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Tech Reform Watch: Pre-Inauguration Edition

by Major Major Major Major|  January 18, 20216:55 pm| 99 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues

The Washington Post today has several articles about the incoming administration’s, and new congress’s, thoughts and priorities on regulating tech companies. If you’re interested in this–and you should be if you’re reading this on, say, the Internet–I recommend checking them out, or at least reading the overview. Silicon Valley braces for tougher regulation in Biden’s …

Tech Reform Watch: Pre-Inauguration EditionPost + Comments (99)

The Web Is Broken, Everybody Knows It, And Donald Trump Has Proven It

by Major Major Major Major|  January 9, 20214:44 pm| 121 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues, Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All

I’m sure we’ve all seen the news that Donald Trump has been banned from Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, Shopify, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Pinterest, Discord, and Reddit have similarly cracked down on Trumpy content. Parler, a social network for people that find Twitter insufficiently extreme, has been banned from the Google Play store, and Apple …

The Web Is Broken, Everybody Knows It, And Donald Trump Has Proven ItPost + Comments (121)

What is a social network? In a nutshell, it’s just people, forming connections, posting content, and reacting to said content. We know these mostly as centralized systems like Twitter, where a single organization controls all of the content and user accounts. It is completely predictable that such an organization, of sufficient size, will find itself in a constant, morally fraught fight against extremism, harassment, and illegal content. This architecture will always have a serious problem via Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem: “Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well.”

So what is a distributed social network? Let’s talk about the most popular one: Mastodon. Mastodon is, essentially, a series of communication protocols that are woven together to link decentralized communities.

Huh?

One protocol you might know is HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP. Anybody can set up an HTTP server, and if you send it the right text, it sends you a web page, or whatever. You can link websites together, form informational networks, and so on, very easily with this protocol. This is what the Web is, or was, back in the day: a mostly-open collection of linked documents encoded in HTML, an open standard. We would later call this Web 1.0, and it was very different from the walled gardens of today.

Mastodon occupies a space somewhere between Twitter and Web 1.0. Anybody can set up a Mastodon instance; think of it as their own personal Twitter. Mastodon instances can form voluntary connections with one another, and all instances, user accounts, and posts (“toots”) share an open data format and communication protocol.

The key word here is interoperability. It’s a little like Reddit, where people run subreddits with their own rules, except in this case, there would be nobody who actually runs Reddit–it’s like a community of linked subreddits.

Here’s a toy example. Let’s say I run a Balloon-Juice Mastodon instance, and Scott Lemieux runs a Lawyers, Guns, & Money Mastodon instance. We both have public timelines, and can post replies to each other, etc.

Now let’s say that the people from some troll or Nazi instance discover ours, and we want to get rid of them. We can block individual users or even their entire instance, preventing them from reading (and therefore replying to) our posts. Their Mastodon account is still around–it’s just formatted data, after all–it just won’t do them any good here.

In a system like this, you deal with a Donald Trump not by deleting his Mastodon account–which you cannot do–but by banning that account from the respectable instances. He’s still welcome at any instance that does choose to deal with him, which in this case would be something like Parler (or for a real example, Gab, which is a Mastodon fork). We’ve reduced the moral footprint of this decision dramatically, even as we’ve achieved a similar result.

I hold little hope that we will end up in an open, decentralized informational utopia any time soon–it’s just too hard to monetize, compared to the alternatives–but a man can dream.

Update: I just remembered that Twitter is funding a small, dedicated team to explore this space and either develop a new standard or bring an existing one to the next level. So, good for them!

Let’s Talk About Section 230 of the CDA (Or: Why You’re Allowed to Comment on This Post)

by Major Major Major Major|  December 28, 20201:05 pm| 52 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been in the news a lot lately. Conservatives hate it! As I told @jack, by labeling posts, @twitter is taking a policy position. When taking a policy position, you’re acting as a publisher (even under current law). #BigTech can’t pretend to not be a publisher & get …

Let’s Talk About Section 230 of the CDA (Or: Why You’re Allowed to Comment on This Post)Post + Comments (52)

Merry Christmas From Outer Space

by Major Major Major Major|  December 25, 20202:09 pm| 64 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

No, I’m not in outer space, or even the stratosphere**. I am in fact in NYC with Samwise* and my husband. But we don’t all have that luxury–poor Santa has to deliver presents around the whole galaxy, if not all of spacetime. I have photographic proof: I found this in a nice collection of these …

Merry Christmas From Outer SpacePost + Comments (64)

Hogfather Reading Club: Talk Amongst Yourselves

by Major Major Major Major|  December 20, 20203:00 pm| 98 Comments

This post is in: Books, Recommended Reading

Hello and welcome to a special holiday edition of Recommended Reading! Today we’ll be talking about our Light Solstice Reading Club selection, Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather. I’m so happy we could share this reading experience together. I didn’t remember much from my prior read, so this was almost like reading it for the first time. And …

Hogfather Reading Club: Talk Amongst YourselvesPost + Comments (98)

Guest Post: Sister Golden Bear’s Transition Anniversary!

by Major Major Major Major|  December 9, 20208:47 pm| 86 Comments

This post is in: Civil Rights, LGBTQ Rights, Open Threads, Women's Rights

Sister Golden Bear mentioned in an earlier thread that she has something worth celebrating this week. She was kind enough to write up something for me to share. So, without further ado: happy anniversary, SGB! So this week marks the fourth anniversary of me starting to live as a woman, as my true self. Fortunately, …

Guest Post: Sister Golden Bear’s Transition Anniversary!Post + Comments (86)

Ironically, I didn’t really have much time to celebrate at the time. I was due to fly to Buenos Aires on New Year’s Eve for five weeks to do a series of surgeries to feminize my facial features. Yes, part of it was vanity, but part of it was survival. Life is far harder for trans women who don’t “pass” (a framing I hate), i.e. don’t look plausibly cisgendered. Since I hadn’t been blessed by the androgyny fairy and have a body that’s bigger and bulkier than the vast majority of cis woman (my peasant ancestors were built for the plow), it was important to me to have one visible part of my body that wouldn’t mislead people about who I am.

Trump’s election had thrown a huge wrench in my plans. I’d originally planned to travel to Buenos Aires under my male passport. Not ideal, but practical because I’d just gotten the court order changing my legal name and gender the day before, and it would be touch and go whether I could get my password changed before I needed to leave. But there were serious rumors that one of the first acts of the Trump administration would be to prevent us from changing our gender on passports — which posed a danger visiting a number of countries—and I wouldn’t be returning to the States until after the inauguration. So I booked the airline ticket under my new name and gender, and gambled that I could get the passport changed in time. I managed to do so with only two days to spare.

It’s been a long journey since then, partly because of multiple surgeries to make my body congruent with who I am. (I’m extremely privileged to have been able to do so. This is something many trans folks can’t afford to do.) Partly the lengthy recovery from those surgeries, but plus other personal medical issues and personal tragedies. (My mother died less than two weeks before I was scheduled to leave for another major surgery in Thailand.) Partly it was truly learning to move in the world as a woman—moving into the second-class status that women face definitely made me an even more ardent feminist.

I was looking forward to this year as The Year Everything Came Together, where I’d finally moved through all the transition-related stress and would be able to restart my life again. But obviously 2020 had different plans for me, and billions of others. It’s frustrating having the rest of my new life put on hold, but one day the pandemic will end, and I look forward to making up for the lost years—the so many lost years—living my life authentically.

*At the time, the general advice was to give one’s co-workers 2-3 weeks to adjust to the idea before coming to work as your true gender.

**Why Buenos Aires? Because it’s a specialized surgery and only a half-dozen surgeons in the world are excellent at it. I personally think my surgeon there is the best of the best, plus the favorable exchange rate meant I could do it for less than half the cost of doing it in the States, even including airfare and staying in an apartment for five weeks there.

Nice Things Open Thread

by Major Major Major Major|  December 9, 202012:33 pm| 188 Comments

This post is in: Books, Music, Open Threads

I’ve decided we should have an open thread. I went to Central Park on Sunday to enjoy the sun. (It was maybe forty degrees, but that’s what long underwear is for!) Clearly I wasn’t the only one who’d had this idea; the park was bustling. But that’s the benefit of being outdoors and masked: bustle …

Nice Things Open ThreadPost + Comments (188)

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