Deadly global #heatwaves undeniably result of #ClimateCrisis, scientists show | #ClimateScience | The Guardian
"Surge in electoral autocracies: The share of global output coming from economies classed as ‘mostly unfree’ (economies with a high degree of state ownership and control) is set to rise from 12 percent to 43 percent, based on Bloomberg Economics’ gross domestic product (GDP) forecasts and the United States (US) Heritage Foundation’s classification system."
Well that sounds pretty damn dystopian, doesn't it. 2/2
Thanks for the detailed reply, @dynamic@social.coop, there's a lot to respond to here so hope I covered it all!
There's no literature on fediverse demographics as far as I know. Given a long history of racism (I'll include links on that below) and sexism, the English-language fediverse almost certainly skews white and male. There are a lot of trans-led instances which *don't* skew male, although most of them are very white.
And yes, it's disappointing how cis white males are so dominant in the fediverse's power structure and discourse discourse today. Eugen drove away the trans and queer women and non-binary people who were major contributors in 2017/8 (links below), and Mastodon's large size means that it's disproportionately influential, attracts almost all the coverage. Almost all the larger English-speaking instances are run by cis white guys (@hachyderm@hachyderm.io is the only exception that comes to mind, although there may be others). Because Eugen also runs mastodon.social, development of mainline Mastodon deprioritizes the needs of smaller instances. So forks like Giltch-soc (which was originally created by trans women) and Hometown (where the maintainer is a person of color) have better community and anti-harassment functionality, but relatively few instances run them.
And this all has a huge influence on the Meta discussion, not just on social.coop. We're here, we're queer, fuck Facebook (or whatever they're calling themselves these days) talks about the LGBTQ+ aspects. How many trans and non-binary people from the fediverse have been in the discussions with Meta, either the NDA meetings with admins or on the SWICG call and email discussions?
And the next section in that article discusses the racial aspects. Agreed that despite Facebook and Instagram are a lot more racially diverse than the fediverse today, so many Black people are likely to find much more community and support from their friends and relatives on Threads than they do in the fediverse -- @harris@social.coop's points about potential upsides from that perspective are valid. And yeah, Facebook Instagram and Meta are racist a f ... but so is the fediverse.
Then again, perspectives aren't monolithic. For example:
@wynch@soc.ironwyn.ch "can't believe some people are seriously considering allowing #meta before they solve their spam, esp. nazi spam problem."
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io similarly observed that he's not sure why folks are spending so much time debating whether defederating before the inevitable harm is bad
Longtime Indieweb/ActivityPub developer @jalcine@todon.eu reacted to the Meta person joining the SWICG by saying he'd be leaving the list because "I do not feel comfortable sharing space with representatives from organizations known for causing direct damage to society.".
But just as I rarely see white advocates of blocking Meta acknowledging that the tradeoffs are different for Black people, I rarely see white advocates of federating acknowledging these other views.
Hmm this turned out longer than I expected ... maybe I'll distill this into a blog post at some point. @dynamic@social.coop, my apologies if there's stuff I didn't respond to!
And a few links:
Dr. Johnathan Flowers' The Whiteness of Mastodon and his discussion on the Radical AI Podcast are good looks at how deeply racism is embedded here.
Ana Valens Mastodon is crumbling — and many blame its creator, from 2019, has some good perspectives on how early contributors were driven away.
Mastodon: a (partial) history has a lot of summaries and links to examples of racism from Mastodon in early 2017 in the section on Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy, and the section on A breaking point for the queer community has some more quotes
@ricmac@mastodon.social @J12t@social.coop
If anyone knows any licensing lawyers who might be willing to provide their opinions on public domain licensing that would preclude use in generative AI, it'd be awesome if you could tag them.
I'm making plans to get the word out about my almost-launched book How To Write A Tech Book. I enjoy talking on podcasts and I think the story of how this book came about (such as the crash course in LaTeX that inspired it) is something a lot of tech podcasters might find interesting.
The audience is basically any technology professional and aspiring tech authors. If anyone here is a podcaster (or knows one) who would find this topic interesting, let's connect!
A brief update: we've hit a nice milestone with the federation: 10 resolutions passed 🎉 👏
https://docs.coopcloud.tech/federation/resolutions/
We now have the makings of a solid collective foundation: decision making process, common fund management, compensating finance and development work and how we deal with membership and dues and more 🤯
1/2
-- d1
Online accounts forcing you to rotate passwords periodically is bad enough, but even worse is when you use a password manager, and they reject the first password you generate because it fails some arbitrary complexity requirements (with no warning before submission).
So now it wants my "old" password, but of course in my password manager that's been replaced with this new one, so I get to go through the password reset workflow instead...
Do there yet exist any ready-written Creative-Commons-style licenses that explicitly withdraw permission from data harvesting for #GenerativeAI?
(boosts welcome)
Why is it so hard to find documentation on what (if any) consequence "Limit" level moderation of an instance has on the Limited instance's ability to view content from the Limiting instance?
All that the JoinMastodon documentation page (https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/) seems to say is "At this moment, limit does not affect federation."
Does anyone have more specific information on this?
(boosts welcome)
Interesting, thanks for the link! I’ve been impressed by social.coop’s work getting the opinions of its members, and the discussion is interesting. @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io it’s stinking how many of the arguments in favor of federation I mentioned in https://blahaj.zone/notes/9h51zblm9z came up in this social.coop discussion, including the effectiveness of Meta’s talking points!
@dynamic@social.coop had a great point that these discussions determine the kind of users social.coop gets in the future. A trans woman asked me a couple days ago whether I’d recommend social.coop and I’ll certainly point het to this thread. What leaps out to me is the demographics. Is social.coop really 90%+ male or is it just that guys do all the talking? And I hardly see anybody talking about the anti-trans hate groups already active on threads, just concern that there might be future incidents, which leaves open the question of whether people don’t know it or just see that as less important that their personal desire to communicate with people they know on Threads. “I see the risk as relatively low,” well yeah, it is to you. Are there really so few cis allies on social.coop? Or did they just not feel comfortable bringing forward trans perspectives in this discussion?
It’s also interesting to me that limiting is seen as a compromise. I can see why people hope it’ll limit harassment but without a detailed analysis it’s hard to believe limiting will fully protect people — there’s a reason that everybody blocks shitposting instances instead of just limiting them. And of course limiting does nothing to prevent data harvesting; and it also doesn’t address the ethical concerns that several people raised.
Richard, it you wind up writing about this, it would be really interesting to highlight the demographics— and also the demographics of the SWICG group at the first meeting thst Ben Savage from Meta attended.
@J12t@social.coop @ricmac@mastodon.social
THE NIGHT IS YOUNG AND THERE ARE STORIES TO TELL - WE KEEP US SAFE - TERFS CAN BURN IN HELL
Help us print the first anarchist ABC book in Swedish for children
Donate to our fundraiser (we are 22% from reaching our goal, and 39 days remaining): https://www.firefund.net/abcbook 🏴
#anarchism #anarchy #directaction #abolishadultsupremacy #solidarity #youthautonomy
I'm interested in this #LibreSoftware powered AmpliPi from https://www.micro-nova.com/amplipi but it seems they're sold out... and there's no indication of if/when they might have new stock... anybody in the Fediverse know if they're here or have contact with them?
I posted about switching to Firefox as my "daily driver" browser as a little tiny step away from Chromium browser hegemony, and I had a ton of people in the replies suggesting I should just use Brave or Edge or Opera or Vivaldi instead.
I'm a little concerned that people don't realize just how pervasive this problem is. Every single one of those sits on top of the Chromium codebase.
TIL there was no single burning of the historic Great Library of Alexandria. The “single burning” story is just myth.
Instead, the Library of Alexandria was slowly defunded and its librarians, intellectuals purged from Alexandria. Over generations its prominence and scholarship slowly faded away, and the collection was likely slowly lost to corruption, war, plunder, dilapidation, or dispersed across other private and public collections.
While the extremists in the US work to return the nation to an era of racism and denial of basic human rights, it's important to remember that in much of the world contempt for basic freedoms has never stopped. Malaysia is an example, and this musician's protest is admirable: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/22/malaysia-festival-halted-matty-healy-1975-criticises-anti-lgbtq-laws
Video of women attacked in Manipur breaks silence on systematic gang rapes in #India - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/22/video-of-women-attacked-in-manipur-breaks-silence-on-systematic-gang-rapes-in-india the details here suggest that things are getting even worse...
#ShlaerMellor, #FunctionPointAnalysis, #punk, #environmentalist, #unionAdvocate, #anarchosocialist
"with a big old lie and a flag and a pie and a mom and a bible most folks are just liable to buy any line, any place, any time" - Frank Zappa