Brian Beach has moved @bwbeach@qoto.org

The task of a healthy publicly owned rail company is this:

To run as many trains as possible, within the financial constraints under which it operates

Note trains. It’s not “transport as many passengers as possible on the fewest number of trains”

That 5am train with a dozen building workers on it, or the last train home in the evening *matter for the trust and reliability of the system*, even if those individual trains make heavy losses and are largely empty

My feelings as I scroll through #Mastadon:

1. I have no idea what all these people are talking about.... IT, coding, video-gaming, sub-cultures in-jokes I do not get....

2. Omg I feel so seen... I experience that exact #Autistic #ADHD #ND thing too! Validation🎉

3. Oooh pretty flowers.

4. Whoa, that reminds me how lucky I am to live in Ireland.

5. More cats..... Neutral feelings.... Oh wait that one is actually very cute.

6. Yay Star Trek stuff!

@ddritter

Twitter:
*I make a post at 9am and go about my day
*A racist replies with racial slurs at 9:15am
*Everyone sees the racist replies
*Everyone reports the racist replies
*Twitter mods take it down by 10am
*I check Twitter again at 11am, and never even see the racism!

Masto:
*I post at 9am
*Racists reply in such a way that only them and their followers see the racism
*So no one reports it
*Everyone gaslights me with "I don't see racism here!"

https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke /111012743709881062

Maybe Jesus came back, and it was Mr. Rogers, and we didn't deserve him.

D’oh, the climate catastrophe is bad for business, not just people: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-08-02/a-1-trillion-time-bomb-is-ticking-in-the-housing-market

This is so mind-blowing to me that this doesn't rate as an absolute emergency.

"A critical system of Atlantic Ocean currents could collapse as early as the 2030s...

New research, which has been peer-reviewed but not yet published in a journal, uses a state-of-the-art model to estimate when it could collapse, suggesting a shutdown could happen between 2037 and 2064.

This research suggests it’s more likely than not to collapse by 2050."

#ClimateCrisis
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/02/climate/atlantic-circulation-collapse-timing/index.html

Great 👎

Federal Appeals Court Rules That Fair Use May Be Narrowed to Serve Hollywood Profits | Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/federal-appeals-court-rules-fair-use-may-be-narrowed-serve-hollywood-profits

Dahlia Lithwick writes of “years of doomerism and nihilism…foisted on the country by a determined and omnipresent sense that MAGA was not just inevitable but undefeatable (even in defeat)”

“Experts on authoritarianism have been warning for years that fostering hopelessness, powerlessness, and political depression is a deliberate tactic of most totalitarian leaders”

☝️☝️ THIS ☝️☝️

I keep saying: Despair is surrender. Cynicism is surrender. Nihilism is surrender.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/harris-trump-2024-kamala-vibes-trumpism-loses.html

I've been participating in the fediverse for about 8.5 years now, and have run infosec.exchange as well as a growing number of other fediverse services for about 7.5 of those years. While I am generally not the target of harassment, as an instance administrator and moderator, I've had to deal with a very, very large amount of it. Most commonly that harassment is racism, but to be honest we get the full spectrum of bigotry here in different proportions at different times. I am writing this because I'm tired of watching the cycle repeat itself, I'm tired of watching good people get harassed, and I'm tired of the same trove of responses that inevitably follows. If you're just in it to be mad, I recommend chalking this up to "just another white guy's opinion" and move on to your next read.

The situation nearly always plays out like this:

A black person posts something that gets attention. The post and/or person's account clearly designates them as being black.

A horrific torrent of vile racist responses ensues.

The victim expresses frustration with the amount of harrassment they receive on Mastodon/the Fediverse, often pointing out that they never had such a problem on the big, toxic commercial social media platforms. There is usually a demand for Mastodon to "fix the racism problem".

A small army of "helpful" fedi-experts jumps in with replies to point out how Mastodon provides all the tools one needs to block bad actors.

Now, more exasperated, the victim exclaims that it's not their job to keep racists in check - this was (usually) cited as a central reason for joining the fediverse in the first place!

About this time, the sea lions show up in replies to the victim, accusing them of embracing the victim role, trying to cause racial drama, and so on. After all, these sea lions are just asking questions since they don't see anything of what the victim is complaining about anywhere on the fediverse.

Lots of well-meaning white folk usually turn up about this time to shout down the seal lions and encouraging people to believe the victim.

Then time passes... People forget... A few months later, the entire cycle repeats with a new victim.

Let me say that the fediverse has a both a bigotry problem that tracks with what exists in society at large as well as a troll problem. The trolls will manifest themselves as racist when the opportunity presents itself, anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-furry, and whatever else suits their fancy at the time. The trolls coordinate, cooperate, and feed off each other.

What has emerged, in my view, on the fediverse is a concentration of trolls onto a certain subset of instances. Most instances do not tolerate trolls, and with some notable exceptions, trolls don't even bother joining "normal" instances any longer. There is no central authority that can prevent trolls from spinning up fediverse software of their own servers using their own domains names and doing their thing on the fringes. On centralized social media, people can be ejected, suspended, banned, and unless they keep trying to make new accounts, that is the end of it.

The tools for preventing harassment on the fediverse are quite limited, and the specifics vary between type of software - for example, some software like Pleroma/Akkoma, lets administrators filter out certain words, while Mastodon, which is what the vast majority of the fediverse uses, allows both instance administrators and users to block accounts and block entire domains, along with some things in the middle like "muting" and "limiting". These are blunt instruments.

To some extent, the concentration of trolls works in the favor of instance administrators. We can block a few dozen/hundred domains and solve 98% of the problem. There have been some solutions implemented, such as block lists for "problematic" instances that people can use, however many times those block lists become polluted with the politics of the maintainers, or at least that is the perception among some administrators. Other administrators come into this with a view that people should be free to connect with whomever on the fediverse and delegate the responsibility for deciding who and who not to block to the user.

For many and many other reasons, we find ourselves with a very unevenly federated network of instances.

Wit this in mind, if we take a big step back and look at the cycle I of harassment described from above, it looks like this:

A black person joins an instance that does not block m/any of the troll instances.

That black person makes a post that gets some traction.

Trolls on some of the problematic instances see the post, since they are not blocked by the victim's instance, and begin sending extremely offensive and harassing replies. A horrific torrent of vile racist responses ensues.

The victim expresses frustration with the amount of harassment they receive on Mastodon/the Fediverse, often pointing out that they never had such a problem on the big, toxic commercial social media platforms. There is usually a demand for Mastodon to "fix the racism problem".

Cue the sea lions. The sea lions are almost never on the same instance as the victim. And they are almost always on an instance that blocks those troll instances I mentioned earlier. As a result, the sea lions do not see the harassment. All they see is what they perceive to be someone trying to stir up trouble.

...and so on.

A major factor in your experience on the fediverse has to do with the instance you sign up to. Despite what the folks on /r/mastodon will tell you, you won't get the same experience on every instance. Some instances are much better keeping the garden weeded than others. If a person signs up to an instance that is not proactive about blocking trolls, they will almost certainly be exposed to the wrath of trolls. Is that the Mastodon developers' fault for not figuring out a way to more effectively block trolls through their software? Is it the instance administrator's fault for not blocking troll instances/troll accounts? Is it the victim's fault for joining an instance that doesn't block troll instances/troll accounts?

I think the ambiguity here is why we continue to see the problem repeat itself over and over - there is no obvious owner nor solution to the problem. At every step, things are working as designed. The Mastodon software allows people to participate in a federated network and gives both administrators and users tools to control and moderate who they interact with. Administrators are empowered to run their instances as they see fit, with rules of their choosing. Users can join any instance they choose. We collectively shake our fists at the sky, tacitly blame the victim, and go about our days again.

It's quite maddening to watch it happen. The fediverse prides itself as a much more civilized social media experience, providing all manner of control to the user and instance administrators, yet here we are once again wrapping up the "shaking our fist at the sky and tacitly blaming the victim" stage in this most recent episode, having learned nothing and solved nothing.

If you're in computing, read this. https://harihareswara.net/posts/2024/a-story-about-jessica-by-swiftonsecurity/

the less snarky version here is that a lot of things make sense to have in the deploy pipeline but you have to know why you're doing them. I usually view it as collecting factors of confidence for your hypothesis that a change is good (I wrote about it in more detail at https://unwiredcouch.com/2019/04/02/factors-of-confidence.html) and you get different factors of confidence from different tools. It's choosing tradeoffs and not cargo culting that gets you there.

What's amazing to me about this article/study is that after discovering mentions of "AI" make people less interested in products, their recommendation is "so you should not call attention to the AI in your marketing". The idea of simply *not doing* the thing that people don't want is apparently never considered. We cannot conceive of a way of constructing software other than "develop for the investors" https://xoxo.zone/@vwampage/112881383051537497

We watched Kamala Harris' speech in Atlanta on YouTube, and it was just extraordinary — her pitch-perfect message casting liberalism as patriotism, her taunting of Donald Trump, and just the sheer joy she brought to the proceedings. I was impressed with her body language and comfort level as well. I don't think we've seen anything like this for a long time, and I just hope it can continue. https://www.youtube.com/live/gCaBznoWNfk?si=vSAeKr8UT1SBgf5k&t=5009

I wrote about how Senate Democrats are spearheading an effort to brief online influencers on key policy initiatives instead of relying on traditional media. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/30/democratic-senators-influencers-laws-initiatives/

As a software engineer, I have wanted to see something like this happen FOR YEARS. It's long past time that makes of shitty software start being held accountable by their users.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/29/delta-hires-david-boies-to-seek-damages-from-crowdstrike-microsoft-.html

#CrowdStrike #Tech #Microsoft #BSOD

Hey guys, you don’t need a mother, sister, or daughter to care about women’s rights. It’s so nice to hear a man say, when asked “why do you support [policy that impacts women and girls]?”

“Because women’s rights are human rights. And I care about and support all women.” Not just because you are related to one.

I see a lot of people talking about technical solutions to racist attacks on Mastodon. I used to do that too.

I was wrong.

Yes. There are things that could be done to improve technical protections. Signup validation, proactive moderation, visible replies, limiting who can reply.... But those don't actually solve the problem.

The problem is us.
The problem is what we allowed our community to be.

The tech community has a lot of racists in it. Some are billionaires. Many of those billionaires fund and support explicit racists and eugenicists. When these people, and those who want to emulate them, suffer zero consequences for their racism (and they almost always do), they get more brazen and more explicit. For some it's a thrilling game to see what they can get away with. For others it's a deadly serious ideology.

We need to make it clear that VCs, developers, managers, and influencers who don't take racism seriously won't get hired. That their companies will be boycotted. That nobody will work on their projects. It's not enough to not be racist. We need to be proactively anti-racist, and we need to hold everyone we work with to the same standard.

And when I talk about fighting racism, I'm not just talking about someone saying the n-word. The guy who says, "We don't allow politics in our company/project" has just stated that they are perfectly fine hiring and funding a racist, even if it drives others away. The company that says they don't need a DEI initiative because it "doesn't help the bottom line" has just told their employees that being biased is perfectly fine. You know what they call someone who sits down to dinner with Nazis; if you enable one, you are one. Every step backwards is one more racist who feels empowered to step out of their dank closet.

And fighting them has a cost. We may need to turn down opportunities, and be attacked in response. It's no accident that a lot of the Black (and LGBTQ+) folks who receive the most attacks are the same ones who stood up to their organizations, who called out and continue to call out the racism and bias, and who daily pay a price for it. The message is clear. "Do what they do and we'll make an example of you too."

All of this is going to be harder than we want, because the racists hold a lot of the purse strings. But the tech community is our community, we live here, and we're responsible for making it safe for others.

And I don't want to see one more post saying, "I haven't seen it myself, but...". If you're not seeing it, go out and search for it. Or turn around and look at your own organization and see how you can make it better. We can't cleanup Mastodon without cleaning up the entire community; it doesn't exist in a vacuum.

And yes, you can replace "racist" in what I wrote with any other fascist ideology. They are all cut from the same cloth, and a follower of one invariably joins the others as well.