ML2 @mathlover@social.cleverlibre.org

A 20-year-long Indigenous-led movement to undam the Klamath River just won the largest river restoration project in history! FERC unanimously voted Thursday to remove the four lower Klamath dams starting next year! The salmon are coming home for the first time since 1918.

Hearing strong indications that lawmakers will try to move the Kids Online Safety Act (#KOSA) during the "lame duck" session. This is a terrible bill that won't make kids safer online but will subject them to censorship and surveillance. It could lead to biometric age verification, widespread removal of LGBTQ+ content, and a bunch of other bad crap. Very few civil society groups have spoken out against it. We need #LGBTQ groups especially to sound the alarm. Plz help spread the word if you can

U.S. Supreme Court clears way for lawmakers to get Trump's tax returns https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-clears-way-lawmakers-get-trumps-tax-returns-2022-11-22/

It’s good to see engagement and use growing here. It would be healthy to have a social platform free of the billionaire oligopoly and the corporate ad folks, don’t you think?

Making a home for myself at Mastodon after a decade on Twitter. Love to make the plunge but where is everybody? #manuscripts people seem hard to find, as are #medievalists. I will jump if you are!

@llebrun Mastodon has rules against discrimination. The owners of those servers cannot always see them. It is up to us to flag these #Horrible actors and help kick them out.

I currently have no plans to start a Hive Social account. Its privacy policy is hugely lacking. It was allegedly created by a person named Kassandra Pop who now goes by Raluca—that's all I could find so far. And it has two employees (Raluca and a full stack engineer), neither of whom appear to specialize in security. Gonna roll the dice and hold out on this one.

And here is @Gargron addressing the moderation issue outlined above.

Some bigger questions about how these systems are set-up, but at least someone is stepping forward and showing accountability:

https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109383947978442853

Update: Good to see @Mastodon being responsive and I'm sure it was an innocent mistake, but these mistakes keep happening and they point to deeper issues with the approach to moderation over here that really need to be worked out. A lot of responsibility is left on the shoulders of volunteer mods. Things could be more transparent and less arbitrary.

I hope people take some of these concerns that have been surfacing seriously rather than just tell people to go find a different server or whatever

It’s about time we showed up here.

We’re The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that’s skeptical about Big Tech. And there’s a lot to be skeptical about right now.

Twitter's Monetizable Users, Not Human Rights, Matter Most Under Musk’s Rein, Leaving Behind Vulnerable Communities Who Made Twitter a Critical Platform For Speaking Truth to Power

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/twitters-monetizable-users-not-human-rights-matter-most-under-musks-rein-leaving

#ReadingAccessibility #ContentBlocking #SocialNetworks #FreeSpeech #Privacy

The first black child ever allowed to attend a white school is only 68 years old now.
White parents pulled their children from school. White teachers refused to teach her.
Ruby Bridges now works as an activist & public speaker
This wasn’t a million years ago. /1

Perfect introduction of Mastodon by @jeffjarvis. Worth reading. https://medium.com/whither-news/on-joining-mastodon-d539eed5e41a

Whom do I know at the US Digital Service? It would be good to have a mastodon.gov instance, as a way to verify that toots are actually coming from US government agencies. (Other countries should change the domain suffix appropriately…)

Like I was telling a friend, seeing folks scrambling for whatever social media life raft they can find, and it's painful to watch.

At first #mastodon was pushed, and many moved over, but for the rest, "iT'S ToO CoMpLiCaTeD".

So, yesterday #cohost was the new hotness.

Today it's #hive.

Tomorrow...?

Going from one ruined, disgraced centralized service over to ANOTHER centralized service so we can do this dance all over again.

Worse, they aren't actually vetting the sites. Zero thought goes into what these fly-by-night opportunity vultures are actually like. Who's behind them? How long they can realistically stay up? Any 4-bit asshat can boot up a pretty Twitter-clone.

At least with #Mastodon if the guy running your server turns out to be an asshole, you can just hit the bricks and move elsewhere. Good luck doing that with whatever flavor of the day you flocked over.

The beast will still be here, at least, when the next apocalypse happens

Wrote up something explaining just why Elon's latest actions on Twitter were so problematic. It's not so much the final decisions (even as those are bad), but the process that shows his lack of concern about anything other than himself. That's no way to do content moderation.

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/21/its-not-the-decision-but-the-process-musk-the-trump-decision/

Just read the interview that @Julia did with @adamdavidson. It was interesting to see Mastodon from a journalist's eyes. Even more importantly, journalists who understand what Mastodon is.

But I'm not here to give them applause.

I want to focus on this quote from @adamdavidson because it's the first time I've seen such a mainstream journalist admit this publicly, and it is truly shocking to see!

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/can-mastodon-be-a-reasonable-twitter-substitute-for-journalists/

Does your ISP offer IPv6?

boost for visibility, thanks

Surveillance Doesn’t Make Kids Safe. Tell your lawmakers and \@SenSchumer to keep #KOSA off must-pass legislation. https://www.fightforthefuture.org/actions/surveillance-doesnt-make-kids-safe