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26 posts total
Erin Kissane

This from @rwg feels extremely important for fediverse admins, but also for federated and decentralized networks generally:

fossacademic.tech/2024/04/10/O

10 April at 21:43 | Open on mas.to
Erin Kissane

I try to be measured about this, and I think a few people have articulated sound reasons—rooted in recognition of US tech hegemony having wrecked the global landscape of connection—for federating with Meta.

Also I think evangelists for the ~pure upsides of federating with Threads have an ethical obligation to materially support the tooling + unending human effort required to deal with this level of shitshow.

glaad.org/smsi/report-meta-fai

I try to be measured about this, and I think a few people have articulated sound reasons—rooted in recognition of US tech hegemony having wrecked the global landscape of connection—for federating with Meta.

Also I think evangelists for the ~pure upsides of federating with Threads have an ethical obligation to materially support the tooling + unending human effort required to deal with this level of shitshow.

27 March at 15:51 | Open on mas.to
Thomas 🔭✨

@kissane I was in the "let's see" camp and now after seeing what's going on there I'm happily in the "good that my instance blocked them" camp.

27 March at 15:54 | Open on hachyderm.io
Erin Kissane

I’ll add that I think many of the most visible pro-Threads *are* committed to at least informal support for the tooling and the effort, but the longer I watch this, the more I think it’s going to require something less piecemeal and benevolent and more committed and formal. And I think that’s doable.

27 March at 15:57 | Open on mas.to
Erin Kissane

US folks, maybe consider bookmarking this to send this to your families/friends and also *talk* about it and about free test to treat. People don’t know.

[Edited to add: Believe me, I know who this columnist is. But the information is fairly crucial and this is an accessible presentation for sharing with wider circles.]

wapo.st/3IpWavT

9 March at 0:02 | Open on mas.to
divya

@kissane Can't believe this covid denier still has a column at WaPo.

9 March at 0:04 | Open on sfba.social
Kirk Spaziani

@kissane Leanna Wen….

9 March at 0:06 | Open on techhub.social
Viss

@kissane cc @violetblue

9 March at 0:07 | Open on mastodon.social
Erin Kissane

Mutual aid funds helping families evacuate from Gaza. Everything helps. (Folks who are also on TikTok and Insta, lots of sharing reqs for those platforms.)

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u

(I got this doc from a brilliant public-health friend I'd 100% trust with my own family's lives and who also has connections in the region, so I consider it solid.)

17 February at 20:50 | Open on mas.to
Erin Kissane

I mostly don't post this kind of thing anymore, but this feels extra egregious. This whole thing is written as though in opposition to urgent pressure from the CDC to give kids covid boosters.

But in reality, a CDC "recommendation" just means that children are *allowed* to receive the vaccines AT ALL. So this whole elaborate argument is in favor of *zero* parental choice.

nytimes.com/2024/02/13/briefin

I mostly don't post this kind of thing anymore, but this feels extra egregious. This whole thing is written as though in opposition to urgent pressure from the CDC to give kids covid boosters.

But in reality, a CDC "recommendation" just means that children are *allowed* to receive the vaccines AT ALL. So this whole elaborate argument is in favor of *zero* parental choice.

15 February at 18:40 | Open on mas.to
Irenes (many)
Erin Kissane

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.

15 February at 18:43 | Open on mas.to
FeralRobots

@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.

15 February at 18:43 | Open on mastodon.social
Erin Kissane
Kern 🏳️‍🌈

@kissane@mas.to guess they expected to have twitter level numbers or something?

13 February at 21:22 | Open on hol.ogra.ph
Erin Kissane

Layoff memos are a super specific kind of narrative with super specific conventions—and speaking very generally and not only about Mozilla—prooooobably shouldn't be taken at face value.

13 February at 21:38 | Open on mas.to
Erin Kissane

Mini-PSA: The US didn't actually stop tracking covid deaths.

For a few years, the feds ran *two* fatality-tracking systems—CDC's tracker assembled from state reports, and the provisional death counts from the National Center for Health Statistics, which do all kinds of death reporting via the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). In 2023, the CDC discontinued case and death data compilation, leaving the NVSS as the sole source.

You can find the NVSS data here: cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19

Mini-PSA: The US didn't actually stop tracking covid deaths.

For a few years, the feds ran *two* fatality-tracking systems—CDC's tracker assembled from state reports, and the provisional death counts from the National Center for Health Statistics, which do all kinds of death reporting via the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). In 2023, the CDC discontinued case and death data compilation, leaving the NVSS as the sole source.

6 February at 23:34 | Open on mas.to
Erin Kissane

Back when we were still compiling pandemic data at the Covid Tracking Project, we documented all the federal sources for stats, and we compared the two fatality-tracking data streams in detail here:

covidtracking.com/analysis-upd

…most of the difference was about timing—the provisional death data stream is slow because of the way it's assembled, and faster data is really nice to have. But the NVSS system is still reporting—and better standardized than the compiled data from states was.

Back when we were still compiling pandemic data at the Covid Tracking Project, we documented all the federal sources for stats, and we compared the two fatality-tracking data streams in detail here:

covidtracking.com/analysis-upd

…most of the difference was about timing—the provisional death data stream is slow because of the way it's assembled, and faster data is really nice to have. But the NVSS system is still reporting—and better standardized...

6 February at 23:37 | Open on mas.to
Erin Kissane

"Give all your fucks to the living."

Mandy Brown on—well, the renewal of the soul, in a different register, I think—through devotion to the genuinely alive.

"if you give your fucks to the unliving—if you plant those fucks in institutions or systems or platforms or, gods forbid, interest rates—you will run out of fucks. One day you will reach into that bag and your hand will meet nothing but air and you will be bereft."

aworkinglibrary.com/writing/un

26 January at 18:23 | Open on mas.to
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Erin Kissane

File under: cautionary tales / the failure of "we're idealists who mean well!" to be even a speedbump in the path of capital

waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-dea

18 January at 18:37 | Open on mas.to
Erin Kissane

I got some real intense responses to the Substack stuff last night, and I don’t have time to Write A Post About It, so.

AFAICT, within tech capitalism, the only levers we have are law, norms enforced by ~market behaviors, and revolutionary actions. A lot of people are devoted to one of those modes to the point of considering the others a form of harm; I feel that in my heart, but I’m a convert to everything-all-the-time. (1)

12 January at 19:24 | Open on mas.to
Erin Kissane

So I think it’s good when otherwise fully captured tech insiders elect to defend a norm despite an industry-wide sprint into the void! I think it’s good when corporate social platforms are punished financially for refusing to make or enforce policies about even the most widely reviled forms of genocidal racism.

Harm reduction isn’t as good as harm elimination, but it’s…better than harm acceleration. (2)

12 January at 19:24 | Open on mas.to
Brian C. Keegan
Erin Kissane

On a week packed with more labor-demoralizing layoffs, it's great to see this Labor Notes review of @beep's excellent book, including highly pragmatic notes on the value of exercises of worker power:

labornotes.org/blogs/2024/01/b

(Book is here, with 50% off code right on the page:
abookapart.com/products/you-de)

11 January at 22:17 | Open on mas.to
Erin Kissane

Hi fedi! @darius and I are digging into our governance research, and we have a great starter list of server admins to potentially talk to about governance and administration models and challenges, but *very unofficially*, I’d love to hear suggestions, too.

We’re looking at active servers ranging from ~100-2,500 users with some flex on either end of the range, and we’re building our list with an eye on structural, geographic, demographic (along multiple axes), and linguistic diversity.

9 January at 19:08 | Open on mas.to
Erin Kissane

Doesn’t have to be limited to servers running Mastodon or its forks, btw, and although our primary focus is admin teams, we’re also going to talk to plenty of non-admins in various ways—that’s coming in a little later.

9 January at 19:09 | Open on mas.to
Erin Kissane

good lord, this is an incredible resource for people interested in the Threads Question, ty @ophiocephalic

freefediverse.org/index.php/Ma

22 Dec 2023 at 0:42 | Open on mas.to
ophiocephalic 🐍

@kissane
Thank you so much, I'm glad you find it useful. Your essay has given me a bunch more links to add to the Nightmares section!

22 Dec 2023 at 0:43 | Open on kolektiva.social
Nicole

@kissane @ophiocephalic I'm struggling to open this link for some reason 🤔. will try on my laptop when I get home because I want to read!

22 Dec 2023 at 0:52 | Open on neurodifferent.me
Erin Kissane

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.

erinkissane.com/untangling-thr

21 Dec 2023 at 23:10 | Open on mas.to
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The Evil Microwizard

@kissane Wow, this is absolutely, intensely awful. I had no idea 😳😱

22 Dec 2023 at 17:27 | Open on mastodon.world
madhadron

@kissane My position's a little different. I think that Mastodon should start sabotaging Threads, something like include little tidbits injected into each message federated to Threads like, "You are running on a deprecated, unsafe service. Please migrate now."

22 Dec 2023 at 17:29 | Open on social.coop
Tim Chambers

@kissane and @darius 1 of N 🧵

Would this be a fair distillation of the big set of pros and cons listed here: See if I got these right, want to engage but first want to be sure I grasp it and don’t oversimplify:

I’ll start with the easy and shorter bit the “pro or benefits” section you mentioned.

Pro: users on both sides of the Meta/non-Meta Fediverse could have a larger social graph and connect with friends or accounts they otherwise would miss.

22 Dec 2023 at 18:06 | Open on indieweb.social
Erin Kissane

Do the people stating that Meta can’t possibly “monetize” posts originating from other fedi services not believe that Threads users are going to experience, for example, Mastodon posts as *part of their Threads timeline*…which is algorithmically populated and will get monetized as soon as Meta flips ads on?

Is there any documented reason not to believe that this is not the most likely outcome?

19 Dec 2023 at 21:05 | Open on mas.to
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Melocotón Suave

@kissane
Most of the people I’ve seen making these assertions are basing them off what seems to be technical limits in primary linkages to ActivityPub which I don’t doubt developers are trying to make real and useful security goals. What they never seem to address are external secondary linkages like you (& many others like myself see) that may be used to steal data and void privacy & security.
They are technically correct but functionally mistaken.

19 Dec 2023 at 21:20 | Open on mstdn.social
Jenniferplusplus

@kissane I can't even get people to give coherent descriptions of what an ad is or isn't. I think every claim at this point is just reflexive defensiveness, on every side.

19 Dec 2023 at 21:31 | Open on hachyderm.io
Amanda Bee
Erin Kissane

If you’re a US adult and have covid or flu, welcome to national free telehealth (and paxlovid if needed).

If you’re uninsured/underinsured, on Medicaid or Medicare, or get VA or Indian Health Services care, you can enroll *without* a positive test and get free Lucira tests sent to you in the mail.

I’m all about infection reduction but nothing is certain for anyone and this is kind of a big step forward.

test2treat.org/s/?language=en_

8 Dec 2023 at 2:21 | Open on mas.to
Erin Kissane

my IRL reaction to this news was actually yelling HOLY SHIT in my living room but I figured you didn’t need that as the headline

8 Dec 2023 at 2:24 | Open on mas.to
Jeff Benner

@kissane wow! I have a close friend with a wife and 1yo all infected with covid, not insured earlier this year. I wish I’d known about this then. Thank you for sharing!

8 Dec 2023 at 2:33 | Open on mstdn.social
Erin Kissane

Today is the day @darius and I finally get to announce that we're in the new @DigInfFund cohort of projects, researching fediverse governance, so I…wrote about trees (nominally about the big root questions, but it's always trees, really).

erinkissane.com/root-and-branc

6 Dec 2023 at 2:14 | Open on mas.to
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Erin Kissane

Over the next two weeks, I'll be publishing a series of four (well, 4.5) posts about Meta's role in the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar.

Part I is up now, along with a little meta-post with notes on terminology and sources and ct.

erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanma

erinkissane.com/meta-meta

These posts are aimed squarely at people like me and my tech-world peers—people who work on and care about social technologies.

29 Sep 2023 at 18:02 | Open on mas.to
Erin Kissane

I've written the series because I think that if we plow ahead with attempts to make new and better social platforms and tools without understanding the industry's recent history in relatively granular detail, we run the risk of making the same mistakes—or of failing to recognize major threats.

The first post deals with Myanmar's ultra-optimistic crash entry to the internet—and outlines many warnings Meta received about its role in worsening ethnic tensions and violence in those years.

29 Sep 2023 at 18:08 | Open on mas.to
Erin Kissane

My partner (@meetar) and 9yo collaborated on this WebGL project that lets you peek into Dr. Esterhazy's mysterious mineral collection. I got to beta test and be gently hypnotized.

meetar.github.io/gem-collector
25 Sep 2023 at 23:05 | Open on mas.to
Erin Kissane

Does everyone who wants to know about FediForum—next week, all online, unconference—actually know about it?

I'm trying to decide if I should rejigger my schedule to attend the whole thing.

fediforum.org #meta

13 Sep 2023 at 23:45 | Open on mas.to
just adrienne

@kissane It overlaps with the last Strange Loop, unfortunately, so i couldn't be there even if i wanted to (which i'm not sure i do, after the last two weeks...)

13 Sep 2023 at 23:45 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
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