I’m not sending Christmas cards this year. Instead, I’ve decided to spend the money on gin.
Merry Christmas.
Ex-Twitter Executive: Elon Musk Is Putting Us ‘In Harm’s Way’ By Showing How We Censored Content.
Violet Coco is right: The climate hyperthreat demands emergency action
Australia has achieved international infamy through the decision to jail climate protestor, Violet Coco, for 15 months. Allow me to add evidence to support her stance that emergency action is demanded of us to avert the climate crisis
Absolutely Maybe: Mapping the Mastodon Migration: Is It a One-Way Trip or an Each-Way Bet for Science Twitter? – “…The best metrics I’ve seen for Mastodon growth are the number of active users per month, and the number of instances. Instances are the communities people join: Mastodon is what those instances are called as a collective. It’s part of the Fediverse – a federated universe of open source systems. When the Mastodon instances are connected to each other, you can navigate them all at once as though they are a single system. But instances are run separately, and can disconnect from each other. For example, an instance that’s a gateway to hate speech can be blocked off from other instances. People’s experience of Mastodon is mediated by the instances they have joined. Mastodon’s help page saysmore effective methods for blocking than it already has are in development. And that’s clearly urgent…As Casey Newton wrote, Musk’s takeover has been “brutish and poorly planned.” This level of smashing and burning doesn’t just lead to damage. It’s destructive – not just for a tech company, but for the communities, activist systems, and livelihoods being shattered around it. Meanwhile, over at the elephant-y place, people have formed new communities with lightning speed, collaborating on new ideas for how to connect and build. Science journalists are there, and the number of journals is slowly growing, though I haven’t seen a list. Some universities have set up instances…”
Noema: Mastodon Isn’t Just A Replacement For Twitter – Users flocking to the platform will need to shift their expectations for social media and become engaged democratic citizens in the life of their networks… As users migrate to the fediverse, they often bring the old expectations of scalable social media. We are used to someone else being in charge and taking care of the problems that might arise, and we are used to complaining when they mess up. Users also bring the same racism, sexism and bad behavior to Mastodon that have arisen in other kinds of online spaces. But in the fediverse, we cannot simply rely on a company’s trust and safety department to take care of problems for us. The challenge and the opportunity of spaces like the fediverse is that it is up to us which rules we want to follow and how we make rules for ourselves…”
An Uncensored Library Created in Minecraft Defies Authoritarianism
Indubitably Odin: “Censored articles from around the world find refuge in this massive Minecraft map. Reporters Without Borders is an international non-profit and non-governmental organization with the stated aim of safeguarding the right to freedom of information. In order to expand upon this goal, the organization has turned to an unlikely source: the video game Minecraft, and a 12.5 million-block neoclassical library containing banned journalism from around the world. Sharing news and information, especially when it’s been banned by a government, is no easy task. How to disseminate — to share — that information becomes a matter of both undermining systems of control that seek to restrict it, and to present it in a manner that is accessible. If you can’t easily find and read the news, what good does it do? That is why this project, one of the most innovative uses of Minecraft in history, is so flippen’ cool…”
…Divided into six sections, the library offers a way to access the articles of five prominent journalists and news sources, as well as the work of Reporters Without Borders itself. Each of the five journalist sections features a pedestal on which a book is placed that showcases the current state of government censorship in that country. This includes that country’s rank on the World Press Freedom Index, a valuable tool for seeing how poorly so many of these countries treat those who value truth…”
