Gregory's Server
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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.) Longer post(s) to come after the morning school rush, but! The Fediverse governance research @darius and I have been working on this year—with the absolutely central participation of so many wonderful Mastodon and Hometown server teams—is out: https://write.as/fediversalist-papers/releasing-our-findings
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I feel like the one of the lowest level human internet problems we haven’t solved is how to be around millions of people, many of whom vocally disapprove of at least some of our thoughts and actions, without letting our hyper-social status-sensitive primate brains either melt or devote themselves to arguing that all our positions are the right positions for everyone. Like yes, some algos are bad, but we also just built structures we can’t quite handle and are perma-mad at each other about it. Persistently shocked by how much of adult life is dealing with the consequences of other adults determinedly (and obviously!) playing pretend, with terrible consequences. https://lattice.com/blog/leading-the-way-in-responsible-ai-employment Bluesky has reply-gating (you can set who can reply to a post, like people you follow or a given list or no one) and is now testing out post-publication reply locking. I just want to yell for a second about how humane and consent-forward these features are, especially after seeing some people here losing their minds when someone asked for gating recently because they felt (alas, not a paraphrase) entitled to always be able to respond.
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 @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. It's not completely clear to me how various zones of the Fediverse distinguish "scraping" from "non-Mastodon ActivityPub services functioning according to spec in ways I didn't expect." Given how frequently protocol behaviors act as ethical markers ("if you *can* do it, it's fine") this seems like a fruitful territory to try to map… (I say this as someone who has myself been surprised more than once by AP implementations that put Fedi posts into unfamiliar-to-me contexts, don't eat me.)
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 @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.) Delighted and totally honored to be at XOXO this year, look at these absolute badasses who will be speaking, lordy, no pressure or anything 😬 |
@kissane “It’s as if 3M’s accidental invention of Post-It notes while failing to make space glue landed them a UN veto.”
dying
@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.