Notices by Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)

@danialbehzadi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_4

@gregprice I think it would not just be from having fewer accounts on the network posting, although I think we are dipping pretty low for a sustainable network already.

mastodon.social is also a hub in the network; users there redistribute content from other parts of the network with their boosts and replies.

It's also the flagship server. It would be a hit to morale to have it taken offline.

@burnie configurable rate limits in Mastodon, or having 20 or 50 newbie servers (maybe per-country subdomains like fr.mastodon.social, mx.mastodon.social, au.mastodon.social).

@darth I literally just did

I should say that this fiction was not the worst reaction possible to the challenge of treating formerly excluded people as fully realized human beings. Saying, we have always believed this is right, this is who we are, we have always been coming to this moment, might not have acknowledged some important facts that needed to be fully internalized in order to reach reconciliation. It pointed in the right direction of the just society we could become, but interfered by holding that we already had.

@genmaicha two things can be true.

@virtuous_sloth we had a few break out in middle school and high school. It was an exercise in systems dynamics; one or two people started throwing food at each other, and in a matter of seconds it hit a tipping point and the entire cafeteria went into a phase transition, food flying *everywhere*, people fleeing for the doors. As the critical mass diminished, the last people in the cafeteria fled, fearing discipline. Maybe 30-60 seconds tops from start to finish.

@leo lol

One steep price of centralization that we all pay today!

One thing that people who don't write #ActivityPub software might not know is that Mastodon has remarkably low rate limits for other servers to make requests -- getting data from or sending data to a Mastodon server. The rate limits are hard-coded in the Mastodon software, and they're for the whole server. mastodon.social has the same rate limits as your server on a Raspberry Pi. That means that the server that you need to access about 1/4 of the time is throttling everyone's access to it.

@adb my new hero @ricci showed me https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/ and I really love it.

@joemcl ding ding ding

I've talked a little bit before about thinking of a nation as the people who are there; everyone who is there. I think that it would be good to let go of the idea of the Founding Fathers and their guiding principles as the glue that holds the nation together, and just say, there are 342M people in the US today, and us 5-10M Americans abroad, and the only principles we have to uphold and honour are the ones we make up and share with each other today.

@dneary hey!

Now, 50 years later, white America has largely reneged on that somewhat fragile and unspoken deal. It makes the 250th anniversary less attractive across the board, at a time when waving an American flag feels like a very political act.

I think America needed the Bicentennial for a lot of reasons -- #Watergate, the failure of the Vietnam War, the lingering economic effects of the Oil Embargo. But the manic drive to celebrate had at least something to do with a hoped-for end to social unrest.

I think the #Bicentennial came at an opportune time for this revisionist history movement. We could connect the current state of the US into a two-century continuum of increased justice and freedom for everyone. The United States of 1976 was where we were always coming to, and if it had taken a little too long to get there, well, that's sad, but also, aren't we all a little nobler for having made the heroic struggle?

After the civil rights, LGBTQ+ and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the US devised an interesting mythology about itself to keep operating: namely, that America had *always* been about universal human rights, and had over time made improvements to live up to the promise of its founding principles. This wasn't true, but it was a convenient fiction that let some parts of the dominant subculture accept change as if it were their own idea. It was the story I was taught as a child.

@treats you mean _code_ contributions? You should turn on GitHub sponsorship too.

@mpjgregoire is it like a voice agent? An Open Source Alexa?