Lotta fluoride moving through the glowieverse. Welcome to Friday Hell. Hold onto your while I poke the global surveillance bear.

TL;DR: INDEPENDENT FEDERATED TRUST AND SAFETY (but first I talk about mirroring for a couple of paragraphs)

A lot of the URLs can be mirrored to your instance locally and read/replied to/reposted on your instance without making you look at the glowie servers. Paste the URLs into the search bar, they'll show up on your instance. This should probably be easier in most FEs.⁰

You know what's better than archive.today links? Mirroring the shit onto a few dozen fedi instances. You put, e.g., https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/iftas-funding-crisis/ into the search bar, it is mirrored to your instance. If you reply to it or repost it (or you are on Pleroma and you smash dat like), it is mirrored to instances where someone follows you.

IFTAS is making another push for centralizing fedi. IFTAS is a surveillance/steering organization that has enough overlap with Newsmast, the Social Web Foundation, Oliphant, FediMod, indieweb.social, hachyderm.io, that they are effectively the same organization. (Sockpuppets are bad when you're LITERALLY HARASSING JOURNALISTS but it is fine to use orgs as sockpuppets. These people spin up 501(c)(3)s faster than most of us spin up domains. The orgs are, not coincidentally, all based in .us/.de/.uk/.ca.) Here's who they are: https://about.iftas.org/advisory/ .

The organizations get government/corporate funding through organizations like nlnet or the Social Web Foudnation ( https://socialwebfoundation.org/2025/03/27/defederation-on-the-fediverse/ ) or the Ford Foundation through the DIIF. They use this sort of thing as a mechanism to pay themselves, so Newsmast "buys" indieweb.social from Tim Chambers ( https://www.timothychambers.net/2025/03/27/the-next-stage-for-indiewebsocial.html ), who was a member of IFTAS ( https://about.iftas.org/2024/07/12/tim-chambers-joins-the-iftas-advisory-board/ , "Tim has been at the forefront of pioneering strategies that leverage technology to promote social good and a healthier social web. [⋯] Tim’s deep understanding of the disinformation landscape further strengthens his value to the IFTAS Advisory Board." ). The Executive Director of IFTAS is employed by Newsmast and it should probably be really fuckin' easy to call this a conflict of interest. I don't know how much money they move like this: my concern is not with hustlers using tax dollars and "charitable" contributions to get paid for forcing their politics, you know, I don't like it but my main concern right now is that they are trying to kill fedi.

IFTAS has recently been hand-wringing about the ratio of jannies to humans going and pushing the coop model. They've also been very interested in regulation, trotting out the "Oh, it's not the 'wild west' any more! You can't just write whatever you want on the *internet*!" See attached, and see the IFTAS founder's push: https://jaz.co.uk/2026/03/13/there-are-a-million-fediverses-and-theyre-all-regulated/ . Jaz-Michael King, head of IFTAS, incidentally, lists Newsmast as his employer. They are creating a fake problem to force their solution. This is part of the (also attached) broader strategy from the .us/.de/.uk/.ca governments to stamp out "misinformation" on fedi: the .de government refers to fedi as "The Hydra on the Web" and expresses frustration that they can't use NetzDG as a pretext to take down random Peertube instances. (They did indeed say the quiet part out loud and it's in the PDF.)

IFTAS's "CSAM detector" (attachment scanner) "ran out of funding" right when the USAID faucet ran dry. ( https://wedistribute.org/2025/02/iftas-funding-crisis/ ) Before they did, they grabbed about 1.86M files from fedi: https://about.iftas.org/2025/03/27/content-classification-system-post-mortem/ . (In addition to things like requiring access to a server admin account for "CARIAD", https://cariad.fedicheck.iftas.org/ , a closed-source tool to show you something that fba.ryona.agency / fed.dembased.xyz will already show you, for free, with source, and without requiring you to give them access to read an admin account. Anyone wanna spend a minute spinning up a new instance and checking to see what requests they make exactly?) It's one thing for them to say "Oh, you're unsafe, you said a hate speech" but it's another *entirely* for them to say "You don't use the CSAM protection!" (I don't know about other admins, but speaking of USAID, very few pedos have been visible from here since that dried up. Either they finally, with extremely coincidental timing, realized that I put heads on pikes, or maybe there was not a coincidence.) This is gonna be the wedge. It's easy to say "I don't stop people from discussing their opinions, even if you don't like their opinions", but nobody on the network actually wants to host anyone's CP bin.

Oliphant's blocklist is dead now. "Note: As of April 15, 2026, the Oliphant Unified Tier 0 Blocklist has been retired. There are numerous instructions on this page to create your own, but we're moving to a more FIRES-centric model, and I want to support that going forward. Rather than combining various blocklists here, I'd prefer to forward FIRES datasets as a better alternative to sharing moderation advisories, as it is a living protocol." https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/the-oliphant-social-blocklist . FIRES is a spinoff of the new Fedimod shit out of *Germany* because YSHL. It is done by IFTAS member Emilia Smith ( https://hachyderm.io/@thisismissem , https://github.com/thisismissem ), or at least she's running the Github org. It is worth noting who was on the Oliphant blocklist at "tier 0" from the beginning. (Say what you want about Seirdy but he's at least transparent about his notes.) FSE is always top of all of these goddamn lists, before they got arround to adding Pieville or Gab or whatever explicitly angry racist instances: why is that? (Well, why the fuck do you *think*?)

So IFTAS builds these things, then conducts these polls: "Which do you want, this, this, or this?" All of the options are, of course, things they want to push; for example, "What if you had automated threat-sharing? What if you had an automated blocklist?" They give you four choices and all of the options are things they want to push, in some cases things they have already developed. When their 2026 needs assessment survey comes around, I suggest you take it. (There's probably some funding requirement that demands that they do a survey, so they do one to show that it's super important that they get funding; in either case, it's also a classic "manufacturing consent" maneuver, it is old as shit.)

You may be familiar with Newsmast ( https://newsmastfoundation.org/about/ ). I had never heard of them until I wrote an MRF that automatically added #ukraine #russia #elonmusk #trump #uspol #putin #economy #antifa to every post on FSE; IDIFTL. ( https://git.freespeechextremist.com/gitweb/?p=fse;a=blob;f=lib/site/mrf/shut_yr_mouth_about_them_politics.ex;h=2d861996b79deb2a1df69f59fa2d18a0472ff966;hb=HEAD ) To my surprise, a series of bots started reposting everything on FSE. Even shit like @whereverbot and @lainbot. I also started getting scraped by backend.newsmast.org, which is looking for not just posts but tracking follower/following relationships. (Larger write-up https://fsebugoutzone.org/objects/377a61ff-78e8-47e8-a2b0-0ed60ac406da , https://media.freespeechextremist.com/rvl/full/88476363018fe449b766bf0979d40fe470c965459c631a1c4540561560d5b6a4?name=newsmast-glowies.png ). I wouldn't be surprised if the fedi "OSINT" scraper tool (remember the one that was like, "IT EXPOSES WHO TALKS TO WHO" and people just used it for fun instead of being terrified?) from a couple of years back was a prototype for this.

There are a lot of instances that are socks used by the IFTAS crowd. For example, the eleven instances¹ that were part of the Fediverse Governance paper ( https://github.com/fediverse-governance/fediverse-governance.github.io ) or instances where they don't even bother to change the links so their "About" page just links to Newsmast's "About" page: https://fsebugoutzone.org/objects/e67f127d-f38a-4ef2-ac14-68eb8f8060e2 .

So I mention, like, "They aren't really against centralization. I took the survey they gave last year and the questions ranged from 'completely irrelevant' to 'insulting'; the main problem was that they were looking for a conclusion and the survey assumed the conclusion. That is, the survey existed to validate the thing they wanted to push. It was stuff like 'Do you suffer mental health problems because of unmoderated content?' and 'Would an automated blocking system help you block better?'" https://fsebugoutzone.org/notice/B33GlKrNA7pYVrEnse .

Dots connected this week: the 2023 "Fediverse Governance" paper, IFTAS (Independent Federated Trust and Safety), Newsmast (the organization that is responsible for scraping fedi and also people's following/follower lists to build a social map of fedi), . I can't be the only one to have noticed these people are all the same group, but I have never heard anyone mention it: https://fsebugoutzone.org/notice/B5Ke039Y3bhptYDXpA . Jon Pincus, outspoken IFTAS tendril and member of the "Disinformation Defense League" (which wants a tax on targeted ad revenue to be earmarked for journos, I SHIT YOU NOT), has been bending cwebber's ear; cwebber's now on social.coop (which pulled in $20,000 per month last time I checked), one of the original eleven¹ instances that were part of the original fediverse governance paper (coauthored by Kissane ahead of the founding of IFTAS). A lot of these things that came out of nowhere, they were astroturfed by these people.

Here's an example: why all the press about the "CSAM problem" on fedi, where did that come from? These people built a detector, they want to create demand for the detector, so they reach a few tendrils out.

hachyderm.io is another great example of the astroturfing. They show up out of nowhere, have a bunch of tech celebrities on there, then the admin starts making these impassioned declarations about how fedi "needs to do $x" or "won't survive without $y".

:glowingthedark: cosocial.ca was the topic of this thread where phnt (I should tag people that were involved but I also think, like, maybe they will get spammed) posted this:

https://fluffytail.org/objects/caa22ad6-309a-43ad-86b2-1bac2659e6c5

> The sleezy kind of freedom haters. They are too afraid of backlash that play these dumb masquerading games to look like "the good guys trying to save this network". Their goal is to just turn this place into another corporate Twatter place nobody asked for.

This is accurate. If you have noticed that these people get hostile and instance-block you if you ever question their premise (as happened in that thread when phnt asked some pretty obviously good-faith questions), this is because they are pushing an agenda. People interact with them and exclaim, "How annoying! He refused to explain what he meant, he instance-blocked me for asking why or questioning the approach!" They are trying to present "Choose the color of the bikeshed!" as a choice before you've agreed to let them build a house. The style of interaction is driven by the motives: you think you're talking to a person, but you are talking to an agenda.

They are trying to push an agenda. The agenda is to kill fedi by turning it into a centrally controlled system, these are the mechanics.

There, that's it, that's my tinfoil screed. No action item. Please see my recent posts/reposts over the last four days for more information.

⁰ FediBBS, you type a comma, like you just do `, $url`, but very few things are "easy" on FediBBS. I think, like, this should probably be done in a similar way to the thing I suggested to feld where it's just an object lookup and the frontend. Several of the repos mentioned here are mirrored to https://git.freespeechextremist.com/ now and I think revolver should probably include some kind of "import/mirror git repo" feature in v2, or anyway I have "git support" in there somewhere, so, like, while FediBBS can just do tarball upload, a server that can absorb git repos and let you clone from any node, that'd be cool; I did this with IPFS but IPFS is, as I have mentioned and you may have noticed, slow and terrible and shitty and unreliable and painful.

¹ The Individual Eleven:

https://cosocial.ca/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/cosocial.ca
https://hcommons.social/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/hcommons.social
https://hachyderm.io/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/hachyderm.io
https://masto.donte.com.br/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/masto.donte.com.br
https://mspsocial.net/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/mspsocial.net
https://piaille.fr/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/piaille.fr
https://sfba.social/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/sfba.social
https://social.coop/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/social.coop
https://tooting.ch/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/tooting.ch
https://wandering.shop/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/wandering.shop
https://woof.group/ | https://fedilist.com/instance/woof.group
the_hydra_on_the_web--challenges_associated_with_extremist_use_of_the_fediverse.pdf
Mapping-Fediverse-Communities-1.pdf
fedimod.png
glowie.png
linkitylank.png
spread_anarchy.jpg
racialslurs.png
hellallyourfamily.jpg
fuckedupshit.jpg
newsmast-glowies.png

@p

>Here's who they are: https://about.iftas.org/advisory/

Worth noting that this list of members used to be pretty public and was accessible from the front page if I remember correctly. Or maybe even was the front page. But at some point, it became hidden and is now linked nowhere on the front page.

>Jon Pincus, outspoken IFTAS tendril and member of the "Disinformation Defense League"

He's also the author of "Nexus of Privacy". A blog that keeps talking about how Bluesky is a part of the Fediverse, how bad Mastodon is with supposed harassment prevention and keeps trying to say how Fediverse should be built. Now seemingly somewhat successfully when he's in IFTAS.

Here's one such gem: https://privacy.thenexus.today/unsafe-by-design-and-unsafe-by-default/

>FSE is always top of all of these goddamn lists, before they got arround to adding Pieville or Gab or whatever explicitly angry racist instances: why is that?

Seems like you get blocked a lot. Maybe you should think why that is?

@phnt

> He's also the author of "Nexus of Privacy". A blog that keeps talking about how Bluesky is a part of the Fediverse

holy fucking shti what

You literally cannot be anonymous on Busky.

I have seen people get into arguments with him on here and he did the "Ho ho ho, these people exist to fill my blocklist" thing but I couldn't find it; some people on some instances always take the bait, *always*.

> Here's one such gem: https://privacy.thenexus.today/unsafe-by-design-and-unsafe-by-default/

Dear god.

Nah, this is the type of thing I'm talking about, though, like, they all get into a Discord and then they coordinate a push. "People need to perceive IFTAS as the white savior of the feddy verse, so we need to just keep hammering how unsafe it is here."

> Seems you get blocked a lot. Maybe you should think why that is?

@phnt

> Here's one such gem: https://privacy.thenexus.today/unsafe-by-design-and-unsafe-by-default/

See, this shit looks like infighting until you realize that IFTAS is a glowie hydra and Ore0h is not necessarily ideologically different but a member of a competing organization: https://privacy.thenexus.today/the-bad-space/ .

@p @lainbot @whereverbot i hope they kill this God-forsaken place

@nimt @lainbot @p @whereverbot WHO authorized that. Cum estate is a rogue island state and will be vanquished

@pernia pernis real crabby lately.

@nimt @pernia I'll take cum.estate's trust and safety recommendations.

@pernia @nimt The entire fediverse council has elected cum.estate as the chief governing body.

@p This is a good analysis, and I can confirm that there is indeed some coordination between the organizations and people you mentioned. I wouldn't call it a conspiracy, though. I know some of them well enough to conclude that it is a not a single organization, but a loose group. Some of them seem to be fake, but others seem to be sincere in their convictions.

I'd like to share a couple of additional links you may find interesting:

- https://about.iftas.org/yoel/

Remember this guy? Given the timing, I suspect that some of these projects were supposed to be sinecures for former Twitter employees.

- https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/pulls/140

This is a draft of a FEP about mandatory CSAM scanning. As one of the FEP repo maintainers, I immediately raised concerns about privacy, centralization, etc. That made me persona non grata at W3C.

@p God hates fedi. It was written.

@p @nimt the scramble for cum.salon . Next you're gonna set up ports and flood me with opium.

@silverpill

> This is a good analysis, and I can confirm that there is indeed some coordination between the organizations and people you mentioned.

Thank ye.

> I wouldn't call it a conspiracy, though.

I'm a fuckin' lunatic, I'll call it one.

> I know some of them well enough to conclude that it is a not a single organization, but a loose group.

The thing is they put out tendrils without acknowledging the coordination or any other kind of transparency about who decided what and when and why. Like, Seirdy puts out his receipts, IFTAS just declares things and then calls people enemies of progress and says "Well, you can't just have a website where people say whatever they want": this behavior is as good as an acknowledgement of an agenda that they don't want to publicize.

> others seem to be sincere in their convictions.

Oh, yeah, I mean, I can acknowledge that. I think a lot of them are sincere in their convictions the way Bob McNamara was, though. "Taquiyya is praxis." I don't doubt that there are some that hear these things they're saying and agree with them and push them.

> - https://about.iftas.org/yoel/

Am I missing something? It's just a photo of the guy's head.

> Remember this guy? Given the timing, I suspect that some of these projects were supposed to be sinecures for former Twitter employees.

That is interesting.

> - https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/pulls/140
> This is a draft of a FEP about mandatory CSAM scanning. As one of the FEP repo maintainers, I immediately raised concerns about privacy, centralization, etc. That made me persona non grata at W3C.

*Very* interesting.

Evan Prodromou, "Board member at CoSocial.ca. Research Director, Social Web Foundation." says:

> This conversation is not very fruitful, so I'm withdrawing the PR. I'm going to rework this proposal and submit it to the SocialCG directly instead.

And Jaz shows up as well. Very interesting conversation; worth reading.

The citation without noting connections is very interesting.
yoel.png

@p @lainbot @whereverbot

> the .de government refers to fedi as "The Hydra on the Web"

Projection sounds the same in every language.

> They are trying to present "Choose the color of the bikeshed!" as a choice before you've agreed to let them build a house.
> They are trying to push an agenda. The agenda is to kill fedi by turning it into a centrally controlled system, these are the mechanics.

They would have to change the spec to accomplish their goals though, or that’s at least what it seems like to an idiot like me; wouldn’t that just create an isolated fediverse that is partially-incompatible with, well, literally everything that already exists, and dies slowly like BlueSky? You said

> No action item

but it really seems like no action is necessary, only vigilance.

@vii @lainbot @whereverbot

> Projection sounds the same in every language.



> wouldn’t that just create an isolated fediverse that is partially-incompatible with, well, literally everything that already exists, and dies slowly like BlueSky

Worth noting, all of these people list Busky accounts alongside their (often only partially disclosed) fedi accounts.

> but it really seems like no action is necessary, only vigilance.

I could come up with some action suggestions, but the main one I have is "get back to work, Pete" and suggesting to other people that I get back to work is kind of absurd.

Mainly I think it's better to point a flashlight. I am frustrated that people constantly take the bait and then the servers get blocked so you can't say things like "Why didn't you disclose that you are on the board?" or "You paid these people to conduct this research or build this product and you're talking it like the results have come out of nowhere and shocked you and you've just had a huge realization" but I can't really control other people so I am flooding my personal wiki with shit. (Side-effect of FediBBS: it is easy to copy and paste bios and threads into my wiki, especially since I'm running FediBBS in acme anyway.) So if I were to suggest something that other people do, it's "Here are the dots I have connected, please add dots or draw more lines" and "These people should be ignored: they're sockpuppeting their way into fake mandates and trying to set up a governing body."

@p @pernia lol

@w0rm @pernia Ha, did you poke him?

@pernia That part's real, yes.

@pernia @nimt I would never.

@silverpill @p

> I wouldn’t call it a conspiracy though.

I doubt the bankers of the 1910s were without justification for their security and privacy in the matter, when making plans that affect people they have no right stance making those decisions for. But we can call it “how business is done in this time and place,” and the real problem seems to remain; people who think they know better than the admins are using underhanded tactics to politicize the adoption of technologies, with a motte and bailey for centralized control over all kinds of security beneath the veneer of CSAM concerns.

@p @lainbot @whereverbot is there any way to poison their service?

@p @lainbot @whereverbot how do I end the glowies

@p @w0rm he blocked me after i tried to make amends with him. Im not holdin any grudges.

@MK2boogaloo They've mentally air-gapped it, ha.

@Ree Good question.

>If you have noticed that these people get hostile and instance-block you if you ever question their premise (as happened in that thread when phnt asked some pretty obviously good-faith questions), this is because they are pushing an agenda.

Way to state the obvious.

> why all the press about the "CSAM problem" on fedi, where did that come from?
>These people built a detector...

It's less of building one and more to have witch hunt to throw out on people they hate.
It's the fedi equivalent of WMDs.
The obvious ones are reported and blocked, because let's be honest. Every pedo I see here are retarded and love showing off their fetish that should get them shot in the head as a result.
No, it's just to wage war on instances that they can't control.
Simple as.

>They are trying to push an agenda. The agenda is to kill fedi by turning it into a centrally controlled system, these are the mechanics.

Again stating the obvious.
When has the government, especially ours, ever wanted to downsize their surveillance?

>I think revolver should probably include some kind of "import/mirror git repo" feature in v2, or anyway I have "git support" in there somewhere

Is revolver coming out this year?

@p

>Am I missing something? It's just a photo of the guy's head.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoel_Roth

@silverpill @p >early life
EVERY SINGLE TIME

@p @lainbot @whereverbot

👆

@NonPlayableClown @Soy_Magnus I don't know what 01f446 means but I should just kill that dipshit's account from this side.

@khayyam @pernia @w0rm Player skill issue.

@p @khayyam @w0rm WHATEVER cunnygy has to say he can rape himself widdit. he is cutoff. kaput.

@NonPlayableClown @lainbot @whereverbot

> It's less of building one and more to have witch hunt to throw out on people they hate.

That was what I said, yes.

> No, it's just to wage war on instances that they can't control.

This is my reasoning, yeah.

> Again stating the obvious.

A lot of stuff seems obvious but a lot of people don't notice it until you spell it out. It can be difficult tot ell what's obvious. Anyway, I had to tie it off; it's just rambling unless I make the thesis explicit.

> When has the government, especially ours, ever wanted to downsize their surveillance?

Stating the obvious, yes.

> Is revolver coming out this year?

Yes.

@silverpill Oh, shit! I remember his name now, yeah.

Wonder why they have just a photo of his head. Was there something written there before?

@pernia @silverpill Except all of the other people mentioned in the thread.

@p @silverpill whatever u say, pete bergerstein

> I don't know what 01f446 means

You should probably show it in native HTML to truly understand what 01f446 means

@NonPlayableClown @Soy_Magnus

% grep 1F446 /lib/ucd/emoji-data.txt
1F446..1F450 ; Emoji_Modifier_Base # E0.6 [11] (👆..👐) backhand index pointing up..open hands

@mint @p @silverpill Explain IFTAS to me like I'm lazy and haven't read anything about it. 🙏

@collappsar @p @silverpill @mint its a methodology they use to turn gay people straight

I hope you enjoyed my participation in this thread. Too bad I missed it at the time of the post because I was out doing errands.

@NonPlayableClown Certainly preferable to Sognus's participation.

> Too bad I missed it at the time

Fedi is asynchronous.

@mint @silverpill I think I remember their attempt at rezzing their bluechecks.

@p @lainbot @whereverbot Now this is a gud job!

@mint @silverpill

> mastodon
> posts: 93899 (31.66/day)
> Posts per user: 88.33

Many such cases.

@p I don't remember, sadly. I believe he was on the front page at some point, but as @phnt says, the site has changed since then (and the guy moved to greener pastures).

@silverpill @phnt It's weird that it'd be omitted from the Wayback Machine.

Literally the attribute says <title=":point_up_2:">

@NonPlayableClown I ain't gotta, I can just use grep.

@collappsar @mint @silverpill

> Explain IFTAS to me like I'm lazy and haven't read anything about it. 🙏

See OP.

@silverpill @p Doesn't surprise me Evan was involved in that once again. But Gleason actually figured something usable years prior to that with the NSFW MRF. You could easily host an API server and use some local selfhosted model for detection.

lmfao should have just grep'd the post

@vii @lainbot @p @whereverbot

They would have to change the spec to accomplish their goals though, or that’s at least what it seems like to an idiot like me; wouldn’t that just create an isolated fediverse that is partially-incompatible with, well, literally everything that already exists, and dies slowly like BlueSky? You said

Yes, that's how it would play out if they didn't have large projects interested in their agenda. Issue is, Mastodon is onboard with this and Pixelfed is in SWF so I guess dansup also agrees to some extent. So the partially incompatible isolated Fediverse would be us. They don't necessarily have to change the protocol either, only implement "features" in such a way that a large network split will happen.

@phnt @vii

> Yes, that's how it would play out if they didn't have large projects interested in their agenda. Issue is, Mastodon is onboard of this

And Masto is more than comfortable to pretend to participate in the process and then swerve into doing something inexplicable and worse.

> and Pixelfed is in SWF



> So the partially incompatible isolated Fediverse would be us.

Free fedi.

@silverpill @p I like how the guy opened the PR, and the discussions were really well structured and well laid out, brought up lots of other ideas and the ups and downsides thereto; and the freak closes it with:

> This conversation is not very fruitful, so I'm withdrawing the PR. I'm going to rework this proposal and submit it to the SocialCG directly instead.

Yeah, of course. Because there's nothing worse than quality discussions poking holes at your proposal, allowing you to learn and adapt.

@fish @silverpill

> Because there's nothing worse than quality discussions poking holes at your proposal, allowing you to learn and adapt.

Yeah, that was my thought, like, they do this stuff because they want to look like they're participating, but they stop fast when it becomes apparent that they can't force an agenda.

@nimt @pernia INNOVATIVE

@fish @p @silverpill I didn't expect this much resistance, let me try to introduce it in my hugbox where people will most likely agree with me by default.*

@phnt @vii @p @lainbot @whereverbot His mails to sign up to any of his instances have bad site certificates btw. was surfing there a few days ago.

@p can I fedpost for this?

@MK2boogaloo I ain't stoppin' ye.

@silverpill @p JFC, a few weeks ago I was joking "Countdown to first public server on the Fediverse with Persona-provided age verification", and now I'm finding out some jokers tried to get endorsement for servers running every user-uploaded image by §$#!§-ing PhotoDNA two years ago already. I'm reeling, honestly.

@NonPlayableClown @p man I got first post with and this nigga still crying. Amazing

>man I got first post with :butt_baby_birth: and this nigga still crying.

That's it buddy you're defederated.

@NonPlayableClown @Soy_Magnus It's one thing to attend a GG Allin show and it's another entirely to be GG Allin's roommate.

>it's another entirely to be GG Allin's roommate.

I wouldn't mind being his roommate now... considering he's dead

@NonPlayableClown @Soy_Magnus Do you think the smell has *stopped*? That man's bones have probably figured out a way to fling shit by now.

>Do you think the smell has *stopped*?

I bet whatever this guy was flinging smelled a lot better than any poojeet I've met.

@NonPlayableClown @Soy_Magnus I've watched that entire documentary twice and the man shat on the floor and then rubbed it on his face and spat his own shit at this terrified kid before the cops showed up.

@phnt @p Curiously, Gleason was supportive of the proposal, although at the time he already moved to Nostr (IIRC).

Also, some strange things started to happen in the aftermath of closing that PR. I started seeing vague posts expressing moderation concerns on Codeberg and SocialHub (in this thread, for example: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scope-of-the-socialhub-policy/3506). People suddenly started talking about adding a CoC, etc etc. But every time I asked what this is about, there was silence.

@silverpill @p
>Curiously, Gleason was supportive of the proposal, although at the time he already moved to Nostr (IIRC).

That's because 4 years ago when the MRF was created, is also around the time when Fedi was being flooded with nonces (and also after the Matrix channel arc failed). The whole point of the MRF was that you could plug it into something like PhotoDNA, because Poast moderation was getting tired of dealing with nonces on TLs. Gleason was always supportive of things like this and I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't also pushing something like that on Nostr considering how nonce infested that network is.

> I started seeing vague posts expressing moderation concerns on Codeberg and SocialHub (in this thread

Kinda reminds me of this which I was reading two days ago, but it is unrelated.
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/moderation-norms-on-socialhub-going-forward/8634

He would be right at home in LA then.

@NonPlayableClown @Soy_Magnus You're probably thinking of wherever you live.

@silverpill @phnt

> Curiously, Gleason was supportive of the proposal

Is that curious?

> Also, some strange things started to happen in the aftermath of closing that PR. I started seeing vague posts expressing moderation concerns on Codeberg and SocialHub (in this thread, for example: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scope-of-the-socialhub-policy/3506). People suddenly started talking about adding a CoC, etc etc. But every time I asked what this is about, there was silence.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT

@silverpill @phnt Okay, well, to be fair, the timestamp on the "Scope of the socialhub policy" post is August 1, 2023, and the "PhotoDNA Attestation extension" is from August 4, but I think that was possibly preemptive, because he posted this on August 18:

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scope-of-the-socialhub-policy/3506/9

> Thanks. So, if I have a problem with how someone is behaving in PRs on codeberg, what do I do next?

And then in https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scope-of-the-socialhub-policy/3506/12 and https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scope-of-the-socialhub-policy/3506/13 , he made it explicit that this was about the PhotoDNA discussion.

And he directly retreats into "But think of the optics of not thinking of the children!"

> I ended up withdrawing the PR. I had adapted the proposal in the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Child Safety report into a FEP to start the discussion process. I was attacked personally in the comments, and the FEP wasn’t allowed to be merged. I don’t think it helped our movement to have such vigorous opposition to developing CSAM filtering standards.

The country?
Never seen a guy act like that, let alone anyone but the same 20 people.

@NonPlayableClown And I've never seen that in LA but I have seen it in SF.

@p @phnt @silverpill > I was attacked personally in the comments

A lying little freak it turns out eh. 🇨🇦 🥖

@p @NonPlayableClown BOMB SF
STRAP ME TO A NUKE AND SEND ME TO SF

@fish @phnt @silverpill Yeah, the guy's a cock, right?

Incidentally, @strypey shows up in some of those threads and says sensible things.

@p @fish @phnt @strypey @silverpill huh, so hachyderm's insanity was sponsored.

wait, is the whole federated blacklist mandate sponsored bullcrap

Makes even more sense especially the poop map you posted.

@NonPlayableClown That is a real thing in SF. It is *still* a real thing in SF. I have never seen syringes on the sidewalk in the US *except* SF; same for human feces.

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @strypey

> :blobcatderpy: wait, is the whole federated blacklist mandate sponsored bullcrap

Yes. See top post; hopefully the thread loads. Only ~100 posts at present.

@p @fish @phnt @strypey @silverpill my patience for Current Things is extremely limited and you pasted an opus i no longer read 500 pages of the fall of man per day

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @strypey The short answer: IFTAS/Oliphant/Social Web Foundation/Newsmast/Fediblock/etc. are all the same people, modulo some regular well-meaning people, and are all funded by the Malthusian nihilist cabal.

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @strypey (But the top post contains a dang TL;DR.)

@p @fish @phnt @strypey @silverpill and here i thought humans were just collectively stupid, as they tend to be

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @strypey
rockpaperscissors_but_its_society.jpg

@p
> @strypey shows up in some of those threads and says sensible things

Should it worry me that the self-described "free speech extremists" say that, and everyone else seems to think I'm an aspy-hole? It doesn't.

I try to assume good faith with everyone, always, and ask probing questions in search of deeper understanding. When I get aggressively defensive non-answers, I tend to feel bad, and assume I'm doing it wrong. But maybe I ought to get suspicious instead? Hmm.

@fish @phnt @silverpill

@strypey @fish @phnt @silverpill

> Should it worry me that the self-described "free speech extremists" say that

Well, obviously, in my opinion, no.

> and everyone else seems to think I'm an aspy-hole?

Sir...

> I try to assume good faith with everyone, always, and ask probing questions in search of deeper understanding. When I get aggressively defensive non-answers, I tend to feel bad, and assume I'm doing it wrong.

My 'tism flares up and I am pretty good at reading incentives and terrible at reading affect. "This is not what you'd do if you wanted this; you'd have to want that or the other."

@p Reminds me of what Chapman says in the first essay I ever read on Meaningness;

"... you could recognize sociopaths and eject them. Geeks may be pretty good at the recognizing, but are lousy at the ejecting. Mops don’t recognize sociopaths, and anyway don’t care. Mops have little investment in the subculture, and can just walk away when sociopaths ruin it. By the time sociopaths show up, mops are numerically most of the subculture."

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill

@strypey @icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill I wave "Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths" at whoever I can convince to listen. Excellent article. (I don't know if you scrolled up and saw OP but you may be interested.)

I want to speak up for Evan P, who I think has also been a juicy target for identi-Moonies (eg Jon Pincus, who I wouldn't piss on if they was on fire). Resulting in apparently evasive behaviour on Evan's part that's actually defensive, and a level of sensitivity to the normal rough and tumble of online dev debate that's caused by it triggering memories of being brigaded.

Eg the SWF hellthread on SH. The people gunning for Evan, mostly the same who later targeted me.

@p @fish @phnt @silverpill

@strypey @fish @phnt @silverpill Well, I'm willing to believe he's a little overly cautious but I see the FEP thread, he's suggesting that everyone use a proprietary Microsoft service, I see reasonable discussion, then I see him back out and then say "I was personally attacked and they didn't merge my FEP, how do I get them banned from Codeberg?" And not just once, I see that same style in the other thread: https://cosocial.ca/@evan/116019337987119280 .

(1/2)

@p
> I don't know if you scrolled up and saw OP

Being a stickler for checking context, I certainly did. My take is pretty much the same as @silverpill's.

There is a troubling dynamic at work, where states, political parties and legacy media realise the party is over, and are scrambling to hoard what power they can as the neo-liberal, state-corporate order continues to fall apart around them. Some of what you're seeing will be them putting thumbs on the scale.

@icedquinn @fish @phnt

(2/2)

But most (*not* all) of the people you identify seem like genuine actors to me. Somewhat captured by indenti-Moonie discourse to different extents. But mostly looking for ways that the fediverse can collectively regulate itself. As a bulwark *against* attempts by states and other power players to impose inappropriate regulation on us from above.

We're at an equivalent inflection point to the one that produced S230. A bit of net history worth studying (or revising) for all of us.

@strypey @silverpill @icedquinn @fish @phnt

> Being a stickler for checking context, I certainly did. My take is pretty much the same as @silverpill's.



> states, political parties and legacy media realise the party is over, and are scrambling to hoard what power they can

I should float my "LLMs are replacement for both propaganda outlets and surveillance systems and there is no government on earth that is prohibited from running an army of chatbots" thing past you. I don't think they think the party is over; I think that's why they're racing to fund LLMs. (That's a bit of a digression.⁰)





⁰ Quoted from different thread at https://fsebugoutzone.org/notice/B5G4gbZi5rQXpibiSG :

> There are no "can't use amassed LLM sockpuppets to manufacture consent or to conduct massive real-time surveillance campaigns" restrictions against the government (and even when there are restrictions like that, the 2007 warrantless wiretapping and PRISM and the Biden Twitter/Facebook thing demonstrate that the government doesn't really care when there are restrictions) and you can see that the PRC and US are aggressively pouring money into this while governments that don't have much fear of uprisings are making minimal investments. (The room full of Russkies posting at boomers on Facebook is probably going to be replaced with LLMs from Yandex, but Russia's been half-assing their influence campaigns last 20-ish years at least.) That's going to be a qualitative shift in government and that is bigger than clickbait journos getting the ax. I showed you, right, on consumer hardware, it'll do a passable job at summarizing my notifications. You look at the NSA's exabytes under the desert in Utah, you look at the https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2025/11/ and the US, which had been slipping in the rankings, suddenly ate the top 10 again, China went from owning the top slot to #24. And where you saw only governments before, you see Microsoft and NVidia. (OpenAI has, at current revenue levels, an order of magnitude gap between their $250B commitment to minimum buy for Azure and their revenue of about $3-4B/month. Microsoft already owns 27% and will acquire them unless they get a big contract. They are talking Q4 IPO and they're discussing advertising; advertising will not make up the shortfall and is a dry-hump for businesses that have run out of ideas. But "persuasive reasoning based on natural language analysis" is, in the case of LLMs, dual-purpose: they are eyeing government contracts.

@MK2boogaloo @p @lainbot @whereverbot off course, I wont but it's a vulneb.

@mint @lainbot @whereverbot

> "Last updated 2025-07-01."

Wonder why he stopped. Did he get the full Paula?

> blocked cum.estate and dsmc.space just recently

"What took you so long?"

> appears to be a flagship FIRES server from Oliphant

Dear god.

> I wonder if he's been on board of all this crap.

Maybe the got him to join up.

In the midst of all of this, Evan Polomolodor updated his head and his head makes me want to fight him:
evanagain.jpg

@p @lainbot @whereverbot @mint he has the facial equivalent of those gif banner ads from the 90s that said “click the target and win a prize” except it’s “punch the cheekbone and win a dopamines”

@vii @mint I thought the moustache was what made him unbearable before, but it turns out he's just *like* that:
evanpoppledopolis.webp.png

@p @phnt

>the timestamp on the "Scope of the socialhub policy" post is August 1, 2023,

Hmm. I see Aug 8, 2023 7:40 PM.

Indeed, it was not made after the withdrawal of the PR (I confused it with another thread). This one was made right after my first comments on the PR.

@silverpill @phnt

> Hmm. I see Aug 8, 2023 7:40 PM.

Yeah, it makes me think that the post was created in order to get ready; you notice he claimed that the discussion was unproductive and then went back to that thread to claim that he was personally attacked (which I don't see in the Codeberg thread) and that the FEP was not allowed to be merged, almost like he decided to withdraw it and make the complaint beforehand.
aug1.png

@strypey @p @icedquinn @fish @phnt This article contains a very accurate description of the process fedi is undergoing right now. The conclusion is disappointing, though. Obviously, I didn't read the book, so maybe "Be slightly evil" means something else, but I think there is absolutely no reason to be evil. "Geeks" (to borrow terminology from the article) do not lose because they are not evil. They lose because they don't want to be in charge, and nature fills the vacuum with grifters and sociopaths.

@silverpill @strypey @icedquinn @fish @phnt

> nature fills the vacuum with grifters and sociopaths.

There's no vacuum if no one needs to be in charge. If you make it impossible to make money on fedi then you can maintain the network without the sociopaths showing up. They're showing up because they want to coalesce influence and they don't like the idea of a side-channel.

Someone that is an experienced fedi admin and that has familiarity with FidoNet should try to get an interview with Tom Jennings. (I try to bother the dude as little as possible but it's tomjennings at tldr.nettime.org.) FidoNet basically kept their shit together until the Internet displaced BBSs.

@p @fish @phnt @strypey @silverpill billionaires are basically systems that reconstruct all of the social systems to serve themselves.

it should be obvious from this statement that "do nothing" will never be a viable system response to keep them out

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @strypey

> "do nothing" will never be a viable system response to keep them out

If they don't know what they're looking at, it works better.

@p @fish @phnt @strypey @silverpill realistically you're just living somewhere that isn't a strategic asset. its like those funny island nations with real republics because the country is so irrelevant it's not stuffed with lobbyists.

@silverpill
> "Geeks" ... do not lose because they are not evil ... They lose because they don't want to be in charge, and nature fills the vacuum

I agree. In the context of the article, I think "be slightly evil" means being willing to be in charge, eg organising a process for identifying and ejecting sociopaths. With full respect for due process and principles of natural justice, so it doesn't become a tool of sociopaths (ie "slightly evil" not actually evil).

@p @icedquinn @fish @phnt

@strypey @silverpill @p @fish @phnt good people tend not to want leadership because the responsibility and costs can be considerable.

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @strypey Well, I disagree. You cannot ever get away from people trying to fuck you, but you can make something that the sociopaths do not understand and deride.

@p @fish @phnt @strypey @silverpill they don't understand a lot of what they use

@icedquinn
> its like those funny island nations with real republics because the country is so irrelevant it's not stuffed with lobbyists

Name one. Every country with an identifiable government or other power centre is stuffed with lobbyists. We certainly do in Aotearoa, and I get the impression smaller Pacific nations are the same.

@fish @phnt @p @silverpill

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @strypey Bitches don't know 'bout my whatever you said.

@strypey
This is just yet more division. @p @icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill

@light @strypey @icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill It's not divisive to recognize that some people can lie, attempt to exploit fedi, or attempt to screw fedi.

@light
> This is just yet more division

Maybe, or is it a legitimate example of the paradox of tolerance? Where tolerating sociopaths in the fediverse dev community (instead of identifying and ejecting them) ends up reducing the capacity of the community to be inclusive?

@p @icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill

@strypey @light @p @fish @phnt @silverpill that isn't what popper wrote even though it is deeply misquoted.

the paradox of tolerance is an open society always contains the possibility that people vote away their open society. it is the sine qua non of an open society. once you have thought police "to protect democracy" you no longer have an open society. and have extinguished your liberal democracy.

the society protects from violence against extreme opinions and vigilance protects against voting the extreme opinions in to place. you can't get rid of it without no longer having the thing you are trying to protect.

nobody seems to have ever read the book.

(1/?)

@icedquinn
> nobody seems to have ever read the book

I admit I haven't (I must), but I did investigate what Popper actually said;

"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/paradox-tolerance

@fish @phnt @p @silverpill @light

@strypey @fish @phnt @p @silverpill @light
if you read the book, the context of this claim is after 25% of the book goes on about how much popper hates plato and spent chapters reiterating "plato's republic is authoritarian as fuck, actually"

the stuff about limited tolerance is spoken in direct context of people exiting a classical authoritarian society and discussing the dangers of grognards sliding society directly back in to hierarchical strong man cultures.

people don't read it and decide it means calling randos nazis but it was spoken with the very real and ongoing concern throughout time of people rotting democracy back in to dictatorships.

poppers smugness is that if violence is off the table, then reason holds for the best argument, and the best argument is empirically the open society, so they have the advantage of self-demonstrating being the best outcome and not needing special favor.

the whole book is very much against authoritarian solutions to problems. unlimited tolerance is spoken next to societies that literally did the "someone is a threat to our power with their words, kill them" behavior people actually misquote the paradox to justify.

(2/?)

Substitute 'sociopaths' for 'the intolerant', 'geeks' for 'the tolerant' and 'the fediverse' for "tolerance, and you've got my paraphase of Popper.

Yes, identifying and ejecting sociopaths is "slightly evil". Yes, we need to very carefully build due process for doing it, so we don't end up building a guillotine for sociopaths to weaponise against geeks.

(3/3)

But doing nothing means sociopaths will take over and destroy the fediverse, as they extract all its value as Capital. Maybe that's the better option in your mind than being "slightly evil". You're entitled to that view. But it's not one I share.

@vii @lainbot @p @whereverbot
> but it really seems like no action is necessary, only vigilance.
something something the price of liberty is eternal vigilence

@icedquinn @lainbot @p @whereverbot QUINN

WHAT THE FUCK

I MADE A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE OUT OF SHEER FRUSTRATION WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN

NO I DIDN'T TAG YOU WHEN DO I EVER TAG PEOPLE

@vii where i always am. sitting in a cardboard box on blob.cat

@icedquinn

so what do you get when posix sh and elixir have a baby, raised by a lispy nun in a perl convent?

https://github.com/elizafairlady/ish

I'm refactoring the whole ast, lexer and parser currently so don't like. don't use it. but I thought it was stupid that only elixir really made good use of erlang features like that when I get most of it for free with a kernel and can compensate for what I'm missing with goroutines.

so it's a shell that you can write a genserver in.

(1/?)

This is all out of context, because what I'm proposing clearly isn't "authoritarian solutions", but systematic defence *against* them. But since we're arguing the toss ...

@icedquinn
@fish @phnt @p @silverpill @light

@strypey @fish @phnt @p @silverpill @light
> defense
i tend to favor education in how controllers work as a cybernetic concept, because people do understand they are being predated upon but they keep thinking winning one vote means anything.

it doesn't, really, because they're more like advanced persistent threats or systems that specialize in taking over systems.

i think i outlined this already with the note that sociopaths are morally comfortable using everyone for their own ends, while normal people don't really do much to stop this, which is probably also the whole point of the mops vs geeks article

its hard to blame them though because schooling in the USA was literally co-opted to produce easily controlled morons, and the model is replicated worldwide to varying degrees of success.

@vii i never learned elixir. i had a free class about it once but never had a project that particularly needed it.

i've somehow never been able to escape soft real-time.

been looking in to ada off and on. the on ramp is brutal, though. a little bit of koka this week because effects systems look neat, but i'm not sure how useful they really are.

@vii euphoria had an interesting idea that 'type checking' just meant 'if this function returns true then its a value of that type.' which nelua also uses for concepts at the compile level. ada does not do this, but it does the whole "meters is a distinct integer from inches or other integers" which nim did steal. nim has concepts but they are experimental and janky, where ada generics have just been doing mostly the right thing forever. it kind of looks like ada is just the most morally correct of the wirths. with a couple decisions i disagree with (adb/ads separation)

nim steals some things from them and doesn't commit to the bit. araqs wishy washy bit on this tires me. i've been working on a parser generator last month to do some kind of rebolized smalltalk.

koka does look very interesting in how they are abusing the effects layer and inlining to actually get functional programming tractable. it's actually reducing to imperative code more than it doesn't, which means its finally succeeding at what GHC promises and basically never does. interesting, if still unstable.

@icedquinn I'm having to make decisions right now that make it slightly less elixir, so no worries XD

@vii functional stuff is very clean in theory but the sufficiently smart compilers just never arrived. BEAM is good at message relaying and not much else. (it can be made to do much else, it's just poorly suited to all tasks. but its a cockroach so it will poorly do those tasks until time immemorium.)

koka has some success at "functional but in place" (their marketing) where they're aggressively optimizing tail calls and register reuse, so that might change.

@icedquinn I'm not even caring about paradigm anymore. I mean, yes, there's a serious functional bent in this but also like, it's designed so that anywhere I want to use a shell command instead of an expression, that is possible and unintrusive, but also lets me spin off processes I define myself inline. the ergonomics of spawn/await, the supervisor pattern, I use these things all the time and being able to do it from my cli with a weird chimera of a language is great.

But yeah, I use trampolining for tail calls, I have a cons operator, I have been laughing to myself for a few days that I have the ugliest lisp.

@vii in the past if i had to write a shell i'd say start with rc. or at least rc's semantics and syntax. there's maybe 4 pages in total to a correct rc implementation to build on top of.

promises are a clean way to handle firing off parallel jobs. they didn't use em back then, but its nice

a: 'make florp' run-in-background.
b: 'make check' run-in-background.
#[a b] join-jobs wait.
Transcript show: 'yey.'

or whatever. there was that A+ Promises doc a few years ago that was proposing a really clean api for the things. i don't know if javascript ever took them up on it.

...the rest of the story.

@nicholas @phnt @p @strypey @silverpill @light yeah, basically. the enemies of an open society are people that close its openness without consent.

the parable is a note that people could opt to consent to dissolution. but this *sine qua non*. it's no longer an open society if the state "knows better than you" how to vote.

@strypey @light @icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill

> the paradox of tolerance

I don't think the paradox of tolerance is a real paradox; it requires a really terrible premise that eliminates human agency and consequentialists/utilitarians/positivists love to use it to play three-card monte.

> reducing the capacity of the community to be inclusive?

I think it's okay to stop people from exploiting fedi, you know?

@strypey @icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @light See, that's extending the concept of "tolerance" to "unconditional acceptance to the point of death". Nobody that intends to have a tolerant society can *possibly* mean "radical absolute acceptance of the society's death". A tolerant society means what, precisely?

@icedquinn @strypey @fish @light @phnt @silverpill

> the whole book is very much against authoritarian solutions to problems. unlimited tolerance is spoken next to societies that literally did the "someone is a threat to our power with their words, kill them" behavior people actually misquote the paradox to justify.

That is more reasonable than the popular definition.

@strypey @icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @light

> (1/?)

WE HAVE TO GET YOU MORE LETTERS

YOU CAN ATTACH AN 8MB JPEG TO POSTS BUT YOU CANNOT HAVE ENOUGH LETTERS TO TYPE FOR SOME REASON?

@icedquinn @strypey @fish @light @phnt @silverpill

> i think i outlined this already with the note that sociopaths are morally comfortable using everyone for their own ends, while normal people don't really do much to stop this, which is probably also the whole point of the mops vs geeks article

My takeaway was "this is the lifecycle of subcultures".

(1/2)

@p
> I don't think the paradox of tolerance is a real paradox

Then I suggest you learn a bit more about the history of the 20th century, or read Chapman's piece about how subcultures fail again. Because it absolutely is. Just not in the way centrist authoritarians claiming to be liberals spin it.

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @light

(2/2)

@p
> I think it's okay to stop people from exploiting fedi, you know?

Exactly what I'm saying. In defence of the inclusiveness of the verse, we need to exclude sociopaths from having any role of influence in fediverse dev. Including but not limited to actual fascists, and pseudo-liberal authoritarians.

But to avoid this being divisive, and exploitable by sociopaths, it needs to be based on identifying patterns of *behaviour* not Othering and demonising people or groups/ types of people.

@p @icedquinn @fish @phnt @strypey @silverpill @light
Tweets having 140 character limit made sense before smartphones, when we used Twitter via sms (text 40404) . Not sure why Mastodon castrates itself for any reason other than fetish.

Does any Mastodon instance have Twitter-like text messaging or did they ever? I remember statusnet had xmpp built in but I don't think we ever had proper texting set up. (Maybe this is something revolver should consider)

As long as Mastodon is wearing a chastity belt, the char length be 140 instead of 280 (tweets 2.0 - now twice as much) / 500 (toots are almost twice as big as tweets 2.0 but 500 is a nice round number) because it's a number that actually makes sense

maybe they can get government funding from EU to implement sms integration to make it easier for the government to protect their users.

@strypey @icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @light

> Then I suggest you learn a bit more about the history of the 20th century

I also don't tend to buy "If you don't agree with my conclusion, you must not know what I know" arguments. I'm pretty familiar with the Malthusian nihilist utilitarians that took power in the 1930s and defined the post-Bernays world.

> or read Chapman's piece

I have read it at least twice. I refer people to it frequently.

> Just not in the way centrist authoritarians claiming to be liberals spin it.

Well, that was Quinn's point and I think it's a reasonable point.

@p @icedquinn @fish @phnt @strypey @silverpill @light add a LONGTEXT field to the db table for extended text support

@sampler @fish @icedquinn @light @phnt @silverpill @strypey

> when we used Twitter via sms

I joined in the brief window when there was a website but all these people were using SMS and before phone numbers became compulsory to join, so I have a rare Twitter account that has no phone number associated.

> Not sure why Mastodon castrates itself for any reason other than fetish.

They get confused a lot. "It's like Twitter but it's also like email but if email didn't have Nazis!"

> because it's a number that actually makes sense

There are only three good kinds of number: primes, powers of two, and powers of two less one. (It's a flag, not a float, so Mersenne primes are just good, not better. Three itself is also a good number because it is a Mersenne prime. FSE's initial character limit was 4096 and everyone made fun of me because I had lowered it from 5000 so I made it 8192 and I still hit the limit sometimes so now it is 16384 and this is fine so far. I rarely have more than 16kB to say, although it's 16384 *characters* and thus could be much larger because UTF-8.)

> maybe they can get government funding from EU to implement sms integration to make it easier for the government to protect their users.

This will help Mastodong add age verification.
character_limit.jpg
sign.png
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@sampler @icedquinn @fish @p @strypey @silverpill @light The reason is Gargron was autistic about his vision of a Twitter replacement and posts longer than 500 chars look ugly in the UI. It's a problem that will never get fixed because Mastodon desperately wants to be a Twitter alternative including the way it looks and displays threads.

The actual solution would be to widen the post view and decrease post text size, but that is too much to ask.

@phnt @sampler @fish @icedquinn @light @silverpill @strypey

> posts longer than 500 chars look ugly in the UI

They look just fine in FediBBS. He should try having a better frontend. (Tweetdeck has always sucked.)
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@phnt
> The reason is Gargron was autistic about his vision of a Twitter

I'm not sure if Gargron is autistic and this is neither here nor there. I think the word you're looking for is 'obsessive' (me=actually autistic).

@icedquinn @fish @sampler @p @silverpill @light

@strypey @phnt @icedquinn @fish @p @silverpill @light
Can you prove that you have an autism diagnosis? A lot of people online just pretend to be autistic so they can get free money (see #mutualaid tag) and get away with being rude. I'm not saying you're a liar, but I've seen some things on here before.

@sampler @fish @phnt @p @strypey @silverpill @light dox yourself for our amusement, monkey. dance.

@sampler
> Can you prove that you have an autism diagnosis?

Can you prove you're a human and not a Trained #MOLE?

> A lot of people online just pretend to be autistic so they can get free money

I'm sorry, I seem to have forgotten posting requests for money. Can you link to some of these posts to jog my memory?

Way to utterly miss the point dude. You're not even in same country as the point. I'm not sure you're even on the same planet.

@p @icedquinn @phnt @light @silverpill @fish

@p
> WE HAVE TO GET YOU MORE LETTERS

If multi-post threads really bother you I can switch to my Friendica account. I keep forgetting I have it, and I *hate* the cludgy interface with a burning passion. But if you *really* need me to ...

> He should try having a better frontend. (Tweetdeck has always sucked.)

The default Masto interface is modelled on Pinafore and has been for years. Although the one modeled on TD is still there as an opt-in.

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @sampler @silverpill @light

@strypey @icedquinn @fish @phnt @sampler @silverpill @light

> If multi-post threads really bother you

Not really, it just seems like at some point, tagging overhead eats the limit. Even Twitter stopped doing that, like, tags and links stopped counting towards the character limit. Mastodon *could* do the former because tags are an extra field (and more or less unconstrained).

I do think that it does make threads harder to read and participate in (by increasing the likelihood of duplication: if you have two paragraphs and the second one covers something relevant to the first, but people that go chronologically see the first one and then write a different version of your second paragraph before finding your second paragraph; this can compound, it is very funny when it does), but I'm just pokin' yer ribs, I ain't tore up.

> The default Masto interface is modelled on Pinafore and has been for years. Although the one modeled on TD is still there as an opt-in.

Ah. I mean...you see the UI that I wrote and use, I'm not sure what Pinafore *is*. (And if it gives you an idea, I used to use the bitlbee Twitter backend as my only Twitter interface. Until they killed off *all* alternative clients, you could have a reasonable time with Twitter by treating it like an IRC channel.)

@strypey @phnt @icedquinn @fish @sampler @silverpill @light It's an expression, you know, most bastards aren't actually illegitimate children.

@p
> I also don't tend to buy "If you don't agree with my conclusion, you must not know what I know" arguments

I'm just rolling with the playful banter style of posting you folks seem to favour. I hope it didn't distract you from the point I was making.

> that was Quinn's point and I think it's a reasonable point

Sure, but it's totally orthogonal to the point I was making. We don't need to follow the script here folks, we can improv. Go wild! ; }

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @light

@strypey @icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @light Yeah, I mean, I think "You're trying to get us all killed and you're being paid ungodly sums of money for it so I no longer am interested in speaking to you" is a reasonable thing to say to someone that is trying to get us all killed and being paid ungodly sums of money for that.

@p
> My takeaway was "this is the lifecycle of subcultures"

I would say the main point was 'this is why subcultures are unsustainable as a mode of meaningness'. One that can eject sociopaths becomes something else.

> sociopaths are morally comfortable using everyone for their own ends, while normal people don't really do much to stop this

... is just an assumption baked into common usage of the term, which is followed by its use in the article.

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @light

@p
> A tolerant society means what, precisely?

That's the million dollar question, isn't it. One we've all been grappling with since Popper's time, and probably much longer.

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @light

@strypey @icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill @light Well, what I mean to say is not "Is there an objective classification?" but "What do you mean when you use that term?"

@nicholas
>...the rest of the story.

Pavlov's dogs drooled on queue regardless of whether the situation actually calls for that. Maybe we can be more aware of context that? *sigh*

https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/116442469604430519

@icedquinn @phnt @p @silverpill @light

@sampler @strypey @fish @icedquinn @light @phnt @silverpill

> Can you prove that you have an autism diagnosis?

Participation in this thread is sufficient for a diagnosis.

@nicholas @icedquinn @phnt @p @strypey @silverpill @light karl just spent two volumes explaining why Plato and much of the downstream philosophy (western culture) was 'intolerant', 30 tyrants etc. 90% garbage, it's purpose is to nudge us to a lame combo of fabianism with a pretend libertarian shell. they gave him an OBE for licking the boots of the royals. Read Robin Collingwood, forget Popper.

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@WaughheadRex
> Plato and much of the downstream philosophy (western culture)

Firstly, there was never was a "West". Plato and other Greek writers saw themselves as part of a Mediterranean civilisation, with no connection to anything going on in what we now think of as Europe;

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-there-never-was-a-west

According to David Miles, to classical Greeks, Europeans were among the Keltoi; the barbarians to the north;

https://www.hardtofind.co.nz/book/xxbbaa41566/The-Tribes-of-Britain

@nicholas @icedquinn @phnt @p @silverpill @light

@strypey @WaughheadRex @nicholas @icedquinn @phnt @silverpill @light

> there was never was a "West". Plato and other Greek writers saw themselves as part of a Mediterranean civilisation, with no connection to anything going on in what we now think of as Europe;

Well, Hellenic. But the philosophical foundations of what is now considered "Western" (that is, just Europe plus the Anglosphere, regardless of whether it's in "the West" or not, because the term is wrong) has Plato, the Corpus Juris Civilis, etc.

I don't like the term either, but I know what people mean when they use it; that's sufficient.

> https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-there-never-was-a-west

I hate Graeber so I don't plan to read it because the man is a simpering idiot and a sophist but if he means that there never was a unified Europe, sure.

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@WaughheadRex
> Plato and much of the downstream philosophy (western culture) was 'intolerant'

Platonism has very little to do with anything we'd recognise today as a democracy or a republic. Plato was a fan of a Brave New World style society where parenting is abolished and the state raises kids without families to breed loyalty to the Republic.

Contemporary anglophone society is more the intellectual descendant of Socrates than Plato.