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
That documents do not say what they were trying to censor doesn't change that they were trying to censor, though.
You might even believe this level of censorship and official nudging is good for society. Great! Then own it.
Healthy censorship, if there is such a thing, is healthy.
So let's support it instead of denying what we see with our own eyes.
Do you have many examples of journalists towing their owners' corporate lines?
Because the journalists I know in person are annoyingly loud about not doing that, and it seems like there are constant stories about journalists fighting their corporate owners, demanding everything from pay raises through more newsroom independence.
So what evidence do you really have to support your claims here? Because I really don't see it, AND I personally see the opposite really frequently.
Yeah, I'm critical of Mastodon for how it seems to have mainly been designed as a replacement for Twitter with even more restrictions rather than a broader platform to empower users above and beyond what Twitter offered.
Here you go.
ActivityPub references the ActivityStream types, and here's the list of predefined types, like Article, Audio, and Document.
AFAIK platforms are free to define their own custom types too.
https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#object-types
Same as anything, they're providing a service to viewers and selling advertising to make money.
Viewers are interested in the #TwitterFiles so they are providing the content in exchange for viewership.
Just like every other media outfit.
They understand publishing, though, where there are bills to pay and agreements to be made for access to proprietary information.
So they agreed, reasonably, to let a certain outlet have the scoop, and others could pick up the story and run with it from there.
There's nothing particularly odd or unusual about that.
That's not what the Great Barrington Declaration said.
No, it's an independent branch of government.
@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.
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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