Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 182

@RandomDamage @CharredStencil I use muting and blocking, but only as a last resort, when people are getting abusive, sealioning, flooding my @mentions etc, and don't back off when asked politely. I treat those tools as a sin bin, and clear them every fews days. In my experience for social sanctions to work, the person being sanctioned needs to know they will be given another chance. Otherwise what incentive is there to reflect on their behaviour and try to understand why it's unwelcome?

@RandomDamage @CharredStencil if your answer to question a) is "yes", that's trolling, so ignore those posts. If all their posting is trolling, unfollow, and if necessary mute or block. If your answer to question b) is "no", that's willful ignorance, not trolling. Best to ignore those posts, rather than waste your time trying to convince them, but maybe consider engaging them in respectful debate on topics where they're more open-minded.

@RandomDamage @CharredStencil I think we need to be more nuanced than that. It's not a crime to be simply wrong, and I've seen many examples of people changing their views after rigorous debate on the fediverse. We need to ask two questions; a) does it seem like this person is spreading mis/disinformation knowingly, and if not b) do they seem open to the possibility they might be wrong?

@adfeno @wilbr @bob Taler is great, and I'd love to see credit unions and other financial coops working with them to get some production instances up and running. But it's just a payment processing system. Funding free code development is well outside the scope of their work.

@clacke maybe, but I think it's more to do with the TV scriptwriters lacking the feel for the characters and the attention to detail that the novelist brings to his work.

@RandomDamage users who don't believe in climate change can block users who challenge them on that, and the same can happen at instance level. What's required is for us all to have the intellectual courage to respectfully engage with views that challenge our biases, and to carefully distinguish those from trolling. It's a social problem, with no simple tech solutions.

@RandomDamage I imagine there are as many reasons for using the fediverse as there are users. But avoiding dis/misinformation is a curious one. I guess if it's been a problem on the #DataFarms mainly because of the way their algorithms are gamed by other institutional actors, the fediverse solves that by replacing algorithms with human decision-making by users and instances. But that can lead to filter bubbles that insulate users against corrective data too.

@RandomDamage When you say "commercial social media" I'm guessing you're not talking about TV, radio, or newspapers. But if you were, and if by "here" you meant the net, I would be in total agreement. The #DataFarms (FarceBook, the birdsite etc) are a problem to the degree they behave like network TV stations, *not* like decentralized networks of equal peers (acting as social neurons).

@RandomDamage I'm not convinced of the need for gatekeeping institutions, especially when powerful, centralized institutions are the source of a huge amount of the mis/disinformation comes from institutions (esp. but not exclusively government entities and corporations). They fund entire industries to churn it out (marketing, advertising, public relations, think tanks etc).

@RandomDamage federation offers a different approach. You accept that some people will be mis/disinformed about some things no matter what, and give each user (account) and each community of users (instance) the tools to reinforce signals they believe are true and useful, and ignore signals they believe are false or useless. This is how human brains do it, networks of neurons using neurotransmitters to amplify or suppress signals with far more nuance than the binary allow / censor dichtomy.

@RandomDamage this presumes there is a simple obvious answer to the question of who decides which memes are seductive and dangerous and ought to be shunned. It also presumes, I think, that the use of centralized authority can provide a perfect solution to the problems of mis/disinformation, which is a seductive and dangerous meme in itself. The #GreatFirewall is an example of what this looks like in practice.

@js I don't believe my device is supported by after-market ROMs at present. Also, I'm not much interested in this kind of black/white thinking. Rooting the device allows me to remove a lot of non-free software I couldn't before, and each piece I remove reduces attack surface. Therefore, it's useful for me to know a) what components are free vs. non-free, b) what I can and can't remove without causing catastrophic failure, and c) what components can currently have free replacements.

@wilbr @bob as an aside, I have been throwing around a concept I'm calling #SoftwareBurger that aims to create a libre database of software/ service dependencies, and a way of visualizing them to help people understand how dependencies and #FreeCode re-use work, see:
https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/100776768169524398

@wilbr @bob a friend is working on a system for funding public software development where (from memory) users will be able to choose how much to donate, and list the software and services they know they are using. Algorithms then use a database of dependencies to work out how to divide up their donations between all the projects they use (directly and indirectly), and send batches of donations to projects on a regular basis (eg weekly or monthly).

We desperately need people to learn basic principles of social psychology, like the fact that giving a behaviour 'reinforcement' (attention and reactions) - whether positive *or* negative - will only tend to encourage that behaviour. On the net, where people can't poke or punch you for just ignoring the, that's by far the most effective way to make them give up and go away. In other words; #DontFeedTheTrolls!

"Hogan explained that the only way to combat this kind of propaganda was to not share it, not report it and not give those posting it a platform." - Dr Bernie Hogan of the Oxford Internet Institute, talking about Isis accounts on Diaspora and other federated social networks:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/21/islamic-state-isis-social-media-diaspora-twitter-clampdown

"In some sense, distributed networks constitute a protest movement against the commercialization of online sociability since the 2000s."
https://publichistory.media/2016/02/21/distributed-social-networks-and-public-history/

@enkiv2 "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." - George Bernard Shaw

@enkiv2 or maybe we just need to avoid fetishizing terms, and continually remind ourselves and each other that the map is not the territory? One of the saddest consequences of the monolingualism of much of the anglophone world is that too many people labour under the delusion that a word have one correct meaning. Learning a second language makes it clear that baskets of meaning can be gathered and labeled in many ways, and words mean only what we agree they mean at the time we use them.