Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 4

Yet another reason not to trust corporate #datafarms with your personal, family, or community history. Verizon is blocking attempts by web archivists to save the content of public YahooGroups before it all gets deleted:
https://boingboing.net/2019/12/08/oath-makes-you-swear-2.html

In 20 years this could be FB or Reddit.

"Twitter, like GTD [#GettingThingsDone], fails to provides tools for fitting meaning-morsels together into creative assemblages of higher value."
- #DavidChapman
https://vividness.live/2013/03/06/meanwhile-back-at-the-charnel-ground/#future

What might those tools look like? What exactly would they allow us to do that current social media tools don't? How could they work to help us make meaning together?

Nearly a billion dollars a year is flowing into the organized #ClimateChange counter-movement: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/meet-the-money-behind-the-climate-denial-movement-180948204/

Wow. Imagine how much #transitions initiatives could do with that kind of funding.

#FramaSoft are shutting down most of their hosted services over the next couple of years, but don't panic. This was always the plan. The shutdowns will happen in a series of steps, according to a published roadap. They are keen to help users self-host, migrate to another community hosting org, or even help start new ones:
https://framablog.org/2019/09/26/lets-de-frama-tify-the-internet/

The licensing situation for #WikiTree is a shame too:
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:WikiTree_FAQ#Is_the_worldwide_family_tree_public_domain.3F

#IANAL and I get that licensing a #genealogy database while protecting privacy is complicated, but the least they could do is adopt an #ODbL (Open Database License). Given their mission of ensuring the family tree they are collecting is never lost, it makes sense to remove any legal obstacles that might come from #SuiGeneris database rights in some jurisdictions, allowing personal backups of the database etc.

"Moreover, if all our code were open, it could be easier for would-be hackers to defeat our privacy controls. We work hard to protect privacy. With all our code public we'd have to work even harder."
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:WikiTree_FAQ

Not only does #WikiTree not even begin to understand the principles of #SoftwareFreedom (reasons to publish code other than encouraging replication), they believe in #SecurityByObscurity:
http://www.albion.com/security/intro-9.html

Which is a shame, because otherwise it's a cool site.

#RichardStallman has no intention of stepping down from the #GNUProject. Good news.

"I continue to be the Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project.
I do not intend to stop any time soon."
https://stallman.org/

Here's what I wrote:
Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, created #copyleft and the GNU GPL, wrote a huge volume of work explaining complex software freedom issues (see: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/), and spent years on the road speaking to anyone who would listen about #softwarefreedom and why human freedom depends on it, as computers and software become more and more ubiquitous. He also created #GNUpedia, which played a key role in the founding of Wikipedia.

@Gotterdammerung that's a cool idea. A sign-recognition engine would be amazing for accessibility. In order to train a free code AI to recognize sign reliably, you'd need a huge corpus of freely licensed video samples of people signing. So when deaf users (and anyone else who can sign) encounter the hypothetical captcha, they could record a video sample instead of a voice sample, or audit one recorded by another user against the text it's meant to represent.
@CharredStencil

One thing I've thought about a lot is captchas that could collect samples of natural language, in a range of languages, accents etc under a free license (CC BY-SA or maybe even GPL). These could gradually build up a new speech corpus to add to those being used to train free code voice recognition software (#Voxforge etc)

I wish nobody used #reCaptcha. Not only does it forces users to allow Goggle to run scripts in their browser, making users do unpaid mechanical turking for Goggle is just rude. If it contributed to a data commons, like training free code AI, I would't mind so much.

A core assumption of #democracy is that governments and "experts" can be wrong, that laws and policies sometimes need to be overturned. Discovering when that's the case absolutely depends on the ability of fringe groups to express and campaign on dissenting views, all of which will seem abhorrent and obviously wrong to *someone*. Governments forcing monopolistic #datafarm platforms to censor fringe views is a threat to an emerging global democracy. We must prevent this, not applaud it.

#Mediawatch on #RadioNZ interview folks from #InternetNZ about the dangerous precedent created by ISPs censoring the net, after the mosque shootings in #Christchurch:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018713324/mediawatch-for-15-september-2019

As a non-coder who tries to be a helpful user and support rather than demand (hopefully I succeed more often than I fail), I feel like there's a need to for users to organize ourselves, and train ourselves in how to file useful bug reports, help efficiently with triage, make feature or UI requests and take part in roadmap planning more diplomatically and in the right place for a project's workflow (eg the user support forums instead of the bug tracker) etc etc.

TL;DR the desire to contribute (both time and money) is there, but it needs to be channeled and focused.

Also many people think they *are* contributing by haranguing devs about their particular school of identity politics and whatnot. Don't get me wrong, some great non-coding contributions are made in making free code projects/ services more inclusive etc. But I've seen people in the fediverse going about that in the most toxic ways. I really feel for the lead dev of Mastodon in particular, who seems really well-meaning and cops far more of that than anyone deserves.

People running commons projects are asking their users/ audiences to buy them a coffee once a month, and fair enough. We deserve that. It's so little, right? But imagine if you tried to give that much to every piece of software you use (including all the dependencies), every net service, every blog you read, every activist org you support etc etc. I can now afford to donate a bit (unlike the 20 years I was on welfare), but I'm paralyzed trying to figure out where to start.

People are saying the burnout is about a lack of funding but I'm not so sure. Maybe in some cases. But I suspect it has more to do with the increasingly stressful (even toxic) experience of being in the community. The culture wars for example. But also a massive increase in users getting involved (which is good) but being pushy and demanding instead of collaborative and diplomatic.

"As before, due to burnout and other obligations this roadmap has no timelines."
- #MailPile developer
https://community.mailpile.is/t/tagged-1-0-0rc6-mini-roadmap-for-rc7-and-rc8/245

It's always sad to hear that people working on the commons are struggling with #burnout. I know what that's like. I've been running on low-energy, post-burnout mode since about 2014 or so. It sucks. It's exasperating to struggle through what ought to be sime tasks and not knowing when (if ever) I will get my mojo back.

#NoteToSelf: don't post exasperated. It makes you come across like much more of an asshat than you really are.