Notices by Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)
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Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Jun-2019 22:17:49 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ matrix.org apparently having hardware problems.
I've been saying it for a while, but the project really needs to put more emphasis on running homeservers. This means redesigning the initial setup of Riot apps to make using another homeserver trivially easy. The way it's done right now strongly guides the average user to matrix.org. -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Saturday, 15-Jun-2019 20:24:09 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ @paulfree14 @solarkraft One of the key aims of people from those kinds of organizations is what I call "ethicswashing". It makes them seem more legitimate if they can get selfies at conferences rubbing shoulders with The Great and The Good. The softball audience questions and grinning PR camera shots. It's all about the visuals and the feels. Ethicswashers also degrade the integrity of the conference. -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Monday, 06-May-2019 14:43:42 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ @maiyannah @camoceltic Going down the rabbit hole of "pref flips" leads to a place of creepyness. A lot of what Mozilla does is in the "hidden in plain sight" category.
"What percentage of users do you want in each branch?"
This looks like deliberate manipulation of user behavior with discussions of the legality of what they're doing and "risk matrix" but with whoever is on the team "signing off". The language is often not easy to interpret though, due to jargon.
Whenever I read these Mozilla threads I always come away from it feeling like I've emerged from some disturbing nightmare. It's the cynical way in which they talk about users. -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Monday, 06-May-2019 14:26:31 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ @maiyannah @camoceltic Mozilla is such a rabbit hole.
"Shield is a Firefox user testing platform for proposed, new and existing features and ideas. Broad Applications The Shield system addon targets specific subsets of users, enables features and messaging, and measures the results of those interventions to evaluate the effect of the features/messages on measures (retention, uptake, performance, crashiness) to create insights for the Firefox product and Mozilla as an organization." -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Thursday, 18-Apr-2019 06:08:49 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ @maiyannah It's the same sort of regulatory capture as happens with the Linux project. Developers often like to think that they're immune from being influenced, but if you splash enough cash then most people can be bought into collaborating with any dubious political project, letter agency front organization or corporate monopoly agenda. It takes a rare kind of stubbornness to resist the temptation. -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Tuesday, 16-Apr-2019 11:58:21 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ @dtluna @iMartyn The fact that they have a class action waiver maybe suggests they expect blowback at some future time.
"Any Claim must be brought in the respective party’s *individual* capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, collective, representative, multiple plaintiff, or similar proceeding"
Wouldn't integration with Mastodon instances be a "collective" or "multiple plaintiff" if something were to go wrong? -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Monday, 15-Apr-2019 17:09:01 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ @Wewereseeds I've seen a lot of guillotine iconography in the last few years and I think I understand where that comes from but it's not something I like. For me it's too reminiscent of ISIS. -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Monday, 15-Apr-2019 14:07:57 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ @dtluna @xj9 I'm sympathetic towards the anti-copyright WTFPL type views, but as a more realistic tactic I think using AGPL is a good idea even if the software doesn't primarily run on a server. Google won't touch AGPL and so there's not much chance of things under that license showing up within silo systems. It at least puts an obstacle in their path. -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Sunday, 07-Apr-2019 20:03:57 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ Watching a review of 19.04 and I notice they still have the initial online accounts setup. For this I'd like to see the Google and Microsoft options replaced by systems which are genuinely FOSS. So they could have options for fediverse, matrix and xmpp. Maybe there could be some kind of pixelfed integration for publishing photos.
ubuntu_online_accounts.jpg -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Saturday, 06-Apr-2019 14:04:25 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ @maiyannah Whoever is doing this #Eunomia stuff, please desist at once. We should not be having dossiers compiled on fediverse "influencers" (whoever they are) and sold to quasi-military organizations. -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Apr-2019 09:45:31 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ When people are in small affinity groups they tend to thrive. When they're in large groups they tend to be diminished and overwhelmed by noise.
Seeking ever greater scale of membership isn't necessarily always a good plan. -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Saturday, 30-Mar-2019 23:55:13 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ Zuck wants to remake the internet by his rules https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mark-zuckerberg-the-internet-needs-new-rules-lets-start-in-these-four-areas/2019/03/29/9e6f0504-521a-11e9-a3f7-78b7525a8d5f_story.html
Neither Zuckerberg nor governments should be deciding what happens on the internet. This is a very top-down style of thinking.
He probably by now knows, as the article indicates, that he can't solve the moderation problem without breaking the business model. So he's trying to find ways to externalize that to governments and make it somebody else's problem/cost. -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Mar-2019 19:16:54 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ @lnxw48a1 @erroruser@example.com @moonman That's good news, although the mere fact that they had that feature doesn't give me any confidence in the decision making of whoever is running that site. -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Sunday, 24-Mar-2019 09:32:39 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ @liw I was considering learning Rust, but cargo kept trying to run things from tmp, which was disturbing. -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Wednesday, 20-Mar-2019 19:28:40 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ This might be a piece of news I missed, because I havn't been a Gmail user for a long time.
It looks like Google is now claiming that Thunderbird is an "insecure app" and turning off IMAP support - with predictably dire consequences for non-techy Gmail users who use Thunderbird as a client.
So it seems that Google is doing similar monopolistic lock-in stuff that Microsoft pioneered. Thunderbird of course doesn't display ads and so this is why Google want Gmail users using the web interface or some official Google email client which does show the ads. -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Sunday, 17-Mar-2019 12:13:54 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ - Everyone on one big virtual server creates a digital feudalism
- Generic interfaces create consistency and familiarity, but are boring
- Advertising as a business model creates moral hazard in the economics sense
- Moderation isn't something you can outsource to a separate department
- Centralized systems can't effectively moderate, or only do so in a feudalistic manner
- Apparent ease of use is often due to hidden labor or the cost/complexity pushed elsewhere as externalities
- Celebrities and brands can only really operate as such within centralized information architecture. Outside of that context they become paper tigers
- Personal information should not be a tradable commodity
- The more destructive elements of society come to monopolize centralized platforms unless actively repressed
- Showing the user more of what they're already seen leads to bad outcomes. Don't try to algorithmically second guess what the user wants
- Algorithmic timelines which users can't control degrade and interfere with their ability to communicate with each other, ultimately to the point where they lose confidence in the platform
- Screen clutter is an inevitable outcome of an advertising business model
- Allowing organizations to buy influence in a community makes the community less real and therefore less desirable to be part of -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Saturday, 16-Mar-2019 22:48:30 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ The recent thing in NZ is really the first time I've actually appreciated having the CW feature. In the last 24 hours I've avoided reading silo posts because at a glance I can see that people are completely transfixed and obsessing over this in the way that always happens and isn't constructive.
I don't have much motivation to read about the details. There have been many similar things in the past. Often there's a lot of calls that "the government must do something" followed by bad laws rushed through which only create more authoritarianism and take away freedoms. Often the shooter gets turned into a celebrity and every aspect of their life, or their BS manifesto, gets analyzed in excruciating detail. -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Sunday, 10-Feb-2019 09:09:04 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ The brexit thing isn't really about xenophobia, although there is always a quotient of that. It's a power struggle between the westminster and brussels governments over who gets to make laws. Who owns the proles on this particular runway strip. The manner in which both of these create laws is opaque and very corrupted by lobbyists.
The reason why people, especially on birdsite, get so riled up is that they do want genuine control over their lives and communities. But neither westminster nor brussels has the intention of delivering that, and nor can they.
The current economy consists mostly of scams anf oppressive stuff. We've had a lost decade of austerity and food banks and other really grim stuff. It's not surprising that people want more autonomy, and to dismiss that as xenophobia is to miss the point. -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Monday, 28-Jan-2019 21:24:11 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ @jeff m.s. is getting so large that even though they have at least one paid moderator it will be too be too big to have any meaningful oversight. At some point if it keeps growing then it will become a threat model, because an unmoderatable space will be an easy dwelling for bad hombreys. -
Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ (bob)'s status on Thursday, 24-Jan-2019 17:07:32 UTC Bob Mottram ? ☕ ✅ The got zot campaign was some years ago when Redmatrix started. At the time I didn’t realize how big of a deal it was, but now it’s obvious that zot was ahead of its time in anticipating the sorts of issues which became more obvious later.