| #adventist, #servantleadership | Seventh-day Adventist Pastor |
| #adc, #sda | Adventist Discovery Centre (UK & Ireland) |
| #bio | Husband of 1. Father of 1. Believer in One. |
"I have spent decades looking for examples of Google putting its enormous thumb on the scale to censor or amplify certain results, and it hadn’t even occurred to me that Google just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better.”
Absolutely bonkers. The Google antitrust trial discovered that Google is actually *changing user queries* in order to generate results that give more sponsored ads
https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/
I think the real “problem” the fediverse has isn’t that it’s hard to use, it’s that it doesn’t fit the pattern. It’s like if someone asks “what grocery do you order from?” and you respond “My building’s co-op, I get meals & fresh food delivered from participating farms & cooks— I do solar panel maintenance and run the website in return— plus goodie fees”
“goodie fees? … um … so is that like UberEats then?”
And what’s worse is it sounds more complex because it’s atypical— but really it’s easier
Academia’s migration to Mastodon is huge.
Social networks aren’t just about how many people use it, but who uses it.
Mastodon truly gained traction when devs migrated and started building off the API.
But academia’s adoption likely means student adoption. And student adoption is the vector for everyone else.
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.
Peter Butler
Eric Topol
George Takei 
🏳️🌈🖖🏽
Bruce Sterling @bruces
Matthew Rimmer
Eugen Rochko
myrmepropagandist
Voice of America
Chris Trottier