Eric J. Korpela @SETIEric@social.cleverlibre.org

So this is my second proper day of Mastodon.

Boost if you are staying. Are you happy here? Reply to boost your account. 🖖

This is a big problem for Mastodon.

Canadian journalist Erica Ifill just had her mastodon.online account suspended without explanation. She's been sharing stuff critical of Mastodon re: intersectional issues.

I get the decentralized structure and idea that each server has its own rules. But this Reddit-style moderation, where moderators with god-complexes make mysterious and arbitrary decisions, is going to cause people migrating to Mastodon to flee in droves.

https://www.presscheck.org/journalists/erica-ifill

In Citizens United, the conservative justices asserted that political money can only be regulated to prevent corruption, and that "Ingratiation and access...are not corruption."

Some have speculated that the justices were naive and didn't get how politics really works.

But this story suggests the opposite: that some justices are politicians in robes who are perfectly comfortable with a system wherein the wealthy and well-connected can buy both access and influence.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/us/supreme-court-leak-abortion-roe-wade.html

At an LGBT club inn Colorado, five were killed and 25 injured in a shooting by the grandson of a MAGAlomaniac state rep who praised January 6th.

In Arizona, an elections official has gone into hiding after death threats.

But to the GOP, crime is Hunter Biden’s laptop.

I stumbled upon the New Apostolic Reformation—a massive & underreported dominionist movement—while investigating who had spread the Big Lie after Rs had blocked efforts to improve the security of the 2020 election. @jennycohn w/ @MindShift2018@mastodon.world #NAR #dominionism #ChristianNationalism #ChristoFascism #7M #7MM
https://mindshiftpodcast.co.uk/?p=3357

Understanding #Mastodon gets easier once you get the basic idea that federation between servers can be understood as homeomorphisms across hyperplanes between the Riemannian manifolds of toots, whereas the servers represent countable finite sets of discrete entities.

"Our reporting is nonpartisan and independent. We challenge power structures that hurt our state and keep Mississippi 50th on just about every list," Kimberly Griffin writes.

https://www.mississippifreepress.org/29151/a-truly-free-press-in-mississippi-is-vital-to-american-democracy

The 22-year-old Colorado Springs mass shooting suspect is rumored to be the grandson of California State Assemblyman Randy Voepel - a San Diego-area Republican who has vocally supported the January 6th insurrection.

Starting to understand why charges were never filed regarding the suspect’s previous bomb threats.
https://heavy.com/news/anderson-lee-aldrich/

I've just learned - through two sources on the Solar #Eclipse Mailing List - that the legendary #solareclipse scientist Jay #Pasachoff has died this morning of cancer at age 79. "Outside his family, he didn’t let on that he was sick," writes Rick Feinberg: "He just kept looking forward to the next solar eclipse and his next class of students, which [his daughter] Deborah says is how he managed to keep going in the face of a terminal diagnosis." See https://www.facebook.com/groups/SolarEclipseChasers/posts/5797014940320731/ for personal memories.

https://www.propublica.org/article/dark-money-leonard-leo-barre-seid
If I was a betting person, I’d say that the most dangerous man in the U.S. is Leonard Leo. This article spells out why. Yes, it’s from August.

Weirdly, I don’t have The Sunday Night Fear for the first time in ages. Either the drugs are kicking in, or it’s because I’m ramping down my time at The Other Place.

I've only been here 9 days, but I think Mastodon could use a decontamination chamber for some #Twitter migrants. There's been an uptick in aggression and angst here in recent days, which I guess is to be expected given the long-deteriorating culture of the birdsite. But isn't that what we're trying to leave behind?

Advice to newcomers: Take a moment (or two or three). Look around. Remember why you left the other place. And think about what you can do to make sure this is a far better one.

Greetings. I'm an armchair student of history (not just tech history), but given that I've been involved in the development of the Internet continuously since the early DOD ARPANET days (so, technically before there *was* an Internet) I'm watching the Twitter->Mastodon migration (and the nightmarish, shameful disintegration of Twitter itself) with considerable interest indeed. There is no historical precedent that I know of, and what's happening is even more remarkable given that it has been precipitated by a single chaotic individual in a matter of weeks.

The high speed with which I see social graphs rebuilding here is fascinating, and we can be sure that there are a bunch of PhD theses and books in the future that will attempt to explain all of this for future generations.

Sometimes when you're living through significant historical events it's not obvious except in retrospect, often many years later. What we're living through now with Twitter is clearly significant history, from technology, business, social, and other standpoints.

And even if Mastodon turns out ultimately to be a steppingstone on the way to other social media models able to scale far upward more easily, it is playing a crucial role now in providing a "lifeboat" for Twitter users who are unable to stomach what is happening to that firm with every passing day.

For all its many faults over the many years, we built the Internet to be resilient. And what we are seeing today is that not only has the technology met that goal from ARPANET onward, but thanks to the Internet's vast numbers of dedicated and caring users, even a monstrous train wreck like Elon's Twitter can't bring it (or us!) down.

Thank you all! -L

Think the main difference between the two platforms is on Twitter when you make a joke you get one haha and two death threats, whereas on here you get one haha and someone earnestly explaining the 6th century origins of the specific road that particular chicken crossed. Yet to decide which is more distressing.

I would not blame the stochastic terrorism on "hate" or "division." I would use the words "Republican Party."

This is from Scientific American, earlier this month.

What looks likely to have happened in CO (being cautious bc I don't want to get ahead of the facts) is stochastic terrorism. This was predicted. It was inevitable. We have been screaming about this, in the LGBTQ+ community, and this is likely far from end, we'll see more and more, because the anti-trans rhetoric was always leading to this.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-stochastic-terrorism-uses-disgust-to-incite-violence/

Okay #mastodon …I’m new to this place. What are some tips to get started?

Once thought to be extinct, there are currently only about 400 takahē in existence. Therefore this image of a juvenile and their parent sadly contains a whopping half a percent of the world’s population.

#wildlife #birds #nature #bird #BirdPhoto #photography #RareBirds