Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

My number one recommendation to all new (and old) fediverse server administrators is: make your registrations closed, however your software allows for it. For Mastodon I think "registration with a review step" is the minimum level you should be locked down. Open-registration instances are

1) going to get overwhelmed with computing needs
2) likely to break down socially, you have no guarantee that the people signing up are a good fit for your existing people
3) going to host spammers

Do I reach anyone who has experience using #SPARQL with #SemanticMediaWiki #MediaWiki ? I have an endpoint set up but I truly do not know how to secure it or what best practices are at all. documentation seems very very slim.

#Disabled people and #spoonies, a lovely and very organised-sounding group of people on Mastodon have set up http://disabled.social - if you've been considering Mastodon, this might be for you.

More info here: https://mastodon.social/@PanickedFoodie/109326287778497457

They have a whole accessibility TEAM!

Attention #union friends, members, and allies! Courtesy of @aurynn 's inquiry, I have decided to start a union-oriented Mastodon instance to give union people a home on the #fediverse.

union.place is coming soon - I am not at all artistically inclined, though, so I could use help with a server thumbnail (1200x630px), a mascot image (though one of my schnauzers may work :)), and (optionally) a hero image (at least 600x100px)

Reach out if you're interested in helping!

@tchambers @Gargron @atomicpoet @leolaporte @elipariser @profcarroll We could also make sure to mention that the instance size is not everything. What's the point in switching to something decentralized which basically runs on 5 big clusters?

I mean... that's not what Mastodon and co are about.

Even though this is a super fun thread reading Trump's latest legal filing in his Special Master case, I will try the CW function so that the whole thread doesn't pop up at people.

If I did this wrong, please tell me.

Trump's lawyers filed their response to the DOJ's 11th circuit appeal in the Judge Cannon special master case.

Here's Trump's response: …https://docs-cdn-prod.news-engineering.aws.wapo.pub/publish_document/f36d85e3-6ea5-4df2-add1-1903f07f832b/published/f36d85e3-6ea5-4df2-add1-1903f07f832b.pdf…

Shall we read it together? 🤓

1/

👮🏻 🔎 New report from UK research group No Tech For Tyrants unveils how #police use #surveillance technology to abuse power around the world.

#privacy #SurveillanceCapitalism

https://notechfortyrants.org/2022/11/07/new-report-surveillance-tech-perpetuates-police-abuse-of-power/

Be still my heart, @Teri_Kanefield has joined us <3

For those unfamiliar, Teri Kanefield has been a powerful force for sanity in the U.S. as we struggle to protect democracy from fascism.

She draws on her own legal expertise, on the political psychology literature, and on historical examples of how other countries have dealt with fascism and demogoguery, to explain what we need to do to stay strong.

The solution is... more democracy.

Dr. Stephen Mullen is one of the best historians of slavery on this side of Atlantic. His new book ‘The Glasgow Sugar Aristocracy: Scotland and Caribbean Slavery, 1775–1838’ was published this week and is open access which means that the PDF is free to download.

https://humanities-digital-library.org/index.php/hdl/catalog/book/glasgow-sugar-aristocracy

Just had some folks around for a BBQ & I didn't know a couple of them all that well. One woman was asked what she did for work & turns out she managed a few project teams who were all working on Microsoft Dynamics 360 implementations. I totally tried to look enthusiastic, but not sure I managed. And when I was asked the same question, I explained about the free (beer & freedom) university & because we weren't using Microsoft, it cost about a 1% as much. She thought I was joking.

A few years ago I made this flow chart of which Mastodon posts end up in which timelines!

So, you can see how each instance will have a different local timeline, and even a slightly different federated timeline - and you can see why the federated timeline moves so much faster than the local one, too.

This is why it's important to boost good posts and use hashtags - the fediverse is fragmented and harder to search by nature.

[ #mastodon #meta #tootorial #howto #mastopedia #mastotip ]

So, my grandma is full native. Not many people can tell, because she's pale.

I'm Ojibwe. We're a paler tribe. And she spent her whole career indoors, and so, why would her skin not be pale. I'm actually the same skin tone as her. We're just a pale group. We're great lakes folks, we didn't need the extra melanin. We can get to that stereotypical native skin tone. But it isn't the only tone we can have.

She's 100% (though blood quantum doesn't matter), a tribe elder, etc etc. There's a place in Detroit named after her maiden name.

But because she was pale, after she finished at the residential schools and knew to not speak Ojibwe and to be scared of admitting she was native, she was then just given to a white dude. My genetic grandpa. Nice German dude. Told to make white families. Because she was pale enough to assimilate, here's a white dude for you. She had some kids with him.

But, she refused to give up, she wrote all her kids down as native. Signed them up as Ojibwe tribe members.

All but my mother were sterilized at birth for that. My mother only was spared because she was born like a month after the IHS was caught sterilizing native babies. And so she was able to have kids (me and my brother)

My genetic grandpa died when my mom was real young. And my grandma married her childhood sweetheart. Who grew up down the street from grandma in Detroit and it's cute as hell. They're still together now, nearly 50/60 years later.

But because of what happened to my grandma growing up, she's still afraid to talk outside the house about Ojibwe culture. Once I said out loud in public something about being Ojibwe and she literally froze in fear. It's terrifying. The stories I've heard. The relatives that ha e "disappeared"

Anyways, all that to say. That my anger is very real, my relationship with the government is fury. And my generational trauma is real.

I don’t know if this will help anyone, but:

Mastodon: Help for the Frustrated User!
https://youtu.be/EQLfMLtqWEw

Does anyone know of a unions-centric Mastodon instance? Please boost for reach.

#SocialCoop friends, I've started a bit of a hackpad on sharing lessons from our experience for people building fediverse instances now. Want to join me in sharing our learnings?

https://cloud.medlab.host/s/dyZHePAzNA3PX3w

Teachers reveal scale of pupils’ hunger as 100,000 miss out on #FfreeSchoolMeals | School meals | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/nov/10/children-not-eligible-for-free-school-meals-going-hungry-say-teachers

#UK #England #Poverty #Education #Politics