I have to admit, Barbie becoming a Chinese feminist icon was not on my 2023 bingo card. Anyone taking bets on when we're gonna get a kpop version of this classic?

This article stinks of an agenda. The author goes out of their way not to mention the term Fediverse (pluriverse? wtf is that?), and they clearly haven't done their due diligence on Activity Pub. Either they skimped on the research or this article was heavily edited afterwards to remove any concept of the Fediverse being a viable alternative to centralized platforms. Doesn't surprise me coming from Business Insider.

That being said, the overall dynamic the article speaks to is valid, as is the discussion it engenders, so have an upvote despite my gripes with the writing.

Hi - mod of a small kbin.social mag here - @13thFloor - and a lemmy.world user. Is there anything we can do on our end to help mitigate the problem, or make it easier to flag spam that makes its way to Lemmy? I'd be more than willing to include a note to the lemmy.world admins if a spam post is deleted off of a mag I mod here- just need to know who to contact.

Side notes - Ernest (kbin.social admin) just responded on the spam issue here. The community has been actively working over here to flag and remove spam accounts (I've personally flagged close to 100). According to the most recent news from @ernest earlier last week, we've got a software update incoming, and a magazine cleanup in the works that will hopefully make an impact.

Newsom, we get it - you want to run for president. But don't fuck up my state to do it.

You've done ok in CA when you've kept your mouth shut and followed in Brown's footsteps, but this latest bullshit display of throwing widely popular progressive initiatives (this one passed 66 to 9) under the bus is a slap in the face to all Californians, proving yet again that you're an empty neo-liberal suit playing progressive to pander to the public.

California is not your billboard for a future presidential run. Do your damn job and stop using your veto pen to try to appeal to voters who aren't even your constituents yet.

What wonderful news to start the day with!

As a side note, my son (who's currently in high school) reports that the Tatetification of the younglings has ceased to spread, and raggedy Andy is now openly mocked. Mad props to @gretathunberg for developing such an effective fungicide against Mildew Tate from nothing more than a slice of pizza.

If someone tells you they want to kill you, believe them.

Since this kind of rhetoric always leads to violence, please stay safe out there, and don't be hesitant to report harassment.

Justice.gov links:

• For criminal reports
• For civil reports

The July metrics must have shown them engagement is plummeting, especially content submissions, which have been garbage since the blackout. One look at r/all shows most posts being up for hours and sometimes days at a time - it used to be a matter of minutes. Doubtless this is also reflecting in their traffic metrics as well.

As someone who contributed there since the pre-Digg days, after discovering the Fediverse, I'm never going back. Reddit arrogantly assumed that there was no other platform mods and contributors could go to that would provide what they do. But when it comes down to it, the Fediverse does what Reddit did, with more features, flexibility, and without the threat of centralized mismanagement. The only thing Reddit had that the Fediverse doesn't was an audience of millions, but the audience follows the content, and the best place to create content online is right here, right now, right here, right now, right here, right now.....

Welcome to the next evolution of the web, Reddit, and to the realization that you pushed your audience to evolve past their need for you.

They committed treason for less than $15k a pop. This indicates to me that either the CCP was threatening their family members in China, or that they're just dumb as rocks.

Okay, before people start beating me up, I'm not arguing for complacency, but this headline is more than a bit click-baity.

This is a small poll, and per the poll's methodology (scroll down, keep scrolling.... nope keep going... ok... there you go - emphasis mine):

The New York Times/Siena College poll of 1,329 registered voters nationwide, including an oversample of 818 registered Republican voters, was conducted in English and Spanish on cellular and landline telephones from July 23-27, 2023. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.67 percentage points for all registered voters and plus or minus 3.96 percentage points for the likely Republican primary electorate.

Not only did they over sample Republicans, their margin of error is almost 4% within that group.

This feels like the NYT attempting to establish a narrative based on a very small, biased sampling of data. Remember that the mass media wants to amp up the uncertainty levels (which drive engagement and advertising revenue), and with Trump basically blowing out the primary, they'll need another spectacle to ensure that it appears to be a close contest down to the finish line. The timing of the poll release and the headline is also suspect, especially as this poll was taken before the news of the latest indictment, yet presented as if it's a reaction to today's news.

That being said, I think it is an accurate portrayal of sentiment from those who still consider themselves Republicans. I don't believe, given the small sample sizes and admitted bias, that it's an accurate picture of the country.

Again, that's not an argument for political complacency - rather, it's one against media driven narratives relying on biased polling that make you scroll down six pages of tables to find their methodology.

This is not going to stop porn. All it will do is criminalize the actors, producers, and viewers.

I'm reminded of the drug war, where they took a relatively harmless narcotic used disproportionally by minority populations at the time (Marijuana), and used it to criminalize and imprison large swaths of the population, especially within the black community.

It's no coincidence that most of the folks targeted by this effort are women and sex industry workers, which skew liberal by a large degree. Note I'm not just talking about prostitution or porn actors, but the entire sex industry, including toys and books.

The GOP is scared shitless of the rising power of women in modern society, and being able to criminalize and consequently attack the revenue stream of sex industry workers is a way to blunt it. There's also an element of class warfare involved, as OnlyFans or similar sites are often the most economical way for a young woman to lift herself out of poverty if she has no other marketable skills.

He's flat out lying.

US Constitution Article 3, first fucking line:

Section 1

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.

I also would like to point out the "good Behaviour" clause in the next line that determines the length of a justice's tenure, and under which Alioto has clearly disqualified himself from serving as a justice.

My personal ones for corporate use:

• Never use I when you can use we.

• Even if you're the only one working on a project, never refer to it as yours. Always refer to it as ours.

• Don't apologize, present solutions.

• Don't say "read my fucking email again you goddamn illiterate moron", say "As previously noted in our communications...."

These are teenagers - if you make a law telling them not to do something, you're just making them want to do it. There's a reason why young Russian hackers are some of the best - it's a direct result of the restrictions Putin put on the Russian internet. The CCP just made the dark web cool, and I have a feeling that once this law goes into effect, we're going to see a whole generation of Chinese hackers inspired to hone their craft as a result.

I love boosting good news, especially given the enormous amount of Russian disinformation surrounding the "failure" and "slow going" of the offensive.

It was never going to be quick, or easy, and I think that the extraordinary successes of earlier Ukrainian counter-offensives set expectations higher than the reality on the ground.

But in the balance, Ukraine went from having half its territory captured by the 2nd strongest army in the world to knocking them back on their knees and retaking half of what was lost in the space of less than two years. That's an incredible success in the face of overwhelming odds, even with NATO and EU support. One only has to look at the Russian takeovers in Eastern Europe after WWII to get a sense of how unique it is that Ukraine was able to not only resist, but drive back the invaders.

From California and all Americans who support freedom, Слава Україні!

The news here is that, contrary to popular belief, 5% of NFTs actually still hold some value.

For all the Redditors now breathing a sigh of relief, grab a beer, take a load off, and remember, remember, the 5th of November.

Whoa - read the article. This is much worse than what's been commonly reported:

More than 30% of U.S. adults that used Twitter between March and May reported seeing content they consider bad for the world, according to a survey conducted by the USC Marshall Neely Social Media Index. That percentage was higher than rivals Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. Many users reported seeing tweets that condoned or glorified violence towards marginalized groups or explicit videos easily accessible to underage children.

Earlier this year, researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory found that Twitter failed to take down dozens of images of child sex abuse. The team identified 128 Twitter accounts selling child sex abuse material and 43 instances of known CSAM. “It is very surprising for any known CSAM to publicly appear on major social media platforms,” said lead author and chief technologist David Thiel. Twitter responded to the issue after being contacted by researchers. This year Twitter removed 525% more accounts related to child sexual exploitation content than a year ago, according to the company.

Twitter has been slow to catch and remove some harmful content since Musk fired or faced resignations for nearly 75% of Twitter’s staff, including the bulk of the trust and safety team, which is responsible for managing responses to content reports. On average, only 28% of antisemitic tweets reported by the ADL between December and January were removed or sanctioned. The group found the posts by drawing a 1% sample of all posts from Twitter’s API, or application programming interface. Twitter has since restricted the reported tweets that were found to violate policies, the company said.

"Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, we have seen the platform go from having one of the best trust and safety divisions in the industry, to one of the worst,” said Nadim Nashif, director at 7amleh-The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media.

During Musk’s tenure, content from extremist political groups and misinformation related to national politics have increased. QAnon-related hashtags rose 91% in May compared with a year earlier, with the majority of those tweets occurring in the last six months, according to research from the ADL. In the first six months under Musk, nearly a quarter of the top Covid-19 related tweets included information about vaccines that is unproved and untested, according to research done by Media Matters, a left-leaning nonprofit media watchdog group funded by donors. In November, Twitter removed bans against Covid-19 misinformation.

The challenge with the freedom of speech, not reach policy is, “there’s no way to verify what’s actually de-amplified,” said Yael Eisenstat, head of the Center for Technology and Society at the ADL. Meanwhile, Musk himself has also engaged with extremist voices, replying to antisemitic conspiracy theories and anti-trans narratives, which boosts those posts because he is followed by 148 million people.

So advertisers, remember, if you're paying for ads on twitter, you're directly funding racism, sexism, Qanon, and pedophilia. Yep, that's right - Musk is paying far-right content creators to post on Twitter - so your advertising dollars are going directly to rapists and sex traffickers like Andrew Tate.

You're right - this is very reminiscent of the Microsoft Antitrust suit of 1998. Technically, per that ruling, Google could be subject to an AT&T style breakup. However, it's pertinent to note that on appeal, the Justice Department chose to settle with Microsoft on the issue of splitting the company rather than go back to trial.

Clearly, in the real world, the ruling didn't stick, as today Microsoft, Apple, and Google all package their browsers on their operating systems. As such, I don't think it likely that enforcing an API standard would exceed the current antitrust abuses that we've come to accept as a fact of daily life, and highly unlikely to attract a serious case from the Justice Department.

That being said, I fully support your effort - we've needed stronger antitrust enforcement for a long time, and AT&T shouldn't have been the high watermark of the Justice Department's efforts in this arena.

Thanks to @m0bi13 who posted this breakdown for context :

Data collected by #threads:

• Health & Fitness
  
  

• Financial info
  
  

• Contact info
  
  

• User content
  
  

• Browsing History
  
  

• Usage Data
  
  

• Diagnostics
  
  

• Purchases
  
  

• Location
  
  

• Contacts
  
  

• Search history
  
  

• Identifiers
  
  

• Sensitive Info
  
  

• Other Data
  
  

Oh fuck no. The very first line is basically a HIPAA violation. It gets worse from there. We require less disclosure from Supreme Court Justices and Presidential nominees.

This is a trainwreck waiting to happen - even if Facebook itself doesn't abuse this level of power, you know that bad actors within the organization will. And once the information is collected, you know that tyrannical governments all over the world will be falling over themselves to get access to the data. This is a stalker's wetdream, an Orwellian orgasm of truly grotesque proportions.

Keep the Fediverse from Zucking. Just say no to Threads.

Lawmakers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and legal experts have since called for Roberts to face a subpoena that would force him to answer for Supreme Court corruption.

Stop talking about it and do it. Each day the issue goes unaddressed, the public's confidence in the court decays. We're at the point where in a normal political arena, there would already be an impeachment investigation in play. Roberts is betting on either Trump winning or having a divided legislature in 2024 so that everything can be swept under the rug.

They're doing it because it worked in the 90s. Different companies involved, but same ballgame, same playbook.

Here's some relevant info from a Reddit post 6 years ago from Bruce Kushnick, well known for his activism and writing on the topic:

I've been tracking the telco deployments of fiber optics since 1991 when they were announced as something called the Information Superhighway. The plan was to have America be the first fiber optic country -- and each phone company went to their state commissions and legislatures and got tax breaks and rate increases to fund these 'utility' network upgrades that were supposed to replace the existing copper wires with fiber optics -- starting in 1992. And it was all a con. As a former senior telecom analyst (and the telcos my clients) i realized that they had submitted fraudulent cost models, and fabricated the deployment plans. The first book, 1998, laid out some of the history "The Unauthorized Bio" with foreword by Dr. Bob Metcalfe (co-inventor of Ethernet networking). I then released "$200 Billion Broadband Scandal" in 2005, which gave the details as by then more than 1/2 of America should have been completed -- but wasn't. And the mergers to make the companies larger were also supposed to bring broadband-- but didn't. I updated the book in 2015 "The Book of Broken Promises $400 Billion broadband Scandal and Free the Net", but realized that there were other scams along side this -- like manipulating the accounting.

We paid about 9 times for upgrades to fiber for home or schools and we got nothing to show for it -- about $4000-7000 per household (though it varies by state and telco). By 2017 it's over 1/2 trillion.

Finally, I note. These are not "ISPs"; they are state utility telecommunications companies that were able to take over the other businesses (like ISPs) thanks to the FCC under Mike Powell, now the head of the cable association. They got away with it because they could create a fake history that reporters and politicians kept repeating. No state has ever done a full audit of the monies collected in the name of broadband; no state ever went back and reduced rates or held the companies accountable. And no company ever 'outed' the other companies-- i.e., Verizon NJ never said that AT&T California didn't do the upgrades. --that's because they all did it, more or less. I do note that Verizon at least rolled out some fiber. AT&T pulled a bait and switch and deployed U-Verse over the aging copper wires (with a 'fiber node' within 1/2 mile from the location).

Here's a direct link to the PDF of his book,The Book of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal & Free the Net that he still provides for free from his website, www.irregulators.org.

For reference sake, here's the link to his post on the bad place. Note I usually try to use better sourcing than Reddit, but Google's search on this topic is either flailing or details on how this went down have undergone an active scrubbing attempt.

I avoid this by not watching porn that makes me sad. There's plenty of consensual, happy, joyful sex-positive porn out there.

While your point is valid about this particular situation (which is horrible and criminal on multiple levels), your overbroad generalization of porn and the implied assumption of guilt in the viewers is what's led folks to react negatively to your statement.

On a larger level, this kind of statement plays into the puritanical doctrines towards sex that paint it as a negative force, and subsequently leads to the twisting of a positive, creative act into a negative expression of power and rape in those that accept those doctrines.

Porn is not at fault here, nor are its viewers. Those at fault in this crime are the producers and publishers, who were well aware of the abuses happening under their watch, and deceived their viewers into believing they were observing consensual performance acts. I hope that these women get every cent and more, and it would be excellent to see a class action suit from Pornhub's subscribers arise in tandem to and in support of their complaint.

Fuck off and die you Nazi cunt:

One 2008 “riikka” comment talked of “[N-words] selling pirated Vuittons” in Barcelona, which Purra, then a researcher at the University of Turku, was visiting at the time for an academic conference.

Another described “the sound darker males make when they pass you by” as “not whistling (that would be too obvious) but a fucking hiss between the teeth”, adding: “The more eager Abdullah is, the more saliva comes with it.”

In another post, the commenter wrote: “Anyone feel like spitting on beggars and beating [N-word] children today in Helsinki?”A post in January 2008 read: “I’m so full of hate and pure rage … What are you doing to my psyche, Islam?”

In September 2008, “riikka” wrote about a confrontation on a suburban train with a group of young immigrants: “If they gave me a gun, there’d be bodies on a commuter train, you’ll see.”

I don't say that lightly - this woman has confessed to wanting to beat up children and commit hate murder. She doesn't belong anywhere near government office. Good on the Finns for protesting this atrocious appointment.

It looks like the key in the ruling here was that the AI created the work without the participation of a human artist. Thaler tried to let his AI, "The Creativity Machine" register the copyright, and then claim that he owned it under the work for hire clause.

The case was ridiculous, to be honest. It was clearly designed as an attempt to give corporations building these AI's the copyrights to the work they generate from stealing the work of thousands of human artists. What's clever here is that they were also trying to sideline the human operators of AI prompts. If the AI, and not the human prompting it, owns the copyright, then the company that owns that AI owns the copyright - even if the human operator doesn't work for them.

You can see how open this interpretation would be to abuse by corporate owners of AI, and why Thaler brought the case, which was clearly designed to set a precedent that would allow any media company with an AI to cut out human content creators entirely.

The ruling is excellent, and I'm glad Judge Howell saw the nuances and the long term effects of her decision. I was particularly happy to see this part:

In March, the copyright office affirmed that most works generated by AI aren’t copyrightable but clarified that AI-assisted materials qualify for protection in certain instances. An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” it said.

This protects a wide swath of artists who are doing incredible AI assisted work, without granting media companies a stranglehold on the output of the new technology.

Damn, looks like Conde-Nast is starting to feel the pinch if they're having Wired spew out poorly written transparent bullshit like this.

The Redxodus, if anything, caused a huge explosion of migration to the Fediverse and the open internet in general. I haven't seen as much interest in the open web since the early 2000s - and it's glorious to watch. The web will continue long after Reddit, Google, and Meta have died off. Conflating any of these companies with the open internet is committing journalistic malpractice, and a clear conflict of interest when your owners have a stake in those you're reporting on.

Good ole mass media, telling you something big is going down, and giving you absolutely no clue as to how to get involved.

The FCC has made the comment process extremely difficult to navigate, but it looks like the hearing is on docket 23-293 (commenters, please correct me if I'm wrong). You should be able use the form here to place a comment on the proceeding. Use 23-293 in the proceedings field to bring it up for selection.

Here's a more detailed view of the Media and Democracy Project's petition, which includes a supporting filing from Jamie Kellner, former president of Fox Broadcasting.

Looks like there's a lot of FUD around this, so I decided to jump into the ActivityPub spec and see exactly what they can and can't get with the spec as is.

First off, they cannot get a users individual IP unless the instance owner publishes it in the profile data as part of a "public" activity stream. I don't know of any instance that does this currently (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).

It looks like what Meta is looking to do is scrape the information in the "public" tagged activity streams:

In addition to [ActivityStreams] collections and objects, Activities may additionally be addressed to the special "public" collection, with the identifier https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public.

Activities addressed to this special URI shall be accessible to all users, without authentication.

This is similar to what most instances do to show the posts of a user or community - they send a request to get "public" tagged data to publish to their end users. Within this data is all the activity information on that post - who upvoted what and who, and who commented. Again, this is the same way federation works now - your server has an activity stream of all your followed and followers that it can make available to view by tagging their activity as "public". Many instances have this information tagged as "public" as a default.

Now, this system works fine if you're dealing with small actors that don't have nefarious designs on the network, or the resources to dominate it.

When you have a digital behemoth with grand AI designs that's already embroiled in lawsuits where it was grabbing your medical data and regularly allows law enforcement to stroll through its records, it's an entirely different situation. Meta has the power and capacity to not only engage in an "embrance, extend, extinguish" campaign against the Fediverse, but also to seriously threaten the privacy and well-being of Fediverse users in a way no single instance owner can.

I think the solution here will be for individual instance owners to harden their security and if not outright de=federate from Threads, ensure that posts are private by default and that their users are made well aware in the TOS that following a Threads user will result in sharing data about their profile that could (and most likely will) be matched back to their Facebook account.

Instances that don't allow visibility control on posts, like Kbin and Lemmy, should look at adding an option to post only to the local server, or have the capacity to block threads.net outgoing publication based on user profile settings.

Instances that don't allow follow request filtering probably should look at adding it (Mastodon has it implemented - Kbin and I think Lemmy would need to catch up) - otherwise users could be unaware that they're sending their data to threads.net when someone from that service follows them.

I think it goes without saying that any data Meta gets will get the AI treatment - both to identify users and to sell your activity to marketers. That activity is the real goldmine for them - that's a stream of revenue for marketing that rivals what Meta tracks on its own platform.

As such, it may be worthwhile for instance owners to look at removing voting and boosting counts from the "public" activity feed. This would mean more fragmentation for communities whose populations span instances (vote counts would be more off than they are now), but it would prevent bad actors from easily scraping that data for behavioral analysis.

All in all, though, I don't believe it's going to be a positive event when Threads does start federating. One of the nice things about the Fediverse is that the learning curve is high enough to keep the idiot count down, and I don't really see our content or commentary here improving once Meta's audience enters the space.

Before the protest, going to /r/all would show you posts with ages between 30 minutes and 3 hours. Today, on /r/all, there isn't a post less than 10 hours old in the first 40 entries. The content has changed from primarily trending news interspersed with memes to about 90% memes and shitposts padded with a few soft news summaries and opinion pieces.

In comparison, my Fediverse feed has exploded. The quality of content is at the level of pre-Digg reddit, and the commentary at a significantly higher level. There's still not as much of an audience, particularly in niche communities, but it feels like that's changing quickly. It's clear to me that the creative drivers of reddit - the mods, the content creators, and the engaged commentators - have left, and that the traffic is being maintained by a mostly non-participating readership that uses Reddit as entertainment, not a community.

Reddit crushed the creative spirit of its most active populations. Whatever wins Spez is claiming, it's come at the cost of what made the site worthwhile to begin with.

Forum management 101

Lesson One:

1% of your readers produce 99% of your content.

Only about 1% of the population producing content is interested in enduring the shitshow of toxicity that comes with moderation.

Don't piss them off.

End of Lesson

Shh.... nobody tell them about the Fediverse.

On a separate note, anyone else finding Wired to suddenly be like the Boomer of tech publications? Ars Technica and Techdirt are vastly superior sources these days. Seems like Wired does nothing but pump out stale conglomerated opinion pieces that smell vaguely like Larry Ellison's sweat socks.

I'd like to introduce the gizmodo.com writers to the term Pyrrhic victory. One look at /r/all and it's become nothing but reposts and memes that are hours, if not days old.

Reddit drove out its most important users - the moderators and content creators. They have enough old content to keep their viewership for awhile, but they'll never regain the community trust they've lost. And this will continue to kill their influx of new material, which will inevitably erode the viewer base.

Do I think reddit will die? No, it will continue on, just as have slashdot and fark and other staple communities from the same era, but the highwater mark of the community as the "front page of the internet" is long past.

Fuck this Nazi censorship.

Upvote for sympathy and understanding. The way the US treats the disabled is fucking criminal. My advice to you as someone who cares for two fully disabled family members is to live as much as you can under the radar. Income is very tricky, as you're basically forced to work under the table to survive and maintain your benefits - which are nowhere near the cost of living. Never let a savings account get above $2000 (split accounts if need be), and never tell your social workers more about your life than what they need to know to help you.

Regarding your landlord, use your disability to your advantage. There's very stringent laws where I am (California) that give additional eviction protections to the disabled - you may be able to use similar laws in your area to keep him off your back. This is one area where your social worker can help - ask specifically for rent assistance and mention constructive eviction given that he's threatening to kick you out over a two day delay in rent.

Good. This woman could have sickened not only her target, but anyone who came in contact with what she sent. While I share her politics, hate makes monsters of us all, and she crossed the line. While I don't think the "there are good people on both sides" argument holds much water, actions like hers remind me that there are definitely bad people on both sides.

Speaking as someone who ran a set of public forums back in the early days of the internet, the number one thing I can suggest is don't do it alone.

Alone, you're one person arguing with hundreds of other people that your opinion is the right one. This burns out anyone but the most narcissistic assholes (I should know, being the latter). With a team, you get to deflect attacks that would be personally directed at you to the overall team while relying on their support to provide a unified front. Bullies generally target single individuals - they rarely go after groups.

This can be hard to build, and it often relies on a third party in the admin role to encourage the creation and unity of the mod team until it gets on its feet, often becoming part of the team in the early phases until it runs well on its own. A minimum of three people is usually what it takes to really make a community thrive cleanly.

Unfortunately, the fragmented nature of the Fediverse makes it difficult to build these kind of teams, as the mods have to be users on the same instance platform, and a small instance with only 20 users can end up with an enormous amount of content and commentary from users across the wider Fediverse. This, of course, ties into @hoodlem 's comment regarding bandwidth costs for instance owners - the speed at which your traffic can scale is exponential, and you need to be prepared for it from both a financial and staffing standpoint.

One solutions that could help would be to have an ActivityPub login standard that would allow logged-in users from one instance to moderate a community on another when given permissions. A cross-platform private messaging standard would help here as well. Of course, both of these functions would have to be encrypted and secured to prevent cross-site attacks, but they could be steps in unifying the Fediverse without centralizing it.

EDIT: as pointed out in the comments, you can mod across instances, but it doesn't look like you can mod across platforms yet.

I'd pay to keep my ads off of Twitter.

I spent a lot of my twenties trying to get a publishing group off the ground using a worker co-op model. It became clear pretty quickly that a hierarchy of responsibility was needed simply to keep the workflow moving, as relying on the self-motivation of contributors was a recipe for disaster, especially for those doing editorial or production work.

In my estimation, it can work, but only if the workers take on the attitude that they truly own the business and are responsible for it. This requires a higher level of scrutiny on incoming members than in a traditional business structure, as bad actors can have an outsized affect on a organization with loose hierarchical controls.

Sadly, my experience led me to believe that most people are more willing to work for someone telling them what to do than they are for themselves. The ability to muster effort and energy behind effective self-motivation is a rarer trait than most of us would like to admit. For a co-op to be successful against corporate competitors, every worker has to take responsibility for the organization and its success. In a corporation, only the boss has to - the workers only have to be responsible for what their boss thinks of them, not the direction of the company.

This is one of the reasons I'm hesitant to start my own instance - the moderation load expands exponentially as you scale, and without some sort of automated tool to keep CSAM content from being posted in the first place, I can only see the problem increasing. I'm curious to see if anyone knows of lemmy or mastodon moderation tools that could help here.

That being said, it's worth noting that the same Standford research team reviewed Twitter and found the same dynamic in play, so this isn't a problem unique to Mastodon. The ugly thing is that Twitter has (or had) a team to deal with this, and yet:

“The investigation discovered problems with Twitter's CSAM detection mechanisms and we reported this issue to NCMEC in April, but the problem continued,” says the team. “Having no remaining Trust and Safety contacts at Twitter, we approached a third-party intermediary to arrange a briefing. Twitter was informed of the problem, and the issue appears to have been resolved as of May 20.”

Research such as this is about to become far harder—or at any rate far more expensive—following Elon Musk’s decision to start charging $42,000 per month for its previously free API. The Stanford Internet Observatory, indeed, has recently been forced to stop using the enterprise-level of the tool; the free version is said to provide read-only access, and there are concerns that researchers will be forced to delete data that was previously collected under agreement.

So going forward, such comparisons will be impossible because Twitter has locked down its API. So yes, the Fediverse has a problem, the same one Twitter has, but Twitter is actively ignoring it while reducing transparency into future moderation.

In theory they can, but it's very unlikely, as it requires a 2/3rds majority in both the Assembly and the Senate. One of the things I severely dislike about California politics is that the Governor's veto power is near absolute in practice. On top of that this state has an entrenched political machine that has invested in Newsom since he ran for Mayor of San Francisco - and many in Sacramento owe their careers to him. There's no realistic chance any of these vetoes get overridden.

The purpose of technology is not to make us more productive. The ultimate purpose of technology is to take the burden of productivity away from us so we can live our lives without the chains of labor. Anyone telling you differently is likely your boss.