Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

My stance towards Meta is that the Fediverse needs two types of servers:

1. Lobby servers that explicitly federate with Meta for the purposes of moving people from Meta to the rest of the Fediverse

2. Exit servers that explicitly defederate with Meta for the purposes of keeping portions of the Fediverse out of reach from Meta

Both approaches not only can co-exist with each other, they might just be complementary.

People who use Meta need a way to migrate towards a space that is friendly, easy-to-use, and allows them to port their social graph.

But People also need a space that’s free from Meta, and allows them to exist beyond the eye of Zuckerberg.

Guess what? People who use Meta now might want to be invisible to Meta later. And people who dislike Meta might need a bridge to contact friends and family through some mechanism that still allows them to communicate beyond Meta’s control.

And thankfully, the Fediverse allows for this.

Software Patents: "We urge all developers and supporters ... whether a student, open source maintainer, or enterprise ... to voice their opposition today to the proposed rules"

https://github.blog/2023-06-19-developers-need-the-right-to-challenge-junk-patents/

The IRS could recover $12 for every $1 spent on scrutinizing the ultra-wealthy's taxes

https://www.businessinsider.com/irs-tax-audits-recover-12-dollars-for-every-dollar-spent-2023-6

#BusinessInsider #IRStaxaudits #ultrawealthy #taxrecovery #governmentrevenue #financialscrutiny #Politics #News

The Productivity Commission has today added to the piles and piles of evidence we have had for decades about the devastating consequences of persistent poverty.

There’s a clear and immediate solution and that’s an Income Guarantee paid for with a fair tax on the wealthiest few.

We should be trying to invent online social spaces that are much, much smaller, and I think it's possible to do this without losing the benefits of large social networks:

https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/2023/06/19/groups-should-go-small/

#SocialMediaDesign

HOW TO SPOT A DEEP FAKE:

1. You can't.

Don't think you can. You can spot clumsy ones, but you've already missed a dozen others. We're past the stage where even _expert_ practitioners can have a 100% success rate.

Instead, think about how to avoid taking action, or trusting someone, because of who they seem to be. Holding onto the fantasy that "I can spot 'em!" is harmful, and moves the onus of responsibility from collective to personal.

This is also true for #genAI, of course.

@scirave @stux There's some reporting on the fact that they're facing increased regulatory scrutiny for monopoly power and their walled garden business model, so federation could just be a way of offering an excuse to regulators. I highly doubt scraping the Fediverse is a goal — the number of people on here is a rounding error for FB. Not worth spinning up a whole new product to get a few million new users in the system.

@trysdyn *sigh* also btw speaking as an activist, it is our position that when you speak to representatives of an entrenched power structure, you can EITHER have it as your goal to represent the community, or you can agree to not share anything that's said in the conversation. if you sign an NDA you are de facto representing the company-or-whatever, not the community, even if that's not your intent.

it sucks. people agree to this stuff because they haven't seen it before, we think.

I'm sitting here watching this "Meta had an NDAed meeting with big fedi devs/admins" stuff shaking my head because I was one of the people who woulda been in the NDAed meetings when Meta, Google, and AOL did this exact same fucking thing to XMPP.

They're not even altering their playbook! This is EXACTLY how they "joined" XMPP then squashed it 2 years later.

EXACTLY. How can you be so gullible??

It's NOT platforms like #Facebook or #Instgram that join the Fediverse ⚠️

Meta is working on a new platform that intends to federate

So it's not everyone on FB or IG that joins but a new crowd probably

We have great moderation tools on Masto and other software that can cut them off within a second if needed

But let's not "block everything by default" but first check..

You won't be happt if your admin starts blocking things without even checking them first

The same rules apply to them also

Thanks to @Andrew for pointing me at https://calckey.social/notes/9f8fucbd3f which gives me pause-for-thought...

@lwriemen

When a company doesn't invest enough in employee training to ensure that low-level employees are able to respond to more than the most basic of questions, nor to pay them for the level of engagement that is required to answer those questions, it becomes necessary for customers to speak to the managers.

@lwriemen

One of the many nasty little trends in contemporary capitalism is called "skimpflation", where when costs start to go up, companies try to keep prices constant by silently reducing the quality of service provided.

I don't think this is something that we as consumers should accept. Refusing to ever escalate to higher paid levels of service enables companies to push us around in exactly that way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plZkO3y9_hY
Churchill was an utter bastard

This is Ellsberg's copy of the published Pentagon Papers, with his notes in them: https://archive.org/details/pentagonpapersde00beac/page/n1/mode/2up

the rest of his archives, scanned by Internet Archive staff in his home: https://archive.org/details/danielellsberg

@fonecokid

american taliban

Anyone find this language about "open-source" on Rocky Linux's page troublesome? @osi @lightweight #freesoftware #gnulinux #opensource #floss #freesoftware It would seem they are reifying open-source, OSI, and permissive together as a whole, and distinguishing that from copyleft, which would therefore be something "other than open-source" by inference. Am I interpreting Rocky Linux's position wrong here? Ideas welcome ...

Android Authority doesn’t get it.

Compared to #Reddit, #Lemmy sucks. And so does #Kbin. We all know that.

The #RedditMigration isn’t about any app being better than Reddit. It’s about a company that’s grown on the backs of volunteer labour now claiming ownership of that labour.

Reddit didn’t write those posts, draw those illustrations, make those videos. We did.

And Reddit sure as hell didn’t create those communities, nurture them, and moderate them. We did.

I agree with tech writers who say that the average person just “wants their memes”. But Reddit never made those memes. We did.

Content might be king. But who makes content? We do.

I have no doubt that the average person just wants content. But while we might be providing content for free, we’re not dancing monkeys. Who decides why content is made, how it’s made, and where it exists? We do.

The Fediverse doesn’t exist merely as an engine for content. It exists so that people can share what they love.

Why are people coming to the Fediverse specifically? Because we rightfully see ActivityPub as insurance for our content – which, again, is made by and for us.

Not Reddit. Not Big Social. Us.

If I’m giving my content away for free, then so long as it is federated, no one company can own it – putting up gates, demanding payment for my work. Instead, my work is out there, living on 24,000 nodes that presently exist.

Android Authority might dismiss this as “suffering the same fate” – what fate they perceive, I don’t know. But to me, the true “suffering” is when a company like Reddit claims ownership of my work, locking 3rd party developers out from API access.

For this reason, I’m locking Reddit out from my work.

Perhaps the author of this post, Dhruv Bhutani, doesn’t consider that he’s writing for a, well, blog. And that this blog exists on its own domain, with its own design, as its own property. He could have written this entire post on Reddit, but he didn’t.

Why? I suspect it’s because he believes his work has value, and Reddit simply doesn’t give him what he believes is his worth.

Same deal with me. I’m not looking to get paid for my work on Reddit. I do it for fun – always have. But if I’m doing something for fun, it’s still going to be on my terms.

Not all of us creatives are willing to be a cog in Big Social’s machine. That’s why I’m here on the Fediverse right now. I don’t give a damn whether the average person just wants memes. I create for me.

So yeah, Lemmy and Kbin suck. I can live with that – they will both improve. And I have no doubt that, with time, they might prove to be better than Reddit.

But this isn’t about how good Lemmy or Kbin are. Nor is this about the insatiable appetite for memes.

This is about my need to create on my terms – and I’m not alone here.

Decentralization is the killer feature here.

https://www.androidauthority.com/reddit-alternatives-lemmy-3335429/

@fediversenews

How can we expect students to take plagiarism seriously as an issue if we in the academy are condoning this behavior by corporations? (4/?)