bonifartius 𒂼𒄄 @bonifartius@social.cleverlibre.org

A world where we don’t trust anyone and where everything is a monetary transaction is a world, in the words of Oscar Wilde, that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

In case you’re wondering, “fuck blockchain” is what I’m saying.

Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany http://demoscene-the-art-of-coding.net/2021/03/20/demoscene-accepted-as-unesco-cultural-heritage-in-germany/

That’s very cool.

Please boost this post if you would like the EFF to join the fediverse.

In a survey the EFF sent me, I suggested they create an account on the fediverse, so they can reach more supporters and support innovative free software that promotes interoperability among platforms, something they've advocated for in the past, too.

If you can boost this post, maybe I'll be able to show them that there are quite a few users who would like them here!

The EFF is the infamous nonprofit organisation that fights for privacy, government transparency, and digital freedom. Their fight is very important, and the EFF is very special to me. https://www.eff.org/about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation

You can see some of their work here https://www.eff.org/work

In the meantime, you can follow @eff, which is an unofficial mirror of their Twitter.

A telegram group where people trade links to the hottest discords.

Do you use an RSS/Atom reader?

Boosts appreciated for sample size :)

>I saw mood swings, you just withdrew.

Gee, I wonder why. Why would somebody withdraw from others while experiencing depression? Maybe because they felt that they couldn't talk to those around them and they were right. Because when they tried to reach out, it was minimised. Maybe their parents weren't interested in knowing because it triggered them. Maybe the only way to feel safe was to withdraw. Nah... it's just mood swings and chemical imbalances. Nothing to see here.

@bonifartius meanwhile even from the end user perspective, stuff that worked 30 years ago still works just fine if not better than the modern alternatives (TeX, SQL, graphviz, mutt, both major text editors, &c.)

It's funny enough to respond to this nonsense with "OK then when are you going after the browsers?"

But please remember, the people instigating these problems are saying "Don't worry, those come next"

If you do not fight for your freedom, they will take it away from you.

Oh wow.

"Finnish astrophotographer J-P Metsavainio has released a Milky Way photo that took him nearly 12 years to create. The 1.7-gigapixel image has a cumulative exposure time of 1,250 hours."

https://petapixel.com/2021/03/16/photographer-spends-12-years-1250-hours-exposing-photo-of-milky-way/

#Space #Images #MilkyWay #Galaxies

@evilscientistca

@funny
Me as I food shop on my diet...

what the fuck? these fucking idiot artists using tech they barely fucking understand with no regard

Tusky: Censoring people

Me: Please don’t do this, censorship harms marginalized people the most

Tusky: Yeah right, Nazi

Google: Censors Tusky

Tusky: NOOOO I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY IS THIS HAPPENING???

POV you are watching a pentest in action

@freemo That's great. You've managed to strike a very delicate balance in a philosophical minefield that is constantly contracting.

And how ironic that the safety of the LGBT community was threatened not by maintaining a link with the perceived threat, but by breaking that very link and becoming unable to keep a spotlight shone on it.

'Know thy enemy' didn't become an adage for nothing.

This is the myopia of censorship, and it's as applicable to the digital world as it's ever been to the corporeal.

You can ban speech, but speech is merely the verbal expression of thought; and you simply cannot eradicate thought, no matter how repugnant you might find the doctrines it sometimes espouses. All you achieve is driving it from scrutiny into the shadows, where it festers and grows with ever greater resentment.

More importantly, you drive a stake through the heart of constructive discourse, too; which is why it's tragic to witness the succumbing of so many academic institutions in the West to the practice of creating safe spaces, where ideas can and must go unchallenged, and anyone foolhardy enough to issue such a challenge is punished by being summarily deplatformed.

This is how the USSR used to operate, and for reasons I will never understand and would not even believe possible, had I not witnessed the emergence of the phenomenon first-hand, this is what many people in the West now also aspire to: a culture in which free thought is suppressed, either semi-voluntarily via peer pressure, or under direct duress.

The town square has undergone a seismic shift in recent years, a process catalysed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Public discussion no longer takes place in open spaces, be they physical or virtual, but has slowly moved, one brick at a time, behind the walled gardens of big tech.

And people have foolishly done it to themselves over the last 15 to 20 years, shifting all of their content away from the public digital space onto platforms that require an account to read it, and/or editorial control over it before they will print it.

A few powerful companies in Silicon Valley are now very much the arbiters of free speech, with no government or even industry oversight to prevent the abuse of that power. And these are not neutral entities, but corporations with a very well-defined agenda run by demagogues with delusions of grandeur.

Most people have yet to even wake up and realise just how much freedom they have surrendered.

I always imagined that people would go screaming into the night when Big Brother finally came to assert total control over their lives. Never did I consider the possibility that they would surrender without a fight in exchange for the illusion of a free lunch. A Faustian bargain if ever there was one.

Anyway, I'll rant all night if I build up a head of steam, so I'd better quit here and save the rest for an endless diatribe of toots some other day.

@ianmacd We put a lot of effort into being respectful well behaved members of the wider community. So I'm glad that can be seen.

We actually had a rather unique history with our stance as free speech. Early on when GAB came ont he scene is when instances started to push other instances to defederate with anyone they didnt like. As such you get a few instances with massive block lists of pretty much any instance that federates with any instance they block, and then any instance that federates with them, ad nauseum. At the time we were stuck to make a decision, get cut off from short sighted but well intentioned instances, or start censoring our users view of the fediverse. So it entered a debate here in our very early days as an instance.

It turned out that the LGBT community were actually the ones that convinced me of a free speech stance, which is ironic as many of the LGBT instances are the ones that ultimately took a block-first mentality. What had happened is LGBT servers were very heavily blocking instances that exhibited anything remotely resembling intolerance. This left very few LGBT friendly instances that were free speech and as a result we had a sort of exodus of LGBT scholars joining QOTO (and boosting our early numbers).

It turns out the LGBT community had a strong voice when we opened the discussion up to the community. Many of them explained to use that they came here because they monitored hate-speech accounts on GAB and other places to identify doxing within their community and other threats and warn the members of their community. So they felt their safety was at risk on other servers, they also didnt feel safe on other free speech instances since hate was common on those servers and didnt want to be on a hate speech instance. So they urged us to not block other instances, and ultimately the community agreed and we remain free-speech.

It is also why we implemented features like subscriptions, specifically for the LGBT communities safety and others in a similar position as them. This way they can get alerts of the public posts from threatening accounts they monitor without actually needing to follow the account and alerting the account that they are following them.

Its just really sad how some in the LGBT community have ultimately used that against us, that we went out of our way to take the heat for the LGBT community at the time only to see a small number of people use our decision as a weapon against us. Thankfully its a small minority of servers today, but still it was sad to see.

For what its worth QOTO is one of the most heavily connected servers in the fediverse. Last I checked we were in the top 10 of english speaking servers.

"A Peer Review of TODAY’s Gen Y Speaks Op-Ed ‘I Don’t Want to be Woke’"

https://www.ricemedia.co/current-affairs-commentary-peer-review-todays-gen-y-speaks-op-ed-i-dont-want-woke/?fbclid=IwAR3otnHig2gX0oSTVko0l50IozIn-fLDjdoE-oDFTbJr0YdTHvQLFbirqBk