Notices by Joe Cooper 🇺🇦 🍉 (swelljoe@mas.to), page 4

@tokyo_0 there's a book (and a cult) called Nonviolent Communication, which you might find helpful. I think one has to take it in measured doses and integrate the ideas slowly and as appropriate for what you need right now...as embracing it all at once can be weird to those who know you. But, the basic premise of communicating from a place of empathy is sound, and it has a lot of tools for approaching conversations that way.

@brunogirin @mekkaokereke @jshirley in a lot of places police are considered a "first responder" for any 911 call. If there's a police unit closer than an ambulance or firetruck, you get police first, even if they have no training for the problem they're responding to. In America there's bipartisan agreement that police are superheroes who should be invited to every stressful situation, just in case someone needs to be shot or beaten.

@krismicinski @brunogirin @mekkaokereke @jshirley water is invisible to fish. Cities spend 35-50% of their budget on police. The solution to every problem has to be "police" because there's no budget left for anything else.

@danhon @thomasfuchs if I were a wagering man, I'd bet on, "Banks need a profit motive to encourage them to service these otherwise high-risk, low-profit, customers. If they can't gouge them on overdraft fees they have no reason to allow poor people to have bank accounts."

Gonna be 11°F tonight. I guess that makes it a good pizza night, so I have a good excuse to run the oven at 500°F for an hour or so to heat up the pizza steel.

@thomasfuchs good luck enforcing probation when I'm invisible.

@tokyo_0 "close friends" sure...but casual acquaintances I've made over the years on Twitter? I'm not too fussed about it and I'm on an instance that preemptively opted out of federating with Threads. But, I understand the problem people have with the situation.

Problem is, these two positions are currently incompatible. If you don't defed instances that are lax about moderation, you inevitably get Nazis in your feed and in your threads, and you can't control that! You can block them, but if they've responded to your threads, their posts will remain visible to others. You won't see it, but your friends will unless/until they block that person, too.

Defed is a big hammer that smashes a lot of innocents on big instances. I have friends on Threads, too.

I've expressed few strong opinions about the #Threads issue, specifically, or the defederation issue more broadly, but I think the fact that there are very good arguments for either action is indicative of a systemic problem.

The two positions (simplified):

Anti-defed: "I want to see my friends posts, and I want them to see mine." I want that, too.

Pro-defed: "I never want to see Nazi shit on my feed, and I don't want my followers to see Nazi shit on my threads." Yep, me too.

The most valid argument for "keep everything the way it is and defed all the loosely moderated instances" is that the fediverse is best when it's lots of small servers, so everyone can choose their own adventure.

But, the argument that trumps that is that it is gatekeeping bullshit. It's saying the fediverse should _only_ be for nerds and should remain small. My friends on Threads don't grok instances and federation. They'll never be "here" if here is only many small focused instances.

I want to curate what my followers see when they read my threads, which is not how things currently work. I can curate what I see, but I have no say over Nazis leveraging my threads as a platform. And, people with large follower counts are a very attractive target for Nazis on any platform that allows that kind of engagement farming...it's why they hate the platforms built explicitly for them: it doesn't provide a platform to spout their garbage opinions in the mentions of popular people.

And, it's also worth noting that defederating doesn't actually provide the "zero tolerance for Nazis" experience, anyway. Because of the way things propagate, entire conversations can happen around your posts without your instance being involved and without you ever seeing it. That's unintuitive, to put it mildly, and it's kind of an even more hostile implementation of the quote-tweet pile-on tactic used over on Twitter. The classic Polite Nazi infiltration tactic works here.

@mastodonmigration Mullenweg is also just plain nice. He's serious about Open Source and serious about building sustainable community around Open Source. (I have complaints about WordPress and the commercial ecosystem around it, but they pale in contrast to many of the alternatives.)

@theauracle it's about all the other people they hate. Trump represents vengeance.

One huge weight off my shoulders: I found a stray dog on Halloween night...or, finally caught a stray that I'd seen when walking my dogs for weeks, but she would never come close enough to put a leash on because my dogs are obnoxious. I'd been putting off taking her to the shelter so she could get a little bit more relaxed/socialized (she had a weird set of anxieties) while trying to find her owner. Tonight while walking we just happened to walk by her owner, who was outside in her bathrobe.

Weight has returned to my shoulders, along with a renewed understanding that humans are literally the worst. Went to walk the dogs, and found the stray waiting on the front porch. I walked her back to her owner's house, who said, "You can just keep her, I don't want a dog I have to keep chasing after." I explained I couldn't keep her, and she'd have to go to the shelter, and "OK", was her reply. Anybody in Texas want a very sweet, well-behaved (though anxious), husky? #dogsofmastodon

@ncweaver @mattblaze If his attorneys were not strongly discouraging him from testifying, it's malpractice. They had to know after a practice run that it was gonna go badly.

@cstross I'm in Texas and it's been topping out around 39-41°C most days for the past month or so.

@thomasfuchs jwz's argument is that blocking in Mastodon doesn't work in an intuitive or effective way, and I'm inclined to agree. So, saying "just block them" doesn't answer his complaint, because his complaint is that we, as individuals using the platform, don't really have the kind of block functionality he wants.

On the sad news of Bram Moolenaar's passing, I've been thinking about vim and the role it's played in my life. vim is among my oldest friendships. I've used vim longer and more than any other piece of software I can think of. Young me used the young vim on Amiga more than three decades ago, and every computer since has had vim. I've written almost all my code in vim. I wrote a book in vim. I've edited infinite config files in vim. In my muscle memory "edit text" is spelled "vim". 1/?