mcneely @mcneely@librem.one

BREAKING NEWS: In what I believe is the most widespread election monitoring effort it has ever undertaken, the DOJ Civil Rights Division just announced that it will have officials in the field monitoring the polls in 24 STATES on Election Day. This is huge. This is the DOJ being true to its mission. You can find the list of jurisdictions that will be monitored here:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-monitor-polls-24-states-compliance-federal-voting-rights-laws
#Democracy

Kudos to the #Netherlands.
https://www.uu.nl/en/news/82-of-scientific-publications-open-access-available

"Dutch universities published 82% of their peer-reviewed scientific publications #OpenAccess in 2021. This is an increase of nine percentage points compared to 2020."

(Well-funded) Universities should run *open* #Fediverse, and currently specifically #Mastodon, instances. They have the resources (knowledge and hardware), they're non-profit, are largely independent, and to do so aligns with their educational mandate. Same for #Wikipedia, IMO.

Expect some of the following to happen in the coming weeks:

- celebrities with huge follower counts pushing tiny community-run servers to their knees

- instance admin burnout; shutting down of servers

- big new servers that don't "vibe" with common rules or culture being widely defederated

- some notable account violating an instance code of conduct and throwing a fit

- lots of people ragequitting Mastodon for one reason or another

- etc.

It'll be a rough ride. Patience and strength, all.

I see a lot of people talking about how Mastodon "Feels like the Internet I remember from 20 years ago."

That's no accident. That's Federation. That's UseNet, IRC, Email, Message Boards, etc. What do they all have in common?

Federation: Users congregating around watering holes of common interest, but still being a part of a larger whole.

THIS IS HOW THE INTERNET WAS DESIGNED TO BE. And I am HERE for it.

It's actually pretty amazing that a open source product developed by a tiny non-profit, running on a network of servers self-funded by volunteer administrator and moderators has managed to absorb some portion of one of the world's largest for-profit social networks.

It's a miracle the whole thing didn't collapse or catch fire.

Great job everyone.

Morning folks. Nobody knows what’s gonna happen. Only thing left to do is make some calls and knock some doors for some of the dozens of winnable tossup races.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pollsters-have-no-fcking-idea-whats-going-to-happen-during-2022-midterm-elections

Lots of Mastodon instances are struggling with the heavy influx of users. Twitter was the same in the early days. The Fail Whale, was something you’d see on a regular basis. Gives it a chance, things will get better.

I plunged in here & just realized that I need to introduce myself. So:

Greetings!

I'm a political historian whose work centers on the American founding, political culture, & political violence. My last book--The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress & the Road to Civil War--is FAR too topical these days. Joy.

I'll be tooting (tooting? really?) re: the culture of politics, the makings of democracy, US history, & occasionally, about my History Bird, @historynewbie

#histodons #introduction

suggestion: hashtags are important here. please use “Camel Case” so screen readers understand what the words are and can pronounce them properly. example:

#DogsOfMastodon not #dogsofmastodon

make sense??

looking for silver linings in *waves vaguely at everything* — it sure would be nice if the end result of all of this was a resurgence of indieweb / personal sites and blogs

anyways: RSS is working on my site 👀
https://jason.af/feed.xml

I’m really excited about the idea of someone deploying encrypted DMs on this thing. Need a good plan for key distribution and identity binding (makes me sad Keybase got eaten by Zoom, oops) and then the rest is just Signal protocol?