-ton blocks of metal and glass that are capable of rapid acceleration to high speeds in close proximity to each other. Done poorly, this is a recipe for disaster.
We might conclude from this that traffic requires fairly extensive and intrusive regimes of rules for managing this process: markings on the road, road signs, traffic lights, traffic police, traffic cameras. This is the kind of driving that many westerners are familiar with. But, in the US at least, this kind of hyper-managed driving is enormously, absurdly deadly: drivers there kill more than 40,000 people each year with these machines.
Maybe they’re just not managed *enough*?
But we discover that, when we start to reduce that regime of top-down rules and management, driving tends to get less dangerous, not more. It turns out that when people can’t rely on cues from road signs—that is, constant instructions from authorities—they drive more cautiously, with more awareness of the actual conditions of the road and other users of that road, making lots of life-and-death decisions in concert with other drivers.
They’re also able to do this rapidly, without the needs for lots of deliberation and meetings, often with fairly little communication between drivers. Perhaps many kinds of anarchist decision making can coexist, depending on changing contexts?
My point is not to argue that anarchist modes of decision making are more efficient than the alternatives. My goal here is to challenge the idea that *efficiency* is something we can meaningfully define for decision making, or that efficiency is something we should pursue in decision making.
If efficiency has to be subsidized—by the immense expense of the coercive state, or the risk of nuclear disaster, or with the lives of people killed by drivers so some of those drivers can reach their destinations faster—then perhaps efficiency is an entirely wrong metric for understanding how people interact with each other to reach decisions about shared problems.
If you’ve read this far and have enjoyed this thread, I’d like to ask you to consider supporting anarchist writer @KevinCarson1 with a donation or a patreon membership—if and only if you have the comfortable means—both of which you can find at his website below.
Kevin is a prolific writer on anarchist theory and economic history and is immensely generous with his ideas, which I find consistently insightful. He’s is one of those thinkers with a knack for seeing straight to the heart of complex phenomena and I’ve learned a great deal from him.
This is like a lot of talk in economics, business that I'm seeing lately. A highly efficient system is optimized to standard (or standardized) conditions.
If things go outside of those conditions, the system fails.
Think "just in time warehousing" and then the pandemic, Suez canal, global shipping issues.
"Efficient" has been the goal of capitalism for a while now
What are people calling “efficiency” anyway, when something has to get signed off on by somebody or multiple somebodies far away from the actual situation?
I learned to drive, and spent most of my driving life in a country that had few road markings or working traffic controls. Driving in the US has felt isolating and terrifying because there is no car language. People just drive to the rules without paying attention to what's happening around them. I have no idea what anyone is about to do because nobody in the US telegraphs or observes. I don't know how it affects accident numbers, but that's what it feels like.
@alm “People drive to the rules”? I’m not sure where you drive, but where I drive almost everyone drives above the speed limit, 25% of drivers never use the turn signals, 10% run red lights, etc. If people followed the rules 40,000 of us wouldn’t die each year.
@VirginiaHolloway @alm I don't think drive to the rules means exactly that.. The rules guide how they drive, And then because they assume they themselves are qualified to go slightly beyond the rules, They do. Whereas if all these uninforced, (especially if you're rich) rules didn't even exist, they would have no choice but to make eye contact and read body language before moving through busy intersections or through places crowded with pedestrians bicyclists children and animals of all shapes and sizes.
i watch lots of aviation videos lately. From what I can tell it seems the industry now favours less hierarchy and more collaboration in the cockpit, rather than the "captain god-emperor" of the 70's., precisely becayse it's safer. (Can a pilot confirm?)
take a look at how.complexsystems.fail/ — it's little islands of human expertise all over; the top-down view of how big systems work is ultimately just abstraction
My favorite example is how the TSA failed to stop the Shoe Bomber even though his fucking DAD literally called a hotline and reported him. Only thing that thwarted him was fellow passengers getting up and grabbing him. And how did the TSA respond to that? By adding a rule against getting out of your seat.
Attached: 4 images
I really like this study on organizational knowledge. People mistake organizations and their processes as preexisting constraints, rather than emergent properties from individual actions – often a “horrifying realization.
just to add one more historical exemple to your list : the Icelandic Parliament, that was in use roughly 1000 years ago (not as old as Iron age I agree !)
also like... Have there been *any* anarchist proposals that would *force* people to engage in these decisions? (I'd say no, because if there have been proposals like that, IDT they count as anarchist lol) I feel like it's always gonna be an option to let others make the decision, but I'd rather let the people make decisions than the corporate elite. People can literally just abstain if they don't have input 🤷
and it's mostly a theatre: decision making around here takes months for relatively simple issues, mainly because of the incompetence that lifelong politicians have at anything but propaganda. I believe that - for instance - the decisions around COVID would have been faster within a council/federation/etc. It's a propaganda of fear that keeps people from seeing how useless a government is, even within representative democracy: most public services work independently from it.
“Google and Amazon are fueling the genocidal assault on Gaza through a $1.2 billion contract with Israel’s government & military. Use the message tool below to demand these companies immediately cancel Project Nimbus and end their complicity in Israel’s war crimes.”
“We’re heeding the call from over 1000 Google and Amazon workers to rise up against the contract, known as Project Nimbus. Technology should be used to bring people together, not enable apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and settler-colonialism...”
The victims of prejudice, violence and genocide cannot "block" attackers that were radicalised online. Victims of bigotry and hatred cannot opt out of being beaten up or murdered.
Some people have claimed federation would get people off Meta's services, as if Meta hadn't considered that possibility.
The truth is Meta would simply switch off federation if that happened. We know they would because they have done it before.
Facebook used to use a free open messaging standard called XMPP, to allow messaging with people on non-Meta services. But in 2015 they switched off their connection to the outside world:
it is wild because we wouldnt be having this convo if it was a shitty mastdon or soapbox or pleroma instance but because its meta people are just gonna defend them for zero reason ig
Meta's decision to be federated is likely to be driven entirely by regulation by the EU. So how long it lasts likely depends on how long the EU is willing to keep applying pressure on them.
Not only facebook did this. At the same time all big email providers skipped it. It *really* sucked. With a multi protocol messenger like pidgin, miranda or so you could talk to almost everyone until then. Since then your chat contact list is much shorter if you refuse WhatsApp.
technically, Facebook never allowed people to contact outside services, and the reverse is also true. What they provided was a client-to-server endpoint you could use to connect to your own Facebook account and message people, using an XMPP client. Obviously that means you did not see ads or could not scroll your feed, so there was little incentive for them to keep that endpoint alive.
The thing I often think about with Zuckerberg and Musk et all are Robert Caro's thoughts about Power.
"What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals. When you have enough power to do what you always wanted to do, then you see what the guy always wanted to do."
Mark Zuckerberg revealed that to us over a decade ago. He revealed what he can do with his power again and again. He showed us that from the beginning when at university.
We have a serious issue with power and consent in tech.
The idea of not objectifying the communities that congregrate on their platforms doesn't seem to be grokkable. The idea of not collecting our metadata to use for targeting content seems to be done with little thought.
Because frankly there are a lot of very privileged folk in tech who've never had the systems that that data can aid turned against them.
Plus some of us left Facebook for very good reasons. #fedipact
While it may be too late for some of us having used these systems and social media, we can reduce the flow and help the next generation of kids to reduce the amount of data tracked.
Although I will also settle for not seeing people from the abusive network many of us left behind.
Yes our friends and family aren't bad people. But there's no need for one communications medium to rule them all.
With folklore, folks used to be cautious about what to do with hair and nail clippings. As those could give a witch or sorcerer power over you.
We have this now with our electronic clippings, we give our clippings to social networks and that gives a whole heap of power to them and to the buyers of that data who can then analyse it.
@RxBrad Defederating instances with poor moderation that enables Nazis to run amok on them is pretty standard stuff on the Fediverse, afaik. Why should Threads get a special exemption? It's not a fundamentally different situation, it's just a very large single instance.
"I liked it better when this account gave Fedi tips instead of stirring up internet drama."
I give up most of my spare time to do my Fedi support accounts and sites because I am very concerned about the effect of Meta, Google, Microsoft etc on human rights and society.
If I didn't care about the danger from Meta etc, these accounts and sites would not exist.
The reason I help people is exactly the same reason I am making a plea to defederate Meta.
If this is your considered belief then why is your account on an instance that defederates with all the usual troublesome Fediverse suspects? Surely you'd prefer to be on an instance that let's YOU decide if you want to see posts from skinheads.social if you're being ideologically consistent. Why are you letting your admin make that decision for you?
For me it's about consistency of defederation policy. Defederation is a useful tool to prevent individual Fediverse instances from growing beyond their moderation capacity. While you're not incorrect that other large Fediverse instances also have moderation issues (mastodon.social, for example), my suggestion is we shouldn't be afraid to defederate those instances either to discourage them from growing beyond the bounds of their ability to successfully moderate those "disgusting shitheads". Defederating Threads is only part of a larger discussion we here in the Fediverse need to have about not allowing exceptions to Fediverse norms for large instances.
And if we want to get into hemispheres (an argument that makes no sense to me or has relevance here) we can talk about how Meta long allowed Facebook to be used to maliciously influence the outcomes of elections globally
I mean, california has more republicans than delaware... should that mean that you defederate with the largest source of democrats?
replace that with LGBT folk and transphobes
yes, facebook has both
however, lumping them all into the same bucket doesn't work at that scale (it's like trying to say everyone in the EU likes oat milk).
being prejudice about an instance or its moderation only works on instances half the size of mastodon.social. get any bigger than that and the instance contains multiple subcultures, cliches, rules, and amazing and awful people.
were threads servers the size of individual facebook groups, I would gladly federate with the LGBT group ones.
I get that it's not the punk "fuck nazis" thing you'd hope for and they shouldn't advertise it as being any sort other than "more good people in facebook than bad"
"just move to fedi" is kinda like telling folk in an oppressive state "just move" and comes from a place of 1) privilege & 2) detachment from the old state. ([1])
(friend groups still on facebook, all events in the town on facebook, etc)
where federating is like having high speed rail, lowering the barrier to moving to a better place
for my part I think the developers will and have taken it slow, and have listened to feedback about the design and moderation concerns.
there's still more to go, but bit by bit it gets better. I'm hopeful future social media is less entrenched, and that open standards are enforced by e.g. the EU.
[1] you see this effect in millennials(?) not quitting tiktok because their friend groups are on it.
It is absolutely not like moving places. You don't *have* to pick only one, you can make a transition and have both. Facebook doesn't want you to have a life elsewhere, but that's their business model, not a physical impossibility.
Yes, it's more work. Demanded by Facebook. But you can help your friends who stay on Facebook, by showing them how it's done elsewhere, by opening accounts for them, by taking them by the hand.
We know switching costs are maintained artificially high because that's what Facebook wants, but there's a difference between "Leaving Facebook is hard, I won't do anything" and "Leaving Facebook is hard, let's explore this other thing in the background". And yes it's hard but again, it's our job to help those people explore that other world and show them how it's done, not provide them with an excuse. @katievm @ada @mnemonicoverload @FediTips
If you don't do this you are allowing hatred to spread in the real world, leading to bigotry, violence and ultimately murder and genocide (see the links). Meta is allowing hatred to spread, it needs to be defederated.
The larger an instance gets, the harder it is to moderate. Small Fediverse instances have a much better staff to user ratio than large corporations, so they tend to have better moderation.
This demand to "wait and see" after 20 years of consistently appalling behaviour including defending holocaust deniers, and being sued by victims of genocide...
It seems that some people are very deeply in denial.
If you genuinely cannot see the problem here there is nothing more to be said.
Take action now. It's the same company, the same people, the same policies. They have consistently awful behviour, we need to get ahead of this before more people are hurt or killed.
I, too, expect that some day someone will, for example, launch bot attacks against Mastodon from Threads, and Meta will be slow to take action.
This is why I have threads.net limited. To protect against poor moderation. It's what I do with Mastodon instances, which, I believe, are poorly moderated.
For example, if an instance has 1000 users and 1 admin, that's a ratio of 1:1000.
For Meta to have a similar ratio of human staff to users, they would need literally millions of moderators. In reality, the total number of employees at Meta is 67 thousand and most of them aren't moderators.
Meta relies heavily on non-human automated systems to moderate, with humans checking appeals, and the staff ratios are very very poor compared to a typical Fediverse instance.
@Jerry @tauon I’ve now seen some posts originating from #threads and for now they seem okay. I don’t trust facebook / Zuckerberg and I expect a massive lack of moderation, soon, as I do expect that we’ll discover the usual odorous and evil stuff ingrained in Zuckerbergs empire. But for now I don’t see a justification to preemptively take any action against the platform or their users.
@tauon Interesting, I have yet to encounter a single post from threads in the wild, lest a user report. Do/did you see many of them on your instance and what kind of shite are they? And how does #threads react to reports, if at all? @FediTips
it's not preemptively though. even before they were federating, a huge amount of bigoted content was available on there and was being recommended to people on other "meta" (facebook) services.
@MisterMoo What threshold does an instance need to cross before you'd agree that it needs to be defederated? Or is there no threshold and should every instance be allowed to federate, no matter how toxic?
If you agree that there is a line that can be crossed, why doesn't an organization that has facilitated genocide violate that standard?
@Jerry @tauon We‘re approaching the level of „If you don‘t block threads you are like Hitler!!1!“. These are real people using facebook to communicate. I don‘t consider it a good decision, but they have reasons and, unlike us, they may not have the options to change platforms or to operate their own infrastructure. I have not yet seen them disbehave (counting the minutes) and I will not block human communication because I personally despise facebook (and block it in my LAN.) #threads
@RxBrad Right, that's why I already mentioned that Fediverse instances that grow at a pace that exceeds their own moderation abilities are also a problem that needs addressing. We need more acknowledgement that growth can't be the only metric of success. If you run an instance and it's growing so fast that your moderation team can't keep up and bad actors start flocking there as a consequence then you risk defederation.
@RxBrad Right, that's why I already mentioned that Fediverse instances that grow at a pace that exceeds their own moderation abilities are also a problem that needs addressing. We need more acknowledgement that growth can't be the only metric of success. If you run an instance and it's growing so fast that your moderation team can't keep up and bad actors start flocking there as a consequence then you risk defederation.
For me it's about consistency of defederation policy. Defederation is a useful tool to prevent individual Fediverse instances from growing beyond their moderation capacity. While you're not incorrect that other large Fediverse instances also have moderation issues (mastodon.social, for example), my suggestion is we shouldn't be afraid to defederate those instances either to discourage them from growing beyond the bounds of their ability to successfully moderate those "disgusting shitheads". Defederating Threads is only part of a larger discussion we here in the Fediverse need to have about not allowing exceptions to Fediverse norms for large instances.
All Fediverse servers can have moderation problems. Meta HAS a long-standing well documented 20+ year track record of severe moderation problems as a fundamental underpinning of their corporate culture. Under no circumstances do you have to give them any benefit of doubt.
@mnemonicoverload I don't give them any benefit of doubt, I try to understand the source of the swiftness everyone seemss to show to close the doors and burn the bridges with Meta. And from my understanding for the same reasons you gave, I think we should start setting ALL the instance in authorized_fetch mode only and build trust lists. That way we can prevent a lot of moderation issue .
@MisterMoo As I said in another convo about this, the only meaningful difference between Threads and a fedi instance that would be universally defederated on the spot is the fucking user count.
All of the hand-wringing about this issue is a thin veneer over the underlying desire to crank the numbers up and, understandably, nobody wants to admit it to themselves or others.
Small instances on the Fediverse with a large percentage of bad actors are regularly and broadly defederated. Small instances are much less of a problem. "How would you know" is irrelevant, because on a 10 user instance the admin knows and if they don't do anything about it then their instance gets quickly defederated. The tougher problem is larger instances with insufficient moderation that Fediverse admins are more hesitant to defederate from.
"Some of us just want to follow accounts here that will never natively be on Fedi. It doesn't mean we adore Nazis."
Correct. It does however mean you're willing to tolerate Nazis. It means you think being able to follow those Threads accounts is more important than not giving Nazis additional reach to spread their hatred and recruitment efforts. It means you're okay with federating with Meta, a known and active Nazi collaborator that algorithmically boosts hate speech for profit instead of making even bare-minimum efforts to minimize it on their platforms.
@mnemonicoverload @RxBrad Yes, this. They should get defederated in the same way any other instance does. It's important NOT to put Meta in some "too big to defederate" category.
"If I had even a 10-user instance, and 5 of them were bad actors with private accounts, how would I know?"
Because you'd be seeing complaints. In theory, the bad actors could keep quiet and you wouldn't know. But they don't keep quiet.
The fundamental tactic of fascists on social media, which we've seen develop over decades, is to actively disrupt discourse and drive out everyone else, silencing them and killing the platform. They make themselves obvious.
@Killab33z_OG @loewe I don't think it's about if they are making the world better or not but users should be consider or at least informed about this. A user should have the right to an opinion either if you belive its wrong or not.
@Killab33z_OG @loewe and am all for that, thats why I think the fediverse is superior to any other social media but I think it's good manners to at least tell your users you are now going to block an instance and let them give their feedback.
If we do not have a good communication channel user/admin we are going to end up with one person instances all over the place.
@redking well, one of the best things about the #Fediverse is the user which doesn't like their server admin blocking the #Fedbook sponsored #Threads can #SelfHost a server to federate with #Fakebook.
As COVID-19 flourished, so too did disinformation campaigns, anti-vaccine rhetoric, sectarianism and politics aligned with anti-science populism.
Let's learn from COVID-19 as measles is making an inexcusable comeback. We have the tools — vaccines, masking, ventilation and testing — to stop the spread of airborne viruses.
We apparently don't have the tools to recognize and admit to ourselves that there's a significant faction that actively, specifically wants people to die of preventable diseases.
They're against public health, eradication of childhood diseases, vaccination, and just generally people not being miserable. They want people to sicken and die because they can't deal with the idea of facts in place of authority.
And #CanadianMedia is largely responsible for the promotion of anti-vax rhetoric. The day of the esteemed #FourthEstate is nothing but a memory. Today, #CanadianMediaFailsMiserably in its role as advocate for citizens and in positioning political issues. It is a cesspool of misinformation , disinformation, borderline slander, outright lies, parroting of political BS and is totally subservient to the highest bidder. It has become a tool for propaganda. Nothing more.
Great article, I'm always happy to see rational people explaining themselves clearly.
It's simply astonishing that vaccinations are even in question in 2024.
As a personal note, I used to deliver the Ottawa Citizen about 50 years ago when I was a boy, and I'm glad it's not gone to the dark side like too many other newspapers.
Agreed. We normalized the anti-science crazies during the COVID-19 pandemic with "but both sides"-style journalism, and now measles is making a comeback. This is not a coincidence.
@RealGene I really had the feeling this was a result of the medical company just wanting to be able to make advertising money off of their patients in addition to their fees and insurance billing but this actually seems very plausible. Perhaps it's both.
Both probably are factors in this move. The only thing for certain is that medical care is not at all about care anymore. @PenguinToot @neilk @lrvick @BenAveling @Jennifer
@BenAveling @Jennifer There isn’t even a suitable web experience? (Putting aside that even that isn’t good enough of course), it’s installed app or bust? That’s crazy.
@philip @BenAveling @Jennifer That's disgusting. I'm so sorry. My providers have web portals but don't require you to use any of it. They're trying to root out the patients they won't get as much from. This sucks, because others will start if they see it working.
@BenAveling that is so unethical! Might be a long shot, but send an email to the Verge and Ars Technica. They cover all kinds of tech news and have big audiences. @nilay_patel is on here but don't know how active he is.
sorry you’re dealing w this. if this is in the US - providers can not discriminate based on sex, race, and ethnicity. Beyond that they can pick and choose patients at their discretion. Your local newspaper and news station might be interested to hear. I wonder if this could be argued that it creates a monopoly. Orgs/companies like AARP, Jitterbug, your email provider would/could help fight.
@lufthans This is obviously outrageous, and I’d be happy to talk about this case on the Serious Privacy podcast. However, I’m not sure our platform is big enough to give this the attention it deserves. You’re more than welcome to join us though if you want!
It's not only unethical. It's appalling and disgusting. Not only they force you to give your private health data to tech corporations, but is also the perfect example of how people without economic resources to buy one of those horrible devices will be out of the health system. #SocialMedicine.
@nezumih It's not a device issue, it seems it's the clinic itself. Is there a US body that oversees medical providers or administration processes? They'd be the people to go to. Or any insurance regulators - they might not be the exact party causing the issue, but they might be able to point OP to who to make the complaint to.
In most cases here, as far as I'm aware, you have to start with making a formal (in writing) complaint to the clinic first though. I'm presuming OP already has.
if the provider in question accepts Medicare or any other form of federal funding, this could also put them at risk of violating Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and possibly other disability rights laws, unless the iOS and/or Android apps in question are fully conformant with WCAG 2 and Revised Section 508 accessibility standards. #accessibility
@Deus That no one listens to Richard Stallman anymore is hardly surprising.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, in fact, the last time I had a real job (at Linuxcare, which was a dot-com that collapsed in the dot-bust), I was working a little late one evening when Stallman came into the office.
This was an open office plan. Plenty of space. Plenty of air. I could still smell his body odor at a distance of, I’m guessing, 50 feet. Plenty of people were still fawning over him nonetheless, even as I heard unsavory stories, including of sexual harassment.
He’s definitely not what I would call a savory character.
That said, no matter how disgusted I am by him personally, sometimes, it is worthwhile to go beyond dislike and look into the work. It would not surprise me, even for a millisecond, if he’d touched on this issue somewhere along the way.
Someone at the clinic legal or risk dept. must have seen this blowing up, or they saw the formal complaint I filed with the California Board of Medicine.
They suddenly offered to take me back as a patient on the condition that I sign a form that indemnifies them of any responsibility if they fail to contact me in a timely manner because of my choice to use "non standard communication" methods like phone or email.
Hard pass. They will get an email to transfer records to another provider soon.
Priority 1 for me is to get an alternative provider secured, and get back into desired treatment.
On the other side of completed treatment when no one can blackball me, I have names to name, to make sure a strong message is sent to never treat anyone like this again.
@joelcrump @itsmeholland I am a security researcher and have been close to mobile development since Android was created. I even released some of my own de-googled mobile operating systems over the years.
I was connected 24/7 to the point it was impacting my mental health and relationships. Also the privacy and security issues created by modern app culture are immense.
I don't have a phone now by choice, and am happier for it. I feel this should be a choice everyone has.
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
@lrvickFrom what I've read of people who've met him, he seems to have an open mind than many out here (in the Fediverse) - isn't judgemental, doesn't say No, or 'too busy' if you approach him.
@Deus Richard Stallman could be pretty dogmatic about “free software.”
The trouble here for me remains what it has always been: “Free software” does not have a satisfactory model for compensating people who donate their time and talents. Whatever arguments there are for “free software,” and there are many, this is a problem: Developers are human too. They still need to pay the rent.
@benfell @Deus I spend the overwhelming majority (and soon entirety) of my engineering time developing free software, and I am able to enjoy a middle class life in one of the most expensive zip codes in the USA.
In order to do this I have to put a salesman hat on sometimes and be willing to make a case to companies why paying me to extend an existing open source project will save them money over making something custom in house.
@benfell @Deus Honestly I learned sales by being jobless for a while, and finally taking a job at Radio Shack.
I saw they had floor models of laptops running windows, which I was unable to sell with a straight face.
So I installed Linux on all of them, and sold people on why they were dramatically less likely to get viruses or slow down over time like their current laptops.
Ended up being the top laptop sales of any store in the state, and corporate looked the other way on my use of Linux.
@Deus My mileage definitely does vary. I’ve tried sales. It simply doesn’t work for me.
Which is bad. The neoliberal presumption is that everyone can sell and its idea of self-actualization is entrepreneurship. You have to sell, even to get a job. I can’t even manage that level.
@benfell @Deus Yeah it is true, that even getting jobs or almost any upward mobility in life tends to require luck, sales, or some combination.
But sales does not have to be how people classically "sell".
Some of my biggest opportunities have happened because I wrote software or researched something that interested me, and just put myself out there to give a talk on it, even though I was terrified.
Most never do this which means a lot of amazing talent in this world goes unused and unnoticed.
@benfell @Deus Preaching to myself here. I only ever document or give a talk on like 1/20 big projects I take on, to my own detriment.
I make -enough- so it is hard for me to convince myself that going out there to get more opportunities might mean more people that can't sell, will have work to do.
Maybe instead of convincing others to sell I need to do a better job of selling enough to create more FOSS work for others 😀
@benfell @Deus I am formerly homeless college dropout with a background in telelmarketing, day labor, street performing, trucking, and retail. Whatever paid the bills.
If I have any one exceptional skill, it is my refusal to accept defeat. I will fail as many times at a goal as it takes.
I also know many better programmers than me, that struggle to get jobs, and most of the jobs in their careers have been ones I referred them into.
I wish I knew how to teach effective self-advocacy.
@Deus And to find any measure of success from that background is itself exceptional.
I am slowly resigning myself to defeat. It isn’t easy but it’s been 23 years since I had a real job. In that time, I returned to school, finished a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. I have done everything everybody says to do. None of it works. There’s no meaningful feedback: I’m lucky if I get an email that says merely that I wasn’t selected. It’s the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different result.
@benfell @Deus Sorry to hear that. I have been on the other side of the table on hiring for many companies, and have had 100 resumes on my desk before.
Many filter by school, age, or past jobs at known companies etc. I grep resumes for links to open source projects, then narrow it down to the handful that do, then pick the one that has code most relevant to the things we do every day.
It sadly often takes -hundreds- of applications for even a skilled engineer to get a job in this market.
@benfell @Deus One way most anyone technical can go break into the market and make cash short term, is just go find security bugs. Any software you touch in a given day has easy security bugs if you know where to look, and there is always a way to convert those finds to social capital or cash.
File a few CVEs, collect some bug bounties, and then those will put you near the top of hiring lists for infosec.
FOSS types that are good with Linux and the CLI, tend to do well in infosec.
@benfell @Deus Any time I am turned down I always ask for recommendations for areas I could improve. I normally never get any, but -sometimes- I do and it is generally super helpful.
I always break policy and give candidates I turn down a detailed explanation if they ask, including things I would recommend they gain more experience in, and some of the specific ways I learned.
Sadly I am one interviewer out of many thousands that don't do this because of liability worries.
@Deus I never even get contact information. I don't have anyone to contact directly. It's anonymous by design precisely to ensure there's no accountability and that compels a conclusion that this is not, no way, no how, an honest labor market.
I should apologize for a misunderstanding that I mistakenly thought immaterial.
I’m not actually in high technology any more. After landing hard on my @$$ three times from tech jobs, I figured this was a disastrous career choice (actually made for me by my father).
I was once a programmer, from the very late 1970s to the mid 1980s. I burned out, but worse, failed to realize or understand that I had burned out. I can still manage a script from time to time but that’s the extent of it today.
@Deus Well, and you did, in an exceptional way, answer the question I had raised. (Anybody who missed that should not bother trying to trace back the thread. It's as old as open source software.)
@joelcrump @Lance R. Vick yes, it is onerous: it requires one to sign up for an account on a service that is designed to collect personal data, with one of the entities that are actively working to ruin computing.
assuming an android or iOS phone with access to the respective app market, as implied by OP's story: I do have a linux phone which does not require such an account and it's really useful, but also wouldn't run that kind of app.
And then there is the whole “accessing sensible stuff from a device that is routinely carried around and easily stolen”
"Wegen einer @zugkatze im Gleis ist die Strecke vor uns leider aktuell gesperrt. Wir meowntschuldigen uns für die Verspätung und bitten um ihr Purrrständniss."
I can imagine overbuilding it with the intention of allowing for the rigours of a cat lounging though. It's just a question of if you consider the cat as a stakeholder or not when you're formulating your initial project parameters.
@mnemonicoverload 😂 that’s one way of thinking about it! I had an interest in model trains as a kid and while I never did anything other than laying some track, I did look at the magazines and have an idea of how much work goes into some of the layouts. I do my best to accommodate my little feline friend but can’t imagine going to the lengths to build a model train setup that is cat friendly. Kudos to those that do!
My last day at work has been scheduled. In just 3 shifts, my 25 year career in #proAudio comes to a screeching halt while I enter the terrifying world of #disabilityInsurance.
All this because I caught #covid19, once, at work, in June 2022, despite having 4 vaccines.
The first 12 weeks were bad. Then I got a little worse each week. My weight tanked. I am 6' 3 and was a little over 200lbs (my normal weight). A year and a half later, I presently weigh 145 and dropping.
I was diagnosed with #meCFS, #PEM, #POTS, and am still having tests (CT, gastroscopy, biopsy) done on my GI.
#LongCovid is very real, and has robbed me of the luxury of clear though, easy movement, and a "normal" life.
Don't get Covid. Don't get Covid again. #WearAMask, please.
This is so devastating, I appreciate you sharing your experiences and wish more people still wore masks. I was in the studio 2 days ago working with a band in an N95 and a backpack full of masks but had no other takers. There was a few days when I thought I maybe didn’t need it but wore it anyway. Glad I did and this is why. Thank you for sharing. I really hope the tests yield a course of treatment that helps you. All the best.
Thanks for sharing this difficult personal story. It means a lot to me as someone who has been trying to avoid this thing for four years and feeling near despair at the state of society now, on top of the loss of social connections.
Anyone seeing this from my boosting this reply, please read Sean’s post and really think about the consequences of getting #Covid even after being vaxxed as much as you can. (I’ve also had four shots, and wear an #N95 to all public indoor spaces.)
I’d love it if this would get read by a certain famed epidemiologist whose attitude and behavior after he got #Covid last year has been a punch in the gut. One of the biggest disappointments in a year of many.
Some people like Sean continue to understand cause and effect after they’ve been infected. Others appear to exhibit cognitive deficits in that area afterwards. Osterholm even said right after his infection that he hoped he would be sensible after his immunity wore off. Guess not.
“He's been opening (and stealing) my mail, blocking my path when I leave my home, stalking me, verbally harassing my friends & I, harassing my family, starting rumors, and encouraging me to commit suicide. Recently he's begun entering my apartment without permission and I am now urgently looking for help moving.”
Hi there, over the past year and some change my landlord has been committing domestic viol… Alan Meekins needs your support for Get away from abusive landlord
I don't know where @nullagent lives but in the US there are laws that don't permit this. Next a sense of humor is required. An M80 in the mailbox that goes off when opened is a start. A big burly friend to accompany her would be next. Entering her apartment should be met with the big burly friend and two of his friends. It's very hard to biologically pass a trumpet or play one with your fingers broken!
not sure where you/they live but a lot of what you just said is illegal in the States. Opening mail is a potential felony charge, I do believe. Your landlord actually needs your permission to enter if they haven't given notice, even if they own the building it's still breaking and entering. That could get somebody shot if they're deemed a threat to you and your family , not that I'm not condoning or suggesting this.
Sounds like he's got grounds for civil and/or criminal complaints, as well as to whatever local regulatory bodies there might be. Especially the encouragement to commit suicide and other harassment, if he can make recordings. This landlord sounds fucking unhinged, and he's leaving a huge trail of evidence that could land him in deep, deep trouble.
I love good work and craftsmanship, so I love that the knob doesn’t match— I will always think of the random kindness of people and be reminded that most of us are pretty decent.
During covid we called into a virtual repair cafe trying to fix our 50 year old Eletrolux. Not only did we get it fixed, the guy kept on trying to buy it off of us after complimenting how nice the motor was.
Fantastic. There's a bicycle guy one town over from us that does all manner of repairs and improvements, charges about $20, and best of all when you come to pick up the fixed up and improved bike, gives you a big rant about how happy and fulfilled fixing bikes makes him feel.
@kdawson 🥥 2 Words: Volunteer! I'd been looking for a volunteer activity. Starting up a Repair Cafe might be just the ticket! 🥥 #RepairCafe, #Volunteer
@kdawson they have a kit that can be purchased for about $70 us for starting one up, including liability papers, etc. 😀 on the website, repaircafe.org.
it only started in 2009 and now there are 3,000 worldwide! It’s spreading.
He put a $400 blender in a box and didn’t add any wrapping or padding, then shipped it 1,500 miles. He’s lucky I HAD a blender to repair after!
His packing was idiotic. This I was 100% avoidable. He has now learned not to do this. He is 52, not some 21 year old, and should know better. (He agrees.)
It's Rick Parks Admiration Day, again. No scanning; done by hand in Deluxe Paint on an Amiga.
- 1989 - 16 colors (!!) - Hires interlaced (NTSC) - How the F?
For those that don't know Rick's name, you likely know his work very well. He worked at Westwood Studios and worked on Eye of the Beholder I & 2, Dune 2, Kyrandia and other classics.
Rick died in 1996, 7 years after creating this image.
Is anyone going to this? I kinda want to, but I don't want to spend the weekend where the only people I know are the voices I chat back to from @OffTheHook .
Anyone in the Greater Toronto Area have a use for a genuine #Commodore filing cabinet? Perfect for storing your #retroComputing documents! Must be able to pick up in Richmond Hill January 27 or 28.
Florida’s New “Special Persons Registry”: I Hate It On January 1, 2024, Florida enacted a new law, and I hate it. The so-called “Special Persons Registry” gives Florida police the right to make lists of residents based on their disability status, including those with formal diagnoses of Downs Syndrome, dementia, autism, and others. Supposedly this will “improve relations” resiliencymentalhealth.com/202… #Uncategorized
On January 1, 2024, Florida enacted a new law, and I hate it. The so-called “Special Persons Registry” gives Florida police the right to make lists of residents based on their disability status, in…
My google-fu is failing me today. Why can't I find an image of the old style PC CD drives where instead of a tray or a caddy the drive popped out of the PC on a spring loaded mechanism and had a flip up compartment like a top loader?
I needed to understand the angles on Threads federation in a more rigorous way, so I took a few days to think through and write up my sense of the benefits, risks, and available risk mitigations, along with loopholes that need closing and questions to discuss with fediverse administrators.
This is a blisteringly hot subject for me, so it's hard to keep my head cool enough to understand other people's trade-offs, but I'm trying.
@greg @tchambers @darius I think for this my FIRES proposal might help actually — it allows for groups to work together on producing advisories and recommendations about various fediverse entities, including Actors/Users.
I do want the ability for admins of instances to be able to define "custom actions" that can be done with Reports, Accounts, etc.
These are like manually triggered webhooks, which would be useful for ingesting data into tools from the instance admin panel. (I previously called this a “Receipts API”, but I think a more generic solution is best)
@thisismissem @jenniferplusplus @tchambers @darius I do believe the terms of service and privacy policies of various nodes play a role in what can be shared for the tooling to be effective ... but honestly, I have not put a ton of thought into it. There are some processes which are scoped to the reporter and reported, but others that require a lot more information to be effective in automated fashion.
Thank you, Erin, for thisreasoned and informed approach.
I never participated in social media <for reasons> until a year ago when when i dipped a toe into mastodon. It has been wonderful! But i just cannot continue if meta and all the meta-related issues are introduced.
@darius Yes, I suggest considering adding more on that in the doc - & a few other "pros":
"If the Fedi *does* largely support interoperating with Threads - Once interop happens, even if Threads does not (initially) support account migrations out, this still is a giant blow to their formerly fully closed, fully walled-garden strategy lock-in. It fundamentally changes the power dynamic between Threads and its users. Suddenly the cost of any future Meta bad actions becomes sky-high."
The bit about potential off-ramps is in the doc already, with about as much emphasis as I feel I should give it until implementation deets arrive, but I do hope it happens.
I don’t immediately agree about fedi interop fundamentally changing Meta’s power relationships with its users, though—the back-of-napkin math doesn’t seem persuasive to me—but I’ll think on it.
As I type these words, a mass exodus is underway from Twitter and Facebook. After decades of eye-popping growth, these social media sites are contracting at an alarming rate. In some ways, this sho…
I think that you have consider Mastodon.social and the fediverse separately (which many pundits do not do). I think Eugen's endgame will be to sell mastodon.social to Meta (the actual language may be merge or something similar). The bulk of the rest of the fediverse will react with horror. Before the merger expect to see changes in the Mastodon software that will deepen the connections with Threads and then "improvements" to account migration that will make old software incompatible. Fediverse administrators will be faced with accepting changes that will leave them less able to lock out Threads or to reject those changes and be unable to accept accounts trying to migrate from mastodon.social. Expect the possibility of attempts to backdoor defederation and blocking.
one thing to come out of this is that on the fediverse, you can have deep and nuanced conversations about polarising subjects with very little drama. It's the most refreshing thing about a social media platform where you can hear different opinions and think them through without the rage algorithm.
From my POV, this is a risk, but a risk that isn't Meta specific, ANY really big new entry to the Fedi would bring this (GLAAD found *every other big social net WORSE than IG for safety*) & unless the solution is to block ALL biggies this is something we need to build tech for regardless. Chats here with @thisismissem FIRES are promising.
So a problem to solve for for those who choose to federate - but compared to other problems it is a "good problem to have."
@Nora, Misfit Loser Zealot Even if we assume migration capability from Threads to other parts of the Fediverse is complete vapourware, having a list of people you already want to interact with on the Fediverse does technically make migration easier, even if you have to manually reestablish all those connections vs starting out on the Fediverse cold with no idea of who you want to / can follow.
I get that - but it isn't the whole of Meta we are talking about integrating (not FB, full IG, etc, right?) It's Threads which is big (100MM MAU), but smaller (for now) than X, Pinterest, Linkedin, YouTube, etc....so we'd have the same problem of the same scale or worse with any of those joining in too.
Meta/FB's role in the #TigrayGenocide (briefly mentioned already) appears to be similar. The usual estimate is 10% of the population killed during Nov 2020 to Nov 2022.
@boud Yeah, an absolute nightmare that fully invalidates their claims of having fixed the problems. I’m hoping someone else will do a full deep dive on Meta and Ethiopia from a tech perspective—I picked Myanmar because it’s been long enough for a ton of reporting to emerge.
I missed @kissane's post on Threads last week, but I bet a bunch of others did, too, so I just want to share it in case you're one. If you care about the fediverse or how we think about the future of human communication, go read it, in full. ❤️
We've needed so much more deep, thoughtful, and specific writing on these topics for decades now, and I for one couldn't be more grateful for Erin's work.
But if not, here's the thing: the United States is worse than Meta, but it turns out that some things aren't boycott-able. I literally boycotted everything I possibly could from the US for about year after the US invaded Afghanistan. We don't grow a lot up here in the winter, so I ate a *lot* of Jerusalem Artichokes. I still can't stomach them.
Even putting pungent tubers aside — and this might sound obvious — for me as an individual Canadian boycotting the USA wasn't sustainable.
More importantly, the year after I gave up, I went to the US and met an incredible group of committed, tireless activists.
Most Americans aren't bad, even if their country has committed many terrible atrocities. In fact, it's quite the opposite (if you're familiar with Canadian culture, you'll know what a statement this is!):
The Americans I know are consistently some of the most amazing, incredible people on Earth. Also resilient.
But here's the thing: culture and community matters. They can't "just" leave their homes and their communities and move to Canada because a law commits women to forced births, or their identity is banned. Many have, and speaking as someone who's been an immigrant times over, it sucks and is harder than anyone who hasn't found themselves uprooted can imagine.
So for me to cut off America when I didn't know any Americans: that was the easy part. And moral.
But to cut off my amazing American friends who choose not to leave America? Honestly, I would be the baddie.
I'll never be as eloquent as Erin, but for me this experience transfers directly to the Fedi debate. I understand wanting safe space, and strongly believe in communities' rights to build and protect those spaces. From my perspective, though, online safe spaces have always been relatively easy to build, like an off-grid homestead.
Creating a global space with porous borders? That's much harder. And it's not going to be easy. But Erin said all this and I'm just affirming her words.
The only thing I'd add is that the short term goal of federation is to break Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp's monopolies, too. My community is totally dependent on Meta for basic operation, and when we talk about "safe spaces", my entire community is occupied, so I'm going to act from that point of view.
@blaine I have long ago learnt that 'countries' do not exist, and that their people and their governments are completely different things. When I was a kid, UK, chilean, even brazilian people were some kind of enemies (the latter mostly because of football!). Now I have many chilean friends and my best boss is from UK. Yes, people still vote those governments, but mostly because of what they promise to do internally, not about their international relations will be (OK, maybe Brexit).
@blaine I'm curious why "part of the world' and "a safe place" are mutually exclusive? To be sure, there are plenty of unsafe places in the world, but there are people and institutions that have built safe spaces within it too. To me, the benefit of the fediverse is that you can be part of the world, and connect with anyone *and* also build a safe corner of the internet for yourself.
The debate around blocking Threads hinges on the question of "is it possible to have both?"; @evan wrote up a great summary of the trade offs: evanp.me/2023/12/26/big-fedi-s…
From my perspective, we don't have a choice. We have to be part of the world, connecting with everyone AND build safe spaces. We all lose if we fail to do both.
The debate around blocking Threads hinges on the question of "is it possible to have both?"; @evan wrote up a great summary of the trade offs: evanp.me/2023/12/26/big-fedi-s…
From my perspective, we don't have a choice. We have to be part of the world, connecting with everyone AND build safe spaces. We all lose if we fail to do both.
As I often do, I made a poll on the fediverse about two concepts I am interested in: Big Fedi versus Small Fedi. Although I think these are interesting topics, I couldn’t come up with exact summations of what the “Big Fedi” and “Small Fedi” positions are. So, I wanted to write down what I could here.
The fediverse, in this case, is an internetwork of social networks. It works a lot like email; you can have an account on one network and follow, message, and react to people (or bots) on other networks. The biggest software tool for making fediverse networks is Mastodon; there are a lot of other Open Source servers for setting up nodes. There are also some proprietary nodes — Meta Threads and Flipboard are two of the biggest.
The following are some clusters of ideas that I think coalesce into “Big Fedi” and “Small Fedi”. I haven’t been able to tie them all back to some fundamental principle on either side.
Big Fedi
The “Big Fedi” position is a set of ideas that roughly cluster together. Not everyone who agrees with one or a few of these agrees with them all, but I think they tend to be related.
The fediverse should be big. Real big. Like, everyone on the planet should have an account on the fediverse. It will make the internet better and the world better.
Weshould make choices that help bring the fediverse to new people. Because the fediverse should be big, we should be doing things to make it bigger; in particular, to bring it to more people.
There should be a lot of different account servers. (I’m using “account servers” instead of “instances” or “servers”.) It’s good to have a lot of choice, with a lot of different parameters: software interfaces, financial structure, what have you.
Commercial account servers are welcome. This variety includes commercial services. If they provide the right mix of features and trade-offs that certain people want, it’s good to have them, especially if they have a lot of users.
Moderation can be automated. Shared blocklists, machine learning, and other tools can be used to catch most of the problematic interactions on the fediverse.
Account servers can be big. It doesn’t matter how big they are: 1M, 10M, 100M, 1B people is fine.
The fediverse should have secondary services. In order to grow, we need secondary services, like people-finders, onboarding tools, global search, bridges, and so on.
The individual is central. People should be able to set up their environment how they like, including their social environment. They have the tools to do that. The account server may set some parameters around content or software usage, but otherwise it’s mostly a dumb pipe.
Connections should be person-to-person. The main social connection is through following someone. Building up this follow graph is important.
People I care about should be on the fediverse. I have a life outside the fediverse — friends, family, colleagues, neighbours. My governments, media, celebrities, sports figures, leaders in my industry. It would be good to have more of those people on the fediverse, so I can connect to them.
People should get to make choices about their account server. Everybody has different priorities: privacy, open source, moderation, cost, stability, features. We can all make our own choices about the account server we prefer.
It should be possible to have ad-free account servers. Technically and culturally, we should be able to set these up.
It should be possible to have Open Source account servers. People who prefer free network services should be able to run them and use them.
It should be possible to have algorithm-free account servers. You should be able to just follow things reverse chronologically.
It should be possible to have individually-run account servers. A normal technically-minded person should be able to run their own account server for themself, friends, their household, or even for a larger communty.
Harms that are mostly kept to account servers are up to people on those servers to solve. Good fences make good neighbours. If things become unbearable, people can move servers somewhat frictionlessly.
Affinity groups should stretch beyond account server boundaries. Groups, lists, and other social network features are important and should be fully federated. They should provide a lot of features.
There may be some harm that comes with growth; we can fix it later. We’re going to find problems as we go along. We can deal with them as we come to them.
The fediverse is going to look very different over time. The way things work now are not how they’re going to be 1, 3, 5, 10 years from now. Especially as the fediverse grows, different structures and ways of working are going to develop.
Open standards are important. By having public, open standards available through big standards organizations, we gain the buy-in from different account network operators to join the network. We definitely don’t have time to negotiate bilateral agreements; we need solid standards.
Variety in types of account server operators is good. Different people have different needs and tolerances. If we want to have more people, we need to cater to those different needs with different account servers.
Existing organizations can and should provide account servers. Not just existing tech companies; also businesses providing servers for their employees, universities for students, cities or other governments for their citizens.
Existing services, even if they’re bad, will become somewhat better if they have fediverse features. People on those services will get to connect with a variety of new people. They’ll find out about the fediverse, and might move to another account server, or try something else new.
It’s more important to bring good people to the fediverse than keep bad people off it. More people is good, and the people I care about on other networks are also good. There may be some bad people, too, but we’ll manage them.
Small Fedi
Here is a rough cluster of ideas that I’d call “Small Fedi”. Again, not everyone who agrees with one or two of these agrees with all of them.
The fediverse should be safe. Safe from harassment, safe from privacy violations.
Growth is not important. We’ve gotten along this long with a small fediverse. It’s OK how it is, so growth is not important. Growth is a capitalist mindset.
People who aren’t on the fediverse don’t matter as much as people who are. Their needs, at least. When discussing the future of the fediverse, we don’t need to talk about people on other networks much at all.
If people want to get on the fediverse, they can join an existing account server. We don’t need to bring new account servers to the fediverse; there are a lot already. People who really care about getting on the fediverse can join an existing account server, or set up their own. If they’re not willing to do this, they’re probably not that interested in the fediverse, so why should we bother trying to connect to them?
If growth could cause harm, we either should fix the problem before growing, or we shouldn’t grow. We should examine opportunities carefully, but by default we should say no.
Commercial account servers are discouraged. Most commercial services do harm. Even if they’re on the fediverse, they’re going to try to do harm to make more money. So, they should be avoided as much as possible.
Secondary services can cause harm and should be severely limited if allowed at all. People search and content search can be used for privacy invasion or harassment. Shared blocklists can be manipulated to cause echo chambers. Machine learning can be biased. Onboarding services favour big account servers. They should be discouraged or, preferably, closed.
The account server is central. Moderation decisions, cultural decisions, account decisions, most social decisions should happen at the account server level.
Account servers are the primary affinity group. You should find an account server that feels like home. Any other groups are less important.
Feeds like “fediverse” and “local” are important. There is a public community of account servers that your account server connects to, and the public feed from that community is important. You might use it more often than your home feed. Your local feed is also important, because your account server is a group you belong to.
Moderation should be primarily by hand. The courage and wisdom necessary to make most moderation decisions can only be managed by hand. Automated tools can be manipulated.
Account servers must be small. Human moderators can only do so much work, so the account servers they moderate can only be so big.
The fediverse works just about right right now, and shouldn’t change. There’s a good reason for how everything works, and it’s fine. People who want to change the way things work just don’t get it.
It’s not important that people from my real life are on the fediverse, and it’s kind of discouraged. The account server is the most important affinity group, then the larger “fediverse”. That’s enough; other people are needed or welcome. People who I know who aren’t on the fediverse don’t care about fediverse stuff, so they’d get bored here, anyway.
It is highly discouraged to have ad-supported account servers. Even if they only show ads to their own users, they are causing harm. In particular, they’re showing our content next to ads, or using our content to develop ad algorithms. Either way, harm goes beyond the server border.
It is highly discouraged to have proprietary account servers. They just can’t be trusted with their own users’ data. Also, they’re going to get some of our data, just through federation, and who knows what they’ll do with it.
It is highly discouraged to have algorithmic timelines. Anyone having these causes problems. If you want one, you just don’t get it.
Open standards are less important than making things work the way we want them. In particular, fiddling with standards to keep people safe, and to discourage particular account server structure, is an OK thing to do.
Most existing institutions have proved themselves untrustworthy and should not provide account servers. Name any particular part of civil society, and I can come up with an example of at least one bad practice they have.
Harms that happen on one account server are a problem for every account server. Server blocks, personal blocks, and protocol boundaries aren’t enough to isolate problems to their account server of origin. Secondary or tertiary effects can happen and cause harm.
Existing services, if they’re bad, will make the fediverse worse. Bad practices, bad content, bad members will cause problems for everyone on the fediverse.
It’s more important to keep bad people off the fediverse than to bring good people to it. Bad people can be really horrible. There aren’t actually that many good people on bad services, and if they really wanted to connect with us, they’d find another way.
Where do I land?
I’m mostly a Big Fedi person; I did the work on the fediverse that I’ve done in order to bring it to everyone on the planet. I don’t think there should be a purity test to be allowed on the fediverse.
That said, I respect that harm can come from new technical decisions and new network connections. As someone deeply involved in the standards around ActivityPub and the fediverse, I’d like to make sure that we give people the tools they need to avoid harm — and stay out of the way when they use them. I very much like the Small Fedi suspicion of new services and account servers, and careful consideration of the possibilities.
I’d like to find ways to mitigate the problems of so many people on proprietary social networks being unconnected to the fediverse, but still centre the safety of existing fedizens. I don’t have an easy answer to how this can work, though.
Anyway, thanks for reading this far. Also, an acknowledgment: I borrowed the term “Small Fedi” without permission from Erin Kissane’s great piece on Untangling Threads. I’m also using it differently, stretching it out, which admittedly is an ingrateful thing with something you borrow. I hope it is not ruined by the time I return it.
As I often do, I made a poll on the fediverse about two concepts I am interested in: Big Fedi versus Small Fedi. Although I think these are interesting topics, I couldn’t come up with exact s…
@blaine @haubles @evan I vowed not to write about the internet this week, so I will just put here in the margin that I am myself committed to both big-world networking *and* refuge and I think that we(-as-in-tech) are obligated to make both work, which is going to be wickedly difficult and politically(-as-in-polity) messy, but also a worthy and fascinating challenge. 🕯️
Agreed. The fediverse offers the potential of both, so any framing of these views as inherently in conflict is misleading. On the other hand there are real differences in philosophy on *how* best to try to achieve that.
@blaine @haubles @evan or simply encourage mechanisms to 'make the world safer', albeit might sound a bit broad… it's necessary to establish and enforce boundaries, but as a default it may cost the potential for cultural change that comes from integration and diverse perspectives. maybe i rephrase to 'make big fedi safer'
it's more than likely that I'm part of the weirdest audience, but all the things you're saying are exactly the things I wish I'd had words to express for the past ~17 years. ❤️
I’m glad I read through it before commenting. You did a ton of research here. It’s stark that Meta has the money to do good content moderation, but they don’t, while Mastodon is volunteer funded (somewhat).
One idea that’s been thrown around in #civictech circles is trying to get .govs to move to mastodon VS twitter and use a .gov instance. (USAMastodon.gov or something)
Threads being federated with that server helps because we could make the reach argument… but this has given me a lot of pause on the idea.
Easily the best expression of frustration with the backward logic of the 15 minute city conspiracy theory I've seen yet. I don't always agree 100% with this channel but they've really hit the nail on the head with this one.
One of the most genuinely confusing phenomena over the past few years has been the conspiracy theories surrounding “15 minute cities” that have caused people to see things we advocate for — traffic calming, quality bike infrastructure, and public transit — as government control, overreach, and even tyranny.
Maybe someone should do one about, "Repost this if Trans people are sinners?" type thing. Not so much because we want people to be sharing that kind of information, but more anyone who does, is clearly a person to avoid, and that would be right nice to know.
They are indeed (welcome and safe here), but no I will not participate in chain mail requests, and was hoping Mastodon was one up on Facebook and Twitter with those banal requests. Like reposting a meme proves I care (enough to pollute all my friends screens with endless messages about what I'm up to).
I dont think this is the right sentiment despite the good intentions. We should strive for implicit inclusion not explicit. Trasgender people should be accepted as a de facto not through some signal.
Just because someone is trans, doesn't say anything about whether they are welcome or not. What one say and how one behave is determining that. And in my book, that goes for everyone.
🇺🇸 US: COVID cases in the US have risen 50% in 4 weeks.
Dr. Michael Hoerger of Tulane University, who has been modeling the spread of COVID-19 using the Biobot data, noted on Monday that levels of wastewater now correlate with approximately 886,000 daily infections, or an average of more than 6 million infections in just one week.
In Dr. Hoerger’s forecast, the figure for daily infections could reach 1.5 million during the Christmas break, when the next massive wave of travelers will take to the air or roads. He warns that in classrooms, lecture halls, restaurants, and other crowded indoor spaces, the chance of encountering someone actively infected with COVID-19 is essentially a flip of the coin.
With masking practically nonexistent and COVID vaccination rates abysmal, combined with the impacts of influenza, RSV, and other viral and bacterial pathogens, the impact on health systems could soon become catastrophic.
Undoutbedly, concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater will surge even more in the weeks ahead, as the impacts of record holiday travel on viral transmission are fully logged.
HTTP 1.1/418 Have You Ever Retired a Teapot by Mistake?
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Willa :donor: :nyancat:
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