@kissane@mas.to
@kissane@mas.to avatar

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 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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Given all the Threads discussion there is one short thing I need to say.

The simplest tech-world thing I learned from the whole Meta in Myanmar project is that Meta is WAY more callous, deceptive, and incompetent with the life-or-death things that matter the most than even most of their critics understand.

https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series

1/2

kissane,
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They build all kinds of safety capacity but the human-value-extraction machine at Meta’s core will always outrun it because the company is led by people with nothing at all where their ethics should be.

I was very careful in the series to try to keep my feelings largely to one side, but these people have so much very real blood on their hands and I think the whole grotesque organization is deeply, meaningfully unholy and I think no one should fuck with it ever at all.

[2/2]

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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Over the next two weeks, I'll be publishing a series of four (well, 4.5) posts about Meta's role in the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar.

Part I is up now, along with a little meta-post with notes on terminology and sources and ct.

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

https://erinkissane.com/meta-meta

These posts are aimed squarely at people like me and my tech-world peers—people who work on and care about social technologies.

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, (edited ) to random
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If you’re a US adult and have covid or flu, welcome to national free telehealth (and paxlovid if needed).

If you’re uninsured/underinsured, on Medicaid or Medicare, or get VA or Indian Health Services care, you can enroll without a positive test and get free Lucira tests sent to you in the mail.

I’m all about infection reduction but nothing is certain for anyone and this is kind of a big step forward.

https://www.test2treat.org/s/?language=en_US

ETA: Muting thread, good luck! 💙

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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How the US press got rolled on the Claudine Gay scandal by known bad-faith operatives who explained exactly what they were doing, as they did it. (I'd emphasize that this worked especially well against Gay because she's a Black woman.)

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-campaign-to-remove-the-president

See also CNN's coverage, which features a straightforward—if only semi-coherent—rewrite of Rufo and Brunet's oppo research.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/20/business/harvard-president-claudine-gay-plagiarism/index.html

(Ed. note, I'm muting this post immediately to maintain a productive brain.)

kissane, (edited ) to random
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We already try to eliminate single-use plastics but this was what finally tipped me from “Ugh I don’t have time to worry about completely avoiding plastic” to “Jfc fine everything’s going in glass or metal.”

https://www.bonappetit.com/story/can-you-put-plastic-in-the-microwave

ETA: Muting thread, good luck out there.

kissane, to random
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It shouldn’t need saying that any path that runs through murdered kids (anyone’s kids) and grandmas (anyone’s grandmas) isn’t leading to a better world.

Or that the hatred of Jewish people for their Jewishness is so real and terrifying and dangerous.

Or that Palestinians deserve the same freedom to make a good life as everyone else.

Or that every atrocity is wrong and worth trying to prevent.

I feel so choked with grief but when these ideas are controversial it feels necessary to speak.

kissane, to random
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Hi fedi! @darius and I are digging into our governance research, and we have a great starter list of server admins to potentially talk to about governance and administration models and challenges, but very unofficially, I’d love to hear suggestions, too.

We’re looking at active servers ranging from ~100-2,500 users with some flex on either end of the range, and we’re building our list with an eye on structural, geographic, demographic (along multiple axes), and linguistic diversity.

kissane, to random
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Today is the day @darius and I finally get to announce that we're in the new @DigInfFund cohort of projects, researching fediverse governance, so I…wrote about trees (nominally about the big root questions, but it's always trees, really).

https://erinkissane.com/root-and-branch

kissane, to random
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Starting a couple of weeks ago, I've been publishing a long—but I think briskly paced!—look at a specific piece of recent technology history, which is the role that Meta, Facebook, and the internet more generally played in the persecution and genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar.

I've made a landing + acknowledgements page for the whole series here:

https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series

kissane, (edited ) to random
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If you’re doing US-based events for women in tech, especially if your events are NB and trans-inclusive, you need to be paying a whole lot more attention to security than most events do. Get some paranoid infosec women and a real physical security presence. Safety planning right now should make everyone sweat. And don’t do events in states where your attendees are exposed to legal and medical harm. 🤦🏻

ETA: This went wide enough that I’m into the long tail of bad replies, muting now. <3

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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Hey friends, @beep's exceptionally good, concise primer on unionizing your tech workplace, You Deserve a Tech Union, is ALMOST HERE.

(I've read it and it's excellent and of course Ethan's the best.)

You can pre-order it here, and there's even a link to email the publisher if you need a pricing accommodation. https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union

Or there are lots of other ways to support the book: https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/street-team/

kissane, to random
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A thing that I would love to get across about unpaid tech work, rolling your own [x], and running only the purest and most secure technical systems, is that if you add up enough factors like:

  • raising kids;
  • chronic illness or disability;
  • caring for sick, disabled, or dying family members;
  • community service;
  • a non-technical job

…just for starters, the tech stuff is going to get triaged way down the list. And a lot of those factors are not evenly distributed, demographically!

kissane, to random
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Hey it’s that time again.

The contention that using high-filtration masks to prevent transmission of respiratory disease is “unscientific” and “lacking evidence” when we have reams of aerosol and transmission studies is a display of either unawareness/scientific illiteracy (super fixable! non-shameful!) or of an intentional disregard of the evidence for emotional or ideological reasons (common but troubling).

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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The ultrasonic humidifier I use when my lungs get gnarly sent a push notification with a look back at our household's special moments of 2023, I am going to do a crime

kissane, to random
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Madeline Miller, author of Circe and one of my favorite living writers, on the increasingly stigmatized fight to avoid reinfection while dealing with long covid:

“…how long am I going to do this? Until indoor air is safe for all, until vaccines prevent transmission, until there’s a cure for long covid. Until I’m not risking my family’s future on a grocery run. Because the truth is that however immortal we feel, we are all just one infection away from a new life.”

https://wapo.st/3s1vP2i 🎁🔗

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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service cancellations are all now negotiations with truculent demons

  • crap discount offer
  • I banish you
  • meaningless price change
  • I banish you
  • major discount offer
  • I BANISH YOU
  • true form appears, snarling, breaks the contract, disappears in clouds of chatbot
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