Julian OliverHow the cookie we knew would crumble, has actually crumbled
LAURENShe's got it wrong though. They are protective of their bottom line, not some nazi pissant. The only way for them to make money is to go down the right wing path.
Old Man in the Shoe@noondlyt It's the only way anyone can make money moving forward - these are the rules in the new regime.
@jenzi @noondlyt Punishing those that challenge fascists and their hate speech, so as to benefit from their hate, is to assume an essential component in a fascist ecosystem. Whether traffic or cash, it makes no difference. And so one becomes fascist oneself, part of the broader project.
"Kein Bock auf Nazis" etc.
@JulianOliver @noondlyt I would like a way to hand out the sabotage manual
Andrea is Qualifyinggg@JulianOliver Damn, such a shame she got run off of here because of racist whites 😕
@thiswomanswerk 100%. That was terrible
Bridge&Tunnel Jeff@JulianOliver @thiswomanswerk I remember when condescending white racist long-time Fedi users angrily posting back at her every time she made valid points about the many problems with the Fedi especially anti-black racism. The abuse was non-stop and not just from USA posters, plenty of Europeans joined in. Moderators didn't consider the abuse to be racist.
I was so happy when she joined in 2022 (followed her on Twitter before, bought Disordered Cosmos) but I understand why she left.
@jf_718 @JulianOliver yes, and these issues persist. I find it so ironic to circulate her posts when she'd probably be none too happy a white person on fedi even has her name in their mouth; especially encased in this weird "i told you so" energy
@thiswomanswerk @jf_718 I was following her on Twitter and think she is brilliant, such a force. It was bloody awful how she was run from Masto. It is natural she would go to Bsky, and is as usual right on seeing the play & calling them out on their use of 'AI', their effective platforming of a white supremacist.
You have a good point about using an instance whose mods didn't protect her. That I learned of it long after doesn't make it less hypocritical here. I will look to move. Thank you.
David Fleetwood - RG Admin@JulianOliver Her point about a conversation with Link, Aveta and Rudy should have Bsky paying them to help craft moderation policy.
@reflex A good thought! You are absolutely right, this is free labour.
@JulianOliver It's a for profit company, were it a community effort I'd still say to try to pay them but at least it's not blatantly helping capitalists add value.
micchiato 🎋I have a load of respect for her. I wonder why she’s not posting here? Maybe because she hasn’t found the same supportive community she finds on bsky? (BTW, the moderators on your instance terminated my account there because of my pro-Palestine toots. Masto doesn’t live up to the hype in my book).
@micchiato White racists ran her down, I doubt she's ever coming back. Quite understandable really.
Bsky is effectively one instance, one moderation culture. Mastodon has many instances, many different cultures. I run a couple of nodes myself.
But sure, if you get stung, you don't think "what hive". You just think "bees".
JonThat's true but also even being on a very well-moderated instance doesn't insluate you from the culture -- Dr. Johnathan Flowers talks about this in The Whiteness of Mastodon. And, one of the things that she (and others) highlighted were the problems with white users telling Black users that they should just change instances. Here's a screenshot of tweet from hers back in the day (not sure if the tweet still exists, I have the screeenshot because I included it in the "view from 2022" section of Mastodon: a partial history.
@jdp23 @micchiato Blergh, I did not know that was a thing. So very toxic.
Oh yeah. There are a bunch of other common things in the "Common Mistakes to Avoid" section of 5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people
BTW I remember we once talked about community-run infrastructure as a form of self-hosting (or something along those lines), Blacksky is very much an example of that. Not sure if you've ever read Rudy Fraser's 3-part series "Blacksky: Expressing the Black Everyday in a New Digital Space" but it's got some great grounding for the work he's been doing.
@jdp23 @micchiato This is excellent, thank you. Reading now.
Xavier@jdp23 @JulianOliver @micchiato Hijacking this a little to ask if you have recommendations for non-white groups or hashtags outside of the US? I'd love to follow people outside my bubble, but as a European I don't need more US-related stuff in my life 😅
Great question but unfortunately I don't have any good recommendations here. I boosted in hopes somebody else does!
Davey@jdp23 @xavier @JulianOliver @micchiato
There's a map of curated instances at http://mastodon-near.me/ which lets you see where instances are based.
(It also interesting to look at generally)
Fedi Garden has a region list, still north-heavy tbh: https://fedi.garden/fediverse-servers-sorted-by-country-and-region/
FG is restricted to particular moderation approaches though.
Fediverse Party has a longer server list: https://fediverse.party/en/portal/servers/
There's still more outside these lists, paktodon.asia springs to mind.
Fediverse Near Me
A curated selection of well-moderated Social Web providers that are are open for registration and serving specific countries, regions or cities. [[https://jaz.co.uk/projects/mastodon-near-me/|Project Home/Message me]] [[https://jaz.co.uk/projects/startheresocial/shs-language/|Search by Language]]
@jdp23 @xavier @JulianOliver @micchiato
Due to friction in discovery of Fedi in general, you're often better off going to servers outside your bubble and finding people there, because eg: hashtags won't really let you discover people the same way as on "one big" networks.
Bloop@JulianOliver @micchiato would it have been an idea for her to run her own node, like mastofeed just a thought. I do understand that by having your own node/instance you're in complete control, just my 2 thoughts
samiamsamwe tried to warn them
Faraiwe@JulianOliver buT tHIs TiME wILl bE DiFFeRENt
Áine@JulianOliver this is making me remember back to when people either minimised or denied the fact that bsky uses genai moderation when i was pointing that out as a very clear indicator that it is following the exact same "business model" as twitter and would end up being a copy of it. which was like a year or so ago lol. look at it now
Rune Skovbo Johansen@JulianOliver What is the post about AI referred to? I see this one pinned on Aaron's profile. What they said a year ago was that they would not train generative AI, and that seems to still be their stance? If there has been a turnabout, I'd like to understand what it is.
@runevision It seems they are using The Hive, and never gave an opt out, nor heads up.
@JulianOliver Right, but this is not generative AI; it's classification AI. Does them using this contradict something they've said previously?
@JulianOliver I'm not quite sure, but some posts also suggest that Hive is not being trained on Bluesky images; it's only used to classify them. Training an AI on images, and applying an already trained AI on images to classify them are two entirely different things, but the phrasing "feeding images to an AI" obscures this distinction.
It's bad enough that they are submitting users' images to a 3rd party tool for any form of analysis, 'AI' or not, with no forewarning, opt-in, lest of all opt-out.
@JulianOliver That's a fair objection if e.g. Hive is not running on their own servers (I don't know), but it's a very different objection than how the text reads. Accusing someone of going back on their promises is categorically different than having an issue with the choices that someone has made.
@runevision That needs to be loud and clear in their ToS and Privacy Policy, in bold.
And in this mining gold rush, we cannot trust that Hive are doing what Bsky say they are doing with the images. Perhaps Bsky, essentially a debt machine, pays them for classification. Or perhaps they have a deal we don't know about. If they didn't tell Bsky users about the supposed Hive classification back end, why assume they're telling the whole story now.