Stuart Croall @stuartcroall@librem.one

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.

#TheSocialDilemma

🎉 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

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?

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

#TheSocialDilemma #TristanHarris #SocialMedia #datafarming

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

#FreeCode

"Unlike giving cash to needy people on the streets, HandUp helps donors give money to homeless people who commit to using it to fulfill specific needs like rent, security deposits, food, or health bills."
https://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/07/16/a-crowdfunding-app-for-the-homeless-handup-raises-850000/

No human being deserves to have their lives micromanaged by strangers, just in order to secure the basics of life. *Especially* in countries more than wealthy enough to supply them to everyone unconditionally. This is why we need a #UBI.

Find a cool product on #Amazon?

That company exists OFF Amazon, too.

1) #DDG company name.

2) Order from their site.

2a) Can usually find a 10% code!

3) Still get product in 2-8 days.

4) Company avoids losing 25% margin share to Amazon.

5) You avoid giving money to #Bezos.

Massive protests around the #Aotearoa yesterday, in solidarity with the US protests against cops routinely murdering people and getting away with it:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/418031/photo-essay-thousands-march-in-solidarity-with-black-lives-matter

does anyone nearby (i'm in riverside county, in southern california) have a place i could stay in the near future? like, a couch i could sleep on? not yet, but it looks like things are gonna go to shit pretty soon no matter what i do, so it'd be nice to have an escape plan ready. my parents have been incredibly abusive since i moved back in with them, especially since they found out i was trans. today they went into my backpack and took all my hormones, and that's only the tip of the iceberg of the bullshit they've put me through. at the end of next month they wanna take me to mexico and i wanna be gone before then. please help.

Here are our plans for #PeerTube's v3 (#live streaming for this automn!)
▶️ more info on the framablog https://framablog.org/2020/05/26/our-plans-for-peertube-v3-progressive-fundraising-live-streaming-coming-next-fall
▶️ read and support the roadmap https://joinpeertube.org/roadmap

This comment from 2016 is telling in a number of ways.

"U.S. intelligence officials also believe that any attempt to ban Microsoft will be limited because its products are too integrated into Russia's IT infrastructure"
-.https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/putin-wants-push-microsoft-out-russia-battle-us-n674781