Mastodon absolutely needs more journalists. We should not have millions of people boosting one another’s ideas without a solid contingent of people in here professionally trained to vet stories, check facts, and use best practices for sharing news. It is, imo, an urgent issue & critical for the ongoing success of the fediverse #Press
I have zero patience for “no change” traditionalists in this space. the one thing standing between us and a whole lotta hurt is people practicing fact checking, professional thoughtfulness, and journalistic rigor at scale and everywhere.
yes we need to be able to text search public posts, quote toot, and increase ease for users. sorry there is no room for viewing fedi as your private hobby, the world needs fedi to work well for journalists and organizers
@seachanger is there any resource out there that teaches people those fact checking and general journalistic best practices?
I’ve been thinking that I need to find something like that to train my own writers and to share with other marketers. Because of the nature of our work, we end up having prominent voices and yet none of us have good training on any rigor associated with bias or source-vetting.
I only know what I do cause I took some journalism classes
dude can we talk about how many white cis het women are dealing with left or center left husbands spouting alt right talking pts rn? this is an epidemic
OTOH dudes listening to other dudes (esp ones that look like them) has been a huge part of the entire problem. I'd actually love to see males actively normalize and promote as sexy and "manly" the idea of men realllllly listening to women for gawd's sake!
I'd -love- to see men tell other men to shut the hell up so they can more easily listen to, and follow the leads of their wives or gf or other non men.
@BlackAzizAnansi tracks! i actually lost several former white friends to Covid denial. they were on the left fringe and are now just Covid libertarians — many white people under stress come back to our default programming turns out
@seachanger #dogsOfMastodon Our rescue pup, who found himself at a loose end when, following the first Covid lockdown, his owner went back to work. He took himself on walks and ended up in the pound. His owner, I'm told, surrendered him in tears after three or four of these visits, knowing that he needed someone who'd be home with him a lot more. And so he came to us.
I always wanted to communicate better with dogs but didn't know that it could be like this.
never forget: we didn’t ask for robot cars. when polled US majorities have always wanted action on climate, good public transit & safe streets. but our leaders act without our consent.
last year, 78% polled wanted increased investment in US passenger rail, a number that went to 80% among women and 82% in cities and 91% among Black people. this year, 76% polled in the US said they are afraid of self-driving cars & just 9% say they trust them and that number is declining year to year
when you look at all the conflicting currents of our transportation desire as expressed by polls, markets, and popular conversations, it can feel opaque and chaotic. but i think it's really simple. we want to feel safe, healthy, and happy, but billions of dollars are invested in convincing us those feelings can best be found in several $35,000 SUVs per family, even if that forces debt and the loss of leisure
my biggest complaint about AI is we didn’t ask for it. zero popular movements took to the streets to demand AI. no one sat around kitchen tables lamenting how hard life is without AI.
what people want is health care, housing, climate change solutions, etc We sit around kitchen tables wondering how to pay for college, get loved ones the psych and addiction support they need, or help the people on our streets who need homes
AI should be like the James Webb telescope. put a team together and we will decide if your proposal is of sufficient social value to warrant use of the machine, otherwise sorry you can pay an illustrator a living wage to make art for the story
honestly we didn’t need an app for everything in 2010 and we don’t need AI for everything now. all we have ever needed was to tax the rich and take care of people
I literally get more texts from random democrats across the country asking for money than I do texts from my own elected democrats asking me to help organize my neighborhood, that’s a problem
I’d walk my block and knock doors but you never ask me to, you don’t have materials or training for me. you don’t have a system for building a bottom up movement, you only have a system for asking people who don’t live here to give you money 🤔
“Ok so mastodon/fediverse is like a city and you need to pick a neighborhood to live in in order to get started. from there you can stay in your hood or travel as much as you want to… “
@seachanger I guess - except from an end user perspective, especially an end user who is here for the conversation among the people they choose to follow - the instances are a small research stumbling block when setting up an account but otherwise irrelevant. There’s some shorthand value in assuming people on Alaskan.social or akhepcat are people in Alaska whom I might reasonably encounter IRL - but people can indicate that in their profile on any other instance too.
the only argument we should be making for mastodon at this point is that you can post as much ass and vag as you want and as long as you mark it and use the CW feature no one cares because a)we own it ourselves and make our own rules and b) no one is trying to make this a safe space for Brands™
@Robotron@gocu54@lisamelton “there’s more to mastodon than asses and vaginas!” is a great slogan and should not be overlooked by john mastodons marketing staff
kinda makes you think about all the parts of being human that are scrubbed out and literally marginalized/demonized as we get kettled into brute force capitalism. our daily lives should not be utterly shaped and sanitized in service to a few white guys needing extra super yachts
boarding the #alaska state ferry Columbia tonight at 3 am with my truck and my dog and heading 1300 miles down the inside passage of AK and BC as i have been doing for the last 20 years or so. i will live toot when i have service because for me, the alaska state ferries are a kind of church and i am a kind of fundamentalist and missionary
My current fave painting aboard the floating Alaskana museum that is the ferry M/V Columbia: this original #DianaTillion done in her trademark octopus ink. I just LOVE it
Tillion came to #Alaska with her family in 1939 on a 90 ft ship, studied #art in Paris and NYC when she grew up, and returned to Alaska to become a celebrated painter, sculptor, author, and poet
If you’ll indulge me on some meta (why not you’ve come this far) let’s think about why it matters that a state-funded public ferry is suffused both with community art works and the personal touches of its quirky, long term, unionized workers. If it’s not clicking, I’ll tell you: THIS IS APEX HUMANITY. the Columbia is a relic of a time and place(s) in which a citizen- powered government valued the arts, the common good, and its own workers. It’s a vanishing alaska and worth savoring
ok I was just doing errands on my bike and ended up behind this truck with a stuffed mastodon mounted on top. obviously I chased the driver down to ask for a pic. turns out she’d just found it on the side of the road and liked the way it looked strapped to her truck
The US gives more funding to Israel than we do any other nation, annually and cumulatively.
Meanwhile, Israel’s government-run, universal healthcare system ranks among the best in the world, and the US’s health care ranks among the worst of developed nations. More than 40,000 US citizens die annually due to lack of health care coverage.
“The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality, and among the highest suicide rates. The U.S. has the highest rate of people with multiple chronic conditions and an obesity rate nearly twice the OECD average.”
Let me be clear though, the US is still spending far more money per capita for our broken healthcare system than Israel pays for its highly efficient healthcare system.
Switching to a Medicare for all type system in the US could save us billions over a decade, even conservative think tanks have come to that startling conclusion.
I know mastodon has issues, I know the fediverse is basically a prototype of what it could be. I know it’s annoying when people are snobby about masto despite its faults.
But for real, if we want this shit to succeed, we’ve got to also love what is good here and be growing it. That doesn’t mean yelling about how all other social media sites suck. It means focusing on what we’re getting right here, listening carefully to complaints, and putting a little energy into solving problems
@Zeb_Larson@seachanger I really love that Mastodon is mainly real people doing or sayings real things without the need to have to sell something.
For as long as I am here, it is really refreshing and relaxing.
So unless, if suddenly, everybody that I follow is leaving, it is already a success for me.
@seachanger@Em0nM4stodon I just love the coincidental nature of mastodon and getting to know more folks out there the more you start looking and following — it’s kind of building your "algorithm"