ALAN LAVENDER @lavenderlens@social.cleverlibre.org

Please read and share. It’s time we stop talking about “how hard” it all is, and shift the discussion to “how important” it all is.

“Journalists (And Others) Should Leave Twitter. Here’s How They Can Get Started”
by @dangillmor@twitter.com via Techdirt

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/04/journalists-and-others-should-leave-twitter-heres-how-they-can-get-started/

The best New Years Eve story is the English town of Scarborough cancelling its fireworks display in order to avoid disturbing a visiting walrus.
#NYE #NewYearsEve

In just a few short hours it will be completely legal to write, distribute, and profit from story about Dracula, Winnie the Pooh, and Sherlock teaming up to fight crime together. What a time to be alive!

A nice view of Clew Bay from Croagh Patrick. A holy site since pagan times.Some believe the older name for the mountain ( Cruachán Aigle) is connected to a pagan harvest deity, the dark god Cromm Crúaich, later known as Crom Dubh. #pagan #holymountain

this goes out to every newly sober alcoholic who made it through their first new year’s without a drink. i remember mine vividly and i’m super proud of you. keep going. it keeps getting better. 🖤🖤

I'm leaning towards informal evening gown.
#HappyNewYearsEve #JoinIn

For the SF Chronicle, I wrote about getting canceled from #twitter (& switching to Mastodon):

It’s an honor to get canceled by Musk, who is welcoming neo-Nazis back to Twitter while banning reporters. Still, it’s admittedly terrifying to see him cross the bright red line of declaring outright war against freedom of the press.

Twitter has become a virtual simulation of authoritarian rule.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/elon-musk-twitter-ban-censorship-17680044.php

@QasimRashid There are literally hundreds of millions of white folk that do want to hear about ways we can reduce all of those bad things. I work with them. We don't need everyone on every issue. It's cool.

But don't aask me "What do you mean Mastodon is not welcoming to Black folk?" And then in the very next breath, say, "Yeah, yeah, I'm sure Black folk are mistreated, but I don't want to hear about it! CW that garbage! It's making me sad!" Just be real, and only say the second part.

"Racism is so bad?! I didn't know!" Is a cop out. It's a crime in two parts. The first part is intentional actions that people take to make sure that they don't know how bad the racism is.

Sometimes it's in 3 parts. Party A makes sure that Party B doesn't know how bad the racism is. Then party B can happily enjoy life while party C is brutalized. That's the whole CRT debate, and the Texas board of education in a nutshell.

Willfull ignorance is not the same as innocence.

So I've moved!

I live at hachyderm.io now. Unfortunately, I can't recommend mastodon.cloud anymore. The typical user might not be able to navigate what I did. I'll explain in the next post behind a Content Warning, because it's not nice.

But new neighbours, what's good! 🙋🏿‍♂️

Here a video of the current eruption at Mt Etna by Active Nature "Michele Mammino"...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrBgXA8tjGY

🤬
---
RT @Naser_zazai1
#BreakingNews
Taliban banned Afghan girls from University high education in Afghanistan.
After banned teenager girls from school, now they closed high education universities for Afghan girls.
#Afghanistan #education
https://twitter.com/Naser_zazai1/status/1605237182570156033

I just watched my neighbor's dog chase its tail for 10 minutes and I thought to myself, Wow dogs are easily entertained. Then I realized, I just watched my neighbor's dog chase its tail for 10 minutes.

The TL;DR of the Twitter files is this:
Certain foreign governments have been known to engage in hacking to obtain dirt on politicians, which they then leak around election time to influence voters (remember the DNC leaks? That was Russian Intelligence). Social media platforms are aware of this, and are actively working to try and limit foreign intelligence agencies ability to influences the public via these 'hack-and-leak' operations.

Several US government agencies track this from the intelligence side (monitoring the people doing the hacking and leaking). It makes sense for the government to give a heads up to social media platforms about potential upcoming influence operations so the platforms can get ahead of it. In the case of Hunter Biden's Laptop, this is what they did. The heads up resulted in several platforms basically deciding to flat out block links to the story altogether. US politicians on the side who would have benefitted from these leaks tried to frame it as government censorship (The FBI simply gave a heads up to social media platforms, but didn't state how the story should be dealt with, as that would be a clear cut violation of the first amendment).

The Twitter files is just data pertaining to the legal process from the FBI working with companies to notify them of influence ops. None of the released files suggest any censorship, and it's mostly just really boring internal politics. But, the current Twitter CEO knows that people on Twitter only read headlines, so by adding their own commentary to the releases, they can spin it in such a way that people will believe there's some big conspiracy afoot.

A cuppity on prescription is all I ever wanted 🫖🫖🫖 #Tea #Cuppity #TeaLover

My intro from 2017 is a bit outdated so hey! I'm Fi and I am a 3d environment artist for games 👋

An irregular reminder that calling this place "Mastodon" has a bit similar energy as saying "I just sent you a GMail."

"Fediverse" (or "fedi") is a better term.

Mastodon is just one of many software projects that talk to each other to create this multi-instance social network:
https://axbom.com/fediverse/

(kudos to @axbom for this fantastic infographic!)

There are blogs, Reddit-like communities, video instances and many more, all part of fedi.

#TwitterMigration #NewHere

What in the world is nuclear fusion — and when will we harness it? - To create fusion ignition, the National Ignition Facility’... - https://www.theverge.com/23508872/nuclear-fusion-power-clean-energy-breakthrough-explained