Michael J. Gratton @mjog@octodon.social

Keep Mastodon Unmarketable

Reminder that HackerNews won't let you delete your account and the moderators are hypocrites. A platform that won't respect your right to delete your datais not something we should praise.

Nothing happened to prompt this other than the reminder of its awful existence

anyone know any good tenants unions in Mississippi, Michigan, Denver, Minnesota, and Australia?

From @JordiGH in https://mathstodon.xyz/@JordiGH/102077441992534876
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There's good evidence that moderation does reduce hate speech. If someone says horrible things about women or about people with disabilities, clear words and actions from moderators that these statements are not welcome do a lot to reduce them overall.

https://gizmodo.com/study-finds-banning-reddits-bigoted-jerkwards-worked-1803766754

Without these moderator words and actions, the nasties proliferate and even encourage each other.

We have evidence that you don't have to tolerate the bad to keep the good.

The conversation with Todd from Purism was completely unproductive in my mind. In his view, there are only two possible options for moderation:

• Become a complete censorship machine with a slippery slope of who can or cannot speak

• Go by the jurisdiction users are in, hiding content illegal in certain jurisdictions and then removing content illegal in the poster's jurisdiction, for example a Chinese user's dissent against the Chinese gov't would be removed.

There are two problems that I brought up that, being that:

• Purism would be participating in the injustices of those countries

• Legal but harmful content would still be allowed, thus spreading harm.

I felt completely ignored when trying to get this across to him, especially that last bit. I also tried explaining to him that a slippery slope does not exist when you have set principles that you stick to within rules, but that completely flew over his head. It also ended with him basically telling me to solve the problem with a solution that works for every country everywhere and then get back to him. So, the block & boycott of Purism continues.

The The Luxuries of Public Transit: https://bnolet.me/posts/2019/05/the-luxuries-of-public-transit/

On free speech at Puri.sm https://anarc.at/blog/2019-05-13-free-speech/

@amic

Got a new blogpost up, where I go over the basics of how we work on GNOME.

https://blogs.gnome.org/christopherdavis/2019/05/09/developing-gnome-the-basics/

In case anyone's missed it, #Florence's mattermost is open for everyone who wants to work on a community driven fork for #Mastodon.

You can join it here:

https://chat.florencesoc.org/signup_user_complete/?id=2a7237f68937b2c4a99ca25c156e6915

We're currently working on a living document to decide what the goal of the fork is going to be, and how we want to work, this is the best time to contribute to that! #MastoDev

I'd love to form a co-op of marginalized folks that want to work in this FOSS space. We could push actual social change forward. I don't know where we'd start, though, or who our customers would be.

Jeff Bezos made $50,000,000,000 last year, or about 2.5 million times his Amazon employees.

But no, let's blame average Americans for getting haircuts and eating at restaurants for humanitarian crisis-level lack of access to basic necessities like healthcare, affordable housing, food, non-lead-filled water, education, childcare, etc..

Fuck off.