@david@mstdn.ything.xyz @aurynn @maegul

To your first point:
thanks for your offer to help!
The biggest need right now is for an open source, easy to use transcription add on for online voice chat programs like discord or mumble.

Post-processing options mix all the speaker voices together, and this makes the audio harder to process and the live transcription less reliable.

How much time do you have to put towards this? Most solutions for mumble are in rust, and there isn't anything available for discord. It's important to have a latency of 3 seconds or less, and for it to run well on a mid-range pc, or a cloud budget of under $2/hour of use.

When are you available, what languages do you speak, and how many hours per week are you offering to volunteer?

To your second point:

Being gently mean to someone is an excellent way to avoid escalating a social conflict while pushing them away. If someone is being mean to your friend and you choose to be friendly to that person, your friend's feelings are likely to be hurt.

It makes sense to use compassion and patience, especially at first, but if someone *continues* to treat your friend badly, it's important to let them know that you're not okay with it! Most people do this without even realizing it using tools like their body language.

Unfortunately, when we're online, other people can't see our body language, so it's easy for them to not realize they're being rude. ;)

When maintaining a friendly place online, it's really important to let people know when they're being rude early enough that they can choose to change their behavior without losing face.

But, if that strategy doesn't work, and they still decide to be mean, it's important that you are ready! If someone gets really mad on the internet, sometimes they try to attack people! This can be with technical strategies like executing a DDoS attack, or more social engineering approaches, like doxing!

Those are no fun and add a burden of stress and labor to your community, so it's usually much less effort if the person leaves on their own. A good way to encourage this is to give them the impression that their contributions aren't welcome, or that they will have better luck finding friends that like them somewhere else.

Aurynn's strategy of "be mean to people taking advantage of mastodon's data" works off of this basic social principle. Pretty clever, huh?

If you're interested in more of her work, she also wrote some fantastic essays. Here are my two favorites:
https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture
https://blog.aurynn.com/2017/04/13-the-that-guy-effect