Notices by Fabio Manganiello (fabio@manganiello.online)

Ok folks, now this is fucking PERSONAL.

mastodon.social is managed by Zionists and genocide apologists.

It’s not only a few isolated accounts. It’s their whole staff.

My new profile has been limited again, even though there was not a single element of antisemitism in anything I posted, and all of my activity was around gaza-verified.

In the meantime Zionist accounts and serial harassers like 8124 are still free to act with impunity.

Please, PLEASE, support me now. All of my followers. As loud as you can.

I have supported many so far, now I need your support.

The motherfuckers that manage mastodon.social must be called accountable and be publicly shamed.

All the gaza-verified accounts must be migrated out of that instance.

I call for a #Fediblock against mastodon.social, for all of my friends on that instance to move out, and for the Fediverse to isolate these unaccountable motherfuckers.

They have NOT A SINGLE FUCKING RIGHT of saying that they support initiatives for Gaza while they keep platforming genocide deniers with impunity and harassing me for no reason.

They don’t have a SINGLE FUCKING RIGHT of taking credit while folks like me donate, coordinate support networks, spin up Web services for these initiatives and expose themselves to threats - and all they do is sit on their lazy asses and get free publicity.

mastodon.social has become the CESSPIT OF THE INTERNET, and it ought to be defederated just like Gab and poa-st.

Move all out of it. It’s not a safe place. Let it be the cesspit of Hasbara propaganda that it wants to be. Let it be a safe place just for Zionist scumbags who congratulate each other for the nefarious smell of their own farts, and for denying that there’s a genocide in Gaza because not enough kids have died.

@aral @staff #gaza #palestine #mutualaid

@bilal_mo @aral this is awful…there was supposed to be a freaking ceasefire…I stand by your side and hope that he recovers soon. I no longer consider the sadistic Zionist beasts who do these things as human beings.

As largely expected, #ChatControl will soon be back.

Voted down several times already, last time just a couple of weeks ago, Denmark is now trying to bring it up again and reach a deal by December.

Let that sink in. Europe has many priorities on its table right now. And yet the EU Parliament is stuck discussing the same thing again and again because some governments really love surveillance.

Other topics - the war in Ukraine, support for Gaza, the loss of productivity and growth, the stagnating birth rates, the threat of the US sanctions on one side and China’s aggressive exports in response that pose a further threat to the competitiveness of EU economies - all take a backseat.

Spying on citizens’ conversations and weakening privacy for everyone is so important that it’s worth to slow down progress on everything else and discuss the same thing 3 times in a year until it gets through.

Had we shown the same determination on Ukraine and Gaza, we could have ended those wars much earlier.

archive.ph/aZHRE

@millerebonds @raphaellakay @thousandmadleensdenmark @1kmadleenfr @marahismail @mrtagrc @aral @joynewacc @renchap

Mastodon has virality problems, Gaza isn’t on the top, even if there is there is an emergency.

I know, and IMHO by now we’ve already scraped most of the barrel on the Fediverse. Accounts with tens of thousands of followers have extensively shared the initiative. It’s likely that a considerable share of all the active Mastodon users has seen at least a post about gaza-verified. Those who were willing to support the initiative have probably already joined. And yet, according to my back-of-the-envelope estimates, it’s not more than 12-18 of us who support these campaigns on a daily basis. This is also a common phenomenon on social media in general: you can’t keep a topic in the top hashtags for too long - especially now that, according to many in the West, the emergency is over.

The bluesky bridge bsky.brid.gy must be used even if bluesky bans Gazan people :(

The problem is that basically all the Gazan accounts who have been sufficiently successful in their Bluesky/Instagram campaigns have been suspended, often a few times.

If they get their messages bridged through the bridge their bridged accounts are also very likely to be blocked.

But I definitely see the point for as many people as possible who boost those campaigns to use the Bluesky bridge so they get those messages bridged there too (unfortunately it’s not something I can personally do, but mostly because of technical issues that still prevent my personal instance, which runs Akkoma, from properly working with the Bluesky bridge).

In general I feel like any account here that has also some social presence on other social media (either through dedicated or bridged accounts) should post about gaza-verified there too. I’ve personally done so on Facebook too, but since I don’t use it much it’s not like I extended the donors base that much (mostly a couple of one-shot donations from some friends and family). Accounts that follow this initiative and have also strong presence on other social media should probably talk about this initiative there too.

And of course there are also “offline” options available. Like talking about the initiative and these people in real-life pro-Palestine events. Or trying to get news outlets to cover it - something that I think Mohammed did, and I also tried to leverage by reaching out to Al-Jazeera, but without managing to follow up. If anyone has connections with journalists or news outlets they could probably mention this initiative - a grassroot initiative kickstarted on independent social media that managed to save the lives of many is probably something that news should cover.

Something that I would also advise people to do if they want to mention the initiative on other social media is to link the archive - gaza.onl / archive.gaza.onl. Most of the folks out there don’t follow Mastodon regularly, and I’ve realized that we can’t ask them to join and follow just to support this initiative. Since the archive periodically indexes all the content posted by the verified accounts, it can also be used as a timeline to follow their messages and get links to their campaigns by those who are not on the Fediverse.

These are, as usual, my 2c - these ideas have already been mentioned before, but eventually the last word is on Joy and Aral.

My only concern is that I’m not sure that the initiative, as it is structured now, can scale up and sustain more visibility. It’s basically only two people in charge of the whole verification process (my role is limited to the Gaza archive, Joy’s blog and providing a bit of financial and behind-the-lines support). More visibility means both more donors and more inflow of Gazans who want to get some support. That just won’t scale now - there’s already a clogged backlog, which should hopefully be cleared more efficiently once Aral brings the new verification site online, but it still won’t be ready to sustain volumes higher than 5-10 accounts/week with the current resources.

And that’s currently the biggest elephant in the room that prevents the initiative from scaling up. That as of now there’s nobody who can do Joy’s job in Gaza who can be entrusted. And without anyone sufficiently trustworthy to support her we just have a constraint on inflow of new accounts that can’t be easily overcome.

@mohshbair that sounds like an infection caused the bandage applied to a 3rd-degree burn…I can only imagine how painful that can be 😥

Are you taking antibiotics and changing the bandage regularly?

@millerebonds @joynewacc @aral @marahismail @mrtagrc @1kmadleenfr @thousandmadleensdenmark not sure about “taking the risk”. And I also have some concerns with the “anyone can verify on Signal approach”, mainly for two reasons:

1. Bad-faith verifier case: anyone can pull up a campaign on Chuffed/GFM, create a fake account, verify it, and collect money.

2. Good-faith verifier case: even if the verifier is in good faith, Aral and Joy currently check many things in their calls, including where they’re actually connecting from etc., and yet gaza-verified had cases of people from Gaza who were in Egypt while still claiming to be in North Gaza in order to boost their campaigns.

Maybe I’m a bit paranoid, but even with all the precautions that gaza-verified takes two cases of fraud/abuse still slipped through, and gave people who have interest in the failure of these initiatives some undeserved ammunition.

More than the high risk + fully decentralized verification idea I would propose something like this that sits more in between maybe.

@esoteric_programmer @WeirdWriter well there are licenses that are technically open-source but also enforce ethical or moral constraints on the user - look no further than the May you do good and no evil of the SQLite license.

But of course they are not OSI-compliant. Because the OSI framework for FOSS licenses is very clear about the principle of non-discrimination.

The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

Which of course is a double-edge sword. I’m very Popperian in stating the principle of intolerance towards the intolerant. But the doctrine here is that something that is truly free to use shouldn’t care about its end user - just like cash is allowed to pass through any hands.

Of course I would like to have a better framework that explicitly prevents the usage of my product for military purposes or to run the website of the local Nazi club, without compromising the FOSS label on my product. But I also realize why the license committees so far have pulled back: limiting the usage of free products on ethical basis is a slippery slope that can be easily abused - the definition itself of “Nazi” is something that even today many don’t agree on, let alone be consistently enforced through an objective framework.

And the other problem is, of course, enforcement: if anyone can git clone a project, then enforcement becomes nearly impossible.

Look no further that Mastodon itself, whose codebase was basically ripped off by Truth - and in that case the violation happened because Mastodon is AGPLv3 and Truth didn’t disclose the source code, not because Truth is a genuine Nazi shithole.

But still, if a Nazi used my project released under an OSI-compliant license I would clearly state that I strongly disagree with that guy, that I wish I could impose limitation upon that usage without compromising my OSI compliance, but given the constraint of the licensing framework I can’t - I can either impose limitations on usage, or maintain an OSI-compliance license, but not both.

I definitely wouldn’t say “we’re a big tent for everyone” like that guy did…