Lady of the Land @Lady@cat.family

if you want to clearly delineate what is or isn’t allowed you can do that easily just by saying “i would like you to do this / i would not like you to do that”

what legal frameworks give certain classes of individual is the potential for enforcement. but as far as content licensing goes, the potential for enforcement by a marginalized internet user is basically zero. this advantage is a myth

what legal frameworks give the programmer is the illusion that they can automate systems based on a string matching of a content license and still have those systems be ethical. this is also a myth. a computer can never be held accountable. you need a human making those decisions regardless of what the license does or does not say

certain kinds of tech people find clear terms and rules and specifications attractive, and are drawn to legal frameworks for solving social problems because they think that legal frameworks can provide that structure and “clearly delineate what is or is not allowed”

and i don’t know what to tell you, other than, they can’t

I Have Some News For You About The Function Of Law

oh man if you think the solution to imperilled trans people is a legal framework, buddy,,

(if you are not interested in doing the work of the community then your relationship is necessarily one of exploitation, as you are gaining value from the community without giving back in a manner which the community can recognize. you do not have belongingness within the community and you should not be developing solutions for the community except perhaps at the community’s express request. it does not matter whether your community is an anarchist book club or a trade union or a political state, we all agree that nonmembers should not be the ones coming up with solutions for how the community should operate. it holds for social media networks as well)

(i realize that people who are new to mastodon are in a place where they are not yet a part of the community but still want to contribute and that enthusiasm is why we keep getting things like this. what i wish these people understood is that the best way to integrate oneself within a community is by doing the kind of work that the community does. new mastodon admins for example acclimate extremely fast. people who contribute to the forks quickly find themselves in productive conversations with experienced people who can help educate them on how things are done here and why. people who build software toys on their own and then blast them out there “for discussion” are doing none of this. they are not meeting people where they are. they are not performing the labour of the masses. they are doing what is easy and fun and fulfilling for them and then expecting everybody else to embrace or at least tolerate their genius. this is not how software should be built)

(not one of these people has shown any interest in actually contributing to the community beyond toys and discussions and experiments that they entirely control and which are done entirely for their own satisfaction and pleasure. i have, as a rule, very little patience and tolerance for people whose approach to computers begins from a premise of fun solitary genius and not difficult solidarity work. insofar as computers are information technology their job is to bridge and facilitate communication across space and time. meaningful communication depends on social context and community. software therefore should also flow from social contexts and communities, not simply be thrust upon them one day by a stranger who thinks they know what is right)

(the real reason people keep trying to implement moar text search on fedi is because it is mind-numbingly easy to tell a computer to search for a thing, whereas building actually beneficial tools for users requires design and planning and thinking about human interactions and is generally quite hard)

sometimes i do want to find posts which i didn't bother interacting with the first time. the posts are never more than two weeks old and i usually can narrow down who shared it to a handful of people. i can just scroll through their timelines until i find the post. i don’t need a computer for that.

build me tools for things i CAN’T do

if you want to fix something broken in mastodon, make lists work better lol

let people sort, organize, and annotate (for personal usage) bookmarks, and let bookmarks be exported/migrated between accounts

add better notetaking capabilities beyond just shooting yourself a DM. make it easy to write notes no matter what you are doing or where you are in the timeline. make it easy to attach what you were looking at to the note

add a reminder functionality to remind yourself to look at something again later

add a hiding functionality to clearly mark and collapse things which you have already read

and idk i work in libraries, i write XSLT and weird yaml metadata files and raw RDF as a hobby; the kind of person who views digital space as, ideally, an uncurated mass of raw data to sift through is not somebody i will ever understand

the tools i want are not search tools but organizational tools

the absolute bare minimal action of favouriting or bookmarking a post that you might want to see again is the bar which is too high for these folks

literally any active effort or curation is too much of an ask, it has to be entirely automatic

“funnel my entire home timeline into a massive bin that i can have a computer run a full text search on” is, to be clear, entirely the latter

my most pretentious take is “you should learn how to cultivate your own digital space instead of relying to tools to avoid having to”

if you can't identify at least one of the types of at least 95% of the pokémon have you really been successful or are you just fronting

so is cat gonna start writing pokémon fanfic now or

choose your fighter

“LEARNING OPPORTUNITY” IN NAME ONLY, FOR IT IS NEITHER

i see a lot of people talking about COVID-19 being the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2020, behind heart disease and cancer

what i don't see those same people discussing is how heart disease and cancer are both conditions whose prevalence is also inflated as the result of economically-driven policy and communities deciding to take on a certain level of “acceptable risk”

COVID-19 is not worse than cancer. so why is it that people get extremely up in arms about that one but remain utterly silent about the other “big C”?