volkris @volkris@qoto.org
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
@mattsheffield Keep in mind that posts like this come across as pretty hard gaslighting to those of us who read the #TwitterFiles releases for ourselves to see the revelation of government censorship and coercion.
It's like you're telling us that we didn't see the things that we read with our own eyes.
@braindouche a serious question: How do you explain socialist with anarchist tendencies?
To me it sounds like those should be in tension.
Quick answer is think of Fediverse as being like the internet.
On the internet you have email and web browsing and watching home security cameras and whatever else, they are all different separate things that go over the internet.
Well on Fediverse you might have one platform that's all about microblogging right next to another platform that's all about sharing pictures.
Same system with different applications coexisting.
Fortunately I'm not a fan of Trump and fascists, and that's to the point where I'm not even leaning hard enough in that direction to tell people what platforms they should be on.
Seems rather fascist to me to tell somebody where they should and shouldn't be!
@michaelcoyote @Azih @georgelakoff @gilduran
Keep in mind my specific example of journalists talking amongst themselves about how they don't get it, how they explicitly don't understand it.
I'm willing to take their word for it :-)
When I hear penal discussions from journalists talking to each other about how they don't understand their loss of respect in the public, yeah, that says so much to me!
But that is suggesting causality in correlation.
You're seeing journalists as mere autonomatons when in reality individual reporters will be rebelliously anti authoritarian to a fault.
These are human beings choosing to act in ways that turn off the public, acting in ways that they should probably knock off, and you can't pretend that's not a thing merely by looking at the financial situation of their employers.
It depends on the business, its products, its needs, and size.
One thing to keep in mind is that ActivityPub is so much more than just text tweets, so businesses can use it in all sorts of interesting ways.
For example, imagine a power company broadcasting machine readable stats on current energy usage. They'd likely want their own instance, probably a custom one, to streamline that automatically.
Meanwhile, the little lady down the road making custom handycrafts, yeah, she can probably use a hosted instance to post about her latest projects.
We don't need such conspiracy theories to explain this.
We can hear from journalists themselves, even ones I know personally talking in private, that they have these backwards attitudes that are reflected in their engagement with the public.
No, these people are making their own choices. We shouldn't let them off the hook by imagining sinister overlords.
Well it's complicated by the nature of ActivityPub being so open to diversity of interfaces.
What happens when you go from a text-based interface to one that's 100% music posts, for example? We can't expect that different services will have compatible features.
It's REALLY IMPORTANT to get the word out that nothing on #Mastodon / #Fediverse is truly private. People should not say things here that they wouldn't want the whole world to be able to see.
(And IMO this is a huge problem with the platform)
Mastodon lets you mark your expected level of privacy, but then it completely relies on good faith cooperation of others to respect that privacy.
I'm often really troubled because I know many people don't understand this, and they don't realize they're exposing themselves as they are.
@michaelcoyote @georgelakoff @gilduran Since I really don't care about #Twitter or #Musk, meh, I don't think it's that important to say anything about the rules on that site. It's a garbage site and not really worth attention.
I DO care about the state of #journalism, though, and I really wish journalists had more awareness about the reasons they've lost so much credibility in recent generations.
I don't know how many times I've heard panel discussions among journalists lamenting that the public just doesn't trust them anymore, and they don't know why.
This. This is why.
fediverse finances + my financial situation (mh-)
@PaulaToThePeople FWIW, I'd respond with the response I'd give any family member: really work on cutting your costs to find a more financially sustainable path.
Maybe you don't need to be paying for all of the things in that list. At some point it sounds like you won't be able to pay for them all, if your expenses are so overrunning your income.
Feel free to ignore this response as unhelpful, but I mean just a bit of positive encouragement: if you can get to a more balanced financial situation you'll be able to do even more good, and with less worry in life.
volkris
boosted
A friendly reminder that Mastodon is not a social network! It's one of many pieces of software that makes up this network, often called the fediverse. While Mastodon is the most used software in the network, it is far from the only one. Reducing the network to Mastodon only really misses the point and potential of this diverse network.
#fediverse #mastodon
#fediverse #mastodon
It's not hard to understand. I'll give you a hand:
The service has value to users regardless of who owns it.
Some of us are able to separate ideas like knowing when a service improves our lives vs caring about the feelings of someone involved in providing the service.
Some of us are able to avoid such obsession with guilt by association.
@georgelakoff @gilduran "Honestly, I was surprised Twitter would go after a local journalist with fewer than 7,500 followers."
That's really the key phrase.
#Musk said journalists have to abide by the site's rules too, that they aren't special and somehow above the rules.
This journalist was surprised by that.
And it pretty much proves the point Musk was making about #journalism.
I'm no fan of #Elon Musk, but I'm even less excited about journalists with inflated senses of themselves.
That's a great illustration of how journalists have lost so much credibility with the public lately, and they don't seem to get that.
But this misunderstands what insurance is.
Insurance is absolutely not about paying for healthcare. It is not a payment plan, or a savings plan. That's something different.
Insurance is fundamentally about managing risk, not payment. You're not buying healthcare when you buy insurance; you're buying temporary access to other peoples' money because you're afraid you might not have enough.
I really wish we had better financial education so that people better understood how this stuff worked.
Then we'd be able to make so much more progress in things like improving access to healthcare for all.
So long as people are mislead into thinking buying insurance buys healthcare, insurance companies win and our money is wasted.
And hey @skroobler I'm #QuotePost ing this using the feature on #qoto!
Yep, instances that give users more power and more features are able to participate in #Fediverse even if other instances leave their users hamstrung by questionable software development decisions of the past.
Quote posting allows us to built on other peoples' content, giving proper credit and adding value for all.
It was a silly decision to leave it out of #Mastodon
@FinchHaven@mastodon.sdf.org @shoq@mastodon.social Definitely not a dead horse. The ability to boost with additional context is a key feature of so...
volkris
boosted
Newspeak in the #Fediverse: “Discoverability is harassment.”
One way to think about #ContentWarning tags vs filters is empowering the end user or not.
If a person doesn't want to see a topic on #Mastodon they can add keywords to their filters, helping them manage their own feeds.
This functionality empowers them.
But adding content warnings everywhere, as many people demand, instead forces such content to be wrapped regardless of whether the end user would want it to be.
So many people have such strong opinions that content should be wrapped, and I'd say we should push back on that proposal.
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
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