Nick Doty @npd@octodon.social

A dangerous precedent: soda companies paid to put an intentionally harmful but potentially popular measure on the California ballot (all local taxes would require 2/3rds ballot initiatives) and then convinced the legislature to block new municipal soda taxes for 13 years in order to withdraw the measure from the ballot.

Now that large companies are aware of this possibility, I fear the extortion will happen every election year.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-cities-banned-from-imposing-new-soda-13035692.php

@gargron promoting Pleroma and Misskey is great, but I think you could push that even further as a fundamental advantage.

If you or your community wants to interact with Mastodon but needs different features or disagrees with Mastodon's development approaches, independent but interoperable alternatives are available and encouraged. We can rely less on any individual, or any particular software project, and allow for diverse, customized software.

@ross yeah, I get that, there's some freedom in the permanence/independence.

But I think there could be so much improvement just by making profile information federated and accessible over the Web, rather than moving to an opaque identifier stored in an irrevocable way.

@ross Cool!
How is this different from using WebFinger to access the account information for my Mastodon account, or any other identity/domain that I choose to use to represent myself?

e.g. @npd has information, including keys and links, at https://octodon.social/.well-known/webfinger?resource=https%3A%2F%2Foctodon.social%2F%40npd

@sxilin these are awesome and it's great to see nice graphics for local botany. I've been interested in having more of that so that we can refer to our natural world as iconography. Would you be interested in commissioned work along those lines?

https://octodon.social/@npd/99406714510741153

It'd just be great to have easily referenceable and recognizable icons for coast redwoods and desert agave and California poppies and coast live oaks and so much more.

Henry George wrote _Progress and Poverty_ in San Francisco, pawning all his belongings to cover the cost of the plates because no one would publish it, recognizing exactly the same problems that we see in San Francisco today. And he identifies the remedy (property tax, in particular tax on land valuable by virtue of location), the very remedy that wealthy voters have explicitly excluded from California with Proposition 13.

Oil portrait of Henry George, that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

To those who, seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state, and would strive for its attainment.
-- San Francisco, March, 1879

@cwebber I ... don't understand. I could certainly bear a Web in which many thousands of distinct servers, operated by a wide range of individuals and organizations, provided customized and interoperable communications for millions of people as an alternative to a handful of centralized corporate social networking sites.

That we could see improvements to bottlenecks in various other layers of Internet infrastructure doesn't seem to be a blocking issue.

@gargron it seems like attracting organized spam campaigns is a sign of a new level of reach for a social network, so, congrats all

¡Ya voté!

@HerraBRE lots of people use humans.txt to credit the humans that built the service; there's even an informal mini standard:
http://humanstxt.org/

@brennen oh, and it looks like the latest Mastodon release actually adds support for custom profile fields, so this functionality is already a step closer, yay?

@HerraBRE secure transit vs. encryption at rest are also very different, in terms of usability and common threat models. Use of HTTPS requires almost nothing of users, and mitigates well-known widely-used attacks on confidentiality and integrity by various network parties.

Encrypting backup hard drives (or other long-term storage) is a much weightier risk of lost access and requires user to manage long-term keys, and protects against certain types of mostly in-person theft.

@brennen WebFinger allows quite a bit in the returned JSON Resource Description file, including a list of links to other resources. It would be great to have your blog, or even other social media profiles, entered into your Mastodon profile and then accessible via WebFinger.

@mala it sounds a little like a proposal for people who thought the problem with email was that there was too much reader privacy

@mala @LHWilkinson I wonder how these compare to Berkeley's Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity scenarios
https://cltc.berkeley.edu/scenarios/
Those don't have the same dimensional organization, but some of the dystopias sound similar.

@Siphonay some miniature lupine (Lupinus bicolor, I think) from today's BioBlitz.

This weekend is City Nature Challenge!
http://citynaturechallenge.org/

If you haven't used iNaturalist yet, check it out: just take a picture of a plant or animal you see in the wild and get advice on what species it is.

Here are my observations from a short trip to Maui last weekend, including the Haleakalā Silversword (Argyroxiphium sandwicense ssp. macrocephalum) and a Green Sea Turtle:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?d1=2018-04-19&d2=2018-04-22&place_id=any&subview=grid&user_id=npdoty

Cesar Chavez & S. Van Ness: a game, with two players.

The pedestrian runs across the crosswalk and tries to make it to the other side of the street. The other player is the car, who, egged on by a green light, guns the engine and tries to hit the pedestrian or force them back to the sidewalk.