Notices by benjamin melançon (mlncn@social.coop)

Trump/Musk rewriting the system that sends Social Security payments is designed to fail. It is yet another transparent grab at the people's money; to present it any other way is beyond naiveté. They (and willing media) may then blame the failure on programmers as a profession, because it is never the fault of the geniuses at the top and it cannot be intentional systemic violence, no never.

So out of self-interest let me offer a straightforward solution: give everybody in the US $3,000/month.

Government of #Switzerland arrests director of a #news org long reporting on Palestine.

https://electronicintifada.net/content/eis-ali-abunimah-arrested-switzerland/50333

Hey #tech friends please share far and wide that any #startup or other company bragging about their #Swiss legal incorporation and the privacy laws there is meaningless when Switzerland's police will detain people for days for running a #media organization.

https://electronicintifada.net/content/eis-ali-abunimah-arrested-switzerland/50333

i thought this was an incredibly tone-deaf acronym for, i don't know, Free-Libre Unconference, but in fact #FluConf2025 is an online-only conference precisely because #COVID still rages on amid plenty of other disabling-to-deadly diseases.

#FLOSS safely @fluconf !

https://fluconf.online/

@dalias

@arisummerland

there is free public hosting i've used a little with mutual aid groups in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and @agaric we like to use the paid hosted plan in order to support development of the Zulip software (#LibreSaaS !) and to not add to our pile of self-hosted tools. EDIT to add, the ability to have guests on the paid plan we've found consistently more generous than documented.

@MediaActivist That is, i think reporters who are part of and accountable to communities struggling for liberation is more important than removing reporting from being a dedicated role some people have (though opening that up to everybody is central to Visions Unite style democratically-moderated mass media).

@MediaActivist

Reporting (and #journalism if one must call it that) includes skills worth developing, and #tools that support it.

(Related, you got the long-winded version of me because Fedilab on my Android ate my mobile posting while i was drafting it!)

@MediaActivist

Oh, last thing i was trying to fit into only two posts:

i realize that #VisionsUnite is likely to mostly make "wildly popular yet remarkably mild alternatives and tweaks to the system" stay in public consciousness, but i hope that when they system denies these anyway it makes people more radical and more organized (without the corporate mass media able to perform a lobotomy every single time).

@MediaActivist

Very interested!

Full disclosure i've wanted for 20-odd years, and occasionally worked on, something supplementary to what you describe:

Mass communication that avoids the problems of hierarchy and power-seeking in the flow of information by collectively sharing the work of deciding the reach of any given message.

We have a prototype up: https://visionsunite.gigalixirapp.com/about

@MediaActivist

The Visions Unite shallow version of #sortition – an approach in its fuller version that i think all of us working to build a world without 'leaders' separated from the rest of us should consider – would also be supplemental, the broadcast layer or extra attention-boost mechanism for what i felt you were leading up to, social-movement-embedded local news orgs.

@webology

@ntnsndr

give @zulip a try! Much better UX than Slack or Discord in my opinion

@inthehands

I've noticed at least some parts of the #Minneapolis skyway system and second-floor businesses to be very good (500s) and at least one new Aldi to be shockingly bad (4000s).

As a way to try to get places to improve, as much as to help people make individual decisions, do you know of any community-sourced mapping-of-CO₂ concentrations out there?

#COVIDisAirborne

I am big on credit unions and not big on under-regulated venture-capital-backed app-based banks, but i have an unexpected 20,133 gems in #Duolingo after not using it for a couple years so if they opened an online-only bank i would have to consider their savings account options.

@inthehands @bhawthorne

We are working on a communication network that makes it easier for what matters to reach people— where all of us in the network participate on an equal basis in the work of filtering out the noise, so our voices are heard.

https://visionsunite.gigalixirapp.com/about

(Disclosure: Zeynep Tufekci's take on the idea: "Good luck convincing people about the Central Limit Theorem"!)

@inthehands

This is a 'common sense' thing that given our own media and a couple not-too-corrupt politicians would have a ton of legs.

Like i've met people up by the boundary waters who are pretty conservative and feel they need more mining industry to keep their remaining hospitals and schools open, but also like nature to survive and the tourist economy it brings, who propose themselves that hundreds of millions of dollars be put in escrow for immediate cleanup of a tailings pond spill.

@inthehands

Of course at any cost commensurate to the risk such an escrow account requirement would kill all these projects.

But if there were a "big government" commitment to keeping hospitals and colleges open people probably would not miss the environment-destroying industries…

@MediaActivist

Doing your own WordPress (or Drupal or…) subscription setup, with an easy e-mail address entry box and call-to-action, should work as well as anything. For blog-specifically there's Ghost and Bear Blog https://bearblog.dev/ (and others, but those i know have e-mail subscription).

Your best bet, though, is likely WriteFreely, https://writefreely.org/ – allows subscribing by e-mail *or* the fediverse (which Drupal and i think WordPress can do too but that takes work).

i totally missed this news from neighboring Golden Valley, #Minnesota — the racist police abolishing themselves.

https://portside.org/2023-07-05/half-police-force-quit-crime-dropped

@gbhnews @jsit also setting up your own instance of Mastodon or other software on the fediverse is pretty easy. For one client @agaric is doing this two ways: One where "News Org dot Social" engages like you are now (and also, not so needed, invites the public) and another where the news org at its main domain publishes full articles directly. This could be done on the same domain with some technical differences, or easily on a main domain and a subdomain (social.wgbh.org or social.npr.org).

@jasonwilson wrote that whatever value Twitter has "was generated by users and users have no say over what happens next. It’s a bad deal and we all keep taking it"

Same for truly-important non-dollar value here.

Let there be a thousand #Mastodon servers following the https://social.coop model!

You don't have to be absurdly into cooperatives like us to want collective control over your important online home. Make your spot on the #fediverse a co-op like us: https://wiki.social.coop/home.html