@aral Yep. Cut off access to information and then they will probably initiate a PragerU curriculum... Kids won't know anything other than ultra conservative dogma. Scary.

@aral
It’s how you burn ALL the books, without the tedious work of having to discern between them, and/or having to justify your irredeemable actions.

@aral The conservatives attack on the 'right to read' is apparently following the pattern of the attack on the right to an abortion: close the local brick &. morter facilities, then attack the online access to supplies. Laws requiring personal identification to access adult web sites can easily be used for stopping access to banned books at online libraries also. #libraries #ConservativesReallyAreThatBad

@aral Surely that cannot be considered free speech. He's suggesting harm to self and others.

@aral 🤣🤣🤣🤣

@aral R Kelly has entered the chat

@aral This resonates even from over here on the marketing/content side of things. Sure you can work for a nonprofit, but they'll expect you to do the jobs of four or five people for a "salary" that only someone with a trust fund, or a partner working at Google, can live on.

@aral Right now America is running on two things …… GREED and STUPIDITY !!!

@aral I gave up on software and computer engineering because of this. I tried to find something but couldn't, and didn't have the financials to go into open source and start a company or product, although I'd love to work in a co-op, for example 😊

@aral The meme itself is bad but I'm forced to agree with what it says.

@aral
yeah but they preloaded those 100 million users from Instagram anyway it's not even like it was organic sign ups or anything

it's just the social media version that movie Cube

100 million people who just wanted to see Kim Kardashian's latest butt foundation blending tip for bikini season woke up with a bunch of strangers trapped together in a box blasting brand ads like a Yodobashi Camera store while chainsaws come out of the ceiling

@aral @fosstodon probably because your ideas are close to communism and speak to communists like me and others? 😂 beeep, beeep, anticommunist alarm! ⚠️

@aral @fosstodon Maybe no one told the Fosstodon admins that because you're a human rights activist/privacy advocate who wakes up and works at a not-for-profit on free and open software every day that their rules just don't apply to you and you can say and do whatever you like and they can't ever do anything or risk your ire?

@aral @fosstodon

If the #fediverse is worth something I belive is for advocacy for or against something NOT for perusing censure of different points of views. Any server or instance that promote censure of reasonable point of views is in the wrong place. Needless to say that racism, nazism or misogyny is NOT a point of view.

@aral @fedora @charles_ex @stefanieschulte

@aral @fedora
seems like that having a corporation based, for-profit baked distro was a very bad idea from the start. Thank you Fedora for the good times, but for my next setup i'll go for a real community based distro.
#fedoraLove #goodbye #debian

@aral Very important to read this article!

@aral I am almost certain the meetings and NDA part was stupid fwarmongering but it still keep spreading, somethimes the open source community sucks!!!

@aral why in the ever loving … would anybody use their app?

(I know)

@aral this, but on a tea towel

@aral @tchambers https://mastodon.social/@MissingThePt/110638264231062454

@aral the illusion of free(dom)…

I started on the Fediverse with Mastodon about seven years ago when I had ~42K followers on Twitter and zero here.

Personally, I don’t care how many followers I lose. My tiny, ineffectual, instance of one will defederate with any instance, no matter how large, if this rumour is true.

If this comes to pass, I’d urge those of you on the instances that become Meta’s lackeys to move to instances that are not if you’d like us to stay in touch.

Remember, it’s about quality not quantity. Always.

@aral I think this is a battle we cannot win at all. But we can do our best.

The same goes for other large servers.

Look at how many of the people you interact with are on the handful of the largest servers and imagine that just those handful of servers blocked your server.

Come, let‘s take this further…

Apparently Facebook/Meta is “joining” the fediverse. How nice of them. Now imagine that the largest instance is run by Zuckerberg. (Or <insert your favourite Silicon Valley billionaire here>.)

Imagine they become large enough to do the same thing to mastodon.social…

@aral my instance muted .social because of spam and lack of moderation. I don't discuss their decision it's up to them and I trust them.

But the user experience is really bad, account from .social that I don't follow are not being displayed. It breaks a lot of conversations, it's a real mess.

@aral thing is.. It's not that easy to choose or host one that would do better, and it could be hard to migrate for those that chose those now "big" elephants a while back.
But I agree, and at least you made me advance that point in my todo list.. Thanks ;-)

@aral perhaps there is a need for a kind of small instance pact towards blocking when one of them is served with a unjustified block. With enough critical mass they'd have to think twice before doing it.

@aral I find it odd that they did that tbh. I would think they'd just blunder in and force everyone to conform to their implementation, kind of how #Mastodon has done

@aral
Meta and Tweets get blocked, no questions asked

@aral To serve Man is a cookbook

@aral both those things are true - while it is a billionaires crisis, it is also a personal responsibility crisis - those companies are delivering good and services mostly to the billion or so people in the global middle class (income eg. US$20000-300000 annually). As long as we pay them, they'll continue to do it

@aral no one will miss the billionaires when they're gone.

@aral Basically, Fortune 500 is our hit list, how convenient.

@aral That's the real definition....
AI is not capable to create proper ideas, it's only mixing the one's human told him before!

@aral

Could AI replace you?

I'm afraid there probably is not enough signal in the noise.

@aral Based opinion.

@aral @Codeberg This is pretty amazing, thanx! :)

@aral And sourcehut! https://sr.ht/

@aral @Codeberg I won’t deny I looked up @gitea and #gitlab today.
I’m not sure I want to host it myself. Codeberg could be the way.

@aral
Every social construct is fiction. It's our participation in social fictions that allow us to get along.
This includes believing that money has value. It's not real, but it is useful.

*social. Some form of money would exist even in a primitive society without governments and their laws. It's the good old "the shoemaker needs bread but the baker already has enough shoes".

And here’s what’s saddest: the question itself is moot.

Because mastodon.social wouldn’t block it.

Instead, we’d hear about how Meta joining the fediverse is a Good Thing™.

This would be about a year or so before Meta or some other major instance with major Silicon Valley money displaces mastodon.social as the primary fediverse instance.

At which point maybe a certain someone will realise that legitimising Big Tech-style scale and centralisation is a silly strategy when you’re not Big Tech.