kukkurovaca

kukkurovaca , 10 months ago

I assume OP was using an unmodified camera. The hot mirrors (IR blocking filters) built into modern cameras are extremely efficient, so it takes a lot of exposure to get an image past them.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

It’s pretty widely known and has been an issue for a long time. It’s not terribly hard to google for.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

Unsurprisingly given its extremely high profile as a purveyor of transphobic coverage, many mastodon instances have greeted them with a firm block. (If this confuses folks who don’t pay attention to this sort of thing, just picture in your head if it was fox news.)

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

The question is, if there are instances that are full of transphobic content, and they’re reported, does firefish defederate them. If they do, the view will improve. Although, global feeds are never very useful.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

They serve vastly different purposes. Lemmy would be a terrible place for people to chat about how their days are going, which is a key part of what microblogging platforms provide to be honest. And conversely, for structured conversations focused on specific topics, Lemmy has obvious advantages.

Beyond the basic structure, there are cultural issues with both that make them a bit tenuous for me.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

The iceshrimp fork actually came before the thing with .art broke and seemingly had to do with issues internal to the calckey development community. It’s hard to say for sure what the situation was because most of the stuff on both sides was pretty vaguely stated.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

I posted a medium-short summary elsewhere with a couple of links for folks looking for slightly more context.

I don’t think the eris or defederation things are Huge News in themselves, but if it’s true he doctored a screenshot to make the .art admin look bad, that’s not a good look for a lead deve/flagship instance admin.

.art is an influential leader in community safety/moderation standards in the fediverse; their standards for federation are moderately high, and probably higher than folks on many lemmy instances would likely agree with. But it feels like the firefish guy has possibly a pattern of not doing his homework about things in general?

Obviously the big question is, did he actually doctor screenshots and if so, WTF, man.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

The actual issue is, that as an instance admin who had previously been in the loop for some time with #fediblock and other channels in which admins share this kind of info, folks expected him to already have disqordia blocked.

Also, it seems from his posts elsewhere that he actually was aware and didn’t care. Ample reason to defederate from .art’s perspective. (Firefish.social has subsequently silenced but not blocked disqordia)

All of this is relatively routine, the screenshot fabrication thing more unusual.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

Welcome to the fediverse! Instance admins are under obligation to federate with every other instance possible, and are also under no obligation to do everything in their power to recapture the reddit experience.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

I feel like finding a good instance in the fediverse (that’s accepting users) is always a nightmare.

That being said, I’ve been happy with the vibes on lemmy.blahaj.zone and they have a calckey/firefish instance (that’s the main blahaj.zone). But it’s not strictly general-purpose.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

Who browses the local timeline on a large fediverse instance lol.

Anyway, reality is bad and we’re living in it, so I have relatively little patience for people who complain about doomposting. There’s a lot of doom out there.

If folks want to only see good news, start an “only good news” community (assuming this doesn’t already exist) and just stick to your subscribed communities view.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

Firefox, but make it wet

(I don’t know if it’s a worse than “calckey” tbf)

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

mas.else.social/

Someone checked and there’s already an existing trademark for Firefish in software specifically, at least in Europe. Apparently they make HR solutions of some sort.

jobs.firefishsoftware.com/…/meet-the-team.aspx

ohno

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

We need the Lemmy equivalent of fediblock so we can post this for everyone to defederate

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

It’s going to be incredibly necessary in the long run. Decentralized means some proportion of important communities are going to be on servers that will eventually be shut down for various reasons. Not everybody who’s running an instance now will run it forever, but there may be communities with important conversations that folks will want to preserve.

Mastodon has account migration and Lemmy community migration should work similarly.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

No disrespect to the blahaj admins at all (I’m on lemmy.blahaj.zone rigth now!) but safe spaces for queer folks aren’t automatically safe spaces for non-white folks and there’s a lot of historical pain and drama about that on the fediverse

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

Does it have to be calckey specifically? If not, ubiqueros is misskey and rage.love is hometown. Blacktwitter.io is running normal Mastodon I think. Fediverse party lists neovibe.app (Mastodon) as Black-run. Weirder.earth (Hometown) has strong antiracist moderation but I don’t know the composition of the mod team offhand

I remember seeing a recently formed Black queer instance being posted about but I don’t remember the name, and of course because it’s Mastodon there’s not really a way to search for it 🙄 but I’ll see if I can find it edit got it: blackqueer.life, running Mastodon.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

Not sure if there’s still interest here, but just saw this:

mastodon.art/

ubiqueros.com/notes/9hp228mcdv

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

Tech also involves corporate $$, “disruptive” (read: anti-worker) innovation, etc. the general skew of tech as an industry seems center-right to me plus lots of tech bros fully engaged (sometimes “ironically”) with the alt right.

At the local level, tech bros form natural partnerships with right wing interests around gentrification and policing.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

From an opsec standpoint, certainly. Or they’ll kick in your door like the Kolektiva admin. Definitely best to use end to end encryption if you have any need to protect yourself from state actors. But also fuck meta

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

There are many different visions for “success” of decentralized projects, some of which require/imply explosive growth and some do not. There are also some goals, such as diversity and inclusivity, which can have complicated relationships with the concept of “growth.”

I want all kinds of people (that are NOT BIGOTS) to be join the fediverse, participate safely and form their own communities[^1].

To achieve this, it’s beneficial for it to be easy for folks to join the fediverse at all, e.g., being able to easily find an instance and sign up for an account and not worry about the infrastructure or instance politics, and critically to be able to easily find one another and interact. These are also features that just fuel userbase growth generally.

But to sustain it, it’s necessary to have strong moderation (which in turn requires a manageable workload for mods) and to keep large pools of bad actors in check. It’s also important on a safety basis for many users to be less discoverable because high discoverability of marginalized users results in high rates of harassment by bigots. These are features that support a better and safer experience for people who are in the fediverse.

These things are directly in tension, which makes it very difficult to have a healthy fediverse. The result on Mastodon has been a bifurcation of “successful” (by different definitions) instances into, on the one hand, very large but poorly moderated instances with garbage fire local timelines but lots of people and lots of content to interact with, and, on the other hand, smaller, well moderated instances that flourish internally but can be hard to join or to interact with if you’re on one of the large instances.

Both models exert exclusionary forces in their own ways. If you keep everyone in your federation, and that includes nazis, then you are de facto participating in driving people who are targeted by nazis off of the network. But if your happy little closed instances are impossible to join and has a constraining monoculture, then a lot of other nice folks may get left out.

There’s not an easy solution to this. The situation for lemmy will be similar in some ways and different in others. The piece that worries me particularly is that instance politics questions become potentially more charged due to the fact that instances are hosting the communities[^2] and not just the users, plus there’s not yet a way to migrate communities.

[^1]: in the sense of social connections generally, not just “community” as a lemmy feature [^2]: In the lemmy feature sense

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

I don’t know that a formal charter is required, but I do think that it is important that all instance admins do a couple of things:

• Develop and publish a moderation policy in some form
• Determine and publish criteria by which they decide when to defederate from another instance

There isn’t one right answer for either of those things, and the point isn’t to ensure everybody passes a purity test. It’s to set expectations for users on the instance, users on other instances who may participate in communities on the instance, and other instance admins.

Well-thought-out policies will be copied and forked by other new instances, and that will create consensus communities of instances that are at least on the same page when it comes to how a site is supposed to work.

It will also be helpful for the community to be able to talk about things like what instances have a lot of bad actors or poor moderation, something similar to #fediblock on Mastodon. The issues that mods face and that individuals targeted for harassment face are often invisible to the average joe user, and can also be invisible to admins if they aren’t actively encountering reports themselves. #fediblock creates a place – sometimes fractious, yes – where folks can ensure that those issues are visible and give admins an opportunity to determine whether or not they need to take action.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

One of the things that’s very funny to me is when free speech absolutists confidently assert that defederation, a standard practice and indispensable tool of the fediverse, is inherently tragic and destructive, and that people who don’t want to be in federation with the worst people and entities imaginable should leave and start their own protocol. (It would actually make more sense for those folks to leave and start their own platform where it’s impossible to defederate.)

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

I’m not on lemmy.world, but I’ve joined some communities that are. I think an important question is, for any community mods who take this stance, do you plan to shutter your lemmy.world community and move to another?

This situation is one reason why it’s important to get tools for community migration into Lemmy. (Another is: what if an admin simply has to shut down their instance for personal reasons?)

(Also FWIW there’s already reason to defederate based on the garbage moderation even if you’re not concerned about EEE, so I don’t get admins who are in “wait and see” mode.)

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

As others have said, nothing.

Mastodon has a sort of lightweight verification which just signifies that you are to some degree in control of the URLs linked to in your profile. So for example, if you have your own domain or something that people associate with you, then you can use that in your profile to show that it’s you. Of course, that depends on that domain meaning something to the end user, and the end user being savvy enough to, for example, know that someone could get the .com version of your .net domain, etc. etc.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/Uj38P8mXdU.png

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

FFFF

it’s time to move things forward

Also, this bit in particular is very funny to me:

however they’re never going to be able to advertise to most people in the fediverse, who also happen to be some of the most knowledgeable people in some fields.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

I guess we’ll have to escape to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

Defederation is an important tool and is part of what makes the fediverse work. In my experience, people who are strongly defederation averse are mostly either quite new to the fediverse or have the relative privilege of never having to really deal with bad actors especially en masse.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

The more the merrier for the Fediverse and if you don’t like it, join a smaller project or find one with the privacy policy that suites you. defederate

The good thing about decentralized platforms is that you don’t have to immediately cede the public square to corporate ownership or resign yourself to sharing space with the worst bad actors.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

That’s not what gatekeeping means.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

Gatekeeping is keeping someone without access/power on the outside. People who are already running instances have by definition passed the gate.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

Indeed, that is not gatekeeping. It’s applying social and moral pressure. Similar to a boycott campaign, protest, etc. Such methods are intended to discomfit and inconvenience. They’re used in situations where being nice and getting along are determined to be nonviable strategies for getting the desired result.

Those methods in themselves are morally neutral; the question is, are they employed for a reason which justifies and necessitates them, i.e., how serious is a thread does Facebook pose to the fediverse. (I think it’s reasonable to take facebook as an evil seriously and to not give them an inch.)

Some people are very entrenched in their opinion and I wouldn’t be surprised to soon see posts with “We must defederate from everyone who federates with Meta”.

That’s definitely already happening. This is a normal part of federation, tbh. Instances block instances that federate with bad actors because they want to limit as much as possible their exposure to/involvement with those actors, as well as to place pressure on others to do the same. Obviously not everyone considers facebook to be a bad actor, but it’s not surprising that those who do would act accordingly.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

This has already been happening with Mastodon for years. It creates a need for instance admins to stay on top of defederating from those instances, and from instances that refuse to defederate from those instances. It doesn’t particularly impact public perception of Mastodon overall.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

I’ve also observed this issue with stuff on lemmy.ml not making it over, I assume because the servers are just too slammed. It’s not exclusive to lemmy.world. (Although it does seem to be the worst with lemmy.world.)

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

BTW, you can force the server to see a comment by searching for the URL of that content, but this obviously only works if you know the comment exists. I don’t think there’s a user-side way to trigger the server to look for contents en masse. Not sure if it’s something that the instance admin can configure.

kukkurovaca , 11 months ago

I think the use case and the default expectations about search are pretty different on Lemmy, but I can definitely see this being a potential point of friction, particularly since most content is actually structured by community rather than instance, and in many cases it would make more sense to exclude stuff based on the community it’s posted to or the individual user than by instance. (But I’m sure that wouldn’t be immediately technically feasible.)

kukkurovaca , 1 year ago

New signups have been crashing Cohost for much of this morning, and it looks like a lot of folks are seeing new Mastodon users as well

kukkurovaca , 1 year ago

It's just so many websites to log into. I would really to see a fediverse app that unified timelines from multiple accounts.