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Michael Wehar
https://wordofthehour.org
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Illusion and Evolution in Galaxy Cluster Abell 2667 Credits: #NASA, ESA, Jean-Paul Kneib, Laboratoire d�Astrophysique de Marseille, et al. #nature #space #astrophotography
Kristaps Porzingis has confirmed he will represent Latvia at FIBA EuroBasket 2025, declaring that only injury could prevent him from suiting up for the national team this summer.
Assumption, not announcement: Foreign Ministry spokesman responds to Lithuania’s statement about a possible Russian strike on Easter byteseu.com/927188/ #Lithuania
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs considers the statement of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania, Kęstutis Budrys, that Russia may commit an even more brutal attack on the regions of Ukraine than the recent one on Sumy, on Easter holidays, not…
How to win an argument with a toddler (includes defensive bureaucrats, bullies, flat earthers, folks committed to a specific agenda & radio talk show hosts)
You can’t. That’s because toddlers don’t understand what an argument is and aren’t interesting in having one. Toddlers (which includes defensive bureaucrats, bullies, flat e…
This is why the Fediverse is so important: each Fedi server is totally independent, servers communicate directly with each other, anyone can set up a server anywhere.
Bluesky posts all flow through Bluesky's own corporate relay which is impossible to bypass, making censorship easy.
No one controls the Fediverse
🦋 Bluesky is controlled by a US-based for-profit corporation
Bluesky didn't reach a federated stage where you could choose a service provider in a free country before they started to censor people based on authoritarian demands.
For-profit corporations generally try to because they don't want to lose market share (though they may lobby to change laws of course). That's why online services from large corporations may vary a lot depending on where you are accessing them from.
Independent servers aren't worried about market share.
I have seen other reports that it is the Turkish gvmt shutting down servers that BlueSky was using. Not BlueSky doing the censoring. I do not know which is more correct.
It's rhe guys who ran Twitter before Musk. They shadow banned anyone who spoke out against how the Chinese Government destroyed Hong Kong's democratic system.
Are you shocked they would cave to another Authoritarian Regime?
I know Erdogan government is much closer to a dictatorship than a democracy, I don't like Bluesky and never had an account on it and I'm a fediversian (just invented... it's an inhabitant of the Fediverse 😁).
All of this being said, can we accept to stand up against Bluesky because they blocked someone that was (apparently) breaking the law?
What law was he/she accused to have broken? Aren't we standing for a terrorist, a pedophile, a scammer or someone like that?
I think that when we have this sort of reaction we look more like facebookers (inhabitants of Facebook) than fediversians.
So, before being indignant about something, shouldn't we investigate to better understand the facts behind a screenshot?
Is there any authoritative source that could shed some light on what happened?
With greatest respect, your post misses the point?
It's the fact that Bluesky has the technical ability to force everyone on their network to accept their judgement that is the main danger. This power is inevitably misused, especially in countries with authoritarian governments that are run by convicted criminals and who ignore court rulings (such as the country Bluesky is based in).
This action isn't possible on the Fediverse, as there is no one who controls the entire Fediverse.
The ability to censor an entire social network is absolutely enshittification. Such an ability is always misused, especially if the company that controls it is itself based in an authoritarian country.
BS's entire selling point was that this wasn't possible, yet here they are doing it.
@northrup No. Self-hosting a Bluesky PDS just means that you get to pay for the hosting of your data (storage and bandwidth), and the renewal of your vanity domain. You also get to be responsible for keeping your server software up to date. The wider ATProto network controls the visibility of your content across Bluesky.
Yup, that's the problem with AT, it pipes everything through a relay and does not allow PDSes to communicate with each other. And at the moment, the only relay belongs to Bluesky corporation, giving the corporation full control over the network.
Fediverse servers communicate directly with each other, giving them total control over what they see and who they connect to. (Relays do exist on the Fediverse, but they're optional and don't prevent direct server-to-server comms.)
Not exactly - each instance admin controls their instance, and as such the experience of their users. That’s a critical difference for two reasons
It means you can join an instance that you jive with, and don’t have to “put up with” things you don’t like.
It means that in order for the Fediverse to continue to have diverse information and viewpoints, people need to avoid congregating on a few large instances.
Yeah, totally agree, to put it exactly: no single person or organisation controls the entire Fediverse. The power is decentralised to thousands of independent instance admins who all control a tiny bit of the network 🙂
But the character limit is unforgiving on vanilla Mastodon so I tried to say something briefer 😁
I've seen a lot of people who still think Bluesky is decentralised, because that's how Bluesky hypes itself in interviews and media promotion. The media then perpetuates this for whatever reason.
A lot of what I've heard about Bluesky is that "it's like Twitter used to be!"
I don't think anyone who says that as a positive remembers how bad Twitter was about this kind of thing even before Musk bought it. At the absolute very least, everyone knows how everything turned out.
If there's anything we can learn from that, Trump's reelection, and COVID, it's that large groups of people can't seem to make decisions based on anything beyond a year or two ago. I'm not sure how to account for that to make any meaningful change.
Also, people seem to think corporate structures can be okay if only the people in charge are good people. This is similar to the "benevolent dictator" fallacy, it totally misses that the main problem is with the structure rather than who is in charge.
If people could think about the effects of structures more, real change could be possible.
As part of ESA/Hubble’s 35th anniversary celebrations, the European Space Agency (ESA) is sharing a new image series revisiting stunning, previously released Hubble targets with the addition of the latest Hubble data and new processing techniques. ESA/Hubble published a new image of NGC 346 as the first installment in the series. Now, they are revisiting a fan-favorite galaxy […]
Like most of Michael Fried's books, French Suite: A Book of Essays (2022) is both informed & insightful but also at times highly dense & rather too self-referential. Examining a range of French artists as always you find Fried has some really interesting things to say, but then you get caught up is a swirl of (to my mind) dense analytics that detract from his clear(er) insights... but perhaps its a matter of reading taste?
Whistleblower Accuses DOGE of Letting Russians Access Government Accounts in Shocking Security Breach
"DOGE has also been using Starlink as a means to exfiltrate data. What that means is that, from our understanding, Russia has a direct pipeline of information through Starlink, which means that anything going through Starlink is going to Russia.”
“We also know that this is not unique to the NLRB,” he said. “This is happening government-wide."
During an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, a whistleblower made shocking allegations regarding a DOGE security breach at the National Labor Relations Board.
As Gaza's health system lingers on the verge of absolute collapse, Al-Shifa Hospital's staff are struggling against immense odds.
The facility, which was already crippled by 18 months of Israel's genocidal war, now shoulders the impossible burden of treating hundreds of wounded patients after Israeli warplanes reduced the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital (also known as the Baptist Hospital) to rubble early Sunday.
The W3C Advisory Board has updated the Vision for W3C and proposes advancing it to a W3C Statement.
The Vision articulates the values that underpin W3C’s mission, what W3C is, what it does and why that matters, and the principles by which it operates including:
The Web is for all humanity. The Web is designed for the good of all people. The Web must be safe to use. There is one interoperable world-wide Web.
The Vision for W3C articulates the values that underpin W3C’s mission, what W3C is, what it does and why that matters, and the principles by which it operates and makes decisions.
Could you define what you mean by "safe to use"? Historically, claims of "keeping people safe" have been used to motivate censorship (especially of queer content). If there's another phrase that better captures your intent, it might be good to use that. (For example, the linked page links "safe to use" to a principle relating to ensuring security and privacy. If that's what is meant, why not say that?)
No one controls the Fediverse
Foghorne Leghorne
in reply to Observable • • •Nice job Mr. Linear 😁