honestly it warms my heart and makes me really happy to see large swaths of the fediverse coming together to defend our communities against the evil megacorporation known as meta
if this is the pre-threads fedi's last hurrah... it's been an honor to spend so many years cultivating this beautiful community with y'all
The only reason the algorithmic biases of the Zuckerberg entity are not dominating fedi discourse at this very moment is because they began to federate with "sharing" opt-in. If/when they switch that toggle over, 160 million accounts governed by these censorship algorithms will flood in and algorithmic creep could quickly destroy the journalistic prospect of the fediverse. Why would journalists show up here if less than 1% of the network can see their posts?
Probably a lot of the problem causing people to remain stubbornly on instances like mastodon.social & the other big ones that federate with threads & shit is some kind of inability to understand the concepts of horizontalism and federation themselves. People want the fediverse to be a "replacement" for corporate internet with someone at the "top" who just takes care of shit for them without them having to really be involved in building the experience and even the infrastructure themselves.
And I get it. I am not a tech person. My literal job for over a decade has been very rope-and-hammers, working with "tech" that's essentially over three centuries old. Everything I have taught myself about Linux, for instance, has been at the cost of a LOT of my personal time & frustration. So I do think that part of it is that folks who do know the tech and do build the infrastructure have become accustomed to being a sort of hidden or even ignored minority (numerically) compared to tech users. And that's real. And I do think that this requires a shifting of everyone's understanding of their roles in these projects.
But as a tech user, I am trying to recognize my responsibility towards learning more about how these technologies work, if I want to keep using them. I also want to call on the technologically-minded to recognize their responsibilities to teach and make knowledge accessible. This isn't unique to the high-tech world. Going forward, we all need to recognize our interdependence on a greater level, and change how we view the systems that we rely on. We can decide NOT to rely on some of them, for sure, but no decision we make about that is truly made in a vacuum. If we want things like the fediverse (or the internet in general) to continue, we need to understand that it can only be a cooperative endeavor.
Like I said, this goes for everything. Water. Transportation. Food. Shelter. But in the case of tech, we all have further to go to break out of the user/provider binary. At least to the point of understanding that if we want anything like a "free" and federated internet, we can't just ignore movements like the #fedipact as not being applicable to us. If you want a twitter experience, go to twitter. If you want a facebook experience, stay on facebook. Don't bring that shit into a project where we're all trying to learn how to break out of corporate control. This learning may not be easy for most, but it's necessary and if you're already here on the fediverse I don't think I need to explain why.
Ah, is that time again for unsolicited opinions about #threads and #Meta let's gooo. Spoiler alert: If you like corporate social media, you are not going to like this thread🧵
#Fedipact is so easy to understand that even a male cis westerner like me can get it: A coalition of servers want the #Meta shit machine as far from their gardens as possible. Because they built those gardens with suffering and lots of love.
and yet, by and large, the fediverse is the only major social media platform that actually manages to do this (the decent sections of it, at least)
why? well, here's the big secret: BECAUSE WE DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT PROFIT
big companies allow nazis to fester on their services because it makes them money, and here we're not beholden to such a corrupting influence. that's kinda the entire point
my favorite thing about the new updated more accessible version of https://fedipact.online is that, now, no matter which way you slice it, the colors of the page form some version of the trans flag
pink background, light blue highlights, black text, and white links
(also links are animated rainbows if you mouse over them, so, even more pride!!!)
do you enjoy the work i've done with FediPact? the rad instance i've set up? the cool clothes i DIY together? my pirate radio station, vantaradio? my awesome videos? my amazing selfies? my posting generally? or just wanna give a trans gal a nice gift?
well i'm unemployed, job searching, was recently kicked out of the place i'd been staying for years, and am surviving solely off donations for the moment so if you wanna support me anything helps
(to support cyberpunk.lol costs directly please use the separate instance kofi on our about page)
⚠️ threads’ fediverse beta opens to share your posts on mastodon, too ⚠️
"threads is rolling out a beta of its fediverse integration in the us, canada, and japan. in a post on thursday, meta ceo mark zuckerberg announced that toggling on the feature will let you cross-post and view likes from other federated platforms, like mastodon."
Would you want Facebook to know if you visited a suicide hotline?
Our investigation from June 2023 found that over 30 suicide hotline websites sent visitor data to Facebook. That story has now become a finalist for a NIHCM award!
:facebook: ☣️ FLOSS.social was launched in the (now small) Mastodon signup wave at the end of March 2018, as a result of the #Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Since then, #Meta has shown little to no sincere interest in reforming their culture of abusing their users' human rights of privacy.
As a result, there is no reason to suspect they'll be any different if they join the #Fediverse, and our instance will respond accordingly.