Notices by Daphne Preston-Kendal (dpk@chaos.social)

In terms of features that make people actually want to use the site, Bluesky is beating the shit out of Mastodon

Leftists are eventually going to pay the price again for choosing the capitalist-owned platform over the community-owned one (the difference being there was no community-owned one last time). But given the *significantly* better tools for self-protection, I can’t blame them

Followers-only posts on Mastodon are nice, but ultimately, controlling who gets to reply to your post and getting to choose to hide annoying replies are significantly better.

On Mastodon (see last boost), you can’t even stop someone’s reply appearing under your toot by blocking them! And there’s been a patch for that problem ready to go for three years – which has just been ignored

Okay, here’s a *major* privacy/safety fuckup of Bluesky which I only just found out about today:

Your block list is public. Although there’s no way to see it on the Bluesky website, through ATProto, everyone can see who you’ve blocked and when.

Also, although the Bluesky app also has no way in the UI to see someone else’s liked posts, you can also find that trivially through ATProto.

So things which look private are in fact very public. WTF!

I guarantee that when the fash finally move onto Bluesky, they’ll use leftists’ public block lists to build their networks

This is a massively powerful tool to find other people who also hate the same people you hate or are hated by

Tone deaf. Self-indulgent. If it’d been an on-stage keynote and I’d been in the audience, I’d have booed.

Schemers: Do you think there is a use for weak (ephemeron) hash tables where the comparison function is something other than ‘eq?’ (or ‘eqv?’) ?

There’s also a question around whether ephemerons and ephemeron tables should even allow keys that don’t have their own location (which is where the difference between ‘eq?’ and ‘eqv?’ matters). Those ephemerons/associations would never get broken …

@cwebber We can thank 4chan for killing that one off, I think

@cwebber What is mansplaining? Can someone please tell me

@cwebber It looks literally like the next step of ‘speedrunning the history of Twitter’, and they’re installing exactly the same system of haves and have-nots that got everyone so mad last time

@vmstan @cwebber @lgsp Was there ever any year where web design was better than it was in 1999? I mean just look at this stuff. Unbeaten tbh https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/all-websites/year-1999

@cwebber Noble of you to sacrifice your own mentions as well today

For this protection, a Gender Recognition Certificate is irrelevant, since it is based on perceptions, not facts.

The court’s basis for affirming this protection was existing precedent that negative discrimination is still illegal if based on a characteristic that the discriminating party perceived the discriminated party to have, whether or not that perception is correct. (Concrete [invented] example: if someone were discriminated against on the basis of a Jewish-sounding or Muslim-sounding name, but were not actually Jewish or Muslim, they could still claim religious and racial discrimination.)

Also, the court affirmed certain protections against negative discrimination do continue to apply to trans women. There are two ways this could be read:

The first and most obvious is that trans people of gender x cannot benefit *in general* from positive discrimination in favour of gender x, but can benefit from protection against negative discrimination against gender x.

This would be the better of the two interpretations. Unfortunately …

This cause concerned positive discrimination and whether a trans woman appointed to a position with a gender quota would count as a woman. The court said no.

It might be taken to imply that a trans man appointed to a similar position also would not count as a man, but much of the reasoning in the written decision considers only trans women. Maybe a trans man would count as a man if the cause were fought again: stranger things have happened in British law.

I think both of these are wrong individually – in using the long title of the EA 2010 to ascertain its purpose, it appears to have ignored the potential effect of the word ‘reform’ in ‘harmonise and reform’ – but this is now the law.

The good news:

This case was fought by the Scottish government, which could now introduce primary legislation in Holyrood to reverse the effect of the decision in Scotland. I expect there would be another fight over this: ‘Equal opportunities’ is, with some exceptions, a Reserved Matter in the Scotland Act 1998. They may well be able to get this in under an exception.

Trans people in England and Wales and NI could not benefit from this, though.

We’ll see how the Scottish govt plays this now.