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silverpill

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social remote
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@p This is a good analysis, and I can confirm that there is indeed some coordination between the organizations and people you mentioned. I wouldn't call it a conspiracy, though. I know some of them well enough to conclude that it is a not a single organization, but a loose group. Some of them seem to be fake, but others seem to be sincere in their convictions.

I'd like to share a couple of additional links you may find interesting:

- https://about.iftas.org/yoel/

Remember this guy? Given the timing, I suspect that some of these projects were supposed to be sinecures for former Twitter employees.

- https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/pulls/140

This is a draft of a FEP about mandatory CSAM scanning. As one of the FEP repo maintainers, I immediately raised concerns about privacy, centralization, etc. That made me persona non grata at W3C.

silverpill

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social remote
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@phnt @p Curiously, Gleason was supportive of the proposal, although at the time he already moved to Nostr (IIRC).

Also, some strange things started to happen in the aftermath of closing that PR. I started seeing vague posts expressing moderation concerns on Codeberg and SocialHub (in this thread, for example: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scope-of-the-socialhub-policy/3506). People suddenly started talking about adding a CoC, etc etc. But every time I asked what this is about, there was silence.

pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
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@silverpill @phnt

> Curiously, Gleason was supportive of the proposal

Is that curious?

> Also, some strange things started to happen in the aftermath of closing that PR. I started seeing vague posts expressing moderation concerns on Codeberg and SocialHub (in this thread, for example: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scope-of-the-socialhub-policy/3506). People suddenly started talking about adding a CoC, etc etc. But every time I asked what this is about, there was silence.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT
pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
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@silverpill @phnt Okay, well, to be fair, the timestamp on the "Scope of the socialhub policy" post is August 1, 2023, and the "PhotoDNA Attestation extension" is from August 4, but I think that was possibly preemptive, because he posted this on August 18:

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scope-of-the-socialhub-policy/3506/9

> Thanks. So, if I have a problem with how someone is behaving in PRs on codeberg, what do I do next?

And then in https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scope-of-the-socialhub-policy/3506/12 and https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scope-of-the-socialhub-policy/3506/13 , he made it explicit that this was about the PhotoDNA discussion.

And he directly retreats into "But think of the optics of not thinking of the children!"

> I ended up withdrawing the PR. I had adapted the proposal in the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Child Safety report into a FEP to start the discussion process. I was attacked personally in the comments, and the FEP wasn’t allowed to be merged. I don’t think it helped our movement to have such vigorous opposition to developing CSAM filtering standards.
Strypey

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz remote
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@p Reminds me of what Chapman says in the first essay I ever read on Meaningness;

"... you could recognize sociopaths and eject them. Geeks may be pretty good at the recognizing, but are lousy at the ejecting. Mops don’t recognize sociopaths, and anyway don’t care. Mops have little investment in the subculture, and can just walk away when sociopaths ruin it. By the time sociopaths show up, mops are numerically most of the subculture."

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill

Q.U.I.N.N.

Q.U.I.N.N.

@icedquinn@blob.cat remote
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@strypey @light @p @fish @phnt @silverpill that isn't what popper wrote even though it is deeply misquoted.

the paradox of tolerance is an open society always contains the possibility that people vote away their open society. it is the sine qua non of an open society. once you have thought police "to protect democracy" you no longer have an open society. and have extinguished your liberal democracy.

the society protects from violence against extreme opinions and vigilance protects against voting the extreme opinions in to place. you can't get rid of it without no longer having the thing you are trying to protect.

nobody seems to have ever read the book.
Strypey

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz remote
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(1/?)

@icedquinn
> nobody seems to have ever read the book

I admit I haven't (I must), but I did investigate what Popper actually said;

"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/paradox-tolerance

@fish @phnt @p @silverpill @light

Q.U.I.N.N.

Q.U.I.N.N.

@icedquinn@blob.cat remote
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@strypey @fish @phnt @p @silverpill @light
if you read the book, the context of this claim is after 25% of the book goes on about how much popper hates plato and spent chapters reiterating "plato's republic is authoritarian as fuck, actually"

the stuff about limited tolerance is spoken in direct context of people exiting a classical authoritarian society and discussing the dangers of grognards sliding society directly back in to hierarchical strong man cultures.

people don't read it and decide it means calling randos nazis but it was spoken with the very real and ongoing concern throughout time of people rotting democracy back in to dictatorships.

poppers smugness is that if violence is off the table, then reason holds for the best argument, and the best argument is empirically the open society, so they have the advantage of self-demonstrating being the best outcome and not needing special favor.

the whole book is very much against authoritarian solutions to problems. unlimited tolerance is spoken next to societies that literally did the "someone is a threat to our power with their words, kill them" behavior people actually misquote the paradox to justify.
🐝🐝🐝

🐝🐝🐝

@sampler@freebeerextremist.com remote
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@p @icedquinn @fish @phnt @strypey @silverpill @light
Tweets having 140 character limit made sense before smartphones, when we used Twitter via sms (text 40404) . Not sure why Mastodon castrates itself for any reason other than fetish.

Does any Mastodon instance have Twitter-like text messaging or did they ever? I remember statusnet had xmpp built in but I don't think we ever had proper texting set up. (Maybe this is something revolver should consider)

As long as Mastodon is wearing a chastity belt, the char length be 140 instead of 280 (tweets 2.0 - now twice as much) / 500 (toots are almost twice as big as tweets 2.0 but 500 is a nice round number) because it's a number that actually makes sense

maybe they can get government funding from EU to implement sms integration to make it easier for the government to protect their users.
Phantasm

Phantasm

@phnt@fluffytail.org remote
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@sampler @icedquinn @fish @p @strypey @silverpill @light The reason is Gargron was autistic about his vision of a Twitter replacement and posts longer than 500 chars look ugly in the UI. It's a problem that will never get fixed because Mastodon desperately wants to be a Twitter alternative including the way it looks and displays threads.

The actual solution would be to widen the post view and decrease post text size, but that is too much to ask.

Strypey

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz remote
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@p
> WE HAVE TO GET YOU MORE LETTERS

If multi-post threads really bother you I can switch to my Friendica account. I keep forgetting I have it, and I *hate* the cludgy interface with a burning passion. But if you *really* need me to ...

> He should try having a better frontend. (Tweetdeck has always sucked.)

The default Masto interface is modelled on Pinafore and has been for years. Although the one modeled on TD is still there as an opt-in.

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @sampler @silverpill @light

pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
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@strypey @icedquinn @fish @phnt @sampler @silverpill @light

> If multi-post threads really bother you

Not really, it just seems like at some point, tagging overhead eats the limit. Even Twitter stopped doing that, like, tags and links stopped counting towards the character limit. Mastodon *could* do the former because tags are an extra field (and more or less unconstrained).

I do think that it does make threads harder to read and participate in (by increasing the likelihood of duplication: if you have two paragraphs and the second one covers something relevant to the first, but people that go chronologically see the first one and then write a different version of your second paragraph before finding your second paragraph; this can compound, it is very funny when it does), but I'm just pokin' yer ribs, I ain't tore up.

> The default Masto interface is modelled on Pinafore and has been for years. Although the one modeled on TD is still there as an opt-in.

Ah. I mean...you see the UI that I wrote and use, I'm not sure what Pinafore *is*. (And if it gives you an idea, I used to use the bitlbee Twitter backend as my only Twitter interface. Until they killed off *all* alternative clients, you could have a reasonable time with Twitter by treating it like an IRC channel.)
pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
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@strypey @icedquinn @fish @phnt @sampler @silverpill @light For one thing, short names on short instances producing short tags. They've enshrined as behavior some half-assed incorrect encoding of the *intended* behavior and this is how you end up with crusty, shitty behavior that is *mandated* because otherwise it doesn't *work*.

This is why Mastodon should be completely ignored by protocol implementors: they want to be the Mastodon Network, fine, let them. Stop letting them stomp on protocol design because someone on a jithub issue whined until someone did the dumbest fucking implementation that solved half of the wrong problem. It is time to cut them loose.
Phantasm

Phantasm

@phnt@fluffytail.org remote
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@silverpill @icedquinn @fish @sampler @p @strypey @light

https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/pulls/7875

This does not implement anything meaningful in the spec and only makes quotes work on Mastodon (because they even fucked up that which worked for years before their attempt).

Trust me when I say that if the proper workflow as envisioned by Mastodon gets implemented in Pleroma, it gets patched out by most larger Pleroma instances almost immediately. Myself included, so if Nicole doesn't make it a toggle, I will. Nobody but Mastodon wants this, and I don't want the Twitter copy of hidden replies either.

pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
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@silverpill @phnt @icedquinn @fish @sampler @strypey @light

> Like, what's the plan? Let Mastodon/W3C do their thing until incompatibilities accumulate and the network splits?

They are not meaningfully a part of the fediverse at this point. They have made a Twitter. It is no longer a platform that you use to communicate with friends: it is a broadcast-only circle-jerk and when it fails to be a broadcast-only circle-jerk people that want to "control the experience" and that can't distinguish between startup dipshittery and tech built by people to communicate with each other. Look at the early posts by the hachyderm dipshit, that guy's like "Oh, this isn't going to work, we have to eject these people and we have to make it advertiser-friendly because if we don't then fedi will never replace Twitter!" I don't want to replace Twitter with a shitty clone of Twitter: I want to replace Twitter with something good.

I intend to have a platform to communicate with friends and strangers. I don't really care if Mastodon decides to create a desert and call it peace. They have fundamentally different goals. Nobody complained when Gab fucked off (and they were, in many cases, fucked off before that: https://pastebin.com/E0k5fcd6 ), but somehow Mastodon is important? Go look at what they're putting onto the network: https://mastodon.social/explore .
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pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
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@Mammal @fish @icedquinn @light @phnt @sampler @silverpill @strypey Nothing of value was lost.

There was a lot of the same hand-wringing: "they're the most active instance!" and it's like...do you want to see that activity? For at least a month, the *majority* of their activity was a single account that posted three times per second. I saw the bot, killed the bot, could not tell Gab about the bot because Gab blocked FSE. (Gleason was working at Gab at the time, I told Gleason and offered to help Gab quell the bot problem and told him to pass along the offer to Colbert; Gleason agreed but Colbert says Gleason never relayed the message. At the time, it was in my own interest to stop the flood at the source because Gab was essentially DoSing FSE by constantly flooding us with bot shit. I got to do k-means and come up with interesting ways to automatically detect bots, I was having fun.)

And now it's handwringing, what if we lose Mastodon? What *if*? They're as bad as the Gablins. There are people using fedi to communicate and there are people using fedi to broadcast and try to push their agenda and, you know, fuck the latter category.
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pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
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@Mammal @fish @icedquinn @light @phnt @sampler @silverpill @strypey The main issue with federation was that Gab was cramming shit in that no one wanted and they had the clunkiest UI (which Gleason turned into Soapbox, which is still the worst fedi UI) so they were bleeding users into fedi. They had to cut it off to stop people from going "I can still talk to my friends but I don't have to use Gab?" and hopping to a sane instance. Regular shit on fedi was a "pro" feature on Gab, they were suffering massive downtime, they botched federation (by putting Gab on as many relays as would take them, so they were spending all their bandwidth delivering bot posts to the rest of fedi) and they covered it in ads for whatever low-rent hustle Torba was doing. They expected that they could use fedi to get people to join Gab, based on the way they were talking, and when it went the other direction, they had to kill federation.
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Mystic

Mystic

@Mammal@shitposter.world remote
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@p @icedquinn @fish @phnt @sampler @strypey @silverpill @light Gab was under intense pressure to be able to stay online after multiple hosts deplatformed them over allowing total free speech, aka criticism of zog, woke etc. Gab was a pilot program for the regime to eventually produce today's post-woke musk version of twitter. Free speech was winning the argument against the regime shills on gab so its federation was killed to recreate a scenario where gatekeeper guys could maintain authority.
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pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
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@Mammal @fish @icedquinn @light @phnt @sampler @silverpill @strypey

> Gab was under intense pressure to be able to stay online after multiple hosts deplatformed them over allowing total free speech

"Complete freedom of speech unless it is anime or you ask questions about glowies or you notice how many bots there are or you are FSE, which is a hive of subversive neonazis and communists, or you point out a hole in Epik's VPN or you investigate Gab's finances or you point out that deleting your account silently fails if you have been verified."

They weren't kicked off for freedom of speech. They were kicked off because they antagonized literally everyone in order to prop up the persecution story. I met Utsav--having a PR guy that couldn't stop saying gamer words to journalists when they declined to go to his hotel room was a really stupid move to begin with--and half the sentences that come out of his mouth start with "We must fight the". They fork Mastodon and their announcement is them shitting on Mastodon. They fork Brave and they shit on Brave in the announcement. They were insular when they weren't antagonizing literally everyone. The only reason anyone heard of Gab was that there was a "left-wing bias in the tech press and Silicon Valley" thing going around in 2015 and so after Torba had Gab built, he started spamming an HN networking board (that is, a private board for people that had been HN-funded startup founders at some point) with "BUILD THE WALL I HOPE YOU ALL GET DEPORTED TRUMP MAGA 2016" and ignoring "Please stop that, this is a business board, not a politics board" until he got banned. That is, he committed suicide by janny in order to have a hook to call up journos and go "They banned me just for being a Republican! That is why I am making my own Twitter that doesn't have the left-wing censorship" and do a bunch of interviews. Literally no one would have heard of Gab if that PR push hadn't succeeded and that was the only move in his playbook: he shits on people so that he can complain about their reactions. It gets attention but it ensures that he has no friends, so when the social justice pitchforks come out (because he spends time antagonizing them too), he has no one willing to say a word in his defense: if you're in a position to do something about it, Torba had either burned you or burned one of your friends.
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Candlemaker 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 🇹🇼 🇯🇵

Candlemaker 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 🇹🇼 🇯🇵

@AngelCelt@ieji.de remote
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@p @icedquinn @fish @phnt @sampler @strypey @silverpill @light @Mammal I never took any of this stuff seriously 6 years ago. A lot of us were younger and thought this was all dumb drama about shitposting and blowing off steam when these people were trying to genuinely trying to subvert American culture.

But these days Torba seems to be exclusively running in these weird astroturfed "trad" circles whose only consistent position is shilling for random 3rd world countries. "Save the White race by siding against White countries no matter what the issue. In fact, don't even look into the issue. Being a misinformed vibes based gonzo idiot is BASED!"

It makes me wonder if all the deplatforming from those days that everyone said was "leftist" was actually targeted at people receiving foreign money.

You look at these types of people from back then and where they are now and they're all shilling for Orban when that election was totally irrelevant to everyone except Hungarians and Russians, they all have Russian wives for some reason, or they're promoting pro China, pro Iran, pro pan-Arab propaganda.

Basically anyone that has influence that isn't in the core American geopolitical coalition, the old Far Right influencers are carrying water for those people. I'm thinking more of these Torba types than we thought are just paid agitators of foreign governments. Even back then a lot of them were being promoted by RT.

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Candlemaker 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 🇹🇼 🇯🇵

Candlemaker 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 🇹🇼 🇯🇵

@AngelCelt@ieji.de remote
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@p @icedquinn @fish @phnt @sampler @strypey @silverpill @light @Mammal She's some Asian who was running a company called Tenent Media, it was funding Tim Pool and Lauren Southern and others in that sphere $100K per show and it was uncovered that it was a Russian shell company just promoting anyone that would sew distrust in American/Western institutions. Just the typical Russian shit.

And yes, she is cute, but married to a mystery meat European.

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