kazé
Montana Magpie
- 69 Followers
- 55 Following
- 354 Posts
A Conservative Friend (Quaker of an uncommon, old-fashioned sort), writer & environmental advocate, semi-retired.
“What the hell?” you might ask yourself. “Why does southern Arizona need an avalanche center?” Perhaps you’ve never considered these critical questions: Is the snow I’m skiing dangerously powdery? What are the avalanche risks of a bare scree field? How about an arroyo?
https://www.hcn.org/articles/recreation-what-the-heck-is-the-sonoran-avalanche-center
https://www.hcn.org/articles/recreation-what-the-heck-is-the-sonoran-avalanche-center
Connected PlacesNature has just put out correspondence that calls for scholarly institutes to join the #fediverse, and start their own #mastodon instances.
Together with that, the writers put out a longer article, 'Mastodon over Mammon', that explains the argument in greater detail, and is worth reading.
Great work by @brembs et al, which points to the core issue: the private ownership of public commons.
Full version:
https://zenodo.org/record/7652771
Nature Correspondence:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00486-3
Mastodon over Mammon - Towards publicly owned scholarly knowledge
Twitter is in turmoil and the scholarly community on the platform is once again starting to migrate. As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon. Both historically and conceptually, this is not a new situation for the scholarly community. Historically, scholars were forced to leave social media platform FriendFeed after it was bought by Facebook in 2006. Conceptually, the problems associated with public scholarly discourse subjected to the whims of corporate owners are not unlike those of scholarly journals owned by monopolistic corporations: in both cases the perils associated with a public good in private hands are palpable. For both short form (Twitter/Mastodon) and longer form (journals) scholarly discourse, decentralized solutions exist, some of which are already enjoying some institutional support. Here we argue that scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity to rethink their hesitations towards such alternatives and support the migration of the scholarly community from Twitter to Mastodon by hosting Mastodon instances. Demonstrating that the scholarly community is capable of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover, might renew confidence and inspire the community to focus on analogous solutions for the remaining scholarly record – encompassing text, data and code – to safeguard all publicly owned scholarly knowledge.
I was surprised how true to life this article was. If you live in a thinly-populated Western state like Utah or #Montana, these are among the hottest of the hot button issues, and being a good neighbor across the divide is important. You learn the social art of it, or you live with feuds and alienation and loneliness, and perhaps having no one to lean on when things go wrong. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/feb/25/dining-across-the-divide-us-special-janalee-heidi
@Annalee (& others) — *Thank you* and ❤️ for the history discussion! You ask, do we believe in continuing revelation?
May I suggest the better question is, do we even know what continuing revelation is?
It doesn’t mean we surpass Jesus in our understanding. It means simple truths dawn on another few dolts in each new generation. Usually slowly.
#Quakerism is a focused discovery process. Yay! But it must be used. Many of us never learn how, & many don’t want to. I agree, it’s a problem.
Brendan JonesI’ve noticed a lot of instances are using #patreon to collect instance fees and donations. Patreon is shareholder owned. When you make payments through Patreon, 7% of your payment goes to Patreon, which ultimately goes to Patreon shareholders.
That’s not a model that suits the #fediverse. Here’s an alternative: use https://opencollective.com/. It’s a co-op, and it only charges 2%, which ultimately gets used to fund new #coops. Now, that’s a more #decentralised, fediverse-style model, isn’t it!
Sheril KirshenbaumBy 2018, less than 60% of web traffic was human & half of YouTube views were bots masquerading as people. This wild article is about how much of the Internet is fake. (Spoiler: A lot.)
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html #bot #AI
Archie
Dana R FisherGood summary of the response to #climate #activism at #AGU by #scientists in @Nature (and the lack of any response by the AGU). Featuring @ultracricket and @ultracricket
Dick Hardt 
Major news outlets are now being mirrored to the #fediverse by press.coop https://press.coop/directory (see 🧵 for easy to follow list)