the myth of the good tech giant

#clippy #unix_surrealism #microsoft #ai

STAY WEIRD FEDI: IN DEFENSE OF THE ECCENTRIC, ECLECTIC, AND ERRATIC

by vanta rainbow black

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"queer people joined, and furries. it comes in waves." --Gargron, 2018

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a person's attitude towards furries is a great litmus test for their level of tolerance generally, and the presence of furries and queer people and other outcasts in a space is a major sign of a healthy social ecosystem. maybe the biggest one even. with statistics showing the vast majority of furries are queer in some capacity, it makes sense that 2000's era meme furry hate was nothing more than thinly-veiled bigotry

the fediverse is an interesting place. what happens when you accidentally sextuple-overbook the same convention center with a queer pride event and furry convention and punk show and kink festival and antifa assembly and hacker conference? you get early mastodon, essentially. the november 2022 twitter waves and meta threads' activitypub integration have diluted this vibe considerably, but the fighting spirit of the fediverse is still there. and as corpo gentrifiers (meta, etc.) continue to attempt to chip away at what makes the fediverse so wonderful, here's why it's worth saving:

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ONE: because it's beautiful

the fediverse is the only major social media platform where trans people can freely express themselves and be visible without fear of experiencing unmoderated hate-speech. provided your instance has adequate moderation, of course. but this is the case more often than not. sure, the occassional new bigot pleroma instance pops up once in a while. but at least you can trust that something will actually be fucking done about it when you submit a report. nazis get banned and defederated. it's such a low godddamn bar to clear... and yet, by and large, the fediverse is the only major social media platform that actually manages to do this (the decent sections of it, at least). why? well, here's the big secret: BECAUSE WE DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT PROFIT!!! big companies allow nazis to fester on their services because it makes them money, and here we're not beholden to such a corrupting influence. that's kinda the entire point

all the good servers have all the bad ones blocked. that's the beauty of the fediverse. they're essentially isolated from the good portion of the network. in a book i got interviewed for (Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media by Robert W. Gehl) this is termed the "covenantal fediverse" due to said instances broadly following the mastodon server covenant, the most important point of which is "active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia." the rest is just technical stuff. still important, but nowhere near as influental

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TWO: because it's subversive

c'mon. being "normal" is boring as fuck. "is anything as strange as a normal person? is anyone as cruel as a normal person?" pushing back against the mainstream is awesome and epic and cool as fuck. not just for the sake of it of course, but because the mainstream SUCKS. compulsive heterosexuality, patriarchy, transphobia, ableism, competition instead of cooperation, sanitized advertiser-friendly language ("unalived" etc.), silence in the face of injustice, compromise, conformity, boring watered-down top 100 pop hits playing on the radio and barbeques with a biological family who harshly judges and really just outright hates you

DON'T WE FUCKING DESERVE BETTER?!?!?!?!?!?!

i think we do. let's be less like uptight milquetoast suburbanites and more like the neighbors down the street who they despise -- the punk house with a front yard full of empty beer bottles and crumpled up anarchism zines that's constantly getting noise complaints. in other words: let's have fun, and be awesome, and fuck the corpo stiffs trying to stand in our way!

you can't even say swear words on tiktok. and other corpo social media platforms don't fare much better. that's no way to live. FUCK!!!!!

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THREE: because it's important

as fascism ever-encroaches digital spaces free from corporate tyranny will only become more important. as trans people are being actively genocided here in the U.S. and abroad, alternative social media systems are a place where we can truly express ourselves. find ourselves. become ourselves. corporations are rolling back DEI initiatives and rules against queerphobia. these corpo platforms are no place to thrive. when i joined mastodon in 2017, it was at a crucial time in my gender journey. fedi singlehandedly saved me from being some doofy techbro and turned me into the amazing cyberpunk catgirl i am today. it gave me the critical positive trans representation i so desperately needed, and gave me a likeminded community. a space to learn and grow, and try on new aspects of identity to see what fit. i credit it almost entirely with shaping me into Vanta Rainbow Black

it's a common thread on the fediverse. always has been. even today. so much so that i came up with a name for it, way back in 2017: The Fediverse Effect. people tend to join and realize they're trans due to the sheer abundance of trans people on the network. it really helps to have positive representation y'know? like actual tangible people to dispel common myths and misconceptions, who you can even talk to personally about this stuff. it was indispensible in my journey towards finding myself and molding myself into the person i was meant to be

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in closing... fuck meta. fuck automattic. fuck flipboard. and fuck all the other corporate gentrifiers in the future who might try to encroach upon our beautiful weird digital haven in the name of turning a profit. you have nothing but my contempt

we should stay weird. unsanitized. unmarketable. for to do otherwise would be to forfeit the very soul of what makes the fediverse so special

stay weird fedi

also published on my blog: https://vanta.blog/posts/2025-8-14-stay-weird-fedi

#vantablog #StayWeirdFedi #fediverse #FediPact #meta #threads #automattic #flipboard

"Design is my passion!"

Friends, please stop linking to Spotify like it’s ok.

The company steadily siphoned money from independent artists, then spent millions to host Joe Rogan, then littered their library with AI music, and now the CEO is investing in AI weapons.

There are plenty of less damaging ways to listen to music and podcasts.

ブースト、お気に入り大歓迎！東京カメラ部2025写真展 出展予定者の masatodeluxe さんのご投稿作品。（出展作品とは限りません）

【東京カメラ部2025写真展 in Hikarie 概要】
https://tokyocameraclub.com/special/exhibition_2025/

本展示は、「東京カメラ部10選」の方々の作品や東京カメラ部「日本写真100景〈四季〉2025」フォトコンテストの入賞作品、東京カメラ部３×３組写真コンテスト2025の入賞作品の展示など、2025年も大規模に開催する予定です。

渋谷で、心動かされる一枚に出会ってみませんか？
ぜひ会場でご覧ください。

※天変地異、感染症予防、政府および官公庁による規制など、やむをえない事情により急遽中止、またはオンラインに変更させていただく可能性がございます。

【投稿作品】
https://tokyocameraclub.com/mstdn/masatodeluxe/109687881031355109

#東京カメラ部2025写真展 #つながる世界

One of my first kingfisher shots

#kingfisher #birdphotography #wildlife #nature #animalphotography #birdwatching #perchedbird #wildlifephotography

It's a little late, but it's still the 13th in some timezones.

https://axxuy.xyz/blog/posts/2025/yesyoucanuseafountainpenlefthanded/

#Blog #Blogging #Blogpost #IndieWeb #PersonalWebsite #PersonalBlog #Blaugust #Blaugust2025

Updated: Must Have Essential Applications For Desktop Linux

- Added 16 new apps

Explore the curated essential list of free & open source software applications by category for the graphical user interface of a GNU/Linux desktop.

https://www.adamsdesk.com/posts/essential-desktop-linux-applications/

#blog #linux #FreeSoftware #OpenSource #FOSS #100DaysToOffload

Years ago I bought an interactive map & guide to Anhk-Morpork, very impressive, with both a map and an aerial view up to the last detail. The app never updated and soon become incompatible, big loss. I dismantled it and recovered the 23766 tiles of 256x256 pixels each that composed the two images. I've been slowly rebuilding the aerial one into a giant 24064 x 16896 px image. Already 3/4 done. I intend to print a great poster for my studio. Detail is insane. #GNUTerryPratchett #DiscWorld

Did anyone write a guide yet how to make self-hosted Ghost instances less dependent on external resources? This includes Stripe payment, the Mailgun requirement, but also external JS dependancies like JSdelivr etc.

Seems that even a fully self-hosted Ghost is still extremely entangled with cloud services that I certainly *don't* want to be entangled with.

@semicolon my clients very much agree. I really can't oversell the shocked faces around the company, staring at images of themselves when they did not know some third party entity was recording and analyzing everything that was said.

We originally thought the senior exec responsible did something deliberately. Nope. He just clicked a link from a professional society's meeting, which appeared to actually come from that society's admin staff, that said "click for meeting minutes."

@jimsalter An AI Teams worm?!

On the one hand: fuck AI, right? Shit's terrible. Ugh.

On the other hand: the AI is still only doing what it was trained to do, and what the people who pay huge amounts of money for the hardware it runs on and the power it consumes task it with doing.

Ultimately, it's always the humans that are the real problem. And boy howdy do we ever have a TERRIBLE crop of them in control of the market and the government these days.

We report: the stars show up amidst the clouds like precious stones in a velvet jewellery case, a cracked geode. They twinkle and shift in colour with the wind, and we cannot see the constellations they belong to, but they seem important and special enough on their own.

Github is now a subsidiary of the MICROS~1 Spicy Autocomplete division, so I guess it's time to re-up my "LOL Github" I-told-you-so post from 2018, since in those intervening 7 years you have all learned nothing.

Anyway, good luck with that! I hope your migrations go really well.
https://jwz.org/b/yks-

Went for a short walk today in the park. I saw four Rainbow Lorikeets bathing in an undrained rain gutter on the train station's roof. They seemed to enjoy it, as it has been quite warm today in Melbourne compared to previous weeks. Not sure how long that water has been there though, since it hasn't rained in a few days.

The ducks at the park are not free, you cannot just take them

If you want an ebook of some public domain work, either:

1. Check standardebooks.org before Gutenberg. They clean up books from Gutenberg with sane typography and print design.

2. Consider buying a "Dover Thrift Editions" version of the ebook. Many fly-by-night ebook "publishers" are turning a quick buck on selling you a Gutenberg edition. Dover is a real publisher, even in print, and their well-formatted ebooks of public domain works are usually under $4, or even less.

When things get tough, I play a bit more than usual. It helps. But sometimes it can get just a bit too much. And I wrote about that - also just a bit.

Btw, my small blog now has a fediverse version!

#writing #blog #gaming #dopamine #health https://notpublicopinion.com/gaming-is-like-drinking/