Notices by Mx Amber Alex (she/it) (amberage@eldritch.cafe), page 2

@Sylvhem in less than an hour, my image of Signal has changed from

"amazing privacy chat thing all the cool kids use"

to

"whatsapp if you left it to rot in a pond for three years and duct taped it together"

For the love of god, when you report another user, describe the issue!

Yes, even if you've attached posts.
Yes, even if you think it's obvious.

And if you haven't reported any specific posts, and haven't described the issue, how do you expect us to do anything about it?

Also, keep in mind: if we suspend an account, their posts will be deleted after 30 days. Thanks to some genius at Mastodon gGmbH, they are not retained with the ticket for review purposes, not even links to the original posts. So if we later want to review why a certain account was suspended, that's a lot harder when the reporting user didn't send a description of the problem.

So for fuck's sake, use that text field! Please!

Trade offer:
We receive: description of your report
You receive: moderation

(This post represents the personal opinion of the author and is not an official statement, endorsed by, or representative of the collective opinion of the Eldritch Café moderation team.)

#MastoMod

@beka_valentine @inthehands @zillion @Nonya_Bidniss this one seems to be a more current sample:

https://asistahelp.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Annotated-Form-I-200-and-I-205-ICE-Warrants.pdf

@elilla @chris_evelyn fucking thank you, you continue to put so much frustration I share into words better than I ever could.

My standpoint has been for years "I can stand against nazis with anyone who isn't a nazi (or otherwise wants me and my comrades dead)" and this inability to differetiate between existential threats and in-community feuds is the biggest fucking hindrance to that.

@elilla @chris_evelyn someone who calls me a man who wants to be a woman but stands between me and the nazis that want to kill me is infinitely preferable to someone who talks the talk but kicks me out of the group because I look to AMAB for their FLINTA event.

@cwebber I mean, Bluesky persecutes queer and feminist stuff as "mature" or "adult" and doesn't ban nazis, only limits their reach, was partially bought out by a crypto company and is headed by a crpyto grifter.

"holdout"? not sure.

@cwebber absolutely dating myself here (in my defence: not American) but the Onion was a print magazine??

@annika how many hours for screaming into a pillow?

@Erpel @jk the computers still scream, but they have no mouth anymore 😩

@jerry better late than never. But frankly? They didn't go bad overnight. They always have been. Cambridge Analytica was five years ago.

Every instance who blocked Threads the moment it began doesn't have nearly 4,000 mutual connections to worry about.

If people want to interact with the billionnaire nazi platform, they have to be on the nazi platform and pay the price, in the form of ads and nazi posts on their timeline. A better social media and interacting with Facebook are fundamentally incompatible.

You tried to have your cake and eat it too, and you still seem convined you can make it work.

@siege ah. gatekeepers.

@siege what's BAGIS?

@sophieschmieg ??? help

@sophieschmieg who would win:

• random numbers from radioactive decay
• heating the oceans and consuming the energy output of a small country to produce a bad imitation of radioactive decay

@stapper @uint8_t @researchfairy every little bit helps, but also it can never help enough.

I've never flown anywhere in my life. I don't drive a huge car. Most of my food is from eco-friendly farming. My clothes are mostly second-hand.

If the entire population behaved like me, a dozen billionnaires going on a fifth vacation per year would cancel it all out.

All of our collective "carbon footprints" are smaller than the big toe of billionnaires' carbon footprints.

In other words: if billionnaires and mega corporations stopped pproducing garbage nobody needs, putting AI into everything, using their private jets to fly from the bedroom to the bathroom, and stopped gathering and processing unthinkable amounts of user data, stopped running countless data centers to show us advertisements, the rest of us wouldn't need to live like ascetics.

@nafmo I have no idea, I just do new Date("0100-12-08").

Another post could reproduce the issue with JSON.stringify(), so it seems the conversion to ISO strings within that method has issues with extremely ancient dates.

Oh for fuck's sake…

The timeline tool I wrote a while ago has some issue I can't track down. Dates, which should always end with T00:00:00.000Z, get seemingly random hours/minutes/seconds added to them, and sometimes, this causes them to get saved with a different date (i.e. 0100-09-01 gets saved as 0100-08-31T23:06:00.000Z).

This has happened in a timeline I currently work with which takes place in very, very low years (as above, the year 100); I haven't been able to recreate this with current years (2023, 2024).

Does anyone who knows JavaScript have any idea what's happening here?

I use prompt() to ask for dates in YYYY-MM-DD format and then use new Date(...) to turn that into a date. Later, I use date.toLocaleString(...) to display that date again.

I use JSON.stringify(...) to turn the object containing these dates into JSON, and later JSON.parse(...) to load them again.

The entire source code is here.

I could probably fix this dirty by just not using the JavaScript Date objects, but that would ruin localisation.

I just want dates to be stored, without respect to time of day, only YYYY-MM-DD, and be displayed in an appropriate localisation (i.e. "Jun 10, 2024" for some and "10. Juni 2024" for others), without any timezone fuckery.

#AskFedi #JavaScript

@FediPact early adopter here, and by early adopter, I mean early adopter of blocking threads

As for the current situation, I am waiting for the statement that's been promised to see if that changes anything. As it currently stands, it's definitely not "admins getting into a fight" or "silly drama" and doesn't make the instance in question look good, but I'm reserving my final opinion on the matter until everyone involved has had a chance to tell their side of the story.

That's all I'm gonna say about that for the time being, and I wish I didn't have to have an opinion at all, but sadly, these days, everyone is expected to have one immediately or their silence will be taken as complicity with one side or another.

I'm seeing a lot of "defederation sucks because silly drama means I can't see my friends' posts anymore" the last week and it gets my blood boiling.

First of all, with regards to the current thing, it's not "silly drama". I'm not gonna debate this in detail, but even if you ignore the long pattern of shit behaviour previously, the current incident is entirely unrelated to that and just plain wrong behaviour. As a matter of fact, it's a dead-to-rights privacy policy violation.

Second: "But our users don't want to lose their friends" is not a blank check to behave like shit. That is how instances become "too big to block". That is why people are still on Twitter despite the nazi CEO. It's the literal nazi bar problem. When someone runs an instance that's open to the public, they take on certain responsibilities, such as behaving in their users' best interests. If an admin behaves so badly, their instance is getting defederated, blame the admin, not the people who defederate, including defederating for their own users' safety.

Third: at least bother to try and get an idea what's going on. Framing all defederation as "admins get in a fight and take it out on their users" is just lazy and frankly benefits people who are rightfully being shunned, because now their harmful behaviour is downplayed as "getting in a fight", not to mention that it evenly distributes blame between the one who misbehaved and the ones who won't tolerate that behaviour.

In turn, let me reiterate something I wrote a while ago:

The corner of the fediverse most people around here hang out is majority-queer, and within that, majority-trans. You can't throw a rock around here without hitting an instance owner who's queer. My timeline is like 90% queer by volume.

So when it seems like "they're going after another queer instance again", or "they're taking the trans admins down one by one", or whatever, consider this: in a predominantly queer community, most abusers will also be queer, simply because almost everyone is.

If the entire population has, on average, say, 10% abusers and 10% queer people, the overlap between those two groups is not gonna be very large. Nine straight abusers, one queer abuser. But if a sample population has 90% queer people and the same 10% abusers, then it's gonna be nine queer abusers and one straight abuser.

It's simple statistics. Queer people are not inherently always-innocent saints. There are enough abusers among us, I should know, I've been victim to several in my life. When a queer admin behaves like an arsehole and is subsequently shunned, and it's the tenth time a queer admin behaves badly and is shunned, that does not prove the existence of an anti-queer witchhunt.

It's not by definition queerphobia just because it's directed at a queer person. So long as the person isn't, directly or indirectly, demeaned by attacking their queer identity, it isn't queeerphobia. Saying "pfft, of course they're an abuser, what do you expect from a faggot" is worlds apart from saying "this person did something wrong and we will not stand for that".

Please.

Learn those lessons. Remember that.

Anyone who's spent any meaningful amount of time in larger queer groups knows there will always be abusers who are queer and weaponise their queer identity to protect themselves from accountability. I'm not even talking about the current meta specifically, it happens all the time. I've had the misfortunate of falling victim to abusers who used their being queer to frame themselves as innocent saints who are being wrongly persecuted. Or who used their autism as an excuse to rape people (fortunately not myself) because they claimed they didn't ignore a no, they just didn't pick up on the subtext. Elon fucking Musk is, besides being a nazi, a huge fucking arsehole whose fans use his autism (or so he says) to defend him and paint him as a Rain Man-style genius savant whose rudeness isn't his fault.

Remember all that, now and in the future. Try your best to find out what's going on before you hipfire comments about it. Don't downplay consequences for actual bad behaviour as petty fights or silly drama. Have the restraint to just say nothing when you don't feel qualified to weigh in.

And keep those basic statistics in mind. In a group full of queer people, most accusers will also be queer. James fucking Somerton is queer, for that matter, and for years, his fans and himself fought legitimate plagiarism accusations as just homophobia and defamed victims of his plagiarism as "hating gays and wanting him dead".

Sometimes, you gotta take a deep breath, swallow that initial reflex to bite back, and think it through.

Thank you.

Opinions expressed here are my own and represent nobody else's. Not an official position of Eldritch Café. Speaking personally, not in any capacity as a moderator.

#MastoMod