my take on technical solutions to problems on the fediverse
fix THAT and then maybe we can start talking about building good software
my take on technical solutions to problems on the fediverse
the secret nobody wants to talk about is that EVERY developer of a major fediverse software, yes even that one, has a habit of excusing assholes as a matter of professional practice. it’s impossible to “be a good fediverse citizen” without doing it. without having conversations with the people who make the software that the nazis use, or, less extremely, with the numerous missing stairs running instances that you can’t make a big deal about without that stance coming to colour your entire project.
that professional obligation becomes a personal habit. don’t trust anyone who writes a fedi software used by more than five instances. they will not back you up in a pinch.
my take on technical solutions to problems on the fediverse
it doesn’t fucking matter. i want every person who wants to fix the fediverse to go and read “Thoughts about Community Support around Intimate Violence” <https://archive.org/details/zabalaza_2009_intimate_violence> and then really reckon with how far away we are from ever implementing ANY of those practices in this space. there is not the will or maturity here to tackle any of the really difficult conversations that an actual community platform would have to grapple with on a regular basis, and technologies of community organizing delivered to a social context where people are more worried about losing their parasocial relationship with some popular account than they are about actual abuse doesn't create communities, it creates cults. and mastodon is a space where time and time again i have seen people pay lip-service to “restorative justice” as a way of justifying allowing abusers to continue sharing a room with them while making those same spaces unsafe for all of their victims. conversations about this never happen because the people who get hurt are forced to leave.
nobody wants to talk about this. there is zero will to do the hard work of fixing it. but you think maybe by distributing posts a little differently, things would improve? the beef between myasstodon and PV would have been ten times worse if friends of myasstodon were in charge of formal networks of federated instances instead of just informal ones. “but then you could just block them all in one go” literally when has federation drama ever been this simple
i’m not saying we can’t make things better. i’m saying the social change has to come FIRST. stop trying to build technologies for a community which doesn’t exist and can’t effectively use them. look at the communities we actually have and the actual history of this platform, and take a scientific approach to creating a space which is better. organize and build political consciousness. people will fucking make the technologies they need in their free time if you can get the communities and social support in place for them to do it; we’re not lacking in tech whizzes here
@jdp23 @oliphant@oliphant.social @zkat @blogdiva historically fedipacts have been used primarily by sus instances to try to mandate federation from other instances in the pact. i think it's foolish to assume that every instance in a federation will necessarily want to federate with every other instance, even if belongingness in that federation is opt-in, not the least of all because instances are run by people and people sometimes have falling-outs with each other. sometimes mods of instances with very similar values hate each other's guts. sometimes people with generally good values on paper are abusive interpersonally.
i’m really hesitant towards any system which threatens to take away from admins the ability to make these determinations on a case-by-case basis. “you have to either defederate from the entire community of instances or continue federating with your abuser” is not a healthy federation model. doubly if the penalty to defederation is also losing your funding model. we need a system which allows people to disengage without losing community support
moving
i figured this wasn’t universal but i thought it had (a) been legislated and (b) also in other states
@tamitha @heals first, i’m not saying can/can’t; anything is possible but there are strengths and drawbacks in terms of social factors and rollout
the issue here is folks on other instances. your instance knows right now that my account is discoverable; it does NOT know whether or not my account has opted in or out of search indexing. that information doesn’t federate. if a new flag were added, even if i turned it on, you would have to wait until my instance upgraded and started sharing that information before you could index my public posts. (i think this would be the right decision fwiw)
what eugen is doing instead is using the property your instance DOES know about, “discoverability”, because it means even if i don't upgrade my instance, your instance can still index the posts if it wants. this is what i’m calling nefarious
@heals @tamitha this isn't possible currently because the search indexing flag doesn't federate. we really need upstream to not mess this up or else we basically have to introduce a new, limited-discoverability flag and also stop federating the old one for people who don't want to be indexed.
my guess is eugen is taking this strategy because he knows that many instances are on outdated versions of the software and wouldn't be discoverable under a new flag. so he's keying it off of something they're already using. which is really nefarious, imo
pokémon
the key gimmick is after the first two gyms you decide whether you want to do the east half or the west half of the state, then once you beat the championship the routes open up to do the other one
the east half contrasts apocalyptic flooding in the past with contemporary irrigation and dam projects
the west half contrasts lush greenery and urban development with apocalyptic volcanism in the future
yes the legendaries are kyogre and groudon
baldur's gate
@coriander especially potent since i taught my bard Web
baldur's gate
the solution to every difficult battle is “stand just out of sight with a fireball wand”
me: [talking with the guy who wrote RFC 5785] what's up
guy: well, I've come up with a new kind of directory
me: cool, what's it called?
guy: it's called dot well known
me: oh
me: how many people know about it?
guy: well, there's me; I know about it
guy: and I guess now you know about it too
me: so just the two of us
guy: yeah but I'm hoping it will be, you know,, better known in the future
me: what's the dot for?
guy: oh, that makes it a hidden directory
me: so you're hiding it, in hopes to make it better known
guy: I ... uh, ... I mean, yeah
Kobold
@Satsuma it started it
Administrator / Public Relations for GlitchCat. Not actually glitchy, nor a cat. I wrote the rules for this instance.
“Constitutionally incapable of not going hard” — @aescling
“Fedi Cassandra” – @Satsuma
I HAVE EXPERIENCE IN THINGS. YOU CAN JUST @ ME.
I work for a library but I post about Zelda fanfiction.