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@TheMNWolf He had a severe stroke in 2012 and has been wheelchair bound ever since, perhaps that's what you were thinking of?
Also that Twitter account isn't Tim Curry, it literally says so right in the user name.
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OMG, someone has found The Librarian!
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In 2017, the City of San Francisco recognized the Compton's Transgender Cultural District, the world's first legally recognized transgender district, later renamed The Transgender District. This was the site of the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, when trans women and drag queens fought back against police harassment and abuse. Susan Stryker called it "the first known incident of collective militant queer resistance to police harassment in U.S. In 1965, a group of queer and transgender youth and sex workers formed Vanguard, the first known gay youth organization in the United States. Street kids and Vanguard members would often meet at Compton’s and hang out there without buying anything because they were all broke. In response, Compton would kick them out and call in the police for support. This led Vanguard to organize a picket of the cafeteria in July, 1966, one of the first demonstrations against police violence against transgender people in San Francisco, and a precursor to the riot that would break out there the next month.
In the wake of the riot, Vanguard orchestrated several other street actions, like their "street sweep," when Vanguard members hit the streets of the Tenderloin with push brooms to protest police "sweeps" of queer neighborhoods like the Tenderloin and to symbolically critique the police practice of treating transgender and queer sex workers like "trash." Activists used the momentum of the picket and the riot to establish several community-based support services. The most successful of these was the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, established in 1968.
#lgbtq #trans #TransRightsAreHumanRights #riot #comptonscafetera #sanfrancisco #police #policebrutality #transphobia #pride #pridemonth
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⚠️ VERY
⚠️ FUCKING
⚠️ IMPORTANT
⚠️ REMINDER
Seeing some extra spicy #USPol takes on my timeline right now suggesting certain actions that "someone" should take and y'all I 100000% get it but *especially* today you NEED to watch this:
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These two children’s books about food are a fun and flavorful way to explore culture, family, and everyday adventures. From cooking and sharing meals to mouthwatering illustrations, these books are sure to delight young readers and maybe even inspire a kitchen adventure or two!
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Kevin Bowersox, ᴮᵉⁿ ᴿᵒʸᶜᵉVOTE IN THE PRIMARIES and Democracy Matters reshared this.
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I bet my fiancée that this picture of our cats could get 10 billion boosts on Mastodon.
She said she doesn't believe me. She said there's only 13 million accounts on Mastodon. She said there aren't even 10 billion people on Earth. She said it concerns her that I struggle so hard to comprehend large numbers.
Let's prove her wrong everyone. Boost away and show her just how awesome the Mastodon community is.
Ку 🇧🇬🇪🇺 likes this.
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Scimmia di Mare, stux⚡️, rainey 🌻, Cazimodo Creative, 🌬️Robot Diver🌊🌧️☔️🌧️🌬️, Fi, Ку 🇧🇬🇪🇺, wauz ワウズ and Kevin Bowersox reshared this.
is it worldometers.info?
9 billion by 2027 - January?
Tim.
I’ve got to remember what little C I once knew, get used to my new Linux os again after 10 years away from it and perhaps re-learn a little BASH scripting, and the I’m gunna hack your instance to give you 54 billion-squillion boosts!
Just you wait and see!! 🤣🧐🧐👍👍
Yeah. It's fine this time.
Usually- I am a dog person, but hey ... Like the email virus where the developer, confessing his incapability, asked for manual distribution of his mail 🤣
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House Democrats' younger wing notched a major victory on Tuesday as Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) won a landslide victory to become ranking member of …Axios - Andrew Solender
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🤷🏼♀️🤷🏻♂️🤷🏼
And the fact that I’m not sure tells the whole story. So sad!
Bluesky are openly welcoming, verifying and hosting accounts of prominent far right politicians. Trump's VP Vance is now on Bluesky:
bsky.app/profile/jd-vance-1.bs…
"We welcome the Vice President to the conversation on Bluesky" (Bluesky in their email to Fox News)
More 🚩: Bluesky is centralised, run by a for-profit corporation, its CEO has blockchain background, it is partly owned by VCs & Blockchain Capital.
Bluesky are going down exactly the same Nazi Bar path as Twitter.
(via @mastodonmigration)
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Trump's media org stole Mastodon's software code in order to build their own centralised platform.
I wouldn't personally count them as part of Mastodon.
Hell no, I don't do that shit. I just wanted to tell you the reaction this whole thing was causing. The fact that you thought that I, someone with the responsibility of administrating an instance, would defederate over something like this like a petty child, is something I find personally insulting.
I see this conversation as merely the result of someone misinformed, now informed. Nothing more than that, you just didn't know that ATProto and AP were actually natively possible together. All I wanted now was to make you aware of what your talking with absolutes about this was causing
Precisely. I saw a number of their moderators dismissing and gas lighting the concerns of LGBTQ people in my feed
I don't see that on Bluesky. In fact when there is a trans /homophobic user there, they are dealt with swiftly by the community. Here there are often crickets, or when marginalized groups bring up concerns there is much defensiveness.
@alchemistsstudio @daemon_nova @alexia
"I don't see that on Bluesky. In fact when there is a trans /homophobic user there, they are dealt with swiftly by the community. "
Vance's first post is all about eroding trans rights, and Bluesky are sending emails to Fox News telling him how welcome he is.
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Some did defederate Fosstodon over that, some took the approach that the admins and moderators had changed and did a "wait and see" because of the change of leadership and staff.
But there is an order of magnitude difference between that situation and hosting fascists who have direct control over the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
It should be obvious that Vance is an instant defederation.
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@ainmosni Also derpy fact..
The front end on Trump's platform is made by the dev from Soapbox, who's also a first class racist a-hole!
The type of person who does anything for money
@ainmosni For him it's not.. more like "glory" 
If im right, he originally came from Gab to the fedi i believe so that says a lot
p.p.s. No, Vance wasn't banned by Bluesky. That's why I included the link in the original post so you can see he isn't banned.
Bluesky had blocked the account briefly because they thought it was fake, but when they found out it was real they unblocked it, verified it and sent an email to Fox News saying that Vance was welcome on Bluesky.
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I can assure you I'm not. I am terrified about what is going on.
I don't care what protocol is used as long as it makes federation accessible and controllable by anyone including very-low-cost grassroots instances that can communicate without relays.
Bsky offers better tools to users than fedi.
I say this as a fedi developer
I was talking to a close friend about the Fediverse a while ago. Her main reason to sticking to Meta platforms was mostly that she doesn't use social media for fun, but primarily for marketing. She's a singer, like me, and it's just sort of expected of you to use these things, because that's where your audience is.
But she also said that she's wary of dividing the world into different echo-chambers when using a platform that's more popular with left-wing users. Made me think of this.
You've literally responded to nothing I've brought up.
Jd Vance is blocked by 30% of the users on Bluesky. He has no power there. On the fediverse there is a moderator on a bigger server who has blocked lgbtq/trans related hashtags and quotes a homophobe in their profile.
If you are trying to protect people from fascism, and hopefully homophobia I hope you are calling out fosstodon too. I didn't stumble on jd Vance on BS, but stumbled on them dismissing LGBTQ people here
"Jd Vance is blocked by 30% of the users on Bluesky. He has no power there."
Having 70% of a platform to talk to is a tremendous amount of power. Even if it was only 10% that would still be millions of people to potentially radicalise.
It's the people who don't block him but listen to him that are the problem. He isn't speaking in good faith, he's trying to deceive people into doing bad things.
⏫ often I say that fascism is the presence of unforgivable sins
Theologically there are four and a half vibes and one act that are unforgivable, according to Thomas Aquinas
One as a human tends to be unforgivable by feeling a certain way, the only thing that one can do to be unforgivable is to lie
These things will snowball on each other But engaging in any of the behavior is fascist adjacent
It's not easy to do, but actively vetting damaging information about people IMO is best
I've edited my reply 👍
Yeah... .I tried Blusky because someone told me "It's just like old Twitter"...
And after a day or two I remembered... I hated old Twitter too...
I keep being proven more right.
I have tried to register with Bluesky today but seem to be blocked because they cannot get an e-mail to my e-mail account.
Maybe that is not such a bad thing.
I guess you care more about making a point then addressing valid concerns about trans/homophobia here on the Fediverse.
I find that sad.
JD Vance is not a moderator on Bluesky.
And believe me, the fediverse often platforms racism, transphobia, misogyny and homophobia. Here it can only be dealt with after the fact. On Bluesky its mostly dealt with proactively.
Moderation on BS is actually more decentralized than in the Fediverse - block lists managed by the community are a better tool than Fediverse instance admins being in command, especially since you can't yet switch fedi instances without changing identity.
How would that be different if Vance was setting up its own Fedi instance?
Fair enough! 😀
That's not enough, he has to be deplatformed because not everyone will block him:
social.growyourown.services/@F…
p.s. It isn't enough to say that individuals can just block stuff they don't like.Fascists don't care about people who block them, they only care about those who don't block them.
Fascists use platforms to try to radicalise anyone who will listen. Fascists spread hateful lies about vulnerable minorities, and if someone believes those lies they may follow the fascist and spread lies too.
I've tried to explain this in a way that hopefully anyone can relate to:
social.chinwag.org/@FediThing/…
FediThing 🏳️🌈 (@FediThing@chinwag.org)
Imagine a stranger spreads lies about you. They tell everyone you're doing horrible stuff, the worst crimes imaginable. They make videos, articles, livestreams, all pushing the same lies designed to make everyone hate and fear you.Chinwag Social
Yup, that's why I included the link so people could see for themselves.
If you do an internet search for "fox news bluesky vance" you'll find the article where Bluesky welcome him to the platform (I'm not going to link it).
@dideldum @t_robinart @McWabbit
"And there they are reachable for other opinions and ideas, which have no voice at Twitter. "
No, it doesn't work like that.
When you give fascists a broader audience, you simply get more fascists.
All you do is normalise fascism in mainstream discourse, and people who would have previously stayed away from it suddenly think it's okay to do fascist things.
The only effective response to fascism is to make its audience and reach as small as possible.
Here's a thought experiment:
Someone with millions of followers is telling people that you (not your group but you personally) are a murderer and rapist and all kinds of other untrue stuff.
People believe him, his speeches get carried on TV, on radio, and newspapers give him an easy time without questioning his allegations too much.
What would you do? Would you want even more people to hear his allegations about you? Would you want his audience to be even bigger?
No, here I have to disagree hard: I don't want the crazy hateful, fascist and / or simply cookoo voices to disappear. I want the tankie nutjob, the fascist white power lunatic and the vatnik idiot to be able to scream his or her vile bullshit into the void of the net. Because this is the freedom the net gives us.
Fascism and oppression has to be fought with dialogue, through teaching people and sometimes with fists and steel... but never through censorship and silencing of ideas.
"Fascism and oppression has to be fought with dialogue, ... never through censorship and silencing of ideas."
I'm sorry but that's a load of crap.
When the Nazis were defeated, their party was banned and their symbols were made illegal. Those who voted for them were made to march through death camps and look at the corpses to see the consequences of their votes.
Dialogue with fascists is like dialogue with rapists or murderers, it normalises stuff that should not be normalised.
@gabboman
Hi, question. If a user on your instance who is opted-in to Bluesky integration boosts a post from someone on another fedi instance, is the boost ingested by Bluesky?
Defederation also creates echo chambers. I'd much rather prefer that admins proactively ban spam, disinformation, and other rulebreakers.
I doubt Vance will change people's minds on BlueSky. I'd say the opposite: if we never engage in discussions, they will keep winning elections.
I don't like being in an information bubble, myself. But I recall a quote about #Nazis and #Fascism (I do not recall where I heard it):
"The only thing that a tolerant society must not tolerate is #intolerance ."
There are a few things that should never be allowed a forum for discussion, because the uneducated and bigots do not debate; they merely jump straight to hate. Along the way, they pull others into their darkness.
It's not easy to walk the fine line between #FreeSpeech and justifiable #censorship , but we must be constantly straddling that line and holding onto it firmly.
We do not give pornography to children or spread it on social media. Nor should we give that same social media space to Nazis and hate.
#LyndaCarter #WonderWoman #1970sTV #CarolynJones #TheFeminumMystique #QueenHippolyta #BlueSky #JayGraber
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I feel obligated to clarify, given that you have misrepresented my words in your reply.
I did not, at any point, talk about individuals blocking fascists. I talked about instances banning the individual fascists, rather than cutting off entire instances, as a choice of moderation style. I also agree that defederation is a valid option for instances, perhaps due to moderation burden, or because the remote instance in question is irredeemable.
An instance banning Vance means, on that instance, no user is capable of being radicalised by Vance's account. This is the same as if an open-signup instance banned Vance's account upon registration. This is the same result as defederating the entire remote instance for the sole reason that Vance is on there, except that otherwise innocent users on the remote instance are not caught in the crossfire.
Many of those remote users will not be aware of Vance's presence on their instance (especially when that instance is Bluesky), and therefore cannot be considered Nazis by mere affiliation: they have not interacted with him. Those users remain on that instance, and defederating will do nothing to protect them if he attempts to radicalise them; however, a moderation team can monitor the users of that instance and continually assess the risks and whether defederating later is reasonable to them. What can, in fact, sometimes happen is the opposite: the Nazi gets bullied out of there, or -- as in the Nazi bar analogy -- the users notice the Nazi and leave of their own accord (at which point I'm sure the calculus will shift in favour of defederation); perhaps such users move to fedi in this scenario, having not been ostracised for reasons they would not otherwise have understood.
Finally:
Does your instance currently block mastodon.social? If not, as some instances have out of concerns for its moderation & size, then that is an example of what I was describing which you quoted and responded "No." to.
No instance should be hosting a fascist who has masked thugs literally kidnapping people off the streets without due process.
Any instance that hosts such a person is itself supporting fascism, and should be shunned by everyone. Admins should defederate it, users on that instance should leave it.
The idea is to isolate not only fascists but those who tolerate and help fascism.
Fascism has to be resisted in every way possible, while such resistance is still possible.
The current fascists ARE acting on their beliefs.
Masked thugs are snatching people off the streets without due process and sending them to foreign jails.
Do you think the victms of fascism are getting their freedom of speech respected?
"Just think about it: If you start to censor ONE topic, what guarantees that this is not followed up with other topics?"
There are lots of things which society rightly bans, from minor stuff like spam to serious stuff like CSAM.
I disagree. The Nazi party was banned because they ACTED upon their atrocious beliefs... purely talking about ideas - as much as I may despise them - has to stay possible.
Just think about it: If you start to censor ONE topic, what guarantees that this is not followed up with other topics?
Beautifully put by @eons in a reply to another thread on this topic today:
"when a hostile actor appears, if your options are "look away or leave" then you're in a nazi bar"
mastodon.gamedev.place/@eons/1…
when an hostile actor appears, if your options are "look away or leave" then you're in a nazi bar
afaik posts from the bluesky network do not cross over to the Fediverse network, and vice versa. In other words, a user from bsky can't see wafrn reblogs of posts from fedi users. Replies to fedi posts aren't visible from the bluesky side and vice versa, too. And there are no plans to change this. The closest thing is "quoting", which is just pasting the link to the referenced post; that's something that anybody with an account on both networks can manually do, you don't need a wafrn server for that. Also, even with a shared link to a fedi post, bsky users can't interact unless they also have an account in the fedi network on an instance that federates with the original post's (since it's really just sharing a direct link to the original post).
Under the hood, what a wafrn server does is maintain both a Fediverse account and a bsky account and aggregate posts from the follows on either side in the same dashboard; and also duplicates any post from a wafrn user into both networks. It's really nothing fancier than that. That's why you can't really speak about "federating" with bluesky like it were just another fedi instance.
Also, for any wafrn instance, bluesky integration must be first enabled by the admin and then opted in by each user. Any user that does not opt in is cut off from bluesky, and any admin may choose to not enable the option in the first place. And if a bad actor ever tried to spin up an evil wafrn instance, it really isn't that different from a bad actor spinning up a normal fedi instance, and can be defederated just the same.
Also (and I don't mean it despectively) it's jank as fuck. Nobody serious is going to stomach using it regularly; it houses mostly freak techies that love jank, and tumblr refugees that don't want the hassle of having to keep up with separate accounts and dashboards for following fedi and bluesky accounts.
In a recent @WIRED interview, when asked "Would you welcome President Trump?" CEO Jay Graber responded "Yeah—Bluesky’s for everyone." So their welcoming of Vance doesn't surprise me. (I don't support this choice, to be clear.)
wired.com/story/big-interview-…
All the lefties fled to Bluesky following Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. But CEO Jay Graber says the app is for everyone—and could revolutionize how people communicate online.Kate Knibbs (WIRED)
I guess Bluesky's unofficial motto is now "Bluesky: the social network that welcomes fascists".
That is even more disturbing. Total lack of morality from Graber and Bluesky, at a point in history where people need to be taking a stand. Spineless bunch of greedy cowards.
Follow-up question should have been about whether Graber supports neo-nazis being on there, for example the neo-nazis Trump pardoned.
Everything on Bluesky flows through a central relay system controlled by the Bluesky Corporation. In practical terms they have complete control over everything, which is dangerous if they decide to do bad stuff.
"I still don't understand federated social media very well."
This guide might help? It tries to explain why having lots of independent servers is really important for the health of a social network:
fedi.tips/why-is-the-fediverse…
An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediversefedi.tips
I think there is some misunderstanding here?
Vance's Bluesky post is attacking queer people. I'm not "roping in" anyone, Vance and the far right hate me as a queer person.
In my part of the world the word "minorities" is pretty general and also covers queer people, disabled people, language minorities etc.
I don't know if this is an American vs European english thing, but I'm talking about vulnerable minorities in general, not specifically ethnic minorities.
1. You're accusing me of being performative
2. You're saying people should defederate from mastodon.social
3. You're posting from an account on mastodon.social
I regularly post about how being on mastodon.social is a bad idea due to poor moderation and putting the network at risk, I have a whole article about this: fedi.tips/its-a-really-bad-ide…
Mastodon.social blocks my posts from trending there because they were so pissed off with this.
An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediversefedi.tips
Storage idk in detail (ask @gabboman about that), but bandwidth was affected enough that we had to add Redis (or a fork) into our stack to process the sheer amount of data coming in from bsky.network
Do note, we "filter" the firehose down to only the events we actually need/want, which for us means only users which are actually being followed.
We had redis before
2/10 mb/s btw
Currently, nothing.
We eventually plan to automatically check whether the boosted post is available via bridgy, and boost that on the fedi end (and vice-versa), but that doesn't exist in the software yet.
Bluesky's blocking and moderation tools are better than they ever were on Twitter. The culture is openly hostile to MAGA. This will be interesting to watch.
The top 5 most blocked accounts on Bluesky. Vance rockets to #2 in less than a day.
1. Jesse Singal
2. JD Vance
3. I have no idea
4. Wealthy, insufferable, self-obsessed, Zionist Brianna Wu
5. Billionaire loudmouth Mark Cuban
@Voline @mark_ohe Following / blocked by ratio's interesting too:
Singal ??* / 80,6
Vance 14,5 / 75,4
breezing **
Wu 27,7 / 61,1
Cuban 1 400 / 48,8
____
* couldn't find his account for some reason -- is it only available for logged in users?
** apparently a bot listing "bsky trending words" every ten minutes
It's not enough for individuals to block hatemongers, people spreading hate have to be de-platformed. Platform owners should be refusing to platform them.
Not everyone will block him, some will listen to him and believe his lies and become radlcalised. Then they will spread the hate even further, and it will kill people.
Ah fair enough, apologies for misunderstanding you.
Logan Five Thousand
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