I write a lot about the things that the fediverse can offer that you can't get anywhere else—humane governance according to local norms, especially. I think those things are extremely good, and there are lots of people and groups who stand to benefit from those things.

But you still have to build things people like using, or they will leave/not join, and then the social part goes poof.

You can also just skip all the fediverse stuff and follow the links to the Aquarius undersea research lab at the bottom. It's incredibly great!

The only other thing I will say is that I have *never* experienced the kind of crowd reaction this got, anywhere, ever.

@kissane (thank you erin and thank you for your phenomenal talk!!)

@kissane it's wild how many incredibly talented commercial artists are out there with PILES of fantastic work no one has seen, incredible way to highlight one of these people @cabel!

@kissane it’s in my top five best talks overall even.

Because, it turns out, even EXPLAINING THE PROBLEM to non-fedi people gets very complicated very quickly.

I rewrote a more technical post five (5) times in the past couple of months and then tossed it and wrote the one above instead, because I always do better when I go back to human terms.

There's a lot more coming, including more technical stuff and deeper looks at why I think governance should be the crucial factor in server choice.

@kissane brilliant analogy in that article!

@evan @maj As the three of us are all lovers of extended metaphors, as well as share a vested interest in the success of the fediverse (yourselves especially), I thought you would enjoy this (even if you read the report the blog post about the report, if you haven’t read it, is pretty awesome).

@kissane @RangerRick I mean, it's fine. That account is write-only anyway. They weren't being social with it. Maybe if they were they'd have seen the backlash to their more foolhardy ideas.

@kissane Google pays Mozilla leadership's salaries, and they have been running Mozilla as controlled opposition to defend Google against monopoly claims.

@kissane Mozilla's strategy: be a mediocre imitation of Chrome to show a token effort while alienating long-time users.

@kissane it's one thing to be a refuser of norms and another thing to purity test and be a dick about it

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@kissane For me, it's not so much a refuser of norms, rather, I seek out online environments that are more given to kindness and friendship and respectful exchange of ideas.

@kissane @darius *squeee* 🤗 congratulations!

@kissane @darius congratulations, and thank you both so, so much for this work!

Longer post is now here: https://erinkissane.com/fediverse-governance-drop

@kissane Amen.

@kissane The problem with reply gating is that it encourages bullying or even unfair comments that can’t be challenged.

It’s different from blocking because at least with blocking you can’t see the comments. So personally, I find reply gating problematic. It encourages poor behaviour such as personal attacks and also allows people to live in enclosed niches where directed hatred can fester.

@kissane On a semi-related note, what's your take on social media companies basically omitting a 'dislike' button on posts? YouTube removed theirs awhile ago to the benefit of corporations more than anything.

Is it healthy for the users of a platform to be presented this ideal wonderland where any 'negative' thought is discouraged?

@kissane Agree.
On the Mastodon github this is actually the second most discussed feature request and has been open since 2018, it is really disheartening that there has been no progress towards implementing it.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8565

@kissane in a discussion last week[1], someone explained a related vibe as "I used to create works, now I produce points in a corpus" and I've been thinking about that a lot as an efficient encapsulation of the current moment.

Among other things thoughts, I'm not aware of any protocol, or implementation, or legal supplement to a protocol, that has terminology or other mechanisms to capture that vibe.

[1] Maybe it was @CyberneticForests ?

I think this formulation matches my own sense of why some things feel weird and others don't, and I'm really interested in pinning down what it is about some implementations that produce that impression.

(I think obviously it's more than one thing.)

https://tenforward.social/@noracodes/112604903437836956

@kissane damn, wow

And also, in reality, getting pediatric boosters is increasingly difficult! Zero health providers in our region were doing them this fall. None at the hospital, none in primary care, no drugstores.

Even WITH a CDC recommendation, we had to check all the drugstores in adjacent metro areas every morning at 6 and then pull our kid out of school and drive four hours round-trip to get her a shot.

@kissane It's David Leonhardt. He's staked pretty much his entire brand on anti-vaxxx. He'll never be happy until everyone who worked on them is in prison; & if that happened he'd post every day to gin up outrage advocating for their sentences to be continously extended.