In the course of running an HOA, I have to send out letters informing homeowners that they are in violation of the Covenants.
An unresolved violation of the covenants can result in a $25.00 a day fine.
I personally think that before the organization levies that kind of fine, it is imperative that we have assurance that a homeowner received notification that they were in violation.
I like certified mail for this because it gives me tracking and assurance that the homeowner received the notification (which avoids "I never got notified").
My HOA doesn't have any other unified system for notifying homeowners (yet), so mail is my best (and legal) option.
Of course, the people receiving these are mad that they have to drive to the post office (pretty sure they don't).
I want to add my voice supporting Ryan Barrett's #bridgyfed project.
The #Mastodon#HOA has outed itself as intolerant & abusive as the worst of the twitter trolls.
The HOA tries to impose a minority view on the entire fediverse using abuse & viral outrage tactics in the face of software & protocols that do exactly the opposite.
I noticed this dynamic when I first joined & listened to the cultural differences.
Die Planung für das nächste #HOA beginnt. Fazit vom #HOA23 wir benötigen noch Unterstützung bei der Orga. Gerade für Deko wären neue Verantwortliche/Unterstützer:innen sehr wünschenswert! Wenn du dich in irgendeiner Form engagieren möchtest, meld dich gerne bei uns oder komm zum nächsten digitalen Orga Meeting(https://bbb.stratum0.org/b/lar-jsl-ksr-m32) am 28.11.2023 um 19 Uhr.
I've been on BlueSky for 10 minutes and... (An Essay)
I get it now. I used to be like "Why can't people just stop using Twitter/Instagram/WhateverTheFuck? If they need social media, why can't they just use Mastodon? Why doesn't Pixelfed get more users? It's literally the same UI".
But I get it. I've been on BlueSky for what? 10 minutes? And I can feel my brain chemistry changing. Mastodon is a coffee shop. It doles out caffeine. You still get the little dopamine hit when you get notifications, you get that kind of substitute for human interaction that feels nice. But Twitter and BlueSky and Instagram and these apps from companies with access to inordinate amounts of data to build algorithms designed by psychologists to literally be As Addicting as Possible? These apps are dealing meth. But they've pressed it like ecstasy and made it cute. They've made it socially acceptable. But let me tell you something.
Ever since I logged onto BlueSky, I've been thinking about it. I don't think about Mastodon all day. "Oh my god what should I post next? What will get me followers? Would this be funny? Is this on brand?" I don't think about it. I come here because I have interactions with people without the pretext that they're engaging with me to get engagement in return. Because sometimes in my life I feel isolated and because this substitute for human interaction feels nice.
I thought I'd get BlueSky (despite their horrifying privacy policy - more on that later) because there are some Things Going On that make me need to get a little more serious about making money. But fuck, if this is the only way? I'm taking a vow of poverty, or getting a day job.
Because then there's their privacy policy. Access to websites you visit before and after, identifying information about your device, purchases you make, and it goes on. But even that level of invasive access should give us pause, right? I have a lot of things set up on my computer that mitigate some of that access, but then let's think about how we give the app access to our photos and videos (all of them, not just what we post in the moment), our device's camera and microphone (not just while we're using it) and so on. And then think about how our society grooms us to believe (and maybe in some circumstances this belief is true) that we need these sites for access, for engagement, to make money.
The price of not working in a warehouse is every piece of information we can reasonably gather about you to use and sell however we please, for whatever purpose, indefinitely, and it never expires and we don't pay you for it.
This is exploitation and my ancestry makes me pause, horrified, at what this information will eventually come back and do to us when inevitably the wrong person/group gets ahold of it. And that's pretending like we even know who has our data and what they're doing with it, right? Because we don't know. We really don't. Call me paranoid, say that I shouldn't worry if I have nothing to hide, give me all of the excuses you've been programmed to give about why we should not worry about a surveillance state that we pay for. Then come online and rant about how dangerous governments are and fail to see the irony in it all.
And I'm a hypocrite. I bought in, too. For personal gain. After criticizing others for years for doing the same thing. It's true. But the interesting side effect is that I've gained so much insight into why we're so addicted to sensationalism, why we're so addicted to these sites, why we're so unwell in general. The kinds of things my feed is inundated with, especially since I haven't curated it yet and it's showing me what it wants to? My god. We cannot have a healthy society when this is what we're consuming all day every day. There is no way to be a healthy person, I believe, when consuming this all day every day.
So anyways. As always, perhaps a bit sanctimonious. But I'm a little dumbfounded at the experience of all of this after years off of corporate social.
But your point about welcoming vs not welcoming marginalized communities is a controversial one here, right?
I have butted heads with Twitter people, one black, about CW culture; I'm #HOA on that still.
But @mekkaokereke describes a certain experience in his pinned posts for black people here on Mastodon that is anything but fun, or effortless, or good.
The BlSk capitalists are motivated to make all users have fun right now. Masto, eh... we need to do better.
Started looking through some of the sites blocked by #TheBadSpace. This is at my very most charitable interpretation some serious scorched-earth #HOA nonsense, resulting from #MinimumViableProduct mindset without regard for consequences.
Again,charitably: Someone deciding his end justifies any means. It doesn't.
Watching a gang of artless pixies and a circus of clowns and oliphants dogpile AnarchoNinaWrites all week in a coordinated smear and harassment campaign has been something of a revelatory experience.
I have thoughts, but need time to compose them.
For right now, however, I feel it is very important to look back at the history of a certain nasty woodland creature that identifies as "Welsh" to interrogate the merits of a number of her other campaigns against specifically trans socialists on this platform.
They came in darkness, with knives out for Nina, and left bloodied and missing fingers....but how many others lay gutted in the laneways of Mastodon by these vicious serial harassers and liars?
After hearing tons of #HOA horror stories I've decided I'd rather live in a heavily haunted house surrounded by a centuries old cemetery than with a bunch of Karens in an HOA.
"The judicial foreclosures were initiated for unpaid #HOA debts, not unpaid bank loans, and those debts were sometimes as small as a few thousand dollars before they ballooned w/interest, HOA attorneys fees & court costs.
Braucht hier noch jemand ein Ticket für das Hacken Open Air nächste Woche? Ich muss meines leider verkaufen. #hoa#hoa23@HackenOpenAir#CCCamp23 :BoostOK:
I love to see the outpouring of advice to welcome newcomers to Mastodon! It’s so important to onboard people—make sure they know “this isn’t Twitter,” and that harassment and dogpiling are not part of our culture.
Unless they ask for full-text search or quote boosts, which can only be used for harassment and dogpiling, and therefore if they request such features they must be harassed and dogpiled.
So, how badly did the #HOA attitude on Mastodon fuck things up? This bad:
Be nice to have @Stonekettle active on here.
But nope.
Also note that this is is a 200k+ follower account basically telling that number of people “anywhere but Mastodon”
And the dude ain’t thin skinned.
How? You know you can join more than one server and export/import your follow lists?
There's no reason to be beholden to just one server and when I joined #Mastodon last November almost everyone I followed was on more than one instance.
@rscottjones Nothing to tell. It's just the way of the #Fediverse . I only announce it because it seems to threaten, confuse and bewilder some people who think they're the #Fediverse#HOA and act like they're on #NextDoor policing [harassing] their neighbors.
The #Fediverse has different kinds of software, so if you're going to post on #Kbin or #PixelFed you'll have to get more than one account too. It's normal and most people don't care. Most people don't act like the #Fediverse#HOA
I absolutely LOVE how several people have came out swinging against #gatekeepers and #hoa attitudes. The #fediverse is changing irrespective to whether anyone likes it or not.
I think CWs are a great tool. I like that I can give people a heads up about some stuff.
But If you feel compelled to complain to someone else about their lack of CWs, you should probably devote that energy into setting up your own damn filters instead
I think one of the nicest things someone on #Mastodon said to me was, "I usually look at a person's feed to see if I should follow them. I looked at yours & scrolled 40 posts and can't see a common topic in any of them so I decided to follow you"
Lol, this is the best way to write an #introduction for myself on Masto - Hi, I'm Liz, I promise you if you follow me you'll get completely RANDO thoughts from non-connecting topics from me all day.
So I saw a #Mastodon Home Association member rant that thou shalt only post ONE #introduction post or you are breaking the #HOA rule so here am I boosting my pinned Introduction post for the third time 👆
@liztai this is what I don’t understand about social media #HOA busy bodies. Y’all really out here keeping track of the number of times someone posts about the same subject?