@kissane@mas.to
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kissane

@kissane@mas.to

Working on governance, risk, and social patterns across federated systems. Previously: COVID Tracking Project + Mozilla Foundation + editorial and community advocacy in tech and culture orgs.

I want our tools and networks to be better in more ways for more people in more places. Also: Books, care, plants, very old bones, humane journalism, magic as technology.

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

kissane, to Futurology
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This week, I went over to Bluesky and asked people who'd left Mastodon why they left, and lots of people told me. I grabbed the replies and crunched them and wrote up a summary. I think it's really interesting and often kind of wrenching.

https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt

kissane, to coffee
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Hey coffee fedi, my aeropress has died again (plunger shrank, is weeping gross oil 🙃) and I kinda don’t want to keep making coffee in plastic, even when I’m traveling.

Does anyone have better, ideally non-plastic travel press recs from personal experience? Search results are hard to trust and I can find little french presses but they are so goopy and messy. (And I love you, pour over people, but I cannot deal with all that on the road.)

kissane, to random
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OK fedi, I want to make sure I'm not missing things—please point me to the best arguments on how decentralizing/federating content moderation + other safety work improves outcomes for humans in a world where fedi scales up fast over the next year, compared to centralized networks.

(For adversarial stuff incl spam, CSAM, coordinated inauthentic account networks/influence campaigns, hate speech, semi-pro trolling, professional and non-professional disinfo, covert adversarial instances, etc.)

kissane, to random
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If you want to destroy your brain with frothy SV technocapitalist rhetoric as well as the news this week, this would be a fantastic starting point. I’ve been staring at it for awhile and I’m just going to have to come back to it later.

https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

kissane, to random
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I needed to understand the angles on Threads federation in a more rigorous way, so I took a few days to think through and write up my sense of the benefits, risks, and available risk mitigations, along with loopholes that need closing and questions to discuss with fediverse administrators.

This is a blisteringly hot subject for me, so it's hard to keep my head cool enough to understand other people's trade-offs, but I'm trying.

https://erinkissane.com/untangling-threads

kissane, to random
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Some Personal News

kissane, to random
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Do the people stating that Meta can’t possibly “monetize” posts originating from other fedi services not believe that Threads users are going to experience, for example, Mastodon posts as part of their Threads timeline…which is algorithmically populated and will get monetized as soon as Meta flips ads on?

Is there any documented reason not to believe that this is not the most likely outcome?

kissane, (edited ) to random
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A thing I see a lot from super smart people with whom I generally agree is that you can't fix people problems with technology

And I get the vibe so much—I agree that tech ~solutionism is never going to work!—but I feel like attending really carefully to understanding and remediating the bad incentives and affordances of the techno-cultural systems we're swimming in gets thrown out with the, uh, bathwater

kissane, to random
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Without looking it up—and if it’s not your actual job to know—where would you guess Twitter/X sits on the global top 10 social media platforms ranking? (Ranked by monthly active users.)

kissane, to random
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Ozone, Bluesky's stackable moderation system is up and open-sourced.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderation

I think it's interesting in obvious ways and risky in some less obvious ones (that have less to do with "O NO BILLIONAIRES" or "O NO LIBERTARIANS" and more to do with placelessness), but we'll see.

I hope good things emerge from/grow on top of this framework.

[I recognize that mentioning this is widely considered to be an invitation to explain capital like I am a tiny baby. You could also not.]

kissane, (edited ) to random
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If you're involved in tech in some way—very broadly defined—could you give me a very quick no-Googling-to-refresh-your-memory answer to this to help me calibrate a thing I'm working on?

"What I know right now about what happened with Facebook in Myanmar during the Rohingya crisis in 2016-2017 is…"

kissane, to random
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A few weeks back I encountered a FOSS guy here explaining that when he sees open source devs ask for money, he blocks them and then stops using their code because they're morally wrong and he only wants to work with tools made by people who are doing the work for the right reasons. (I'm paraphrasing to avoid indexing the post.)

I've resisted writing about it because I'm slammed, but the question I can't shake is: Who benefits from the ideology of "pure" volunteerism?

kissane, to random
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My copy still isn't here yet but I am EXTREMELY SO PSYCHED about @jomc's WRONG WAY, which is getting top spot on my holiday-break GTR* stack

It's @EndlessBookshelf's book of the year and an excellent holiday gift contender 🎁

Coverage:

https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780374610661

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a45823821/joanne-mcneil-wrong-way-interview/

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/11/wrong-way-joanne-mcneil-book-review/676028/

Powell's still has copies! https://www.powells.com/book/wrong-way-9780374610661

(* Get To Read)

kissane, to random
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standing athwart my shelf full of books on Roman logistics and necromancy yelling Stop https://hci.social/@cfiesler/111080868938138045

kissane, to random
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so excited to have everyone watching the CDC ACIP meeting livestream with me this round, it's really—

touches earphone

oh, ha, sorry yeah no I thought you were waving at me but you were—haha, yeah.

kissane, to random
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Just posted part one of my series on Meta in Myanmar:

https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup

…and a little meta-post with notes about names and sourcing and all that stuff:

https://erinkissane.com/meta-meta

This series is what I've spent a good chunk of the last few months—and all my available hours in the past month—researching and writing.

I'll probably do a real thread tomorrow, but I am very grateful to have the thing up there.

Three more parts to go over the next few weeks. 😬

kissane, to random
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Dear internet please get someone to do a reported piece on the Grace Hopper conference disaster about how that was a failure of event management bc holy shit was that a failure of event management

kissane, to random
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Genuine, non-snarky question for devs building things on ActivityPub: Is the idea of "socializing" technical changes/add-ons just…kind of not a thing in this slice of FOSS?

In my experience, this stuff varies widely across subfields and projects, and I guess I'd expected it to be table stakes ~here, but maybe not?

kissane, to random
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I migrated servers last week and boy did I develop some strong opinions about migration and the as-yet only semi-fulfilled promise of account portability.

If you're thinking about moving instances—or you'd like to know yet more about my dreams for better networks—here's a post you might want to read:

https://erinkissane.com/notes-from-a-mastodon-migration

kissane, to random
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I tried to reverse-engineer my scrambled footnotes in Obsidian and what I've learned is that when it "reindexes" the footnotes, it's literally separating pieces of each note and scrambling them into other notes, so like the article title for note #1 is now combined with the publication name from note maybe , the date from noete , and a content warning from somewhere else. (I was using the main footnote plugin and Linter, nothing fancy.)

I…have never seen anything quite like this!

kissane, to random
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one of these days I'm going to do something about how little serious book chatter there is on mastodon and then you'll all be sorry 👾

kissane, to random
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Women of fedi! Drowning in waves of condescending reply guys!

I see you and hope to be able to swap blocklists at some point. I'm glad you're here.

kissane, to random
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I’m in the process of moving all of a parent’s credit, banking, online ordering, and medical accounts over to my phone number bc they (my parent) can no longer deal with five-step logins and mandatory SMS codes across wildly inconsistent patterns and hoooooo boy are the tech companies and systems unprepared for what is about to hit them, generationally.

It took five phone calls, three codes, and two emails to change just one account over.

kissane, to random
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Advance apologies, this request is going to be a mess, but I’m looking for literature on learning to hear, prioritize, and usefully act on relevant warnings at the institutional level.

I’m writing about tech while reading about Libya now and Beirut in 2020 but this obviously applies to every part of the world. There are endless examples of failure. I’m looking for the opposite, and specifically for narratives that avoid the Lone Cassandra valorizing.

kissane, to random
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This book review is going to give me nightmares for the rest of my life

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-chinese-history/article/was-there-an-administrative-revolution/AD2E74A82073AAEAA5105E946BA17823#fn23

(via Ted McCormick on Bsky)

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