kalanggam

@kalanggam@beehaw.org

Texas-based writer and hol.ogra.ph co-admin

Feel free to follow me at @gil

(he/they)

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Mixed feelings about giving money to houseless people

So, to get this out of the way, I'm a cisgender white man from a well-off family in a fairly affluent town. I'm making this post because I want to hear perspectives from those who are different from and likely significantly more knowledgeable than me. (Literally as I was writing this post, I came to the epiphany that I should...

kalanggam,

Houseless people are suffering through some of the most dire consequences of living in our capitalist hellscape (which is itself built by wealthy people many of whose wealth is ill-gotten through lying, swindling, and other exploitation). They don't have proper shelter, many deal with food insecurity, many are just desperate to have some kind of stable life or just have someone treat them like an equal, like a fellow human.

They shouldn't have to jump through hoops, prove themselves to be the "good" type, perform some kind of perfect victimhood, or pose as saints for us - and, being real, many of us are only one emergency away from also becoming houseless - so that we can pass what fickle judgment we have and decide they're worthy of aid and assistance. We don't really have the capacity to judge them off a small, often one-time interaction, and even if we did, what kind of message is that? "I'll give you five dollars, but only if you do a little song and dance and show me that you applied for a job"?

Frankly, people deserve housing and food, no matter their moral character; houseless people shouldn't have to demonstrate their character to us in order to deserve even a small parcel of what we're fortunate enough to have. It takes some arrogance and lack of compassion on our part to expect that of them, especially when many of us with housing aren't exactly saints either. Given the messaging we get from society, I understand some of the misgivings people might have, but still. Most people in general shouldn't have to do anything special to be worthy of our kindness.

kalanggam,

I'm looking forward to the UI changes also, as well as the switch to the HTTP API, but I'm really even more stoked about 0.18.1 (especially the CAPTCHA being redone) - which I feel like would be a better time to upgrade.

That said, it just came out today, so the admins will probably want to wait for stability's sake.

kalanggam,

It’s crazy to think that when I joined, Beehaw had <2k users, and now it has about 6 times that. So many server upgrades happened in just one weekend, many new moderators (a dream team, one might say), and many new servers to federate with as well.

Love being part of this ❤️

kalanggam,

I have a lot of mixed feelings about Spotify's UI choices, but I guess this is what Spicetify is for. 😅

kalanggam,

I agree - my main reason for sharing with this post in particular is because the tie-in it has with Beehaw's recent decision to, at least temporarily, defederate with .world and sh.itjust.works; I just found the framing about decentralization, esp. the fact that the Fediverse is not a monolithic entity mandating a uniformly aligned approach, useful.

On the whole, I do think either ActivityPub's protocol spec would need some kind of privacy revision, seeing as it's already been a Problem where microblogging admins have had to block access by servers dedicated to mirroring Mastodon posts which don't delete their copies after posts are deleted by the user, or the software itself, Lemmy in our case, will have to make adjustments to its implementation of federation like you said. Of course, I'm mostly just conjecturing here and I don't actually know what either of these might look like 😅

The main part of this which I problematize are the people who are sticking their necks out for Meta and suggesting instances shouldn't be quick to defederate because this is, supposedly, a good opportunity to bring federated social media into the mainstream. Yet, in my opinion, they're not making enough of the fact that, even with their open-source contributions, Meta's software manufactures discord and bigotry on a massive scale. Letting them federate with an instance opens floodgates on that and for the stealing and selling of Fediverse participants' data.

kalanggam,

I don't think you have anything to worry about; Kbin hasn't really been a huge vector (afaik) for spam/harassment. It's just those two instances in particular which were ballooning and creating a moderation challenge but all the admins are in conversation about pressing for better tools and refederating come that day

kalanggam,

Not currently, but it's been on the radar as a feature request. Not sure if anyone is actively working on it right now though.

kalanggam,

It doesn't feel empty to me, personally (just thought I'd be clear that this is only my opinion) but it is definitely somewhat slower than Reddit or some of the other Lemmy and Kbin instances that are out there. IMO, I think a lot of people coming to Beehaw who're acculturated to Big Social or Big Social-ish experiences are inevitably disappointed with the amount of content because it's not a massive stream of content being funneled into your feed anymore.

But I've been on the Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.) for about four years now and gotten used to the slower flow, that going to Reddit or some other Lemmy instances or Twitter now feels like I'm drowning or being inundated/overwhelmed with content which flows faster than I can give a due-diligence response to. Either I could say nothing, just vote, write a one-off low-effort response, get in a heated debate, or try to take the time to write something more thoughtful (and then by the time I was done with that, the moment would already have past or I'd get some smart-ass reply that would end the engagement for me). Plus there are some concessions involved in getting all that content delivered to you.

Some people like that but it's just not really for me anymore, it doesn't feel healthy. I like being able to slow down and actually talk to people, and I like that I can trust I'll see them again later. I like that I can post something and no matter whether it's popular or not, someone will engage, even if it takes time.

On the other part, I don't really understand how no downvotes is a "weird" decision; it's definitely not uncommon considering some of the subreddits I participated in on Reddit did the same thing. But in any event, Beehaw does have some posts/comments around explaining the reason for certain choices.

kalanggam,

I believe selecting a language filters what content you see, but many don't specify the language when they post so deselecting "unspecified" in your settings will actually hide a lot of/most posts.

I've selected the languages I speak in my profile just in case though. Some people select all of them.

kalanggam,

Hi! Unfortunately this is a known bug with Lemmy, but hopefully this will be fixed soon. For now, I've just been checking to make sure the post hasn't changed without my noticing.

kalanggam,

I mean quite literally that the post you've browsed to may be switched out with another one while you're writing a comment - I don't really know all the reasons why this happens, but it does revert when you refresh the page. It's like the post body you see is pointed at a particular post, but it suddenly will point at something else. So when you submit a comment, it will submit to that post instead.

What are your favorite browser extensions?

Ublock Origin is an obvious one, but I also can't stand not having Foxy Gestures anymore. It adds customizable mouse gestures, so you can set it up to have easy swipes to go back a page, reload a page, close a tab, etc, and it feels wonderful and smooth to use compared to just using the traditional buttons to do everything....

kalanggam,
  • uBlock Origin is pretty self-explanatory
  • Highlighter + Notes helps my ADHD a lot by letting me highlight important phrases in big blocks of texts, especially any articles or posts I might be reading and replying to
  • Archive Page for archive.today is also self-explanatory, I like using it to create permalinks or de-paywalled links to news articles
kalanggam,

Oh my GOD, this is a great recommendation! Thank you so much!

kalanggam,

You can find that here in a post by Lionir on discuss.online. I'll copy the contents of that post below for anyone who doesn't want to click through.

Here’s a laundry list of sort with tons of tools we’d like to see

  • Role for approval of applications (to delegate)
  • Site mods (to delegate from admins)
  • Auto-report posts with certain keywords or domains (for easier time curating without reports)
  • Statistics on growth (user, comments, posts, reports)
    • User total
    • MUA
    • User retention
    • Number of comments
    • Number of posts
    • Number of reports open
    • Number of reports resolved
  • Sort reports
    • by resolved/open
    • by local/remote
  • Different ways to resolved a report
    • Suspend account for a limited amount of time rather than just banning
    • Send warning
  • Account mod info
    • Number of ‘strikes’ (global and local) and reports
    • Moderation notes
    • Change email
    • Change password
    • Change role
  • Ability to pin messages in a post
  • Admins should be able to purge
  • Filter modlog to local
  • Better federation tools (applications to communities, limiting)
    • Applications to communities to allow safe spaces to exist (people should not be able to just “walk in” on a safe space - similarly to follow requests in Mastodon in a way)
    • Limiting (Lock our communities down from certain instances but still allow people using our instance to talk to people from those instances)

Obviously considering the moment when this is being made - federation tools are our highest priority.

kalanggam,

Welcome EP ❤️ I hope you enjoy this space, we're happy to have you!

kalanggam,

Welcome silver! Glad you've found us and looking forward to reading you and everyone's posts here 💕

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