Are there reasonably okay options to paying digitally without the surveillance part (or at least less of it as compared to credit cards?) Blockchain is a nonstarter due to the practical limitations in sustaining proof of work and stake.

What a great thing it is, to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it.

A perspective about NSO that I find important but not usually covered is how their success is related to centralized mobile phone operating software. One vulnerability exposes billions of devices. Perhaps if we had FOSS mobile OS options as mainstream installations, it would not be as easy for these companies to hack almost anybody at once.

For now, paying for a VPS is relatively affordable. But as was noted elsewhere, moderation is the real cost. Last week’s terrible antisemitism and racist trolling and spam is a case in point. It led me to raise sign up effort (registration application etc). That has kind of eliminated local-instance spam by 99% and the random ones are existing users, who we kick out as they post spam stuff. The main problem now is in federating with instances that can be hijacked by such trolls and have their content propagated all over. Nothing we can do about that so far as far as we want to maintain existing federation bonds. The moderation cost is still significant as we have to take them down manually.

In the end, I think this is an ideal set up for our instance. We are not after numbers. In fact, we want to have a small number of users as a sustainable path, and hopefully support other individuals and organizations spin up their instances.

After upgrading to 0.15.1, I activated the signup form. I haven’t had to deal with the daily trolls. Not ideal but it helps.

Question 1 - yes, ansible is run on your local machine.

Kate + RStudio.

I spend a lot of time working in R so RStudio is a practical choice. It could be better in many ways though, which is why I use Kate for general editing tasks.

Lemmy. Fairly obvious why.

Very interesting read. Supplement this with James Scott’s State Simplifications: Nature, Space and People

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9760.1995.tb00035.x

Real name policy (goverment issued ID and such stuff).

Real name policy (goverment issued ID and such stuff).

Don’t forget the whole idea of federation is that an instance with 10 members is not limited to those members only on content sources. I like it when more instances interlink and therefore reduce the centralization risks while keeping network benefits.

Nope! I would rather deal with spam than everyday surveillance.

This is a brainstorm post, not a peer-reviewed paper on moderating fediverse :) Mods with finite resources cannot compete with automated systems. The signal to noise ratio will keep increasing if a new account can post 10 items immediately they join. The alternative could be restricted signups (signups by invitations, recommendations) even though a low hanging fruit could be temporal throttling for new users. Something got to give in the long run.

I agree on the need for a technical friction on new users ability to post – and especially on the main communities that are federated with other instances.

Good stuff @dessalines@lemmy.ml. Successful upgrade on these shores.

If you look at their funding sources – and therefore the structure they are constrained in – you will notice there is a certain pro-American, anti-other sensibility. Philanthropies, while they look all well meaning (and most evolve into reasonable places for social change), they also serve to ‘launder’ the shady histories of their founders. Chen Zuckerburg Foundation does not sound as ironic promoting privacy compared to if this was done by Facebook.

Funding is a VERY tough position to figure out in human rights work, and while I know people need to be paid even when they are in so called non-profit (my preferred word here would be non-monetary gains, since profits could generally be social benefits, but I digress), I also believe wherever you knowingly take money from models you in strategic ways.

Also, consider this recent post on how social indexology reproduces hegemonic relations at the global stage: https://baraza.africa/post/10070

The article critically examines how the neoliberal ethos has influenced the racialised ranking of countries using indexes, or what I propose to call social indexology (SI). SI refers to the use of quantitative metrics to measure the performance of countries based on selected indicators, often drawn from a pool of Western and neoliberal variables associated with governance, corruption, development and other value-loaded concepts. The article critically examines the methodological, ideological and cultural shortcomings of SI and how it reinforces existing racial stereotypes about the presumed natural differences between ‘advanced’ European societies and ‘backward’ Global South countries. These racialised imageries have continued since the time of Enlightenment, colonialism and slavery and persist even under global neoliberal hegemony today. The use of SI metrics for the purpose of quantified measurement and ranking gives it the appearance of being ‘scientific’ and as such has the implicit ideological power of making the racialised inequality of peoples and countries much more acceptable and natural.

I have a very tough time decoupling these lists from their market-led and sponsored base.

See this too:

In 1984, Palestinian American intellectual and Columbia University Professor Edward Said famously argued that Palestinians are denied “permission to narrate”.

More than 30 years later, in 2020, Maha Nassar, a Palestinian American Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, analysed opinion articles published in two daily newspapers – The New York Times and The Washington Post – and two weekly news magazines – The New Republic and The Nation – over a 50-year period, from 1970 to 2019. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she found that “Editorial boards and columnists seem to have been quite consumed with talking about the Palestinians, often in condescending and even racist ways – yet they somehow did not feel the need to hear much from Palestinians themselves.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/13/social-media-companies-are-trying-to-silence-palestinian-voices

As someone who grew up in an African country and spent sometime in North America, I would say there are various reasons one can point to [language, economic conditions, nature of available technology etc]. Most conversations in my growing up were ephemeral + oral. Mobile phones started changing the landscape. Facebook and Messaging apps like Telegram, Viber, and WhatsApp changed a lot of conversations from peer-to-peer to ‘mediated’ ones. I would say that most African-based folks are every social and active in discussions. They are just not in the platforms Westerns frequent, and increasingly so with closed-messaging platforms like WhatsApp groups.