Gregory's Server
This from @rwg feels extremely important for fediverse admins, but also for federated and decentralized networks generally:
 @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. 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. 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.] 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.) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1vtMLLOzuc6GpkFySyVtKQOY2j-Vvg0UsChMCFst_WLA/htmlview (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.) 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. I'm going to continue my post-Mozilla policy of not commenting on Mozilla, but: https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/13/mozilla-downsizes-as-it-refocuses-on-firefox-and-ai-read-the-memo/  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. "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." File under: cautionary tales / the failure of "we're idealists who mean well!" to be even a speedbump in the path of capital https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/ 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) 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)  @kissane EVL (1970) remains relevant a half century later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty 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: https://labornotes.org/blogs/2024/01/book-review-power-tech-workers (Book is here, with 50% off code right on the page:  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. 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. good lord, this is an incredible resource for people interested in the Threads Question, ty @ophiocephalic  @kissane @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! 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.
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 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. 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?
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@kissane  @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. 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. 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 @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! 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).
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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. https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup https://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. 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. 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. 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.  @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...) |
