Conversation
Notices
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@maiyannah @sim so in mastodonland users are supposed to spend time tagging their posts to deal with other people's phobias? That does sound crazy.
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@pettter crazy because it begins to give others leverage over what types of things you can post. Excessive tagging for the sake of accommodating others means that there is not enough affinity in the group and you should consider running more servers or creating more ! groups to cover the social topology appropriately.
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@pettter Trying to hide lack of affinity behind tags probably isn't a good strategy. One thing to consider is that authoritarianism works primarily via self-censorship and control of the inner dialogue.
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@sim @maiyannah it's an old game in which a few seek to control the dominant narratives. For example, who would decide the tag ontology? Who would educate new users on its appropriate use? It soon becomes the dominion of a priestly class, and old social relations are reproduced.
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@pettter revolution requires inconvenience. It urges us to put aside our masks and confront the real social relations with honesty. Only then can transformation occur.
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@sim @pettter but the good news is that this isn't Twitter and bad conventions can't simply be foisted onto the fediverse. On some servers the admin may want to define a formalised interaction ontology, but this doesn't have to apply universally. The power to wield CWs will be limited by network topology.
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@sim @pettter exactly. Their magic has no power here. Authoritarians can run their own servers and mandate each other as much as they want, and that's fine. Thing is though that they always seek to undermine or obtain leverage over others. We ought to actively reject that out of hand.
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@pettter @sim I could have used the word "insane", or maybe just "foobarred". "Fucked up" or "messed up" would also be common ways of describing it.
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@pettter @sim people tagging their posts is actually ok. When it can become a problem is when tags cause text to be concealed and people are pressured to conform to a tag ontology.
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@sim @pettter in the #NSFW case that's for images and it's a long established convention. So far it hasn't proliferated into subcategories.
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@pettter @sim Which goes back to my earlier point. One should not hide behind tags. To live life with integrity the real social relations must be visible. Then we can have honest discussions, and not engage in evasiveness.
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@pettter @sim Indeed, and this is why it's a good idea to pull no punches when it comes to speaking openly about of authoritarian schemes. The surveillance state with its deluded capitalistic hangers-on and scapegoating apologists should come under withering and sustained criticism.
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@pettter @sim If I have an influence upon the wider world at all I hope it may be to trigger people to run their own internet services, to be more independent and to have more freedom. Even just pausing to reflect upon what freedom you have can be the beginning of a journey.
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@maiyannah @stopgap there's also a description here: https://blog.freedombone.net/how-to-run-a-gnu-social-server
Just select postActiv on the menu instead of gnusocial.
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@maiyannah @stopgap Running desktop Windows as a server? I saw it tried in the past and it didn't end well.
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@pettter @sim in the federated context this is the role of the admin. To decide who gets an account or doesn't and to kick disruptive elements out. If nodes gain too many users then the admin has too much power and arbitrary censorship or CoCs can become a problem. In extremis, this is exactly what Twitter or Facebook is. The situation is easier with P2P, or where the number of users on a server is one as may often be the case with a FreedomBox. In that case you can just use the available controls to follow or block whoever you wish.
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@fl0wn @maiyannah @stopgap As a libre distro user I might be considered a purist, but for new users something like Mint or Ubuntu is ok. I recently put a new user onto Debian with the KDE desktop, which I thought is the most similar to the Windows paradigm. Sticking to LTS releases is also a good idea.
Bob Mottram
All Bobinas P4G content and data are available under the