Notices by Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)

Dear folks in tech,

You don’t have to literally pull a trigger to erase vulnerable people from existence. You can do it with just a few keystrokes. And pave the way for those who will pull the triggers.

Withhold your keystrokes.

Use your keystrokes to resist.

Your keystrokes can kill or they can protect.

Your keystrokes will determine the person you have to live with for the rest of your life.

#fascism #doNotComply #resist #tech #dev

@RickiTarr Thing is, the fediverse is ideal for journalists as a means of emancipating themselves from corporate hegemony.

It’s just not great for PR hacks posing as journalists.

Me: Free software licenses should include ethics clauses.

Folks: Don’t be silly, you can’t put restrictions on licenses like that. It’s unworkable.

Apple: You can only run this operating system on hardware I sell.

Folks: Sounds good to us, sir. Whatever you say, boss!

If our only answer to unethical licenses is indifferent ones—as opposed to ethical ones—I don’t see how we win this. I feel the offhand dismissal of ethical licenses in technology has been and is a mistake.

#foss #ethics

#fediblock #mastinator

A site called Mastinator (https://mastinator.com) has started aggregating and republishing toots without permission. It creates accounts with your handle and follows you to get your toots (e.g., @aral@mastinator.com, which, just to make clear, is not me).

A billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist setting up a fediverse account isn’t the win you might think it is.

Who do you think funds and benefits from the Twitters and Facebooks of the world?

We can’t stop these folks from setting up their own servers but please don’t feel a need to federate with them or subsidise their existence on servers you pay for and maintain.

And remain vigilant against embrace, extend, and extinguish.

#billionaires #vc #SiliconValley #mastodon #capitalism

@cgervasi “Having high net worth” makes it sound like “having blond hair.” We’re talking about billionaires here who are the poster-children for capitalism and the colonial mindset, cancer-like tumours on society, increasingly fascistic in their actions and the enemy of social justice and equality. So, yes, if there’s anything we can do to de-amplify their voices and impact in this space, I would argue that it’s in the best interests of the rest of us to do that.

@pfadintegral I believe this wins the fediverse for today.

If you see a surveillance capitalist affiliation proudly displayed on someone’s profile here on the fediverse, ask “are you proud to work for them and why?” “Do you realise this space exists in reaction to the toxic, exploitative, and extractive spaces created by surveillance capitalists like your employer?”

#surveillanceCapitalism #fediverse #corporateCapture #activism

1/n

When I visit someone’s @pixelfed profile, I only see a “login” button, not a “follow” button that I can use to (remote) follow them from anywhere else on the fediverse.

Similarly, I don’t see any way to comment from my own fediverse instance (just “Login to like or comment.”)

Am I missing something?

(I know I can copy the URL into my instance’s search feature but that’s an entirely hidden gesture.)

#federation #fediverse #remoteFollow #decentralisation #pixelfed #interoperability #design

@Vivaldi Hi folks, nice to see this.

In the spirit of keeping the fediverse decentralised, would you be open to agreeing to a maximum size (e.g., N active accounts) for your instance from the outset? (And what’s the N you’d be happy with?) Thanks!

#fediverse #decentralisation #smallTech #smallWeb #vivaldi #mastodon

@Vivaldi @jon Well, Opera was sold to a Chinese consortium for ~$600 million if I remember correctly so let’s leave that to one side :)

My worry is seeing posts like this https://social.vivaldi.net/@daniel/109347059648513928 and that you’ve already extended Mastodon by providing log in with Vivaldi accounts. (This makes perfect sense for you and the people who use the browser of course but it already gives Vivaldi an experience advantage.) So I’m thinking what other features could be added to Vivaldi to extend Mastodon?…

@spacekookie @jon @Vivaldi This is also good question. And what kind of growth. Because vertical scale is very different to horizontal scale.

One idea of growth is having several million people on vivaldi.social. Another is having several million people, all with their own instances. And there are likely gradients in between (e.g., small instances for interest groups, local communities, schools, families, etc.)

Fediverse server admins: have you considered putting a limit on the number of people that can join your instance?

If not, please do.

(This should really be a feature in fediverse servers like Mastodon, etc. “Max occupancy” or something with an auto-shutoff when it’s reached.)

Remember, small is beautiful ;)

If nothing else, I’m sure none of you want to become mini Zuckerbergs or Musks – eww – so let’s make sure we set the right incentives from the start.

#fediverse #scale #smallness

Well, that’s that, then.

#twitter

@simsa04 Thanks; I believe we’re both following each other :)

Optimising #Mastodon = designing flows that encourage people to leave mastodon.social for other instances, not accepting any more new members on mastodon.social, and making design changes that limit how much a single instance can scale.

A single instance that can scale to host hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people, is not a design success in decentralisation, it’s a design failure. (It’s a design success in #BigTech.)

CC @Gargron

#decentralisation #centralisation #federation

We should not be optimising Mastodon so it can handle more people per server. We should be optimising Mastodon so it incentivises more serves with fewer people.

(And if you take that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, you arrive at the idea behind the Small Web: https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/)

#decentralisation #federation #fediverse #SmallWeb

Food for thought: The bigger mastodon.social gets, the less successful the #fediverse is.

Sadly, the fundamental design of Mastodon mirrors the design of Big Tech (a server architecture that can support hundreds of thousands of “users”) and thus inherits its success criteria.

I feel it’s time we at least started thinking about what the web would look like if we all had our own place on it and what it would take to get there from here.

#decentralisation #centralisation #fediverse #SmallWeb

Just discovered the Anti-Capitalist Software License (ACSL)

https://anticapitalist.software/

I like the gist of it but I don’t understand why it doesn’t include a “share alike” clause that says you should give back to the commons if you take from it. As I see it, that’s a core requirement if we want a healthy commons. Worker-owned cooperatives, not for profits (like Small Technology Foundation), etc. should not be enclosing things and competing with proprietary features but cooperating and giving back.