volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@FuckElon it's like asking who's going to stop Trump from flying from city to city merely by flapping his arms like a bird.

It's not possible. Who's going to stop him? Reality.

Trump doesn't have the option of being a dictator. Nobody needs to stop the guy from doing something he can't do anyway.

@uspolitics

@jupiter_rowland oh it's even "worse" than @mikedev indicates.

A basic design choice of the Fediverse protocol is that ANY content that leaves the origin instance goes into a wild west where nobody has technical ownership of the content, period.

As Mike said, you can delete content from your own instance, no matter where the content came from, but you have no way to require anyone else to delete the content from theirs.

So even if you start a thread, don't like how it's going, and then decide to delete it, you have no way to enforce the deletion. The thread is free to continue on other instances.

Basically, you can send out a deletion request, but nobody else has to respect the request.

And BTW this gets even worse when considering that the privacy control is similarly just a request. A key element of the protocol is that nobody has to respect post privacy controls.

@smach right, but that's my point: so much of what we call news is really, effectively, just entertainment at best, that's being labeled as news.

It reminds me of hearing an NPR station doing a funding drive where the hosts kept emphasizing that listening to NPR just makes them FEEL informed. They really stressed that phrasing for some reason.

So news stations focus on things like Iowa and NH because those stories create compelling--if misleading--narratives that get attention and make people feel certain ways.

It's really unfortunate, but when so much journalism is effectively mere entertainment, well that causes all sorts of bad things in society. We see the longterm impacts of that every day.

@nprpolitics

@theceoofanarchism@kolektiva.social that's a misframing of the question before the Court, though.

The issue before the Court is NOT whether cities can punish homeless residents simply for existing without access to shelter, but rather (as the public record shows)
> The question presented is:
> Does the enforcement of generally applicable laws regulating camping on public property constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment?

@bobby115

You can read at the link below.

Basically, a city had an ordinance against camping on public property, then the 9th Circuit ruled that the Eighth Amendment blocked that ordinance, and the city appealed to SCOTUS for clarification about whether the 8th actually prevents it from applying the ordinance.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/23-175/275911/20230823153037814_Grants%20Pass%20v.%20Johnson_cert%20petition_corrected.pdf

@Nonilex

@jupiter_rowland and this is exactly why we need to focus on empowering users and not admins, so that users can shape their own experiences without relying on that complicated dance of admins that may never really result in a satisfactory outcome.

Empower users.
So that they don't have to rely on all of these other structures to shape their experiences for them.

You could say it's why so many of us left the big platforms in the first place.

@uspolitics since he doesn't have that option we should be calling him out for being a moron, not for being the strong man that potential voters actually want.

@dogweapon consent issues, for one.

@jackwilliambell ... we see every day with our own eyes that the computational issues were solved.

You're just gaslighting at this point since we can see for ourselves that what you're hanging your hat on doesn't exist.

@rbreich much of the funding hasn't even been spent yet, so this is clearly false.

@kithrup when you're pretty much pulling numbers out of thin air they can be whatever you want them to be.

@rbreich

@liztai it's really something how folks are so proud of judging books by their covers.

These days it seems like people will even take pride engaging in standards of logical fallacy, to be clear not just presenting bad arguments but actually playing out the standard examples of fallacious reasoning used to warn against it for generations.

@lauren keep in mind that different people have different ideas about how they wish to be treated.

What one person perceives as disdain another perceives as respect.

Keep in mind that other people might have the exact opposite wants in these situations, and one can't assume that everyone else would want the same treatment.

It sounds like an awful lot of people fall into that trap on topics like this.

@thisismissem my immediate reaction was that this sounds like proposing sort of a one-size-fits-all policy that is exactly what so many of us are looking to escape as we leave behind the big name platforms.

When I glanced at the source article I saw this:
> The goal of integrating with the fediverse is specifically to have Meta users’ content appear in someone else’s mastodon instance, and vice versa.

But THE goal? It's far more complicated than that. There are so many different actors involved here, with their own goals, many of which might even be at odds with each other.

So I think it's the same sort of thing. This is a decentralized platform that allows more diversity, both in goals and in policies. There's no one "should" since different users want different things.

And that's the ax I grind: I think far too few consider empowering end users and instead focus on centralized power structures that dictate The Right policy from their positions.

I think what you're describing there is kind of powerful agents playing games with their power when really I'd rather send that down to users anyway.

@lauren but don't overlook that so often employees are simply worthy of that disdain because they're simply bad at their jobs.

I get the impression that's behind a lot of the recent layoffs.

And I don't want to see unionization stand in the way of companies being able to actually serve customers better, by cutting employees who are simply not cut out for their positions.

@danwentzel this is bigger than that jerk, though.

We're going to see more and more inability to sort out what's real from what's AI generated going forward.

Even after Stone has shuffled off this mortal coil--and I don't get the impression his health is so great these days--we're still going to need better ways to sort authentic from increasingly convincing forgery.

This has been coming for a long time, but journalistic institutions in particular haven't laid the groundwork to respond to it.

I honestly don't care about Stone. He seems to LOVE attention, positive or negative, so I figure the DOJ going after him, well, I think he'd enjoy it.

But there are some bigger issues here, even bigger than criminal justice, if we can't even tell what's factual.

@MonkeyPanic looks like it's an already existing feature, maybe depending on which version of software a particular instance is using:

https://fedi.tips/filtering-your-timeline-to-hide-posts-on-mastodon/

@BeAware@social.beaware.live

@smach

Well, you kind of answer yourself: they ARE important... to folks like NPR who want to tell stories and get clicks and maintain their public presence.

Folks pay attention to the caucuses for the same reason they pay attention to reality TV stars. Because it makes for dramatic stories that so many in the public lap up.

It's just journalism. Gotta fill the new cycle.

@nprpolitics