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kissane

@kissane@mas.to

Working on governance, risk, and social patterns across federated systems. Previously: COVID Tracking Project + Mozilla Foundation + editorial and community advocacy in tech and culture orgs.

I want our tools and networks to be better in more ways for more people in more places. Also: Books, care, plants, very old bones, humane journalism, magic as technology.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

kissane , to random
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Men I don’t know have been yelling at me for about 24 hours about how I am promoting toxicity and misinformation and am a narcissist and a bully in replies to my short thread about how it would be super nice to have control over replies here. To give people who for some reason don’t find people yelling at them to be the highest form of online communication a way to participate in public life online.

Many perfectly reasonable comments agreeing and disagreeing, but like…lordy.

kissane , to random
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Bluesky has reply-gating (you can set who can reply to a post, like people you follow or a given list or no one) and is now testing out post-publication reply locking.

I just want to yell for a second about how humane and consent-forward these features are, especially after seeing some people here losing their minds when someone asked for gating recently because they felt (alas, not a paraphrase) entitled to always be able to respond.

kissane OP ,
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Believing you are morally entitled to reply directly to someone because they speak in public is…definitely a position, I guess, but I think being able to specify how you want to be interacted with is deeply humane. (And being able to do it after a thread starts to go sour is so important.)

Someone will ask why blocking doesn’t make this unnecessary and the short answer is that prevention is better than picking off unwanted interactions one by one, and having to process each one as you do it.

kissane OP ,
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Someone else will say that if you don’t want everyone to be able to say whatever they want in your thread whenever they want to say it, you shouldn’t post in public because that’s the bargain.

But like…I don’t want the old bargain. The old bargain is kind of shit! We have a million ways to contain and shelter even “public” conversations offline, let’s have that in the good online places, too.

jencmars , to random
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Small, round, and flappy.

kissane ,
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@jencmars JEN 😍

kissane , to random
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✨💖💖💖☠️☠️☠️💖💖💖✨

ZELDA AS PROTAGONIST KLAXON

https://youtu.be/4kIXfBL6T3A?si=Z3Fr6NmwQrvemz1W

✨💖💖💖☠️☠️☠️💖💖💖✨

kissane , to random
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It's not completely clear to me how various zones of the Fediverse distinguish "scraping" from "non-Mastodon ActivityPub services functioning according to spec in ways I didn't expect."

Given how frequently protocol behaviors act as ethical markers ("if you can do it, it's fine") this seems like a fruitful territory to try to map…

(I say this as someone who has myself been surprised more than once by AP implementations that put Fedi posts into unfamiliar-to-me contexts, don't eat me.)

kissane , to random
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I just had a genuinely humane and enjoyable conference experience over Zoom and I don't quite know what to do with that information 🙃

kissane , to random
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Huge relief to see today’s ruling in Florida. (That moral arc bends toward justice if and when we bend it.)

Judge strikes down Florida’s restrictions on transgender care for minors and adults:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna156589

“Transgender opponents are of course free to hold their beliefs,” Judge Robert L. Hinkle of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, Tallahassee Division, wrote in his opinion. “But they are not free to discriminate against transgender individuals just for being transgender. In time, discrimination against transgender individuals will diminish, just as racism and misogyny have diminished. To paraphrase a civil-rights advocate from an earlier time, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
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    • + futurebird, Npars01, alice
    kissane , to random
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    the puppy just barked at a piece of sweet potato I dropped while cooking

    (then he ran off with it to his lair on the hearth rug and now they are friends)

    kissane , to random
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    Welp.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-fiatjaf-nostr-donation-2024-6

    (https://archive.ph/uXdXN#selection-2141.0-2157.353)

    Nostr "has no board, no company behind it, no funding," Dorsey said in an interview with the Silicon Valley outlet Pirate Wires last month. "It's a truly open protocol. The development environment is moving fast. And I gave a bunch of money to them." Nostr has a relatively small user base of cryptocurrency and privacy enthusiasts, including Edward Snowden. "We don't know who the leader is, it's like this anonymous Brazilian," Dorsey said. That anonymous Brazilian is Giovanni Torres Parra, a developer who has also built at least two webpages devoted to disseminating the work of the far-right conspiracy theorist Olavo de Carvalho. Before he died in 2022 after contracting COVID-19, de Carvalho — known as Olavo — praised Brazil's military dictatorship, claimed that Pepsi-Cola was flavored with stem cells of aborted fetuses, preached that tolerance for homosexuality was "incompatible" with democracy, and had an office in Virginia decorated with portraits of Confederate generals.
    ALT
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    • + Npars01
    kissane OP ,
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    @jencmars this is me 🤐

    kissane , to random
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    It's legitimately interesting to see how often volunteer moderation/server leadership is seen as a vulnerability or a problem in spaces where unpaid open-source dev work is positioned as normal or ideal.

    kissane , to random
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    After weeks of planning, waiting, scouring, four-step protein mordanting, and dye extraction, the first batches of our kid’s summer market project are in production. Want to guess the (botanical) dye source?

    kissane OP ,
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    @KeithAmmann Close on color, but nope!

    kissane , to random
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    Hey it’s that time again.

    The contention that using high-filtration masks to prevent transmission of respiratory disease is “unscientific” and “lacking evidence” when we have reams of aerosol and transmission studies is a display of either unawareness/scientific illiteracy (super fixable! non-shameful!) or of an intentional disregard of the evidence for emotional or ideological reasons (common but troubling).

    kissane , to random
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    Delighted and totally honored to be at XOXO this year, look at these absolute badasses who will be speaking, lordy, no pressure or anything 😬

    https://2024.xoxofest.com/

    hugo , to random
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    the current US president really going all in on supporting the extermination in gaza during an election year really seems mystifying to me. as if deliberately trying to alienate his progressive base.

    kissane ,
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    @hugo It is nearly impossible to explain the immense weirdness of the coalitions and history behind these decisions, but I think my best shot would be that he's maintaining near-perfect continuity with the political world of the past 40 years and there is an enormous rift here about whether we still live in that world or not. (And the rift is so hot and terrifying because both ~sides know that reality is up for grabs.)

    kissane , to random
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    I got the giant puppy one of those toys you put frozen food in and they’re supposed to be entertaining for awhile but the giant puppy is VERY FOCUSED and got it all out, gave himself an ice cream headache, and spent the next five minutes growling mightily at god

    kissane , to random
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    Every box of beans I order from Backporch Roasters comes with a handwritten note that reads “I hope this coffee finds you well” and I receive this wish with a sincere belief in its earnestness because instead of an email they sent me my favorite coffee beans and I will hear nothing against them

    kissane , to random
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    US folks, we have an e. coli recall on organic walnuts sold in bulk bins or repackaged in-store (plastic clamshells, etc.)—recs are to throw them out and wash containers and contacted surfaces:

    https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/s0430-ecoli-walnuts.html

    (Hat tip to the manager of our local co-op.)

    kissane , to random
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    This would be a great day to put the fundraiser for Sydette Harry (@blackamazon in other places) over the top.

    Sydette has been working on making online communities better and safer for more people for years and years, often with little recognition, and her fierce commitment to focusing on the people taking the most damage has genuinely changed the conversation.

    https://www.gofundme.com/f/tired-and-taxes

    kissane , to random
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    kissane , to random
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    Janet Reid, a literary agent who blessed a generation of baby writers with Query Shark and who was also extremely kind to me the only time I met her, has died. We won't see her like again, I don't think, and the world is worse for it.

    kissane , to random
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    Some of the responses to yesterday’s post made a rusty gear start clunking in my brain and oof, understanding aspects of FOSS culture as fandom makes a lot of things make sense.

    https://mas.to/@kissane/112288128849621639

    kissane , to random
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    A few weeks back I encountered a FOSS guy here explaining that when he sees open source devs ask for money, he blocks them and then stops using their code because they're morally wrong and he only wants to work with tools made by people who are doing the work for the right reasons. (I'm paraphrasing to avoid indexing the post.)

    I've resisted writing about it because I'm slammed, but the question I can't shake is: Who benefits from the ideology of "pure" volunteerism?

    kissane , to random
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    Happy book launch day to @kjhealy and @marionfourcade whose The Ordinal Society has been keeping me up late reading and rereading and following references:

    https://theordinalsociety.com

    If you have feelings about how financialization and omnipresent networks affect humans and societies, I can't rec this highly enough—look at this TOC!

    https://theordinalsociety.com/images/tos_sample.pdf

    It's also so tightly and cleanly argued—the authors make that look easy and it's not. A real joy.

    kissane , to random
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    service cancellations are all now negotiations with truculent demons

    • crap discount offer
    • I banish you
    • meaningless price change
    • I banish you
    • major discount offer
    • I BANISH YOU
    • true form appears, snarling, breaks the contract, disappears in clouds of chatbot
    kissane , to random
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    Apropos of nothing, this is a fine look at how to use ML tools* well in journalism:

    https://www.zachseward.com/ai-news-thats-fit-to-print-sxsw-2024/

    • Some of the tools Zach talks about will be objectionable to some of us bc of their provenance or resource consumption, but a lot of them are just fine, and I think it's important to be able to make those distinctions.
    kissane , to random
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    Bless all you people who regularly see the sun in April lol

    kissane , to random
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    The gadget I use way, way more than I thought I would: Infrared thermometer. Turns out I really, really like having more empirical information.

    kissane OP ,
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    @MarkRDavid Cooking, water for tea check, hot pan check, soup for child check, bathwater for dog check, it’s amazing.

    kissane OP ,
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    @MarkRDavid I still need a meat thermometer for anything thick but I use the infrared every single day.

    kissane , to random
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    I'm going to do a real writeup of this, but @lukem translated all 40K-ish words of the Meta in Myanmar series I wrote last year into Polish this spring, and I am just completely floored by the effort and care that went into this.

    https://blog.lukaszwojcik.net/pl/meta-w-mjanmie/

    gerrymcgovern , to random
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    In a city called The Dalles, in Oregon, USA, local people were worried that Google’s water use was soaring. As is so often the case, the city officials, who had given Google hundreds of millions in tax breaks, had no intention of letting anyone know how much water Google was using. It was up to a local paper, The Oregonian, to try and find out. They were forced to bring a case to court. City officials were ordered by Google to claim that Google’s use of scarce pubic water was a “trade secret”.

    kissane ,
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    @gerrymcgovern It's even worse than this suggests — rather than the Oregonian suing for access, the city of The Dalles actually sued The Oregonian in a "reverse public records lawsuit" to prevent the paper from disclosing the data, despite their county District Attorney having already ruled that the information should be disclosed.

    Google funded the suit until the press got too bad and then pulled out, so the city settled.

    https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/the-dalles-city-sues-local-paper-to-keep-googles-data-center-water-use-a-secret/

    https://www.rcfp.org/dalles-google-oregonian-settlement/

    kissane , to random
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    one of these days I'm going to do something about how little serious book chatter there is on mastodon and then you'll all be sorry 👾

    kissane OP ,
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    @JamesGleick It feels like a real loss. Some of the people went to Bluesky—more there than here—but it doesn't feel to me like the conversational wave made it over there either.

    kissane , to random
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    The thing happening here is of a piece with the enshittification Doctorow talks about (a useful model despite overuse) but it’s bigger than that. “The collapse of the value of knowable truth under the dead weight of financialization” is probably too simple, but idk.

    https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

    Thinking about the panicky rush to replace teetering systems of knowledge with plausible-word machines + the old days of plaster dust in milk and spent tea leaves boiled in sheep shit and resold as new.

    kissane , to random
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    So granted, I’m coming down from a fever, but I feel increasingly committed to the idea that the hollowness and repulsiveness at least some people identify in prompt-generated art is the opposite number of the species of thing Christopher Alexander considered most central, and I mean that in the most rigorous and least woozy way.

    Niche post, deeply felt.

    kissane OP ,
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    @dymaxion Yeah, the place he lands with morphogenetic processes especially. Have you seen the collection of some of his early and unpublished work from a couple years back?

    kissane OP ,
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    @dymaxion Early and Unpublished Writings of Christopher Alexander, ed Howard Davies. So far just immensely worthwhile for me. (Nature of Order is a slog unless you happen to be on that exact vibe, for real.)

    kissane , to random
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    it’s wild and slightly alarming to me how much thinking and criticism from the late 70s and early 80s is extremely alive and on point today

    like, the heated debates in late 70s (and even late 60s/early 70s) architectural/planning circles are THE SAME DEBATES were are having now about new networks

    kissane OP ,
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    [“cultural memory can’t survive beyond about 5-10 years at the current pace” is my grudging side-conclusion]

    kissane OP ,
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    @jbaggs maybe? alternately there is just too much stuff

    kissane , to random
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    Ozone, Bluesky's stackable moderation system is up and open-sourced.

    https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderation

    I think it's interesting in obvious ways and risky in some less obvious ones (that have less to do with "O NO BILLIONAIRES" or "O NO LIBERTARIANS" and more to do with placelessness), but we'll see.

    I hope good things emerge from/grow on top of this framework.

    [I recognize that mentioning this is widely considered to be an invitation to explain capital like I am a tiny baby. You could also not.]

    kissane OP ,
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    @tchambers For the Bluesky app, it's the Bluesky moderation team, which is pretty active in the classical/centralized mode.

    https://bsky.social/about/blog/01-16-2024-moderation-2023

    Layers-wise, I think there are two things—the official Bluesky client enforces the use of Bluesky's in-house moderation work (at the level of the labeler) but then the network-wide, truly non-optional stuff—which is very limited in scope—happens at the level of the relay:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39684027

    kissane OP ,
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    @tchambers So although there's a lot of concern across fedi about Bluesky "not moderating," they actually do both takedowns and de-indexing for the Bluesky platform itself and they're inserting a centralized kill switch for the worst-of-the-worst stuff into the network architecture, which would prevent the whole "we just defederate from CSAM" situation we have here.

    It's not difficult to think of a variety of failure modes for this architecture, but I think they're interesting trade-offs!

    kissane OP ,
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    @timbray @tchambers Agreed.

    My main source of frustration about the cross-protocol conversations is that their underlying assumptions about the way AT/fedi and ATP/Bluesky work are kind of freely floating above the observed and stated realities of both protocols. There are lots of reasons for this, but it's getting in the way of crunchier thinking, imo.

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