Notices by The research fairy, but spooky (bgcarlisle@scholar.social)

Can we have electoral reform now?

You can:

* Use filters liberally to remove posts that annoys you
* Mute or block other people or bots who get boosted into your timeline if you don't want to see them again
* Try to remember to not click on CW's for stuff that will leave you feeling worse
* Unfollow

And you never have to explain why

You can do so for reasons that are entirely "selfish" or "petty"

E.g. "Their jokes were crass so I muted them"

Make the Fediverse a place that's good for you

Scholar Social has had the following in its Terms for the last ~ 8 months:

> Scholar Social will suspend any instance launched, acquired or funded by Alphabet, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, or Elsevier.

Does your instance have a similar policy?

Please do not reply until after you have read and understood the following: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

Bruce: Thank you for being willing to share your pronouns and respect others'

The Borg: Only a monster could object to that; and we are adept at adapting to new APIs; your pronouns pose no challenge to us

Episode 10: "Pronouns"

~ At Starfleet Human Resources main office ~

Jimmy: Incoming transmission on all frequencies. It's The Borg.

Bruce: Open a channel. Hello, my name is Bruce, and you've reached Starfleet human resources. My pronouns are he/him. How can I help you?

Borg cube: We are The Borg. Our pronouns are ... umm ... we/us.

Abolish drug patents

Incentivize drug discovery with "bounties" for positive RCT outcomes

Nationalize drug production

Straight people: Gay people are exactly like straight people in every single way except for when they have sex and that is the only difference

Gay people: Okay there's a few more ways that—

Straight people: No it's like a DND character sheet where everything is the same but that one stat is flipped.

Gays: Uhh

Straights: I'm just saying, being gay can't mean anything that makes me even slightly uncomfortable and if it does that's your fault, not mine.

Reminder:

Don't "play by the rules" when you're dealing with Nazis

Change the rules to fuck them over if you can

Break the rules to fuck them over if you can

Hit below the belt when you're fighting with Nazis and kick them once they're down

Because I guarantee you, Nazis have no such hangups about cheating, and even *hearing them out* puts their agenda in the realm of things it's okay to discuss, which is a victory for them

I wish I could be as committed to anything as GIMP developers are to that shitty slur they insist on using as the name of their project

@Laurelai @chara "You do have a deep and intuitive understanding of how every possible git command works and why it might not and what to do if it does something weird, right?"

@Laurelai Right? I want to ditch Masto so bad

But I also don't want to bork my instance :/

Broscience but pronounced like "conscience"

Hello please fund my new app, Circumventr

It takes an existing industry, and indicates which costs of that industry can be externalised at the expense of the public or potential workers

And then it indicates how to circumvent existing public protection and labour laws until traditional companies in this industry have been squeezed out, leading to eventual regulatory capture

Very innovative!

My favourite part of science programmes is when they refer to "our furry friends," meaning literal non-human animals and I intentionally interpret them to mean people on Masto

The biggest threats to the Fediverse:

1. Mastodon dot social might just decide to never close registrations

2. Facebook/Twitter might build ActivityPub support into their product (does your instance have a policy against federating with them?)

3. New government regulations ostensibly designed to curb Facebook's excesses might contain requirements for social media services that can only be met by very well-funded mega-corporations

Reminder to Masto instance admins:

Remember, if Nazi- or abuser-sheltering instances pop up in the wake of the Tumblr stuff, you have to ban them EARLY

You have to do it way before "but it would be unfair to so many users" becomes a reason to tolerate abuse

Reminder to all scholar.social users: Your worth is not determined by whatever you got done or didn't get done this week

Everyone knows that git is great for gatekeeping

But did you know you can use it for version control as well?