Notices by Nathan Schneider (ntnsndr@social.coop)

@light Yes, I think Aether was a really interesting experiment!

Hylo has also been introducing some interesting collaborative moderation tools.

And a student of mine has been building user-governed moderation for Bsky: https://pmsky.social/

These are good times to be reading Yertle the Turtle to one's kids and oneself. https://archive.org/details/yertle-the-turtle-and-other-stories

@cyberlyra @ntnsndr Like, notifications on the watch require having a phone? To inform the person of a text to the watch?

@cyberlyra Yay thank you for sharing this! Do you think it would work as a privacy friendly kid watch? I guess basic needs:

- calling
- texting
- location monitoring only to parents

@rose_alibi @ntnsndr For sure. I feel like the most important art lesson I can convey as a parent is "turn your mistakes into something beautiful"

@kittylyst @ntnsndr And ongoing!

@rose_alibi @ntnsndr Yes, the idea of building something that you will not live to see finished

Cathedrals have not usually been built by top down design, as Eric Raymond assumed. Like the bazaar, they are made from the commons—the overlapping tradition, creativity, and agency distributed across a community.

Unlike the bazaar, they invite people into an interest bigger than themselves.

The best co-ops are sometimes the temporary ones

Colorado is solidarity

Really helpful reframing of AI as cultural and social technology: https://henryfarrell.net/large-ai-models-are-cultural-and-social-technologies/ thanks for sharing @henryfarrell

The success of an AI model should be the number of people it ushers into luxury communism.

But no, instead those companies are forcing people to go to offices and be extremely hardcore.

@UlrikeHahn @ntnsndr It depends what you mean by social media.

The agora enabled Athenian democracy.

Coffeehouses and salons fueled the rise of Enlightenment republicanism.

Early social networks aided the Arab Spring.

But once powerful figure out how to centralize those platforms, they become counter-democratic.

@kolya @ntnsndr The two depend on each other

Any favorite books about Mussolini?

@light @ntnsndr The major social media platforms (at least Meta, X, and TikTok) are now in the thrall of a single political leader. The ability to have dissident speech now depends on having networks that are not similarly capture-able.

@roccobarbi @light @Mik3y @ntnsndr I actually think Trumpism is profoundly resonant with Mussolini-style fascism. Highly personalist, oriented around nationalist religion and deep alignment with business elites. And economically populist. So I use the term with Italian history in mind.

@VulcanTourist The point is he can't be

Billionaire-proof open social media is now mission-critical infrastructure for the future of democracy.

What do you know, the mother of all conspiracy theories is a nothingburger. Turns out governments are not all-knowing masters of the universe but are fumbling through the mess like the rest of us.