Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)

Don't mind me @clacke, just riffing off your post to have a general grizzle. I don't know if there's ever been a Māori character in a USAmerican TV show before, so that's cool : )

Side note: I've heard that the Māori diaspora living outside Aotearoa is bigger than the population here. I'm not sure if this is true, but if it is that's an indictment of the way they've been treated by successive colonial governments. Especially the current one.

@clacke
> in this day and age that should mean the actor is too

I think its sad and unsustainable that the legitimate reaction against blackface has turned into a dogma that actors must only ever play people exactly like themselves. I'm pretty sure Jango/ Boba Fett wasn't Māori, even though Temuera Morrison is. Cliff Curtis has played Arabs and all sorts of other non-Māori roles, and it would make far more sense in the story of Fear the Walking Dead for Travis to be Hawaiian 🤷♂️

@clacke
> Jango Fett was a man a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away

Exactly my point. I can see how it's progress to have a minority of Māori characters in mainstream productions played by Māori actors, or failing that, actors who look at least vaguely Māori. But I'm not sure it's progress to typecast actors. Confining Māori actors to only playing Māori characters, autistic actors to only playing autistic characters, and so on.

Context: Been a community theatre actor most of my life.

@clacke
> We're watching Fear the Walking Dead, and the character Troy looked kind of familiar, so I looked him up, and no, that actor hadn't been in anything I knew about, but he's also English

One of the core characters, Travis Manawa, is played by Cliff Curtis. A kiwi actor who played Uncle Bully in Once Were Warriors.

Got to love the way US liberals stumble on things that are now obvious, and treat them as amazing new discoveries. The wailing and gnashing of teeth about "cyberlibertarianism";

https://techwontsave.us/episode/261_the_problem_with_cyberlibertarianism_w_chris_gilliard

... mostly seems to consist of stuff that people in the software freedom movements, and others, have been talking about since the last century.

(1/?)

#podcasts #TechWontSaveUs #cyberlibertarianism

Toxicity is such a brilliant piece of music. One of a number of songs where System of a Down demonstrate that their musicianship and songwriting is right up there with Tool or Rage Against the Machine. This song is a journey, both musically and lyrically, carrying me through a whole series of emotions, from anger, to frustration, to melancholy, to resolution. On top of that, this is one of their most explicitly political songs, along with Prison Song.

#music #SystemOfADown #Toxicity

What this post is basically saying is;

'Anyone who doesn't mindlessly agree when I accuse absolutely anyone of being a Nazi, is a Nazi."

https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113952267546231391

I don't know which is more terrifying; that someone posted this, or that someone else boosted it, or that a whole lot of people replied to agree with it. Unless it's a joke that went over my head? Please let it be a very subtle joke ...

"Its a perfect example of National's cronyism. And yet another argument for why we need to take government board appointments completely out of the corrupt hands of Ministers, and put them in the hands of a neutral statutory appointments body."

@norightturnnz, 2025

https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2025/02/an-appropriate-process.html

Preach.

"The original premise of state housing was that it would be transitory, to help people through difficult circumstances."

#PeterDunne, 2025

https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2501/S00045/dunnes-weekly-act-looks-backwards.htm

This is fantasy. The original premise of state housing was that it would provide secure, lifelong housing, for the family of any worker who couldn't afford to buy their own home. Public #housing as the accommodation equivalent of an unemployment benefit is a much more recent ideology, an artifact born of Rogernomics and Ruthenasia.

Speaking of fediverse projects needing support, I've mentioned before that @dansup is one of the most prolific developers in the 'verse. Leading the charge on Pixelfed, Loops, Sup, Pubkit FediDB, and fediverse.info. The recent drama around TakeTok in the US, and its possible purchase by ZuckerBorg, have highlighted why developing short video apps for the fediverse (like Loops) is so important.

@Dansup is running a crowdfunding campaign to fund their work. Please share;

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks

(1/?)

"Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital"

@pluralistic, 2025

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis

This is a bit of a clickbait title. Kind of like one that says 'dying from a long fall isn't caused by gravity'.

(2/?)

Technically speaking, it's true to say that it's not gravity that kills you when you fall. The sudden impact at the end does that.

*But*, it's equally true that if impact alone were the cause, jumping off a chair would kill you. The impact at the end of a long fall kills you only because gravity makes you accelerate as you fall. In other words, it's both.

(3/?)

Coming back to Cory's title, he's quite right to say that VC funding of digital tech startups is not enough to cause enshittification, by itself.

In a society with strong labour movement, nuanced public regulations protecting our privacy and control over our data, and obliging interoperation between similar services (eg the EU's DMA), VCs would be forced to invest differently. Aiming to make moderate returns from startups that compete to offer better services.

(4/?)

But it's equally true that VC is essential to enshittification. If it wasn't, then we'd expect to see enshittification of centralised services like Wikipedia, or Archive.org, even though they're not-for-profit. After all, they're just as hard to leave or replace as BlueSky.

We don't see that. Therefore, centralisation, and the lack of labour, regulation and other constraints, are clearly not enough. Dying from a fall requires gravity, and enshittification requires VC.

(5/?)

Cory's point is that we should support the project to realise the federation potential of ATProto, so people aren't locked in to BS. But there's two reasons that's a fool's errand, neither of which he addresses in his piece.

(6/?)

Firstly, because of the protocol physics of how ATProto works, most of the people with BS accounts are irretrievably stuck on the company's service. As @cwebber pointed out in her analysis, BS accounts aren't really that portable in practice;

https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

Yes, setting up clones of the big machines of the BS service would allow people to interact with BS accounts without using any other part of BS. But there's a simpler way to do that, which brings me to point 2.

(7/?)

We *already have* a way to interact with BS accounts without touching any part of the BS service. It's called BridgyFed;

https://fed.brid.gy/

Any time, money and effort we might spend setting up ATProto infrastructure would arguably be better spent shoring up Bridgy. Or setting up more instances of the code, so it's no longer a Single Point of Failure.

Because if @cwebber's analysis is correct - and I've yet to see it debunked - this approach would give us way more bang for buck.

(8/?)

Having said all that, I'm not going to rip into anyone for trying to clone BS's big machines. People have every right to use their time and resources however they want, and I've always believed in respect for diversity of tactics. Let's throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.

But am I going to be putting my time or resources into standing up ATProto machinery? No. Am I going to Boost crowdfunding campaigns for groups trying to do that? Probably not.

(9/?)

If BS does enshittify, one of the first things they'll probably do is massively cut their costs by turning off ATProto connections to other services. Just as Goggle turned off XMPP federation with other services when they pivoted from GChat to Hangouts etc.

At which point, any cloned ATProto machinery will be revealed as the expensive boondoggle it is. Adversarial interop via BridgyFed will then be our best bet for keeping BS accounts accessible to those without one.

(10/10)

Finally, if @pluralistic wants to see composable moderation in the fediverse, he could do worse than supporting IFTAS;

https://iftas.org/

Moderation-as-service is right there on their homepage as one of their core purposes.

He could also support the FEP process, by which the fediverse developer community are extending ActivityPub to address new needs, created by new kinds of social software;

https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/

Some of these are about federating features that BS has.