Stuart Croall @stuartcroall@librem.one
Surviving leukemia since 2001. I was grateful to receive fresh stem cells in 2009. Now, trying to make choices to model a better world for my family and others.
Joined Jun 2019
@strypey @petegozz Justin "Look at Me" Trudeau and his Liberals were elected on a promise that 2015 would be the "last federal election using First Past the Post." He then put on a show of "consulting," and proceeded to ignore the results. We then went to the next election, in 2019, without a single reform of any sort.
And, he managed to hold onto office.
It feels a bit like #Canada is starting back at the bottom of the #ElectoralReform hill again.
Stuart Croall
boosted
I've decided to establish a Guppe group ( @fyre_exyt ) to start building a team around Fyre Exyt, a project I've been envisioning since I quit FB in 2006 (?) to create a detailed guide to escaping the datafarms. Ideally it would take the form of a website or app that would walk users through the process. Maybe also guides for installing apps, choosing hosts, and creating accounts on replacement services.
I don't have tons of cognitive energy or capacity these days, but I do believe in the promise of #federated platforms, and #open protocols and such.
I would like the #Fediverse to be a place I can move my friends and family to, eventually (particularly my kids) and I'm trying to sort out what to do to make that easier and more appealing to them.
Perhaps I should apply my energy to answering some of those questions I posed...🤔
Coming from a #publicpolicy background, this looks like a classic policy problem: Creating policies to solve problems, without having an goal-state in mind.
Has anyone ever tried figure out what they're trying to accomplish with #federated #social media/publishing, beyond the federation part?
What would a #wishlist for a federated #macroblogging site (like #Hubzilla, #Zap, #Friendica, #Diaspora etc) look like? What are the best features of each? What are each of them missing?
@sean Because his platforms "looks" like Facebook, does that necessarily mean the *paradigm* hasn't changed? I see lots of comments about Hubzilla being clunky or looking out date, from the same people who praise much of its fundamental structures.
I'm new to the fediverse, and I am not a coder (nor do I play one on TV), but it seems like a lot of people want something that "works" like #Hubzilla or #Zap, but "looks" like #Diaspora?
That seems like a solveable problem, doesn't it?
Stuart Croall
boosted
🎉 We've been partying in #Fediverse for 3 years! 🎉
Here's a summary about our journey, project team, goals, stats and future plans:
fediverse.party/en/post/fedive…
#FediverseInArt #mastoart #fediverseparty
Here's a summary about our journey, project team, goals, stats and future plans:
fediverse.party/en/post/fedive…
#FediverseInArt #mastoart #fediverseparty
Stuart Croall
boosted
Does anyone use #Moodle or something similar for #education, particularly for grades 6-12, who could speak to the ability of such platforms to provide reading resources, integrating other sites and platforms as necessary?
I have an 11 year old who is learning remotely, here in #Winnipeg #Manitoba and what the province and school division have set up at this point in non-ideal, at best.
The platform they're using is Microsoft-based (Teams/Office 360), but the expectation is the kids access (particularly) #reading resources across a variety of other services and website, each requiring a separate login, some with a pre-established "class code" or, in some cases, a full registration per student, including significant personal information.
I find this a bit frustrating, annoying, and inadequate, particularly for students at this level. Do other platforms integrate these resources better? Is it a reasonable expectation that a student should able to access most resources without hopping services, or am I dreaming of some kind of utopian fantasy?
I have an 11 year old who is learning remotely, here in #Winnipeg #Manitoba and what the province and school division have set up at this point in non-ideal, at best.
The platform they're using is Microsoft-based (Teams/Office 360), but the expectation is the kids access (particularly) #reading resources across a variety of other services and website, each requiring a separate login, some with a pre-established "class code" or, in some cases, a full registration per student, including significant personal information.
I find this a bit frustrating, annoying, and inadequate, particularly for students at this level. Do other platforms integrate these resources better? Is it a reasonable expectation that a student should able to access most resources without hopping services, or am I dreaming of some kind of utopian fantasy?
Stuart Croall
boosted
This!
"As Tristan [Harris] so eloquently puts it, we need not worry about the day when machines overcome human strength (when robots “take over the world”)…
We must worry about the day when machines overcome human weakness, when they can manipulate our behavior to achieve their own goals.
Thanks to the simple, rational pursuit of advertising revenue, that day has already passed."
- #JeffSeibert, 2020
https://medium.com/swlh/the-mechanics-and-psychology-behind-the-social-dilemma-719d618aa8ce
Ok, when I installed #zap this time, there was the option to choose PostgreSQL as the database, so I tried that because, well, just 'cause I guess.
After I found posting wasn't working, I tried uninstalling Zap and reinstalling it with MySQL this time, and that seems to have resolved the problem.
I haven't dug into what caused the problem. I'm just happy to have it working!
I'm trying to get back on track after a tough and tiring spring and summer. Earlier this year, I had a #yunohost server running at home at croall.ca, but I kind of let it slide, and wasn't keeping up with backups. That didn't work out well.
Since I'm still hoping to encourage some of my friends and family to move to decentralized/federated apps and services, I revived Yunohost, except this time on the otherwise,social domain. I'll try to manage it better this time.
@petegozz @strypey
I haven't been engaged much in the outside world for the last couple of months, but I did notice this article from Fair Vote Canada comparing the results of the recent elections in the province of British Columbia, and in NZ.. I'm not sure if this accurately reflects how it feels in NZ.
Canada and its provinces desperately need new electoral systems, but it's hard to imagine how that happens.
Stuart Croall
boosted
I don't have a lot of technical skills beyond installing software and searching the web for help and fixes for any problems I encounter. I think "power users" like me often undervalue our potential contributions to liberating software, because we're not coders or graphic designers. But because we spend a lot of time teaching ourselves how to use software, and hack around bugs, we can give really useful UX feedback to dev teams, and share hard-won experience with less confident users.
Stuart Croall
boosted
It's never been clearer to me that ethical tech needs ethical income and admin models ("business models"). Also that cooperatives, social enterprises, and B Corps need ethical tech. Only by working together can these movements protect ourselves from further enclosement of the digital commons, like Apple's use of their monopoly power over iThings to coerce app developers not to copyleft their code, or this attempt by Goggle to use its power over the Android ecosystem to knobble the fediverse.
@strypey We've had the VoteCompass tool in the last couple of Canadian elections, offered by the CBC and Vox Pop Labs. Of course, voting in our elections is probably not as fun as yours, since we still have First Past the Post. I generally track close to the Green Party or NDP, but voting for either in my riding is like throwing my vote down a hole...
https://votecompass.cbc.ca/canada/
https://manitoba2016.votecompass.com/
Stuart Croall
boosted
Wow, on first blush, *this* is a party I can get behind. https://peoplesconvention.org/ The US needs a major shakeup, and the current duopoly needs to be dismantled.
Stuart Croall
boosted
The Canadians will build a wall, and the US will pay for it ;)
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/02/898165324/americans-go-home-canadians-track-u-s-boaters-sneaking-across-the-border
Stuart Croall
boosted
Political opponents can agree on the baseline negative freedoms (if even that!), but add a dimension of "do no evil" to the license and now you have at least two incompatible licenses.
One will require you to block sites considered bad, for some definition of bad, one will require you not to do it, maybe there will even be one that has another definition of bad, and software licensed under those different licenses can't share code. Are you willing to bet on which camp will come out the winner? Likely all camps come out losers.
This is what is happening right now around the OSI, as people are submitting "open source plus" licenses, "ethical" licenses, which all risk being incompatible with each other and certainly at least one-way incompatible with any pre-existing licenses. Suddenly we're back in the year 2000 again and have to worry about license proliferation undermining the whole endeavor of free software.
One will require you to block sites considered bad, for some definition of bad, one will require you not to do it, maybe there will even be one that has another definition of bad, and software licensed under those different licenses can't share code. Are you willing to bet on which camp will come out the winner? Likely all camps come out losers.
This is what is happening right now around the OSI, as people are submitting "open source plus" licenses, "ethical" licenses, which all risk being incompatible with each other and certainly at least one-way incompatible with any pre-existing licenses. Suddenly we're back in the year 2000 again and have to worry about license proliferation undermining the whole endeavor of free software.
Stuart Croall
boosted
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the rise of "source available" licenses (both morality licenses and the no-commercial-use ones) herald the end of "open source". Not because the practices of code sharing and collaboration that has gone under that name will end. But because the only people who will stick with licenses that honour the Open Source Definition are those who come to understand that computing freedoms are the point, not shared source:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html
Surviving leukemia since 2001. I was grateful to receive fresh stem cells in 2009. Now, trying to make choices to model a better world for my family and others.
Joined Jun 2019
