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  • 48 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • He mocked a disabled former Twitter employee, Haraldur Thorleifsson, who has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair, in a series of tweets on March 7, 2023 Thorleifsson had tweeted at Musk to ask if he was still employed at Twitter, after he lost access to his work computer along with 200 others. Musk accused him of doing no actual work, claiming a disability that prevented him from typing, and seeking a big payout 2 He also posted emojis and a link to a scene from Office Space to ridicule him.

    Just to add to this, Thorleifsson had sold his company to Twitter but taken the payout as a salaried job so that he paid full taxes on it. The big payout if Musk sacked him was part of the deal to buy the company. Musk is willfully ignorant for every possible meaning of the term.







  • There is a really, really big difference between “we want to kill you” and “we do not want to be killed by you”.

    Don’t tolerate fascists. However comfortable that centrist illusion is, you are signing your own death warrant and that of millions of others (most of whom will suffer the consequences of your actions long before they get around to the people who feel safe enough to argue that fascists must be tolerated).






  • I doubt he’s ignoring anything. And I know nothing but I think it’s a little unfair to bash him for this.

    Meta does not need the Fediverse to create a ready-populated instance all of its own. It doesn’t need to federate with anyone, it can probably kill Twitter and Reddit with a single stone (if it pours enough resource into moderating and siloing). Just stick a fediwidget in every logged in account page with some thoughtful seeding of content and it’s done.

    The danger of federating with Meta is much the same as not federating. It has such a massive userbase it will suck the lifeblood out of everywhere else whether or not it can see us.

    The possible silver lining is that there are other very large corporates which can do the same (some of which have said they plan to). We could all end up with multiple logins on corporate instances simply because we have accounts with them for other reasons. And that means a lot of very large instances with name recognition, and easy access, making it much harder for any of them to stop federation and keep their users to themselves.

    Being federated with one or more behemoths might well be hell. Some instances won’t do it. Moderation standards will be key for those that do. But multiple federated behemoths can hold each other hostage because their users can all jump ship to the competition so easily.

    This is much, much more complicated than just boycott or not. They cannot be trusted one tiny fraction of an inch but this is coming whether we like it or not. We need to work out how to protect ourselves and I’m starting to think that encouraging every site with a user login to make the fediverse a widget on their account pages might be the very best way to do it.




  • You can check their post history? Karma doesn’t tell you anything, really. Mine went up tenfold one day just because I replied to what ended up as the top post in a top thread in a much bigger sub than those I normally post in. Some people spend all their time in big subs making short, smart remarks that get a lot of karma, others spend their time in enemy territory battling people they disagree with. Some toxic people have a lot of karma because they hang out in toxic subs.

    The problem to be solved is how to order threads. Old skool bulletin boards just bump the most recently replied one to the top. Which works well on an old skool bulletin board as long as it isn’t too large, but very badly on a big site where a few big active threads can drown out all the others.

    I don’t know what the solution is. But the numbers don’t mean anything without checking the context. Karma is useful for ordering threads/comments, and giving users a bit of dopamine when they get some attention. But there (probably) are better ways to do it.