Notices by AJ Sadauskas (ajsadauskas@social.vivaldi.net)

Some would say Mark Zuckerberg's actions this week accomplished little of value.

But I'd disagree.

Just look at the 138,900 cat photos that are now on Pixelfed 😹

#cats #Pixelfed #Meta

@mekkaokereke Something utterly appalling about America that I learnt in the past week.

Yes, it's a tangent, but it has everything to do with your core point.

Many of the firefighters that have been battling the bushfires in Los Angeles these past few days are prison inmates: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rwdjwglx2o

"Nearly 1,000 incarcerated men and women have joined the frontlines in a battle against record-breaking wildfires burning across southern California.

"The number deployed - now 939 - are part of a long-running volunteer programme led by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR).

"The state pays inmates a daily wage between $5.80 and $10.24 (£4.75 and £8.38), and an additional $1 per day when assigned to active emergencies."

In the richest country on Earth, making inmates put their lives at risk fighting bushfires for US$5.80 an hour + US$1 a day?!

Genuine question: How do you allow that to happen?!

And in the supposedly liberal state of California!

As a foreigner, with all the crazy stuff that's happened in America recently, that managed to shock me.

In good conscience, how do you allow your nation's prison–industrial complex to get that bad?

And that's just one manifestation of it!

Any Democrat who calls themselves a "liberal" and enables it should hang their head in shame.

@kallekn @osma @pixelfed Over the past day or so, there's been a massive number of people migrating from Instagram to Pixelfed.social for Zuck-related reasons.

Earlier today, it was particularly bad, because many were trying to pull across their Instagram posts and videos at the same time.

You can probably imagine how thousands of people suddenly trying to upload hundreds of megabytes of photos and videos at the same time isn't great for server capacity.

@dansup temporarily switched off file migration and, at one point, federation to keep the site online.

It seems to have stabilised a little, but it's still intermittently patchy.

Most of the first-time users are signing up at the main instance, so Pixelfed.Social is likely to be a bit wobbly where other instances aren't.

Hopefully in the coming days, as more server capacity comes online, those issues settle down...

@dansup Any chance of the official Pixelfed account following BridgyFed?

It's time to spread the propaganda on the butterfly app.

The past few days, I've been toying with the idea of setting up a single-user Mastodon instance.

I'm currently looking at Masto.host as a hosting provider. The prices seem reasonable?

First, for those who have rolled their own instance: How has the experience been? Any advice you'd share with a self-hosting newbie? Any pitfalls or downsides?

Have you gone with a specialist managed prover like Masto.host?

Are there any major advantages or disadvantages over a vanilla cPanel web hosting provider that supports Mastodon?

Another option I'm toying with is using a single instance of Friendica as my Fedi home, and consolidating everything there, including photos.

Are there any managed hosting providers that support Friendica?

#Fediverse #FediHelp #Mastodon

Leaders who are upset at Musk, but maintain official X/Twitter accounts, are a joke.

If you really want to send him a message, order all your departments and agencies to stop using X, and to create official accounts on BlueSky and Mastodon.

Here's a little trick for anyone reading this on BlueSky who wants longer posts.

See the button below that reads "Original post on social. vivaldi. net"?

Tap it to see the full post, where you'll learn how I did it 👇

(You've probably seen other posts like this one. Here's how those posts are done.)

Okay.

So the fact you're reading this means you clicked the button. You're now reading a longer version of this post with a 1337 character limit.

How I did it was by setting up an account on a different social media app called Mastodon.

How you set it up is by going to https://mastodon.social and clicking the create account button.

(Sidenote: This also works with most other websites that use the Mastodon software for their social media app. I use https://social.vivaldi.net, which is run by the same folks as the @Vivaldi web browser.)

Once you've set up an account, upload your profile photo and follow @bsky.brid.gy

BSky Bridgy is a service by @snarfed.org that makes your Mastodon posts visible on BlueSky.

(Note: As an anti-spam measure, you need a profile photo and your account on Mastodon needs to be active for a week before your posts appear on BlueSky.)

Once it's set up, all your posts on Mastodon will be visible on BlueSky. Including longer posts, like this one 😊

@dansup @jstevenyork Can you include the ICQ uh-oh too? 🥺

@DaRC_Fantom @Remittancegirl @Tattooed_Mummy It's not just authoritarian states that have spent decades honing their propaganda skills.

News Corp was founded in 1918. Australia's most powerful industrialist of the time, William Lawrence Baillieu, became concerned about the influence of a union-owned newspaper among the workers of a mine he owned in Broken Hill.

(The name Baillieu will be familiar to anyone reading this in Melbourne. Ted Baillieu, a recent stare premier of Victoria, is a descendant of the Myer–Baillieu family.)

It was designed to spread pro-corporate propaganda to break the union's influence. Laurence eventually put a journalist named Keith Murdoch in charge.
https://theconversation.com/the-secret-history-of-news-corp-a-media-empire-built-on-spreading-propaganda-116992

Keith's son, Rupert Murdoch, eventually took over the business, which is now run by his grandson, Lachlan.

So Fox News, the Wall St Journal, the UK Sun, etc, is basically the product of 100 years of anti-union propaganda.

On top of that, you have the entire public relations industry, which is basically corporate propaganda.

It's the PR industry that made Elon look like an environmentalist visionary instead of the spoilt son of a wealthy Apartheid-era businessman.

It also spread doubts about whether toxic fossil fuels are cooking the planet.

When it comes to propaganda, there's no place like home...

@mekkaokereke @professorhank On 22 May 1972, a chap named Richard Nixon visited Russia.

Kalanta set himself on fire on 14 May, just over one week earlier.

Nixon's visit was literally at the same time Moscow is rounding up and torturing people for protesting the occupation, and sending in troops and tanks to violently crush an uprising in Lithuania.

It's inconceivable that Khrushchev wouldn't have been briefed about it.

So let's break it down:

During the visit Khrushchev talks about how great life is in Soviet Russia. Knowing — and I'm being extremely generous here — that's not the full story.

The US intelligence agencies had friends in the Kremlin. Even if not the full details, they would most likely have known something was up and briefed Nixon.

So Nixon, rightly, raises human rights abuses in the countries Russia occupies, without directly naming the still ongoing uprising. A justified comment in my book.

Khrushchev does his whataboutism.

Whatabout Black people in the US. Whatabout Vietnam.

He was simultaneously being truthful and disingenuous.

He called out anti-Black racism and America's war crimes in Vietnam. With complete justification.

At the same time, it was also a deflection of Russia's own mistreatment of its occupied ethnic minorities.

Both things are simultaneously true.

3/3

@mekkaokereke @professorhank The guerilla resistance against the Russian occupation continued into the 1960s. Around 50,000 were killed.

"In Lithuania, all told the Soviets killed about 22,000 partisans while admitting to have lost about 13,000 soldiers of their own. Another 13,000 Lithuanians were killed as suspected collaborators, while hundreds of thousands of people across eastern Europe were deported to Siberia, many of them dying in exile."

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/anti-soviet-partisans-eastern-europe

Then there's the '70. The Prague Spring and the Hungarian Uprising are still widely remembered.

What's often forgotten is that similar uprisings took place against the Russian occupation in 1972 in Lithuania.

In that year, a young man named Romas Kalanta ended his life by setting himself on fire in a public square in Kaunas in 1972: https://www.lrs.lt/pls/inter/w5_show?p_r=8524&p_k=2

In the following days there were mass protests in defiance of Soviet Russian authorities that were suppressed by force: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_unrest_in_Lithuania

In the years that followed, 13 people either set themselves on fire like Kalanta or attempted to do so, including Antanas Kalinauskas in 1976, and there were other riots and mass protests.

Some of these uprisings were reported on in the West, albeit not their full scale.

And something else happened in 1972...

2/3

@mekkaokereke @professorhank The absolute numbers in the US are higher because the population is larger — ~330 million of whom around 45 – 50 million are black. Meanwhile there's around 3 million Lithuanians both in Lithuania itself, and the diaspora.

And the number killed, forcibly deported, and imprisoned during the early years of the Soviet Russian occupation was around 300,000. So that's basically one-in-10 people from an occupied ethnic group:

"On June 14, 1941, mass arrests and deportations of Lithuanians to inner parts of the Soviet Union and Siberia began.

"According to the data of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, the Soviets deported, killed and imprisoned about 23,000 people during the first occupation. In total, about 130,000 people were deported from Lithuania by 1953, and another 156,000 Lithuanians were imprisoned."

https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/2297019/lithuania-commemorates-victims-of-soviet-deportations-on-day-of-mourning-and-hope

That's excluding a host of other atrocities (including mass rapes, mass relocation of ethnic Russians into Lithuania and other occupied countries, whole cities levelled, etc) by the Russians.

That's just the initial stages of the 1941 occupation.

That doesn't include anything that happened later, including in the aftermath of the 1972 uprisings...

(1/n)

@mekkaokereke @professorhank During the Cold War, the Russians raised Jim Crow segregation and anti-Black racism in America more broadly.

Along with US colonial imperialism in Vietnam and elsewhere.

Their criticisms of American hypocrisy were true.

The US absolutely was (and still is) hypocritical in the way it condemned oppression abroad, while engaging in it at home.

So in that sense, yes the Russian criticisms were valid.

At the same time, the Soviet Union was a Russian imperialist empire.

It occupied and colonised neighbouring countries and oppressed their people. Brutally.

(Full disclosure: I have living relatives who are survivors of Siberian forced labour camps.)

That includes under the reign of supposed moderates like Khrushchev.

If you ever visit Vilnius, I'd strongly recommend a visit to the old KGB headquarters, which is now the Museum of Occupations: https://www.govilnius.lt/visit-vilnius/places/museum-of-occupations-and-freedom-fights

The sick bastards were literally having parties on the top floor of that building for visiting dignitaries from Moscow while people were being tortured to death (think Gitmo but worse) in the basement.

So the American criticisms of Russia were completely valid.

And while the points they made in their deflection were true, the Russians were nonetheless deflecting valid criticisms if their empire.

@jalefkowit No, I don't want Microsoft watching everything I do in my browser in case I'm playing a game. And if I do ever play a game, to suggest tactics.

Seriously. If you know you fucked up when your surveillance tech makes the Google alternative the more privacy-respecting alternative.

I recently switched to @Vivaldi to get away from unwanted AI bloatware in Chrome.

This "feature" would make it *less* likely for me to choose Edge in the future.

@klausfiend @Alon @mekkaokereke @14mission The Boring Company was a different fever dream to hyperloop.

His claim was that cars would drive on to "skates" in parking spots.

The cars would then be lowered into a tunnel on the skates, where they would travel at 130 miles per hour.

He ended up building a prototype under the Las Vegas Convention Centre, except it's just human drivers driving Teslas in an endless loop from one end of the convention centre to the other.

@14mission @Alon @mekkaokereke The average in Australia is 1.1–1.2 passengers per car.

I haven't checked, but would imagine the average would be similar in the US.

So if you have a lift that carries 1 car per minute, that's just 60 cars per hour. Which means, on average, 66 – 72 passengers per hour.

For context, a single articulated bus seats around 75 passengers; Sydney's trams carry up to 400 passengers.

But it's worse than that.

Because in his future, he wants robotaxis, which potentially drop the passengers per car below 1.

So at, say, .9 average passengers per car (something that can't be achieved without robotaxis), 60 cars an hour turns into just 54 human passengers.

@fancysandwiches @mekkaokereke @ScottStarkey @MishaVanMollusq In an ideal world, Mastodon (and other Fedi apps) would be developed by a member-owned nonprofit with a democratically elected board.

You want to attend the AGM? You want a vote on how Mastodon is run?

Okay, that's, say, $5 per month.

Instance-level memberships and memberships from other Fedi projects cost more.

Second, the nonprofit has a commercial arm that offers managed instance hosting, and support.

The nonprofit would also raise funds through a grants, gifts-in-wills, events, regular donations over $5 per month, and large donations from major donors.

@MishaVanMollusq @mekkaokereke Do you mean me personally?

If that was my big concern, I would have been on X or Instagram these past 2+ years instead of here.

It's more that I'm disappointed that many people who I respect, some of whom were regular Mastodon users for a very long time, have recently stopped posting here.

They're now on BlueSky.

There was a real opportunity with Twitter imploding for the Fediverse to fill that void.

That means decentralised, open source, non-commercial social media based on open standards could have been the standard.

That window of opportunity is now nearly closed.

And honestly, I feel disappointed that's the case.

I think there is an opportunity for Mastodon to be the place for slower, more thoughtful, longer form conversations with a stronger community.

And maybe that's what Mastodon was better suited to all along?

@mistergibson @mekkaokereke There was a whole wave of Australian journalists and prominent #auspol Twitter users who moved to Mastodon when Elon first bought the bird app.

Some moved back to X, others moved on to Threads and BlueSky.

Many who tried Masto for a time ended up on BlueSky.

I think there's a few reasons why that happened.

The onboarding journey and the default app, especially two years ago but still today, just weren't great.

There have also been issues with moderation and harassment.

There's issues, like quotes, that were supported by other Fedi apps but not Mastodon.

With credit to the Mastodon developers, some of those issues have been fixed, just nig nearly fast enough.

I definitely think there's value in Mastodon and the Fediverse more broadly.

But I'm now a lot less sure that role will be "the new Twitter".

@mekkaokereke Sadly, I get the impression that the window of opportunity for Mastodon to be the great Twitter replacement might have closed.

It's just so quiet in here right now, especially compared with BlueSky.

That might change over time?

I think what a lot of people wanted was just a better moderated Twitter. And that's something Mastodon ultimately failed to deliver, particularly with the default apps.

I think perhaps it's time to focus on Mastodon better at being its own thing. A place for slower, more thoughtful, longer form conversations.

And to keep chipping away at the moderation and other issues that have held it back.

I certainly think there's merit in better federation between the Fedi and BlueSky.

But these are just a few disjointed thoughts...