Notices by wet forest moon folklorist (seachanger@alaskan.social), page 4

@dalias lol apparently? it's scrambling my brain a little to think about, i'd be curious to see how it goes over time. unclear how much profit they're trying to get out of it beyond just maintenance etc

“Instead of looking at how to build a bunch of individual rowhouses in a line –which is what you’re seeing with the new zoning– we wondered how can we build a building that works with a group of people with shared values? That requires a little change of a mindset.”

https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/04/24/phinney-ridge-apartment-complex/

interesting ownership model

"Rather than using a traditional condo or co-op model, each of the investors owns a share of the building’s LLC. Investors contributed anywhere from $50,000 to $5 million in the project and own a percentage of shares based on the size of their investment. Residents all pay rent to the LLC, most of them at market rate. Some of the units were custom designed and range up to 2,000 square feet"

big trump fail number one ✅

- fight back through every means available
- never assume they'll win
- power requires social license, revoke it
- trust that some courts are not corrupt
- tune out legacy media headlines, don't read their takes, look for alt media stories to share
- comfort and support those caught in the crosshairs
- don't panic, take action

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/29/g-s1-45313/trump-federal-funding-freeze-reversed

@inquiline i shared a spotify playlist a ways back and have never lived it down

wondering why so many new French accounts made it here, but I think it’s because they actually did a rad #helloquittex campaign and we in the US could do similar with Meta etc. — they announced a quit day in the future and made a website and publicized the day

Welcome also to new Alaskans on Mastodon: @RyanBowers @Islandstitcher @cefurby and @irwindigital -- we're happy to have you here and please feel free to drop a line with any questions or confusions.

Mastodon is a little harder to figure out at first, but also has A LOT of fun people who love to help new folks get connected and feel welcome.

Using #introduction to introduce yourself and your interests will help folks find you as a new account (since there aren't automatic algorithms)

👀
"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