Notices by Shoq 🌿 (shoq@mastodon.social), page 14

Trump’s corrupt Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy has been openly ratfucking the election (who saw that coming?) for many months, yet the press is only telling us about it now, 53 days before the election.

The Kamala Harris News and Organizing Group has been redesigned by @newsmast, and it’s better than ever. Version 2.0 has new features, thousands of followers, and hundreds of quality sources & contributors from across the fediverse. Follow the debate with us!

Deets:
https://newsmast.social/@KamalaHarrisWin/113006121502900061

For a few weeks, we had fascism on the run. I believe we still do. But we have to stay vigilant and keep the press at bay. The MAGA media mafia is everywhere. And they’re determined to make as much money from Trump as they can, even if that means electing him.

The press is falling into its same old rhythms on social media. But they’ve bifurcated into two camps: Threads and Bluesky, with a tiny fraction of them keeping up appearances of hope for a brighter future by staying in the fediverse. Has anyone noticed that these things are never openly discussed in the MSM? Only major sensational stories get any play at all today. Relevance and nuance are non-starters.

In any other era, this Russian influence scandal would have been front page news for weeks

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/9/5/2268007/-The-Putin-Caucus-and-Its-Enablers

It’s all been said before, but @joanwestenberg distills our media crisis down to its essence. The only thing missing is “What (specifically) do we do about it?” There are several things. I’m trying to decide on the best venue to discuss them. There are several options.

https://mastodon.social/@joanwestenberg@threads.net/113080607524273205

@chrislhayes - This pod should be required listening, no matter one’s ideological stripe. Too few grok the philosophical premises on which modern democracies rely (and which are at great risk, of late.)

What Would a Fair Society Look Like?

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/what-would-a-fair-society-look-like-with-daniel-chandler/id1382983397?i=1000665953393

Finally, the Democrats Have Found Trump’s Achilles’ Heel: Ridicule Him | The New Republic

https://newrepublic.com/article/185270/democrats-harris-trump-achilles-heel-ridicule

ICYMI, in what may have been the most narcissistic moment in the history of the @GOP, @RNC chair @LaraLeaTrump released a video of herself. Singing.

Only a duet of Dinesh D’Souza and @anncoulter savaging the national anthem could have been more painful.

https://www.threads.net/@shoqv4/post/C_bOSsDve6i?xmt=AQGzvov6ctcro3BRQSyWH4M2Mq6kgwtb3c-H3NDdiIVzRA

@jessamyn @steve @tchambers

No ask yet, but tossing stuff around is how ideas are born here. Sometimes the tech can drive the idea, and sometimes the quality of the content can. RSS is not going to help you much. But a well constructed group and some bots might. When I have a little more time, I’ll outline a few ideas.

@steve @jessamyn @tchambers that was my first thought which is why I'm asking for clarification. There are other possibilities.

@steve @jessamyn @tchambers RSS feeds are fine for consuming content generally, but they get messy fast without some degree of moderation. And they’re not designed for thread-specific moderation as Lemmy and like products are.

@jessamyn @steve @tchambers BTW, there are fairly easy ideas that could put a toe in the water, if you haven’t already. A “Best of Mefi” feed, for example, only requires a good posting tool and some guidelines to curate. I think Tim could hook you up with some existing solutions for that.

This is a real @nytimes headline. Seriously.

Conservative Moms, Charmed by Trump, Would Rather Avoid His Misogyny

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/31/us/elections/conservative-moms-for-liberty-trump.html

It wasn’t until I saw that Metafilter owner, @jessamyn, was here on Mastodon, that I fully realized that in the back of my mind, MetaFilter was always the closest analogy to what I thought typical and lasting Fediverse “communities” should feel like. A place where freedom of expression was carefully balanced with common sense moderation and a certain intolerance for random fuckery. I personally feel the entire fediverse has become way too preoccupied with whether and how it can …

lots of other tools so far beyond what big social would ever be capable of providing. That is crazy-exciting to me. The potential is enormous. But we’re still talking about not having quoted posts, and whether we’re appealing enough to sign-up Brazilian refugees who just lost their Twitter.

compete with Big Social, and not focused enough on what it does well, which is facilitate smaller and ultimately more impactful and necessary creative, professional, civic, and educational communities. And for all of them to much better served, we need far more than these extremely simple, brute-force communicators like microblogging. We need things like textcasting standards, personal and group repositories, clearinghouses, verifiers, metadata, more robust full-text search indexes, and …

@jessamyn Indeed. Which is one reason I am working with @newmast and @tchambers on first getting activityPub group actors working well, and then building on that. Integrating and cross-connecting groups should be easier than entire instances. May I add you to our “interested parties” list? I’m organizing a chat about it.

You know what really concerns me. The thought that if Big social media existed in the 1940s, the New Deal might never have happened, the federal highway system wouldn’t exist, and William F. Buckley’s portrait would be on the $100 bill. #shudder

My gripe with @o_simardcasanova’s thread is his grievance seems predicated on the assumption that the Fediverse should be an “equivalent” to Big Social, which by its nature, must play to Big Capital. Who ever said it should be that? He wants that, and that’s fine. Let BlueSky and Threads support the masses with Big Social, post-Musk. The Fediverse can serve those who benefit those masses with productive ideas, discourse, and leadership.