Notices by Jenniferplusplus (jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io), page 5

Consider for even one second what Kamala Harris's replies and mentions must look like. Yelling at politicians on social media has become a favorite hobby for huge groups of people. The most incredibly vile racism and sexism have become accepted and normal parts of public discourse. The purpose of the Harris campaign is to motivate, encourage, recruit, and sway supporters.

First, some terms. This feels necessary, otherwise, we're going to just talk past each other.

Mastodon is software, a network of services running compatible software, and the people using those services.
Kamala Harris is a person. She could be on maston, if she wants, but I can't imagine why she would want to right now.
Harris for President is a legal entity that exists to facilitate her presidential election campaign. That's what this thread is about.

On Mastodon, anyone on earth can attach slurs, hate speech, threats, or shock images to any post the campaign makes. The nature of federation and the design of mastodon is such that this cannot be prevented.

It may or may not be visible to the campaign. It may or may not be visible to any individual user. It may or may not be visible to the server moderators.

Mastodon is fundamentally unsuited to this scenario.

Social media posts are a place where some of that can happen. It serves the campaign's goals to make space where supporters can cheer and critics can argue. It builds enthusiasm, shapes discourse, and keeps people's attention where the campaign wants it to be.

That makes moderation absolutely critical for the campaign.

And all for what? About a million active users, probably less than half of which are even US citizens?

How is this anything other than a distraction for the campaign? Whatever benefit they could possibly get from mastodon has already been achieved. Donations from about 3,000 people. Roughly the population of a large highschool.

For the campaign, this place would be all cost and no benefit.

Imagine Harris for President decides to create a mastodon account anyway. Where do they do that?

On mastodon.social? And they just make this whole moderation burden a few volunteers problem?

Do they set up their own server? Moderation is still some volunteers problem, but they're campaign volunteers, who could have been phone banking or whatever instead. Plus now they have to manage server infrastructure and security. Imagine being that infosec team.

How is any of this a good idea for anyone?

And, it would shine a supernova-bright light on all the worst parts of mastodon. The pervasive nice white liberal racism. The petty tyrants and their power trips. The absolute state of safety and moderation tools.

The best thing for both mastodon and Harris for President is if they post on Threads with federation toggled on.

@inthehands @grimalkina I hadn't heard of it either (or at least not that I remembered). But I found this just now, which helped a lot.

https://edpsych.pressbooks.sunycreate.cloud/chapter/goal-orientation-theory/

@inthehands technical and administrative support networks. Imagine mastohost includes all their instances into a mastohost federation, and they all share media storage.

So many possibilities

I like star trek metaphors for this.

In Trek, you have the united federation of planets. You also have the klingon empire and the romulan star empire, and so on. Those would all be named federations. Servers could join one or more them. The users on those servers would get some extra visibility options on their posts. Depending on the rules of their server and their federations, they could post to the UFP, the klingon empire, both, or neither.

Once again, mastodon's affordances (and missing affordances) are framing everyone's imagination. There are other options than simply allow list vs deny list federation. Personally, the one I want to see is multiple named federations:

Right now, there's just one federation, named public. There's absolutely no reason we can't have more than that.

Do white people On Here realize the extent of the grace that we've been shown by Black people this week?

I'm pretty sure overwhelmingly, the answer is no.

I cannot imagine that I would still be here if I had been told over and over and over again that I was the problem; that I just need to move instances; that I'm to blame for doing it wrong.

I can't help but think that was often the point. And it's inescapable that this space is designed to produce that outcome.

@JessTheUnstill that was still an exercise in eagerly conceding to bad faith right wing demands in the name compromise. And all the concessions eviscerated the ACA and cost them congress, which cost them the supreme court.

I've gotta say, after the last 15 years of dems relentlessly conceding to the worst people on earth, it's refreshing to see republicans on the defensive. If nothing else, Kamala Harris is at least responding to the large scale situation we're in, and that is sadly more than I can say for any aspect of dem leadership in my lifetime.

#USPol

Ascending up a level yet again, from what @hrefna and @inthehands are saying:
https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/112874680998858258

The options and capabilities that mastodon provides ("affordances") both reflect and shape assumptions about what can or should be done. There are reasons we spend so much time talking about block lists. A very big one is because that's the only option that mastodon provides.

I desperately want us to imagine more than that.

An illustration, if you will:

@inthehands @suzannealdrich I get that, but I'm also struggling to find the difference between this and "not all men."

There is definitely a way to encourage, praise, and support the ones who are doing the work in their own community, and criticize the institution.

@inthehands @suzannealdrich I've also known my share of individually good Christian people. But that doesn't mitigate the extreme global scale harm Christians as a group are actively doing. I'm not going to be the one to tell victims of that harm how to speak about it.

@inthehands I also want those things. I hope Heidi Feldman succeeds in bringing the fediverse to the attention of Harris's comms team, and I hope that leads to setting up a white house fedi server after she takes office. Govts should have real-ish time messaging channels that aren't mediated through private ad tech companies. It would probably foster the other conditions that would make this a useful place to campaign, too.

Ok, let's do this. The Harris campaign should not be on mastodon. It would be bad for both the campaign, and mastodon.

🧵

#UsPol #FediMeta #MastodonForHarris, for muting purposes

@mattly Yeah, project with budgets should really be blazing trails for other projects to follow.

But then, for that matter, so should the FSF, the linux foundation, or the apache foundation