@evan That realpolitik style of insistence that there are not and cannot be “honest brokers” justifies both furious grabs at power AND the dismantling of actual systems of accountability. It’s one of my biggest concerns about the ways the us system has evolved over the past 40 years or so.
@trochee I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I think there’s something missing from the “what will we tolerate” narrative. The concepts of fair play, tolerance, etc aren’t universal ones: they’re negotiated and bounded. What’s fair play on a football field isn’t on a basketball court; accepted norms at the bar are different than the office; the battlefield is different than the courtroom, and so on and so on.
So, here's a problem I have with Mastodon: let's say I make a post and someone replies with a racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic comment. I can block the commenter, but that only hides it for me. Other people who come to my page will see the comment, and believe that I tacitly condone that behaviour. I'd like to be able to delete the reply from my replies list entirely. Or at least hide replies from blocked accounts. And, yes, I know that wouldn't delete it from the originating server.
I should also say, as always, I really respect the work that the Mastodon team has put into this platform. Mastodon breathed life into the ActivityPub spec, and made a working social web with a lot of loosely-defined wording. We would not be where we are today with the fediverse without the Mastodon team bridging that gap.
@evan sounds like we're in agreement then, and it wasn't clear to me in what arena we were talking about.
Yes, if your two-person conversation is pinging a bunch of people that aren't participating, you should remove whatever mechanism it is that keeps pinging all the others.
Otherwise, chat/debate away to your heart's content tbh.
On here I only go private if I'm say showing a photo that includes my family, or wanting to say something to them that might be a sensitive topic to someone else.
@evan@ajroach42@Andres@darius This is the Jessamyn West Corollary of Message Board Threads which is the longer a thread goes on (this is on MetaFilter but I've seen it elsewhere) the higher the likelihood that it just becomes two guys verbally wrestling with each other.
There were some concerns that posts by people on their own servers would be used for advertisement, abused, indexed, datamined, etc. by commercial services connected to the social web.
That would be bad. You should have control over that. Granting a person on a server the right to read or view your posts should not grant that server's operator a right to use your content for whatever they want.
We should have better support in ActivityPub for saying what you do or don't permit with your stuff.
If you'd like to draw some conclusions about ActivityPub from this, it should not be that a network should disallow supernodes, but that we have to counterbalance them with a wide diversity of other nodes of different sizes with different value propositions.
I posted this poll after reading about an article in Nature. Apparently 80-90% of Americans dramatically underestimate the support for climate action among their fellow citizens.
Support for climate-positive policies are at 67-80%, but Americans estimate support to be around 37-41%.
So, about 2/3 of Americans support climate action, but most of us think it's closer to 1/3.
@evan@bignose Just because I post something on Mastodon doesn't mean it stays on Mastodon. People can save the image & do what they like with it: share it with their scary friends, photoshop it into a different context, put it on their weird stalker shrine, who knows? A print photo of me once got stolen from a physical bulletin board where I worked! Why? Plus people have body image issues & the internet is where you can be judged by your words, not your looks. My answer would be "almost never"
@evan I think for Canadians, given the length and lack of defense at our land border, "leave your country" can have a very low bar.
That said, I've left a still-countable number of times, most to the US, a couple of times just for a day.
If you ask "how many different countries have you visited" well, my answer ends up being "too few!!!". Would love to have the means and time to get out of North America more.
I suspect some of it is steeped in family and culture. Canada is a nation of immigrants. Even though I was born in Toronto, I had relatives in Turkey from my earliest years and my parents were seasoned travellers, so I caught the bug.
When I lived and taught in Alabama for 2 decades, I met lots of 10th generation Southerners that had seldom left their own state, let alone the US.
"Facebook was better in the Platform era (2007-2011), when third-party developers could add widgets to profile pages, and in-stream interactive experiences."
@evan i think in a free market, we would be allowed to choose a social media experience that is not likely to be spoiled by advertisers (posing as non advertisers trying to sell us stuff when we thought we were there to make friends or talk to people for the sake of itself). good social nets will be those that can be reserved for real, private people. I'm curious what you think about the enshitification of software as Cory doctorow describes it
@RedtheBean I didn't make this world. But I think it would be a better place if more people had access to the fediverse. Right now, most people have most of their accounts on huge services. If we make it so tiny servers can talk on the same network as the big ones, we can start shifting people more easily from the voraciously capitalistic services to cooperative, family run, or civic servers. We need federation to let those people move.
@evan I didn't bother reading it. Kinda tired of Silicon Valley's philosophical whims that are not useful or enlightening. It's just a bunch of boys thinking that they are intelligent producing nonsense for applause.
OK. I'm doing a Tournament of Years. I'll do a poll about the last 16 years, scrambled. Winner of each round goes on to a championship at the end. Here are the brackets (randomized):