 I’ve been thinking about this anonymously produced RPG for practicing anti-authoritarian tactics since I ran into it last week. https://survivethetyrant.infy.uk/?i=1 It dovetails well with my general sense that acting extremely normal online and off is probably a strong move for most people at this time. I hesitate to add to the atmosphere of dread, but Meta's increasingly unfettered acceleration of the kinds of messages that precede genocides is so alarming. And—how to say this… Avoiding Meta platforms doesn't confer a get-out-of-atrocities-free card. This is why I'm so focused on the need to build broadly appealing, maximally accessible alternative platforms. I understand, "It's good if the fediverse stays niche," but that's a solution for a tiny number of people.
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@kissane I get what you’re saying, but Facebook employs 7,000 software developers in Seattle alone, and #Mastodon has 3 payrolled employees. It already punches way above what it should in terms of development. I’m in full support of ActivityPub, I have my own of Mastodon and PeerTube. If @loops ever gets to the point of being fully decentralised I’ll have one of those too. I’m fully invested in it. That being said:  @kissane I'm temperamentally not a predicty person, but it looks to me like the coming wave of LLM-centric solutions to new-school platform governance is going to get a whole lot of resources and attention because it's the saving throw/deus ex machina for redeeming the combination of global scale + hyper-acceleration + a generally neoliberal-to-libertarian sense of what's good. I hope some boring-to-capital, sensible, and human-centric things break through. I think that's all I will say about that. Oops sorry not done, I think the other, quieter reason LLMs-as-AI are going to get shoehorned into everything governance is that they allow technologists to keep focusing on things that sound neutral or blandly prosocial rather than “political” and not being overtly political is a comically huge part of being perceived by powerful people as a legitimate and reasonable force. Just another structural reality. I was going to post something else this week, but the structural inability of global corporations to govern platforms seems inescapably relevant.   @kissane my favorite quote so far is your parenthetical, "These are very simple points, but it remains a wince-inducing faux pas to say them in a lot of tech-thinking spaces, so I will keep pushing on the obvious."  I wrote up the things I think are the most relevant for fediverse advocates and network builders from a great new Engine Room report on what activists and other folks doing social justice/civil society work in the Majority World/Global South need from networks. I'll do a thread tomorrow, but here's the link for the night shift: https://www.wrecka.ge/what-people-in-the-global-majority-need-from-networks/  @kissane Solid read. Thanks for writing. Would you mind changing your header fonts for legibility? It hurts my brain trying to parse the words. Hey folks, you know how @iftas is doing so much heavy lifting bringing CSAM detection and really thoughtful shared-but-not-centralized moderation tools to the Fediverse? And the needs surveys, and the wonderful library of resources, and the moderation community to help keep everyone ahead of threats before they hit? IFTAS has just shy of 50 individual donors and I *know* we can do better than that (This is where I have to admit that I'm one of the blank rectangles on that First 50 page because I default to never putting my name on things, sorry Jaz, I will be reasonable in the future.)
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 @kissane this is really good I wonder whether "light forests" (savannas? glades?) - public, community focused networks with strong moderation - can exist long-term alongside the dark forests? Like, do all of the safe spaces have to be in small caves and burrows, or can we keep enough of the monsters out of places like here and bluesky to stake out a region on the surface? Will context collapse and bad incentives always end up bringing the wolves and bears?  @kissane this is excellent work, Erin Have you spoken previously on or incorporated the idea of Accountability Sinks? It's a recent idea to my reading, but it's kind of like the glasses from They Live -- I just see them everywhere, poised to create ruin. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/accountability-sinks When we leave a system with no inputs, create a megaphone instead of a telephone, we get collateral damage. It's almost universal, it's just the degree of damage that's negotiable. I really try to hang out in more nuanced modes of rhetoric but: Don’t amplify psychological terrorism by repeating it in social media posts condemning it. Stop. When you do this, no matter your intent, you are helping the worst people by repeatedly exposing the intended targets to the terrorizing messages. Yes, hate campaigns need to be discussed. Not by amplifying the messages themselves across networks rich in their targets. Terrified people getting constantly re-terrified can’t think clearly. We all need to be thinking as clearly as we can. This was true in 2016 and during the early-pandemic info vacuum and it’s true now. Over the next several months, I am going to be working to help people who are on other networks get onto fediverse servers that are a good match for their needs. I am starting in what is probably the least efficient way:
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@kissane This is great, thank you. Slight tangent - your site works so well without JS that my first attempt to subscribe failed silently without me noticing; on second visit, I remembered to fix NoScript and try again, which worked, obvs. Not entirely useful information, sorry. Anyway, ty. In the US, most states have programs that assign volunteer advocates to children and youth in the foster care system (CASA and GAL are the acronyms). Anyone with a clean record w/r/t kids can do the training. It’s the weirdest band-aid on a broken system but until we fix the system, it’s also essential work that helps keep kids from falling through some terrible gaps. I’ve been doing it since 2018 and I can attest that there is a huge need for advocates, especially for people who are anti-racist and committed to protecting LGBTQ kids, and to maintaining kinship bonds whenever it’s possible to do safely. Technically you’re a voice for the kid in court but most of my work has been fixer shit: Calling every practice in a metro area until I can find someone to do a procedure, catching missed documents, making a nuisance of myself when the system drops a ball. @kissane a good friend of ours is going through a nasty divorce w/a narcissist, who in the initial hearing was given almost full custody of their kid & has been poisoning their relationship with the other parent thanks to some missteps by the narcissist & the GAL, our friend now has a protection order against the narcissistic parent; may get full custody & other parent may only get supervised visits I’ve seen firsthand the good these people can do – they’re also tremendously backlogged  @kissane Chiming in to say for anyone reading that as a foster parent I have seen first hand that CASA reps are SOOOOO important There is plenty of good advice going around about the big things so here is my small piece: If you’re going to be on social media in the next weeks and months and years, block and mute freely rather than getting into spats and squabbles. Preserve your energy for the work. Keep your powder dry.  @kissane filtering is also good as a spat/squabble prevention measure can't spat over something I didn't see 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. Server governance—moderation, server leadership, all that messy political (de)federation stuff—defines a whole lot of each member's experience of the fediverse. But for newcomers and fedi-curious especially, it's so opaque. I want to address that head-on. 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 first four minutes of @cabel's talk were kind of a sweet, cheerful revisiting and update of ideas from his previous talk and a check-in on Panic, which is great—and then the McDonald's mural arrived and everything took a TURN I don't think I've ever needed to do a "no spoilers!!" warning before about a talk, but if you can go into this cold, do The only other thing I will say is that I have *never* experienced the kind of crowd reaction this got, anywhere, ever.  ED YONG'S XOXO TALK IS UP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddy5uMdzZB8 One of the all-time best humans doing the all-time best pandemic-related talk I have ever seen. (There are even some great birds.)  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. Hi. In the spirit of XOXO and the past couple of years of preliminary work and the things that need fixing, I'm starting a micro-studio and kicking off a community support setup and fixing what I can reach in the only way I know how. Venn diagram of what indie tech people think Mozilla wants to be/should be and what Moz actually wants to be: OO
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 @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. I think one of the hard things about fedi, culturally, is that a whole lot (most??) of us are here because we are refusers of norms. And which norms and which levels of refusal differ. So even if you’re at the 80th to 99th percentile of resistance to corporate social media OR mainstream party politics OR mainstream journalism OR cars OR the normalization of repeat covid infections, there will always be people popping up to tell you that by not being completely pure, you’re killing everyone.
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 @kissane it's one thing to be a refuser of norms and another thing to purity test and be a dick about it @kissane I Can teach you how to invest in stock mining turn your $200 to $5,500 in just 3hrs ask me How! text me for more info TEXT SMS: Text No:+1 (703) 879-8125 WhatsApp link below 👇 👇👇👇 @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. As people come out of #xoxofest with, inevitably, some positive tests, I would like to reiterate as one of your Original Pandemic Aunties that *this is not your fault*. Individuals in busted systems can only do so much for so long. Trying matters and/but so does giving yourself grace. (Also there is a thread in the Slack for noting positive tests so folks can do light contact tracing, just fyi.) |
Gregory's Server
@kissane lol, it's not a rocket-propelled grenade.
@kissane Looks really good (and am somewhat relieved it's not a rocket propelled grenade you ran into, as I first thought).
@kissane I might also suggest… https://subscribe.adbusters.org/products/a-manifesto-for-world-revolution