Notices by wet forest moon folklorist (seachanger@alaskan.social)

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"Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we’re going to invest deeply in trust & safety. We want everyone, especially marginalized communities, to feel safe on our platform.

We’re working on building a stronger trust & safety function—including hiring—which will contribute to new features, educate instance admins about best practices, assess community needs, and partner with organizations like IFTAS to share insights and expand the availability of resources in this critical area."

I made my first small donation to Mastodon itself with a note that I'm pleased to see the team transition leadership and signal intent to invest deeply in Trust & Safety. further donations will be contingent on implementation there!

https://givebutter.com/nAk74p

* I am actually very bummed that the Mastodon plushie and mascot is light yellow. We know that actual mastodons had reddish brown fur, and it would be great actually if the platform didn't signal unnecessary whiteness. next run of plushies and graphic design could shift it to purple or grey or brown! details matter and graphic identity signals values & who is invited or not

"The next 6 months will see the transformation of the Mastodon structures, shifting away from the early days’ single-person ownership and enshrining the envisioned independence in a dedicated European not-for-profit entity.

It also means a different role for Eugen, Mastodon’s current CEO. Handing off the overall Mastodon management will free him up to focus on product strategy where his original passion lies and he gains the most satisfaction"

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-the-town-square/

@ErickaSimone reported as a troll, I think there’s a wave coming from dot social of intentionally shitty reply guys

#socialTech post: thinking in systems

americans want to follow rules (or just follow influencers who figure out the rules for us) in part because we are socialized to be quiet and consume, to take things at face value. the harder things get, the more we want the certainty of order imposed by others

but when we practice thinking about systems -- how the things in our life are interconnected and what the nature of those relationships are -- we're so much better equipped to navigate complexity

of course tons of people are struggling enough with its contradictions to reach beyond the surface of American consumerism and look for something deeper. too often they get scooped up by bad faith actors who correctly diagnose that something's wrong, but offer up the worst possible explanations and paths forward

to address this, liberals pursue fact checking, but fact checking is not critical thinking. to consider the phenomena in front of us, we have to be students of relationship and pattern

our universe and our earth unfold via complex, overlapping, and interrelated systems. this is the nature of our reality: we live in and are ourselves part of systems operating both at scales we can study and also at scales our scientists do not know how to study

though humans across time have no doubt evolved ways of relating to the complexity of our world, our current society has very little cultural infrastructure for it. so its on us to (re) learn these relationships, to think in patterns

pattern is one word for a system of relationships that somehow repeats itself across time or space. if we understand a pattern we know how to react to its various permutations, and won't keep getting fooled by its surface presentations. we also can look at the feedback loops of that pattern for strategic places to shift it.

for example, those of us who understand enshittification already blocked meta, lol. we don't have to wait for bad results, we understand how the pattern works

people are talking about how Octavia Butler "predicted" the chaos in LA , but a big part of that is she understood the patterns of our society & could project them forward. she was a student of the systems we live within.

more of us can practice thinking in systems, examine how systems nest within one another, and be strategic about how to interrupt and shift patterns of destruction into patterns for living. this is why i think systems thinking is one of our most important social technologies!

my experience w/Fb as a former admin of left wing organizing groups & pages is that they have been artificially growing or hiding these pages since at least 2016. They puffed up Alaskans for Bernie Sanders to like 10k (!!) followers before the 2016 general election and then when when the page was used to campaign for the 2020 primary it was shadow banned with no recourse or explanation. It was so weird I contacted an old friend who worked higher up at FB and he just ghosted me

the right is obsessed with telling people about what "the left" is taking from them, and in doing so defines freedom as mindless consumption & the ability to hurt others without consequence

when centrists cosplay the right, they spread the same frames of individualism and commercialism

we have to turn sharply away from the centrists, and get really good at describing the amazing things the left wants for everyone, and defining freedom in terms of luxurious public goods

I think often about how we actually have right now all the physical technology we need for 8-10 billion people to live equitably on earth and save the climate, we legit have the plans and products. what we lack are the social technologies needed to implement them

#socialTech

we quite literally could be riding electric bullet trains around the earth, forest gardening our towering regionally adapted & thriving regenerative cities, and enjoying leisurely bike trips through pastoral landscapes in our abundant time off

California laying high speed rail track this week is 😍

https://krcrtv.com/news/local/california-high-speed-rail-project-reaches-key-milestone-with-groundbreaking-of-railhead

“There is nothing "magical or mystical" about AI, and even less so about generative AI. The opacity of this industry hides the exploitation and precariousness that comes with this false progress that they sell by means of slogans that instill fear, defeatism and a false pretense of inevitability…”
https://mastodon.social/@arteesetica/113783380035511099

@kjhealy my big question is WHY would anyone be part of doing this

the one thing i really implore, in the made up year of 2025, is that we don't sit around being continually surprised that things are falling apart. many of us did the math on this years ago and saw it coming, everything is proceeding according to the laws of physics and other sciences. you are not a deer caught in headlights, you are an animal with opposable thumbs and incredible agency on this planet. for fucks sake use your powers

patently obvious that at least one wheel has spun off the global order and the nuts are looser and looser on the rest. each of us has to decide if we’ll sit continually shocked as reality is torn up around us, or if we’ll embrace the creative possibilities that abound in periods of chaos

people with lots of money should consider thoughtfully giving lots of it away. people possessing relative freedoms should consider how to pivot privileges into projects that hold meaning for you and our planet both. people with time should use it for anything but capitalism. people with no fucks left should cause good trouble everywhere all at once