Notices by Robert W. Gehl (rwg@aoir.social), page 2

Or this:

"Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.”

#MLKjr

@cwebber I was literally thinking the same thing today re: Bluesky. Especially in light of US states getting into regulating algorithms (mostly to protect freeze peach)

Latest FOSS Academic:

https://fossacademic.tech/2025/01/18/makingAlts.html

In which I talk about how state regulations are affecting the development of ActivityPub and the fediverse, and how trying to make a TOS for Loops by using an online service resulted in a surveillance capitalist-friendly document.

#Loops #ActivityPub #Regulations #FOSSAcademic

With a lot of folks trying out Pixelfed, if you're predominantly on Mastodon (like me) but you want to discover Pixelfed accounts, don't forget that you can follow hashtags. Follow #photography, for example, and you will see lots of Pixelfed accounts in your feed -- and then you can follow accounts you find interesting from there.

#FediTips #Pixelfed #Mastodon

@cwebber classic

wtf is Teams? Seriously, what is it? Is it supposed to be a file sharing system? Because it sucks at that and everything ends up in OneDrive.

Is it a messaging system? Um... we have email already.

Is it a video chat thing? It's bad at that, too.

The legend of John Pixelfed is becoming reality

#pixelfed

@aram @admin1 @nik @ubiquity75 @tstruett @paufder

Sigh. Cue up those who would make the disingenuous "if you didn't want this, don't post to the Internet!" argument.

We need state-based regulation of this theft of our sociality ASAP. Whether it's true opt-in, or more robust IP protections for regular people.

Latest FOSS Academic!

https://fossacademic.tech/2025/01/10/moreThreadsBskyAP.html

In which I talk about my new monitoring of Threads's fediverse blocklist, the @cwebber and Bryan Newbold debate, and the trust and safety work of @thisismissem

#FOSSAcademic #ASMupdate #Threads #Bluesky #ActivityPub

@mdc

Good point. I didn't think of that...

I'm so far removed from corporate social media I haven't had the pleasure of dealing with AI support

why did we sign the #fedipact, again?

oh, yeah, now I remember

https://apnews.com/article/trump-meta-zuckerberg-inauguration-donation-c540bf7c638def11b8428e633965c718

I just gave a presentation at the Institute for Technoscience and Society at York University, titled "Seeking Just Governance in Community-Run Social Media."

Now, thanks to Marp and a bit of BeautifulSoup, I can share the presentation and notes easily:

https://robertwgehl.org/presentations/ITS_presentation.html

Here's the text:

https://robertwgehl.org/presentations/ITS_presentationText.html

The presentation includes alt text on images.

speaking toots to power

@cwebber @malte @evan

I would love to read your writing on this, Christine!

Malte, my book about Mastodon and the fediverse will have a couple chapters that touch on what you're talking about.

I'd also be happy to chat if you have specific questions.

I'll be blogging about this soon, but for now let me gush about MARP, a Markdown-based way to make slideshows:

https://marp.app/

If this works the way I think it will, I will finally be able to say goodbye to LibreOffice Impress (and yet still stay away from Google and Microsoft). YES!

#marp #markdown #FOSSAcademic

@cwebber this is why we must indoctrinate children. Sit them down in front of all the Sbemails

they will soon be singing "the Cheat is not dead" in the neighborhood

@darnell thing is, his Truth social post is unhinged. He’s calling for tariffs because there are “hoards” of “illegal immigrants” coming into the US from both Canada and Mexico.

WTF do tariffs have to do with immigration?

@cwebber @fleeky@prsm.space

I'm sure I speak for everyone in saying, "thank you!!!" so much for all the analysis you've done, and for taking the time to answer questions. I know you want us to check out Spritely, so here's a plug!

https://spritely.institute/about/

@cwebber Forgive my ignorance, but is this similar to decentralization with Bitcoin/blockchains: it's decentralized in the sense that anyone can get the whole public ledger, but to do that you need oodles of storage, so people end up using things like Coinbase?

Or am I way off in thinking this?

edit: I didn't notice the whole long conversation this sparked; I will pore over your previous responses in case I missed an answer to this!

@cwebber with one of my big concerns about Bluesky:

"Part of the concern I have with Bluesky presently is thus that people are gaining the impression that it's a decentralized system in ways that it is not. There are multiple ways this could end up being a problem for the decentralized world; one irritating way is that people might believe there's an "easy decentralized way to do things" that Bluesky has discovered which isn't actually that at all"

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

#bluesky