Under the motto “Utopia Test Environment”, we invite you to develop new ideas, discuss them together and design a just, diverse and non-discriminatory analogue and digital future.
More details and the submit form:
https://pretalx.c3voc.de/chaos-feminist-convention-2025/cfp
CW-boost: uspol, actionable
Spam away! https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren/114289133615822854
Doesn't seem to be geolocked either.
strongly worded sentiment
Also, fuck "#AI" and chatbot pushers.
If it's that great then why do you have to force it on people against their will?
Right. It's great, but for a limited class of exploiters.
Today I learned that the TLD for Yugoslavia (.yu) was *physically stolen* after its constituent states declared independence: https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/issue-9/yugolsav-wars-yu-domain-history-icann
random tech musings
I've said before that the cultural texture of the fediverse is in part a consequence of posts being not discoverable and not being discoverable is a good thing actually and we shouldn't make it discoverable. I stand by that statement. I wouldn't have this magical community where I can post photos of my cock, antifa violence agitation, DIY HRT minutiae etc. and not get harassed if it was a "everything federated to everyone" space.
but there are of course legit advantages to a common space that everyone thinks of as "the place" to go talk about something. Twitter was originally an SMS-based system for dynamic organising during Occupy protests, and even decades afterward it still excelled at that—I would often follow keywords and hastags for last-minute updates on what's going on at protests I was in. for this to work you have two requirements, one technical (common and discoverable posts) and one social (that everyone thinks "this is where I go to get last minute updates"). now twitter is unusable and there's no substitute.
same goes for the roles fulfilled by instagram, youtube, reddit etc. reddit is still "the" place to go search information about some hobby or field of study or anything, but every year it's more unusable than the previous. lemmy/kbin are good at being mastodon-style small communities, but they don't fulfill the lack of a reddit for the same reason that mastodon can't replace twitter. again, this isn't a *bad* thing, I'm glad we have something with the same energy as BBSes/phpBB forums/blogosphere/etc. but we also need something with the same energy as Usenet, and at the same time not controlled by big tech or dependent on datacenters.
i.e. I wish for a federated, distributed, resilient, permacomputing-pilled other fediverse aiming towards a "common town hall" model rather than the (equally important) "many independent rooms" model. something similar to DNS, maybe, but non-hierarchical, like, every instance maintain an index of content by willing participants, e.g. via hashtags, which get maximally bounced through the graph. still doesn't solve the social side of the problem, but the technological side maybe could be something in that direction… dunno.
At #2dance yesterday, we were already over time with the final set and the VJ started playing OpenRCT2
@hugh @jonny I really think more institutions need to be introduced to the idea of webseeds. Like, you never have to let bittorrent-the-protocol through your firewall but you can still distribute things as torrents and reap the benefits. But you're right, the concept of P2P generally and bittorrent specifically is deeply intertwined with illegality and transgression in the minds of most decision-makers.
I'm so unbelievably thrilled to see a new generation of people picking up the mantle of torrenting in the pursuit of preserving the basic information of our culture. People who have never scraped a site or packed a dataset picking up wget and a torrent client and going like "that's it? I can do that."
That's what actually empowering technologies do - show people they are already powerful, that there is no priesthood that they aren't already in. Bittorrent is an empowering technology.
edit: realized i don't think i've actually posted about what we're doing here, i'm talking about sciop and @SafeguardingResearch - https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/114289656473282421
In de doos zat een cameratas, een spiegelreflex en twee lenzen.
We stonden te juichen en te springen :)
Hij zei: “Er bestaan dus echt lieve mensen die zomaar dingen voor andere mensen doen!”
We gingen naar buiten en hij fotografeerde en was zó blij (en nog).
De eerste foto’s zijn er en er zullen nog veel meer volgen. 💛
Dank lieve Ingrid en man-des-huizes. Dank Mastodon en wereld vol lieve mensen die mooie dingen voor elkaar doen.
/5
We mailden wat heen en weer en ik zei nog niets tegen de elfjarige (want kon het zelf bijna niet geloven).
En toen gistermiddag kwam de pakketbezorger aan de deur met een pakketje met een brief.
De elfjarige maakte hem open en begon hardop voor te lezen. Na de tweede of derde zin werd hem duidelijk dat vreemde, lieve mensen hem een spiegelreflexcamera gaven en zijn mond viel open.
/4
Ik plaatste hier af en toe foto’s die hij gemaakt had en mensen genoten mee :)
En toen… kreeg ik vorige week een berichtje van iemand hier die vroeg of hij blij zou worden van hun oude spiegelreflexcamera met 300 mm lens. Precies wat we zochten en waar voor gespaard werd.
Ze hoefde er niets voor - ze gebruikten hem niet meer en zouden er blij van worden als onze elfjarige er blij mee was.
/3
Ik vond een aantal weken terug een oude compact camera terug en hij werd nog enthousiaster. Elke ochtend ging hij minstens een kwartier eerder naar school om staartmeesjes, huismussen en ander moois te fotograferen.
Het plan ontstond om te sparen voor een tweedehands spiegelreflex en we waren laatst zelfs al naar Sipkes in Groningen gegaan voor een eerste oriëntatie.
Ondertussen fotografeerde hij enthousiast door.
/2
Tjongejonge, wat kan de wereld gelukkig ook mooi zijn (een lang draadje):
Onze elfjarige ontdekte in de kerstvakantie hoe leuk hij fotograferen vindt. Hij is al zijn hele leven dol op de natuur en ontdekte dat je met een telefoon die natuur in een foto kunt zetten. Er ging een nieuwe wereld voor hem open en hij fotografeerde vogels en in de lente hommels en bijen.
/1
re: uspol, ICE
@zoec by the end of the report she realises that "honesty" won't save her and that she should have lied.
normally I would say you're unambiguously correct but I wonder with ICE agents—there's a point where lawyers don't help anymore, we Latin Americans know that well.
and now in the USA they're already like, forcibly kidnapping people on the streets with masked enforcers and disappearing them in black sites without due process and with nobody in their family being warned about what happened, shipping undesirables to life in labour camps without even a judgement etc. like this is *already happening right now*. at month 4 of the regime. we're already there.
as we keep descending there will probably be more and more cases where the liberal-democracy protocol of "say nothing and demand a lawyer" will only result in you being disappeared the quicker, and your hail-mary best bet might actually be to lie, and lie well. (of course the best strategy at this point is to fight back, as in with an insurrection, as in involving guns not just symbolic protests; and the second best strategy is to be paranoid 100% of the time and avoid getting caught at all costs).
technology, bleak, potential existential dread
One of my more 'ambient' concerns about technology, as it stands today, is the degree to which it makes social development and evolution impossible.
Computer systems require for everything to be encoded in standardized formats, to function. Standardized formats require exhaustively defining the space of all relevant information and concepts that can exist.
Which means that we're rapidly locking ourselves into an ossified, immutable society where everything must forever work how it does today - organic development of novel and better things rapidly becomes impossible because its outcomes are not representable in the computer systems that now run our world.
Even leaving aside the question of "who defines the space of possible things that can exist", the mere fact that this must be exhaustively specified *at all* is, I think, a potentially existential risk for humans' ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
Feel free to flirt, but if you want to actually meet up and/or do something with me, lewd or otherwise, please tell me explicitly or I won't realize :) I'm generally very open to that sort of thing!
Further boundaries: boosts are OK (including for lewd posts), DMs are open. But the devil doesn't need an advocate; I'm not interested in combative arguing in my mentions. I am however happy to explain things in-depth when asked non-combatively.
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.