Notices by Erik Moeller (eloquence@social.coop), page 4

@ntnsndr @axz @clayton

That looks super interesting. If you have funding, the first person I would reach out to is https://hachyderm.io/@thisismissem - she is already working on trust & safety tooling for the fediverse, and may have ability to take on additional paid work.

@ntnsndr

Personally, I would advocate in favor of a rotating role to call people's attention to Loomio posts via #SocialCoop itself.

I would prefer to use something like Discourse over Loomio -- I find Loomio needlessly convoluted in a bunch of ways -- but more than that, with any separate platform I think we have to find ways to direct our collective attention there.

@ntnsndr

Bridgy is probably our best bet for the foreseeable future: https://snarfed.org/2023-11-15_bridgy-fed-status-update-9

@dangillmor

Please ping me if you do notice additional journalists who're actually quitting X so I can add them to the eXit spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1p5crRGK0Y9MuFsfkyOBEC--3wXxFTd71fPCUcIFPXK0/edit#gid=0) - hopefully seeing their peers do it will convince more folks to do the same.

Reminder if you're on #Mastodon or other fediverse software that supports bookmarks:

✨ Bookmarks are amazing! ✨

- Long post, no time? Bookmark! 🔖

- Boost again when other folks are online? Bookmark! 🔖

- Sweet meme, gonna steal it? Bookmark! 🔖

Bookmarks are tasty little snacks. If I could eat them, I would! 😋

Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) shut down their >600K follower account on X back in September, with a final Homer Simpsons "fading into the bushes" GIF. Navigation links to Twitter/X have been removed from https://www.raspberrypi.com/.

They maintain a very active presence here on the fediverse.

If you've never hurt of Raspberry Pi, it's a pretty big deal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi

The German eXit from Musk's hate platform is real and ongoing.

I'm seeing accounts for newspapers, courts, libraries, radio stations, cities, nonprofits, etc. getting shut down permanently or moved into maintenance mode. This is all very organic, e.g., the city of Cologne had a vote on withdrawal from X:

https://ratsinformation.stadt-koeln.de/getfile.asp?id=956920&type=do

I can barely keep up. Many of these accounts are now on the fediverse. The ones I've tracked so far are in the eXit spreadsheet:

https://bit.ly/eXit

I'm not seeing a similar domino effect in the US yet, but the complete eXit of the Trevor Project (not active here yet) and the partial eXit of @indivisibleteam could set the stage for more large accounts to follow.

As the Trevor Project noted, X is not a safe platform. Orgs posting on X risk exposing constituents to harm. By stack-ranking paying accounts above everyone else, Musk has worsened abusive behavior, because abusive accounts can pay to amplify their abuse in everyone's timelines.

It's easy to feel powerless. "Well, what can _I_ do to make things better?"

One simple thing we all can do is help accelerate the demise of X before Musk fully weaponizes it for fascism, hate and abuse.

Please speak up in your organizations, your communities, your networks, and help folks get off X completely.

There's a reverse network effect. Every person or org shutting down their account makes it easier for the next person or org to do the same.

Here's some of what that money will be used for:

- Improve the current state of accessibility
- Design and prototype a new accessibility stack
- Encrypt user home directories individually

Here's what it will not be used for:

- More reminders to use Edge as your default browser
- Clippy 2.0, now powered by a Large Language Model
- Microsoft Teams brain-computer interface

Sinking taxpayer funds into Microsoft's money pits has always been indefensible. Another world is possible & necessary.

Riya Abraham from @signalapp now speaking at #aaronswartzday about the value of feedback to support privacy.

Feedback from users everywhere, whether they're human rights defenders to a grandmother who's trying to attend her grandson's graduation. How to make sure that Signal (which is open source and nonprofit) serves humanity's need for secure communications:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1-VoCguHKU

@sovtechfund (funded by the German government) just announced a €1M grant towards the @gnome project, an open source desktop environment.

Imagine a world in which governments don't spend billions of dollars in licensing fees every year to make Microsoft richer, and that money instead goes towards _public code_ that belongs to all of us.

That may seem utterly implausible - but every example like this brings us one step closer to it being inevitable.

https://foundation.gnome.org/2023/11/09/gnome-recognized-as-public-interest-infrastructure/

Another very large nonprofit has decided to shutter their X account. The Trevor Project ($52M revenue in 2021, 350K followers on X) :

"The Trevor Project has made the decision to close its account on X given the increasing hate & vitriol on the platform targeting the LGBTQ community - the group we exist to serve."

They're focusing on other corporate social media platforms. Quitting X is only the first step to social media sovereignty - but it is an important one.

https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/11/09/the-trevor-project-lgbtq-x/

Some new additions to the eXit spreadsheet (https://bit.ly/eXit) -- notable accounts that have left X:

- @NatSecGeek: journalist, co-founder of @ddosecrets

- @Downes: philosopher, educator, online learning expert

- @lexfri: writer and podcaster (not to be confused with Lex Fridman!)

- @Meyerweb: web design expert, author

- @alex: security and trust & safety; director of Stanford Internet Observatory

- @ndmedienmacher: German nonprofit promoting diversity in media

#FollowFriday

Honorable mention: @indivisibleteam - no full eXit yet, but dramatically reducing usage of their 260K follower account and removing it from their website and emails. Their post explaining the reasoning is worth a full read:

https://indivisibleteam.medium.com/were-stepping-back-from-the-increasingly-dangerous-and-dysfunctional-x-and-we-re-sorry-it-s-a15524fab070

I concur, of course, especially with this:

"When trusted voices begin to leave the platform en-masse, X will lose its appeal, its pull as a source of real-time information, and its remaining legitimacy with policymakers and regular users."

Anecdotally at least, my impression is that the German eXit is very much underway -- Mastodon has long had strong adoption there (there's even a federal government instance, https://social.bund.de/ with many institutional accounts) and this seems to be accelerating. BlueSky seems to also be growing fast.

Musk's tweet promoting the far-right and dehumanizing refugees did _not_ go over well in a country where much of civil society is working hard to prevent fascism from being resurrected.

"Elon is garbage, and this place is now a white supremacist Nazi haven." So said, correctly, @badastro when he completed his exit from X, where he had 600K followers.

Phil is an amazing science explainer and nonsense debunker. Do consider giving him a follow here :-)

@themarkup has 15K followers around here, but they deserve many more.

The Markup is a nonprofit journalism site that publishes investigations and tools to hold technology firms to account.

E.g., you can use their tool https://themarkup.org/blacklight to investigate exactly how a site is tracking you.

Or you can read investigations like this one into the police-industrial surveillance complex:

https://themarkup.org/neighborhood-watch/2023/10/11/accidental-spies-amazon-ring-owners-may-be-unknowingly-emailing-police

Beyond following, consider donating if you value their work!

#FollowFriday

@badlogic

https://firesky.tv/ has been running a searchable live stream for a few months. It's bizarre to me that they're not making it clearer that the login wall is purely cosmetic.

@inventor

How exactly does it fence them off though if all those posts can be freely mirrored and crawled anyway?