Notices by J—dV (redjives@todon.eu)

In light of the recent 1Password muck, I would like to gently remind all you techies: I don't want to self host – not my email, not my password manager, not my remote storage/backup. I'm not a sysadmin. I'm likely to fuck it up eventually. I'm happy for y'all who feel comfortable doing that but it's not really the most useful advice / suggestion for general use.

@hpod16 Algorithmic media is bad for everyone, adults too. So why not regulate that instead? Go after the tech companies that manipulate and profit, instead of introducing onerous, invasive, and anti-privacy age verification that means giving even more data and power to tech companies.

Oh, and for those parents and teens some actually open and accessible (non-comercial) public spaces would probably help too!

@cwebber I swear I wrote that toot before I saw this ny times op-ed that basically says "don't worry, I'm just gay – the inborn, unchosen, immutable kind – and not a scary queer, who keeps demanding more and more rights and is constantly challenging the status-quo"

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/30/opinion/queer-gay-rights.html

@cwebber The "immutable" requirement is such a strange US-specific legal artefact. First, religion is considered a suspect class, and thus subject to strict scrutiny. One’s religion isn't immutable though, so that's not actually a requirement!

And second, during the gay-marriage debates of the early 2000s there was a fascinating split in how US and European activists framed being gay. In the US you often heard "I was born this way" and a strong emphasis on gay-ness being innate. Because in the US context – against the historical backdrop of race – that's how you are awarded rights. But in Europe the rhetoric was almost the opposite, emphasising freedom of choice as the basis for rights.

@MediaActivist @fedizine I don't have anything concrete, but I would question whether Twitter was *ever* that useful. Perhaps instead of arguing that it's evil (which, ok, it is) you may have more luck arguing that the upside was never that big to begin with.

@lavaeolus As someone who wouldn't be here had their (Jewish) grandparents not been active members of the resistance, and who is here despite the fact that the vast majority of their "good and polite" neighbors did jack-all to help them, and couldn't even be trusted to keep their mouth shut most of the time … fuck that shit.

@madeindex I will think carefully how to word it and request it. Thanks for the suggestion!

@madeindex Arg. Apparently there is a "group boosts" option, and I even already have it enabled! … but it is implemented poorly and there is already a feature request to fix it: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18693

My brother and I have a game where every time we run into a coat of arms or unusual flag in the wild we snap a photo and send it to the other. The challenge is to identify it, and if possible even geolocate it. It's like GeoGuessr but for heraldry. We've gotten pretty good at it.

After doing this for a few years I have come to sort of want my own coat of arms (without the aristocratic / lord / monarchy bits of course). So here's my first attempt.

Blazon: field maroon, domestic cat sejant erect with bicycle wheel or.

#heraldry

100% here for no algorithm. But, a filter that shows my boosts only once would be great. Maybe if n *different* people boost the same thing show it to me again so I know it's popular. But I don't need to see the same thing 3, 4, 5 times a few days apart. Ironically it starts to feel more like I'm looking at an algorithm feed because instead of seeing toots in chronological order, my feed gets cluttered with older stuff. I don't want to turn boosts off entirely, though, because sometimes they're interesting.

It's Thanksgiving in the U.S. so once again I am here to tell you about Tisquantum. Did you ever wonder how the pilgrims communicated with the Wampanoag they encountered? Maybe you just assumed they used simple hand gestures (because that's how you communicate with “savages”). 🙅♂️ NOPE!!! When the colonizers landed out strolled Tisquantum, who greeted them in perfect English!

Tisquantum was abducted and enslaved in 1614. He lived first in Spain and then in England. Then in 1619 he sailed back home, serving as an interpreter, only to learn that everyone in his home village had died of disease. He eventually moved in with a neighboring band which is where the settler colonists met him. He ended up being an important diplomatic link between them and the locals.

From there the dealings and double dealings between the various local bands, Tisquantum, and the the settlers gets complicated. There is a lot of history there full of actual people with complex motivations. The bidirectional interaction between “new” and “old” world often get flattened into a single point, with a clean before and after. But there is so much more there!

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

#thanksgiving