@Techmeme@techhub.socialSpaceX wins a property tax exemption for its planned $55B Terafab chip facility in Texas, despite Texans threatening legal action, amid local opposition to AI (Stephanie Findlay/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/86b2440a-60ce-4a5b-94ba-a6a4456ae574
@ubuntourist@mastodon.socialThe DC Activist Street Band (DCASB) rehearsing at Lamont Plaza in Mount Pleasant, DC, April 2.
https://nextdoor.com/p/GhkW_g76BwzF?utm_source=share&extras=NjgzNzM5ODk=&…
@paulwermer@sfba.socialThe President and his lickspittles in Congress are introducing legislation to shield fossil fuel companies from liability for their intentional and knowing actions to emit GHGs, fully aware of the damage, destruction and death that would cause.
Please, if you live in California, write you congress people and tell them to oppose this legislation. It's easy, I just did it using this action network link:
@PaulWermer@sfba.socialThe President and his lickspittles in Congress are introducing legislation to shield fossil fuel companies from liability for their intentional and knowing actions to emit GHGs, fully aware of the damage, destruction and death that would cause.
Please, if you live in California, write you congress people and tell them to oppose this legislation. It's easy, I just did it using this action network link:
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialIn the interests of starting a more productive dialogue than yesterday's main character was interested in, let's make a #brainstorm thread about design changes to ActivityPub and/or client UI that could actually help address drive-by (often racist) harassment on the fediverse.
Feel free to discuss pros/cons but don't feel an idea needs to be perfect to suggest it. Also since this is a brainstorm don't worry about complexity/implementation cost. If you have a great-but-hard-to-implement idea someone else may think of a way to simplify it.
Note that the underlying problem *is* a social one, do there won't be a technological fix! But tech changes can make social remedies easier/harder.
I've got some to start:
1. Have a "protected mode" that users can voluntarily turn on. Some servers might turn it on by default. In protected mode, users whose accounts are less than D days old and/or who have fewer than F followers can't reply to or DM you. F and D could have different values for same-sever vs. different-server accounts, and could be customized by each user. Obviously a dedicated harasser can get around this, but it ups the activation energy for block evasion and pile-ons a bit. Would be interesting to review moderation records to estimate how helpful this might or might not be. Could also have a setting to require "follows-from-my-server" although that might be too limiting on private servers. Restriction would be turned off for people you mention within that thread and could be set to unlimit anyone you've ever mentioned. Would this lock new users out of engagement entirely? If everyone had it on via a default, you'd have you post your own stuff until someone followed you (assuming F=1). One could add "R non-moderated replies" and/or "F favorites" options to soften things; those experiencing more harassment could set higher limits. When muting/blocking/reporting someone who replied to your post, protected mode could be suggested with settings that would have filtered the post you're reporting.
2. Enable some form of public moderation info to be displayed when both moderator and local server opt-in. Obviously each server would be able to ignore federated public tags. I'm imagining "banned from X server for R reason (optional link to evidence)" appearing on someone's profile & an icon on their PFP in each post viewed by someone on server Y *if* the mods of server X decide it's appropriate *and* server Y opts in to displaying such tags from server X specifically. Alliances of servers with similar moderation preferences could then have moderation action on one server result in clear warning propagation to others without the other mods needing to decide whether to also take action immediately. In some cases different moderation preferences would mean you wouldn't take action yourself but would keep the notice up for your users to consider. Obviously the "Scarlet Letter" vibe ain't great, but in some cases it's deserved, and when there's disagreement between servers about that, mods on server Y could either disable a specific tag or disable federation of mod tags from that server in general. Even better shared moderation tools are of course possible.
3. Different people/groups have different norms around boosting. Currently we only have a locked/public binary. Without any big protocol changes, adding a "prefers boosts/doesn't" setting which would warn in the UI before a viewer chooses to boost if the preference is "doesn't" could help. This could be set per-post, but could also have defaults and could have different values for same-server or not, or for particular servers. For example, I could say "default to prefer boosts from users on my server but not from users on other servers" or "default to prefer boosting on all servers except mastodon.social." Last option might be harder to implement I guess.
#ActivityPub #Meta #Harassment
@frankel@mastodon.topHow to Write Your First #OpenTelemetry Declarative Config File with Trace
https://oneuptime.com/blog/post/2026-02-06-first-otel-declarative-config-file/view…
@cdarwin@c.imOrganizers across the U.S. are planning more than 3,000 local events Saturday for
No Kings Day of Nonviolent Action.
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/17/trump-no-kings-protest-safety-tips
@StephenRees@mas.toFrom Bill McKibben
"I work on solar energy because it will help limit the damage from climate change, and because it’s potentially liberating, empowering local communities instead of vast multinationals. But there are days when I work on solar energy just because it’s the sharpest stick with which to poke Exxon and Chevron and the rest, companies that I despise. Companies that if I’m honest I hate, though I try hard not to hate. They are the vampires of our world ..."
@hex@kolektiva.socialTable top exercises (basically TTRPGs for government and business) can be used to test plans and refine plans without needing to actually experience a natural disaster, security event, etc. They're used by militaries to practice war. I've been part of such exercises to test incident response runbooks I've written.
I've been reading a friend's thesis about Operational Art and Critical Philosophy in relation to revolutionary praxis. I wonder if anyone has ever run a table top exercise for an action (or for higher level strategy), and, if so, has anything they could share about it?
While organizing with the Seattle GDC, our disaster prep group ran a table to exercise. We chose scenarios from a set of county exercises for local disaster preparedness. Our GM (who worked in public health at the time) had to modify it a lot to fit our use case, but it still gave us a lot of insight.
Unfortunately, it was a number of years ago so I don't really remember the specific scenario or what came out of it.
I did look back at some notes that I found, and we did suggest creating a D&D committee (partially just for conviviality). Reflecting on this in light of reading this thesis, I feel like we we're really on the mark.
@hex@kolektiva.socialRE: https://social.notjustbikes.com/@notjustbikes/116386013892596738
@… 's "The Sound and Fury of a Collapsing Order" hit the nail on the head. This is exactly the time that things can change. The ways in which they change matter.
Petroleum is the primary pillar of the global order, and weakening it's grip weakens that order. As an anarchist, I'm obviously more focused on direct action but there are absolutely local policies that are also important.
Attacking car-centric infrastructure as a political issue makes it easier to change other things.
@pre@boing.worldWent to see Stuart Goldsmith doing his work in progress stand up show about the climate at the local theater.
He's a funny man and has a good friendly personality (or stage-persona at least I guess) and is terrified and anxious and angry about the way the people are treating the world without out even being their fault.
It's a good show, he's a good guy, you should go see him do it at Edinburgh or whenever he's in your town.
No action you can take as an individual really makes much difference to the end of the world stuff. You should be vegan perhaps, ethical banking perhaps. But really the only thing that works is mass social pressure, so talking about it is the best thing you can do. If you can't be vegan, at least say you are.
Perhaps telling everyone on linked-in to book him for their climate sessions is best he reckons 😆 but I don't do corporate social media at all really, so Mastodon and cross post to Bluesky is the best thing I can do perhaps.
Stu's a friend of a friend, we've met before. Don't think he recognized me sitting in the front row without context against the stage lights though. Maybe a little at the end with some context when he's rushing to get home.
Still love that Captain Pike hairdo.
#comedy #climate #stuGoldsmith #pleasance #london
