Gregory's Server
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/
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"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...) Hey US folks, the FDA is expected to approve boosters very soon, but the CDC’s vax advisory committee doesn’t meet until Sept 12. That’s when we’ll know who will be able to get boosted. Paul Offit, the guy opining in the media about who gets shots, is just an advisor to the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. He is not in charge of anything is always like this: He voted against the bivalent booster and argues against using covid vax to protect against infection.  CANT PUT THE GENIE BACK IN THE BOTTLE!!! screams the CEO of GenieBottle Smash dot com, his hands surgically replaced with blacksmith's hammers If you're involved in tech in some way—very broadly defined—could you give me a very quick no-Googling-to-refresh-your-memory answer to this to help me calibrate a thing I'm working on? "What I know right now about what happened with Facebook in Myanmar during the Rohingya crisis in 2016-2017 is…" Anonymous poll
Poll
little to nothing
3
0%
I remember some stuff about content moderation?
16
0%
I remember specifics beyond moderation trouble
9
0%
I can give a pretty good outline of the whole deal
0 people voted. 3
0%
Voting ended 27 Aug 2023 at 23:37. Admin note: Boosts are welcome, but when this escapes containment and people start doing conspiracy/hoax narratives, I will be blocking liberally and may delete if it gets bad enough. This week, I went over to Bluesky and asked people who'd left Mastodon why they left, and lots of people told me. I grabbed the replies and crunched them and wrote up a summary. I think it's really interesting and often kind of wrenching. https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt
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@kissane thanks for sharing that info. @kissane that's a really great analysis repository! I hope it is leveraged to improve things, without losing what this place has. I've persisted with Mastodon because the alternatives were too morally unconscionable for me but, especially in the first 6-8 weeks, it was very tempting to give up. I migrated servers last week and boy did I develop some strong opinions about migration and the as-yet only semi-fulfilled promise of account portability. If you're thinking about moving instances—or you'd like to know yet more about my dreams for better networks—here's a post you might want to read:
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@kissane The current set of Fediverse protocols *partially* solves migration. Or to quote myself "This is definitely *better*, but is it good enough? Is it how it should be?" (rhetorical question, as migration is one of the major Fediverse selling points, the answer is "no") https://jaxroam.vivaldi.net/2022/11/19/changes-of-address/ Far as I can tell there is no specification for user migration, what a conforming application and servers running it must do to enable this, and we need that. |
@kissane@mas.to guess they expected to have twitter level numbers or something?
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.