Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Today 83,000 Texans lost power and prices surged by 400%

Greg Abbott had YEARS to fix this

Instead of fixing ERCOT and the shitty power grid, he spent all his time policing our vaginas

Flying to fancy campaign fundraisers

Building a useless wall

Not attending Uvalde funerals

Every oountry in the world - I propose that the Ministry of Education in Aotearoa NZ be first off the blocks! - needs to pilot a series of school systems adopting this approach: https://davelane.nz/openschools - there's a comprehensive book (CC-BY-SA-NC) explaining a working system by its developer, the great but understated @charlie3, available for download on that page. 2/2

Got my @workingclasshistory T-shirt of the month today!

Emperor penguin at risk of extinction, along with two-thirds of native #Antarctic #species, research shows | #Antarctica | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/23/two-thirds-of-antarcticas-native-species-under-threat-of-extinction-from-global-heating-research-shows

#Wildlife #Science #Biology #Ecology #Environment #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #Extinction

Provocation: anyone expecting to use Mastodon at no cost is inviting the entry of ads and VCs to this space.

We need commons, not dependency.

https://wiki.social.coop/How-to-make-the-fediverse-your-own.html

RT @Femi_Sorry@twitter.com

We have a government that only 44% voted for, but which holds 100% of the power, proudly admitting that it is INTENTIONALLY making people poorer, during a poverty crisis.

But some people still think the UK is a functioning democracy. 😬

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/Femi_Sorry/status/1605892456494600198

I would just like to point out that a whole lot of us were very skeptical of the efficacy of vaccines against Covid *as a long-term strategy* because of exactly this. Viruses mutate rapidly, and coronaviruses are well known for avoiding previous immunity (hence why there's no cure for the common cold - another coronavirus). But our genius public health leaders went all in on vax-only as their containment strategy. Idiots.

I’m seeing some about the fediverse along the lines of “we welcome our new venture capitalist and Big Tech overlords… what could possibly go wrong?”

What could possibly go wrong? Oh, I don’t know… take a look at the whole damn web. Take a look at email. Take a look at any resource that was part of the commons but was enclosed/captured by corporate interests. Read up on embrace, extend, and extinguish.

1/2

#fediverse #mastodon #corporateCapture #slowlyBoilingFrogs

Look, I’m not saying we’ll be able to keep the fediverse from going down the same path. Architecturally, it’s compatible. Mastodon and nearly every other fediverse app is built on a traditional Big Tech stack and inherits its success criteria (and scaling characteristics). But there is value is resisting for as long as we can. Because the fediverse is a stopgap and it would help those of us working on longer-term solutions to have it around for as long as possible.

https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed-or-why-every-toot-is-also-a-potential-denial-of-service-attack/

I see a lot of discussion about the fear that corporations and VCs will take over the #fediverse.

The thing is, #Mastodon going mainstream will require a lot of capital and development of new products and innovations for this ecosystem.

And that is perfectly ok, as long as everyone connects to the protocol, and the protocol itself stays away from the hands of oligarchs.

If you prefer your local coop to host your account instead of Mozilla, Vivaldi or some other larger entity, that's great. But it's also totally fine that those bigger players are offering theirs, because it pulls in a lot of new members to this ecosystem.

The main corporate takeover attack vector to the Mastodon ecosystem will not be the servers, but the mobile app. It is possible that one VC-backed mobile app becomes the single winner with most Mastodon users accessing the ecosystem with that. The owner of such an app will wield a lot of power over all servers and service providers in the ecosystem.

Algorithmic feeds and fuzzy search are both inevitable mainstream features as the ecosystem grows. People need those to be able to use the platform effectively.

This is fine too, as long as there's no single algorithm dominating, and especially if the algorithms are built transparently with users being able to choose their own algorithm.

There are going to be many points of contention as the ecosystem grows, but for the sake of humanity, let's allow decentralization of social media to happen. Let's also allow VC-backed startups to flourish building services for all of us.

We have the momentum now, and it is a rare chance to take back the power from corporate overlords, and rebuild the social internet as an open platform for innovation!

Would you agree?

How cool is that! Just set up Uptime-kuma (a self-hosted Pingdom service - https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma) which I'll use to monitor all the web services I'm responsible for, and I've set up sending notifications to our Matrix server... only took a few minutes. This has been a niggle for ages, and looks like it's sorted, but for having to create configs for a whole lotta websites... luckily, it's quick and easy!

@markrendle @Radical_EgoCom Looks like it was an artist, but it's probably something he's gotten calls from real cities wanting to buy.

https://www.quietlunch.com/fabian-brunsing-spike-bench/

IT'S SANTIFA 2022! We're doing a livestream marathon from 9pm-1am EST this Friday, December 23rd to raise money for The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund.

Will there be special guests dropping in, including some of the people who've been helped by the Defence Fund in the past?

YES!

Will there be special prizes?

YES!

WILL ALL DONATIONS BE MATCHED BY A MYSTERIOUS BENEFACTOR, MEANING THAT ANY MONEY DONATED WILL MAGICALLY DOUBLE?
YES!

Turn off your streaming services, ignore your family, and join us Friday night! Hell, bring your family, too!

bit.ly/santifa2022

https://youtu.be/sMDGkhPkszc

I spent a good part of this year investigating Google's ad business. Today we published a story about trying to crack open its black box ad network.

Unlike its competitors, Google conceals nearly all publishers it works with and where billions of ad dollars flow. We found that Google's vast ad network contains manga piracy, porn, fraud and disinformation.

Give it a read: https://www.propublica.org/article/google-display-ads-piracy-porn-fraud

I am hiring a lead full-stack Web engineer to help build #OpenSource software to fight #ClimateChange.

If you've shipped 1-2 Web projects and been the tech lead for 1 software project: we need your help.

Please boost for reach! #fedihire

https://www.womenwhocode.com/jobs/14733

There is another option here between "live on a big instance that might get sold/shut down/whatever" and "run your own instance at your own cost and labor."

Social.coop is cooperatively funded and managed. Members of our server get a say in how it's run!

https://mastodon.social/@atomicpoet/109550897582887370

As you may recall:

• The W3C is in part hosted by MIT but MIT intends to withdraw on Dec 31.
• A new W3C nonprofit needs to take over on Jan 1.
• MIT needs to transfer assets (member dues, contracts, IP…) to the new W3C for it to operate.
• I was elected to the W3C Board and am part of the negotiations.

We're two weeks away from cutover and the negotiations are going… poorly. 🧵