“I don’t care about your calls for a premature ceasefire, about your demand that we provide them with electricity, that we stop fighting for ‘humanitarian reasons.’
…
I don’t care that you wave the flag of ‘human rights’…that you shout fancy slogans you don’t understand such as proportionality, occupation and apartheid.
…
I don’t care that you blame us for 1948 refugees, for the fact that they have no state, for…their fantasy of ‘right of return.’”
@aral The irony is that bombing civilians is self-defeating: it turns bystanders into sympathizers and activates sympathizers. There is no insurgency that has been quelled by going after the general population. Israel is acting against its own interests.
@EyalL Right, it’s either killing thousands upon thousands of innocent Palestinian kids by bombing the hell out of Gaza or nothing. Anything else is giving Hamas impunity. Yes, that doesn’t sound genocidal at all.
“We rebuilt the Mastodon backend from scratch and made it able to handle Twitter-scale (500M users, 20M writes/second, unbalanced social graph, etc.)”
Congratulations, you reinvented Big Tech.
Did you stop to consider that fediverse (emphasis “diverse”) servers should not be trying to reach “Twitter scale?” That they should be kept small on purpose? That the goal isn’t to recreate Twitter but with some other asshole in charge?
The big question seems to be whether the fediverse (or parts thereof) are willing to accept the idea that a federated "public square" of some sort or size is a good thing.
I'd bet many would find it interesting, at least, and that along with the self-determined associations that federation enables, there's plenty of scope to add such a thing to the diversity of the fediverse.
I guess it tells you more about “FOSS”todon than anything else that they chose to block a human rights activist/privacy advocate who wakes up and works at a not-for-profit on free and open software every day. Maybe if I were to work at Google and hack on a hobby open source project in the evenings I’d be acceptable?
@aral ah, I found it - your account was limited like 6 months ago but it seems folk have only noticed in the last day or so. That’s why I couldn’t see it in the logs.
The limitation was lifted last night, so you should be good now.
@aral@Gargron of all the pro-meta blog posts in the past six months, I have never read anything to the tune of "Threads is bound by Mastodon's terms of service like any other instance."
Hundreds of thousands of published words and none formed a sentence close to that. Not even in the form of a question. Odd.
@coldfish@aral@Gargron
The fact that Threads is set up as a monolithic instance that prevents anyone from blocking it in piecemeal is a Threads problem, not a fedi server admin problem (the same is true of Bluesky).
Like you said, Threads can't be trusted to properly moderate its content and the tool that server admins have for that is defederation. Making individual users have to handle a deluge of toxic content themselves has never been seriously considered as an appropriate response by any instance that cares about its users.
The fact that Threads is so massive isn't a reason for federating with them, it's the reason why it's even more absurd to act like this is a problem that individual users need to deal with.
If we defederate from toxic instances that have hundreds, maybe thousands of users, why in the good god damn is it not an obvious decision when we're talking about an instance with millions of users?
Israel—a terrorist state committing genocide in Palestine backed by the US, Canada, and the UK—has just destroyed the office building of the Belgian Agency for Development Cooperation in Gaza as retaliation a day after Belgium announced it would continue to fund the vital humanitarian work of UNRWA.
You clearly do support the murder of innocents and children when you defend the state of Israel's genocidal actions. Your objection that these actions are not intentionally genocidal is absurd as so many of Israel's ruling elite have spoken plainly about those intentions, and the tactics being used by Israel are obviously genocidal both in intent and results.
You have to hide behind spurious accusations rather than face the truth of what Israel is doing. You leave yourself in the ridiculous position of having to believe that anyone who thinks genocide is occurring in Gaza is anti-Semitic and a supporter of jihad. You probably don't even buy this lie yourself but you still feel compelled to use it because you really have nothing else to support your genocide denial.
Any instance that goes along with such a thing will be lost to surveillance capitalism. I don’t care how large they are or who they are, any instance that becomes Meta’s bitch should be defederated immediately by all others. Let the largest few get swallowed up whole by Silicon Valley if they’re dumb enough to do it. The rest of us will rebuild.
I’ve been shouting with my whole chest about the danger of large instances for as long as I can remember.
Even if this rumour is not true today or even if the large instance admins decide to act intelligently and with backbone and refuse such an offer if it is true, the danger remains.
You don’t have to wait for the ship to sink before taking action. If you’re on a huge instance, move to a smaller one. Spread yourselves thin. Make each instance a smaller target. Make the fediverse stronger.
(And maybe some of you will now see why I’m designing the Small Web as a peer-to-peer web. Why ensuring that every node – every instance – is equal is essential to any system that wants to resist centralisation and corporate capture. Why if these places are extensions of ourselves, we must own and control them ourselves. It’s the difference between being a person and not a person in the digital age. It’s high time we understood this.)
We’re looking to buy a place in #Ireland (because renting here is nigh on impossible these days) so I approached a mortgage broker and they just got back to me with this gem:
“Bank of Ireland will not consider your mortgage application because you run a not-for-profit.”
How bloody lovely.
Congratulations on creating a system that rewards the worst of the worst and fucks over those striving to work for the common good. I, for one, won’t be shedding a tear should it burn to the ground.
@jimfl Darn thing is, it burning to the ground is not going to be fun for anyone. I’d much rather see us building bridges to better places so we can avoid that future. That’s why I’m working on what I’m working on – to try and build alternatives we can transition to peacefully. But, equally, neither will I lift a finger to stop anyone who wants to burn it to the ground. Because they’re right; it deserves to be.
@aral
Wow, that sucks.
I used to work for a bank. I had to stop working for them to get a mortgage with them (on not much of an improved salary). When I asked the mortgage advisor, he snorted and said "not on your wage!" When I asked if there were any deals for workers, he just said "none that will benefit you".
Those of you caught up debating the technical minutiae of federating with Threads are missing the forest for the trees.
This is about one thing: Affording social capital to/normalising/legitimising Meta/Facebook/surveillance capitalism (and thereby delegitimising those who oppose them).
Hey, if the author of Mastodon thinks Meta/Facebook/Instagram/surveillance capitalism is socially acceptable there must be something wrong with you if you don’t.
@davep Again, it’s not about the technical details of what they can or cannot do. Can a burglar break into your house? Yes, probably. Is it something very different if you throw a party and invite the burglar in as the guest of honour? Yes, very much so.
Consent must be informed and specific under #GDPR. Any Fediverse server may use consent or legimate interest to display public Fediverse content on their server. However, it is not clear to me how consent for or legimate interest of #Facebook repurposing data for behavior analysis/ads could be justified.
Every home server can also decide their API terms of use that Facebook would need to respect. (Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer)
Your Twitter/X account is a microphone connected to a mixer controlled by a fascist. You can speak all you want. The fascist controls your volume and can mute you whenever he wants. And you might not even know you’ve been muted because you can still hear yourself in your headphones.
It’s not called resistance when your volume knob is in someone else’s hand.
@rooftopaxx@flip0xfff Oh don’t worry, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia now owns the second largest share of Twitter/X after Elon Musk so we know exactly where the Arab Spring folks would end up today if they were to use Twitter/X.
And that’s the problem. We have folks who don’t understand the dangers telling people it’s safe to use.
And in case you think I’m exaggerating the danger, Saudi just sentenced a man to death for his posts:
Mozilla fires 60 people to “focus on bringing ‘trustworthy AI into Firefox.’”
Fuck you, Mozilla. No one is asking for AI in Firefox. Sadly, you’re the best we can hope for under capitalism. So if we want something better, we should look into alternative models.
I remember when Microstrategy, a then-respected analytics company that made one of the best data visualisation packages at the time, decided to go all-in on bitcoin. When the fad collapsed, it almost wiped them out, and very few analytics people take Microstrategy seriously any more.
Large companies like IBM or Facebook can get away with going in on bad tech. IBM bet heavily on blockchain and Facebook bet heavily on metaverse. Both survived the experience. Likewise, Microsoft will probably survive their bet on LLMs. Mozilla might not.
This is a problem because the world might not have needed Microstrategy, IMHO it does need Mozilla. Allowing Tableau to dominate doesn't harm the web itself; allowing Chrome to dominate does.
@aral I'm increasingly frustrated with people who will talk about the need to build alternatives to capitalism and fascism who are still on Twitter and won't even look at non-commercial alternatives.
@aral There are reasons to maintain a presence on Twitter; life in an oppressive society requires compromises we'd all rather avoid, which is the point of oppression.
It's the refusal to try to find a way out that frustrates me.
More than 1,000 children have reportedly been killed in 11 days of airstrikes on Gaza – one child every 15 minutes – with children making up a third of total fatalities in Gaza.
@pch Also see: Hananya Naftali, media advisor to Netanyahu first posted it was an Israeli strike on X, then deleted his post and posted about a “mysterious explosion” an hour later.