"“Most #Israelis don’t know much about #Palestinians. They think they are terrorists, all of them, or vague images with no names, no faces, no family, no homes, no hopes,”Baruchin said. “What I am trying to do in my posts is present Palestinians as #human beings.”
THIS IS SO BADASS. This man runs a very queer friendly café, in 2018 he woke up to find his café’s #Facebook page deleted, so he decided to file an action to get back some lost revenue from people thinking he was closed because it was suddenly gone. #Meta lied and lied, and he won.
How owner of Teatotaller cafe defeated social media giant Meta in court
About Meta on the Fediverse :facebook::geodesic::
I have a lot of concerns about Meta coming soon to the Fediverse.
I fear what this means for the exchange of information that will inevitably happen between us and them.
What it means legally,
what it means technically,
but mostly what it means ethically.
I also fear for the culture we have developed here.
I have deleted my Facebook account 5 years ago and never regretted it. I do not have any other accounts with Meta. For many reasons, I intend to stay away from this unethical corporation as much as I can.
I do not know what my instance intends to do about this, but personally I will block entirely any instance(s) controlled by Meta. I might also lock my account if necessary. This isn't about the people on there, this is very much about the practices of the corporation that controls it.
I sincerely hope their presence will not break the Fediverse :geodesic:
I hope we will stay strong and fight together for the better world we have started to create ✊:heart_cyber:
But I can’t help seeing the arrival of Goliath as a threat to the new world we have built...
"#Meta’s lead for Threads, Adam Mosseri, was head of #Facebook’s News Feed and Interfaces departments during that long, warning-heavy lead-up to the #genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar. After the worst of the violence was over, Mosseri noted on a podcast that he’d lost some sleep over it."
It's great to see so many new people joining various services.
Let's talk about some terminology to help you -- don't worry, we will keep it simple.
The #fediverse is a word used a lot. Basically, it is a way for lots of social servers to talk to each other and share posts. Like email, we are all on different email servers, but they all communicate.
When you join the fediverse, you pick a server to join. Some servers cater for niche topics. Don't worry, they still talk with the fediverse, but it means your server has people with the same interests as you. Other servers are more general.
There are various server types. Here are a few examples:
#Mastodon -- very popular; similar to Twitter. You can post messages, attach images, reply, like, share (called boosting)
#Calckey -- similar to Mastodon, but has some extra features (example, text formatting)
#Akkoma and #Misskey are also similar to Twitter but more niche
#Pixelfed is a phenomenal alternative to #Instagram. You will feel very at home there.
Importantly, all these servers talk to each other. So, if you are using Mastodon you can follow someone on Pixelfed and Lemmy and Calckey, all from your one account -- and interact with them too. How great is that?
There are NO computer algorithms in the fediverse to force content on to you. You only see posts from people you follow. So follow lots of people; you can unfollow later.
Do an #introduction post to let people know about you. Use the hashtag '#introduction' to allow others to browse collective posts and maybe follow you.
You will see I have used the # a lot here. Hashtags help others find similar posts. Use them for key topics in your post.
Don't be afraid to ask for help if you are not sure.
People don’t seem to realize that although #Fediverse has many problems to be solved, it’s the first and last free social media that we have a chance to self manage, control the flow of propaganda, increase the influence of activists, unions, revolutionaries, environmentalists, amplify the voice of minorities and freedom of information globally etc, without fascists, mass media, governments, trolls, advertisements etc.
Even if this fails at least we would have tried to build something different of our own…
So people that stay on #twitter#X#facebook#insta#TikTok or jump to the next new hipster trend like #threads#bluesky by fascist billionaires, in my personal and probably unpopular opinion, shouldn’t talk about how fascism, capitalism, consumption, social and mass media control and destroy our lives.
You have your chance and you throw it away. Sorry I don’t miss you here if your words have nothing to do with your actions
Another excellent talk by Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic) on why #Facebook, #Twitter / X and similar for-profit #internet platforms suck so much and are getting even worse. And what to do about it.
"When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you, because it knows that…you’d have to endure worse if you left…[#Twitter & #Facebook] had been shaved down to the point where most of us were only a hair’s breadth away from quitting…Once things got just a little worse, advertisers & users started to quit."
"If we do this correctly…there won’t be a new titanic company to rival #Meta or a platform with…huge numbers like #Facebook. What we’ll get instead is something much bigger: an entirely new infrastructure for our online lives that no company or platform controls."
"In a #fediverse-dominated world, the way to win is not to achieve excellent lock-in & network effects. The only way to win is to build the best product."
The really awful thing about #23andMe and their ilk is that while you can choose not to do your own test, close family members can and probably will (just look at how families typically behave on #Facebook for example) and then your data is quite easily determinable too.
The European Commission today decided it is safe for personal data to be transferred from the European Union to US-based companies, handing a victory to firms like Facebook and Google despite protests from privacy advocates who worry about US government surveillance.
Are you a privacy professional? Would you like to work with companies like Google and Facebook to help them continue to violate our privacy? The W3C has a job for you.
Pays well, by the way (violating human rights always does).
Really sick of these big tech companies.
Absolute parasites.
"You have the right to object to Meta using your personal info to train AI..."
[BUT]
"...We may still process information about you to develop and improve AI at Meta, even if you object or don’t use our Products and services"
#Facebook is turning 20, but there's no reason to celebrate. What many people saw as a promising, innovative network in 2004 has long become a social media behemoth that is hard to control – and has caused a lot of harm in the world.
DW Technology recaps the history of the platform in this article:
The folks at @globalwitness have done some amazing (and shocking!) analysis of content moderation on large platforms:
All those they looked at "except #Facebook and #Instagram, lack human content moderators in some of the EU languages."
And "neither #X nor #Snapchat have a single content moderator who can speak Estonian, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Lithuanian, Maltese, Slovak, Slovenian", and X also has "no moderators for Czech, Danish, Finnish, Romanian, or Swedish." 💥
I know everyone here is aware how much #Twitter has gone the drain since Elon Musk took over, but #Facebook is almost as bad.
As an example, Germany is currently experiencing abnormal warmth for this time of the year - and on every weather-related Facebook page mentioning this, there are hundreds of posters either cheering this on ("Awesome! I like it warm!") or denying that this is an aberration in the first place.
They are out there in force and outnumbering everyone else by at least a 10:1 margin - and thus give the impression that they are representative of public opinion. And with this, they are shaping the opinion of other Facebook users.
So there's the same problem as with Twitter - spend lots of time and effort in countering their claims wherever they appear? Or retreat and leave an entire social media platform to them - in the (possibly vain) hope that we can build better structures here on the #Fediverse that will eventually supplant Facebook and the others?
14 years ago, over on the bad place #Facebook, I ranted about data roaming charges within my fellow European countries. A complaint we've all but forgotten about, thanks to regulation and the shared market.
The notes and accounts from the FediForum in late September suggest that some of "the people who move the fediverse forward", as the conference promotes itself as platforming, are also acutely interested in moving forward the agenda of Meta.
The forum's notes tell the tale. Though a number of topics, including many of genuine benefit, were touched upon, digging through the sessions turns up a path of breadcrumbs that leads straight back to Palo Alto.
Big Tech can transfer Europeans’ data to US in win for Facebook and Google (arstechnica.com)
The European Commission today decided it is safe for personal data to be transferred from the European Union to US-based companies, handing a victory to firms like Facebook and Google despite protests from privacy advocates who worry about US government surveillance.