A film, thoughts about Epicyon and federation, links

Cinema Sabaya

Went with Y and D to see Cinema Sabaya, which is amazing. I didn’t feel like making the effort to see it and D almost had to drag me along – it would have been insulting as Y had already bought us the tickets. But I was immediately caught up in the film, because it’s simply so well done. A mixed group of Arab and Jewish women take part in a video-photography course. From class to class and exercise to exercise they learn about each other and themselves; where they can relate to one another as sisters and where they cannot agree; where they can support one another and where they shouldn’t press too hard. There are layers on layers of complexity. The film is utterly engaging and unfailingly authentic.

Epicyon

I decided to support Epicyon with a modest monthly donation on Patreon, because I like how this software is developing – and developers, especially those who do not have a big support base, deserve to be supported.

I still find lots of problems there, which will need to be ironed out; however, it’s working for me, and I do enjoy its simplicity. The UI looks better on the phone than on the computer.

That said, there seems to be a worse problem with federation itself. I don’t think this is unique to Epicyon, but may be more prevalent the further you move outside the Mastodon scene. I noticed also with Hubzilla that some posts do not seem to federate well, and I’m seeing it now with Epicyon, because I have duplicated my follow lists from fe.disroot to my epicyon instance. When I examine the timeline I see that my posts on Epicyon rarely reach my account on fe.disroot. I also see that not all of the posts from the people I follow on fe.disroot reach my instance on Epicyon. In other words, I cannot depend upon Epicyon (and probably not on fe.disroot) to see everything that someone has posted.

That’s a problem that does not exist in RSS, for example, which works mostly flawlessly.

My interim conclusion is that (a.) If I really want to know what someone is saying, I need either to subscribe to their RSS feed, or to look directly at their instance. (b.) My instance on Epicyon is still a valuable source – I find many interesting posts there. It’s just that I cannot depend upon it as a single news source.

I have yet to try using RSS feeds on Epicyon itself (which seems to be one of its features). That will be my next experiment.

Israelis in Qatar

It’s funny that Israeli journalists are shocked by the way they are being shunned by the people they try to interview during the World Cup in Doha. And it’s good to see that Palestine still finds lots of support in the Arab world. If not from the leaders, then from the man in the street.

I don’t think that these journalists should be shunned: it would be better to use the opportunity to speak directly to Israelis. A message like “Please tell the people in your country that I will be happy to speak to you once Palestinians can enjoy freedom and dignity in their own country. We Arabs are waiting for you to stop the oppression, the apartheid and the occupation of Palestinian lands. When Israelis learn to treat Palestinians as equals, we will welcome you in our countries as brothers.” Something like that. You can’t just boycott people – you have to adopt a carrot and a stick approach and state the conditions under which the boycott can one day be lifted.

Links

‘Extinction is on the table’: Jaron Lanier warns of tech’s existential threat to humanity | Technology | The Guardian

“If you make a dismal prediction and it comes true, it means you’ve failed to have utility. I don’t claim to have all the answers but I do believe that our survival depends on modifying the internet – to create a structure that is friendlier to human cognition and to the ways people really are.”

‘Publishing is not a crime’: media groups urge US to drop Julian Assange charges | Julian Assange | The Guardian

Israeli Filmmaker’s Critique of ‘The Kashmir Files’ Draws Fierce Backlash – The New York Times

This is marvelous. One guy had the courage to tell the truth*, unlike all the fawning diplomats who were left trying to clean up the mess.

(I haven’t seen the film so I should say his truth.)

Diary

Epicyon

I made a new fedi personal instance using epicyon. It took hours, and wasn’t even my first choice. I rented the new server under the assumption I’d be using Streams. See the post I wrote on epicyon itself here. It’s actually a temptation to continue using epicyon’s blogging feature. But org-static-blog gives me better possibilities for presentation.

I love this system, though I do not know yet how well it works. I’ve used a couple of former instances I made in the fediverse, to follow the new instance, and see how well it managing to send and receive posts, and it seems to be performing all right, though with mixed results. From one connection, I was unable to send a connection request; another said that a connection had yet to be confirmed. But these particular instances exist on the periphery of the fediverse.

There are differences between the presentation of the the different fediverse flavors. Mastodon most closely resembles Twitter and is similarly suitable for fast-paced ongoing conversations. Those become annoying on software with a more spacious presentation, like Epicyon, and tend to result in slightly disjointed conversations: it’s easier to follow those by following their link back to Mastodon. I’ve unfollowed some of the chattiest people, even though they have something interesting to say. I’ll catch up with them elsewhere. And, as with Twitter, I often find an easier way to follow people is to browser-bookmark them and go directly to their personal profiles, checking in just occasionally.

In my timeline I like to see more substantive posts – either directly or through links – and that is what I try to post too. After unfollowing, my timeline is closer to what I want to see.

Shantaram

I rewatched the first episode with D, and since then we managed another couple of episodes. It captures well the spirit of the book – I think Roberts will be very happy with it. One thing that comes across very much is the writer’s emotional warmth and humanism. The characters are all 3-dimensional; even the minor parts.

Delivery heroes

I ordered 2 new computers last week for Einat at the spiritual center and all this week the delivery company has been calling to say they will be arriving. On Thursday they called to say that they would deliver by 8 PM. But nada. Today, I was skeptical that anything would come because Fridays here are a bit like Saturdays elsewhere; it’s a day when fewer people are at work and you don’t expect much to happen: out here in the boondocks, even the post doesn’t come.

But at around 6 PM I got a call to say the delivery man was on his way. I met him outside and all my annoyance with the company dissipated. As often happens in Israel, the delivery van was his ordinary car – with packages crammed into the back seats, the front passenger seat and the trunk. It took him several minutes to locate the package in the dark, with the flashlight of his phone.

He told me the story of why he happened to be arriving at dinner time on a Friday: the previous guy in charge of deliveries to our area had quit earlier in the week, and he was the new guy – just 2 days on the job and struggling to deal with a backlog that was especially big due to Black Friday sales. Looking at the number of remaining packages in his car, he obviously had another couple of hours work, and had been at it since the morning.

How can you give a delivery company a poor rating when the guys themselves are working so hard? – being sent out in their own cars, missing dinner with their families in order to bring well-to-do scumbags their new toys. It’s the same as with other forms of exploitation.

I unloaded the computers at the spiritual center and met Einat there. She was super-happy with the new laptop, a feather-weight Asus Zen Book with a reversible oled touch-screen. She too was pretty busy: a group coming to rent the halls at 8 PM, and tomorrow a special program for the UN’s day for the elimination of violence against women.

TROM

I really like the TROM people.

TROM is a project that aims to showcase in detail the root cause of most of today’s problems and proposes realistic solutions to solve those problems. But it is also about challenging people’s values, explaining in simple language how the world works, and providing free and good quality educational materials/tools for everyone.

I haven’t got into TROM as such yet, but I think there’s lots of potential there. They have a really cool peertube channel. And the people involved are really interesting – Tio, Sasha and Aaron are the ones I’ve encountered. Sasha has a great website of her own, “Big World Small Sasha”.

Potato nose

My cold has lasted over a week, and it’s run through 3 packs of tissues + hankies. The span of time is in excess of my usual winter colds and I think this is partly due to a potato. I was spooning a vegetable soup a few days ago when the onset of a sneeze caused me somehow to inhale. I immediately had a burning sensation at the top of the nose and a slightly painful feeling there for the rest of the evening, but then it passed. Two or three days later I started to develop a bad smell in my nose – a smell similar to that of a potato that is rotting at the bottom of a basket of vegies.

An altered sense of smell sometimes result from nasal infections. But I discovered today that this one was for real, when a sneeze suddenly ejected a large piece of potato skin. It had probably been irritating my nose all the while, and keeping my cold alive in the process.

Reactions to political realities

When G was here a week ago, back from Mumbai, I was asking him how he found the worsening political reality there – which seems almost as bad in India as here, and in quite a similar way. He said that one thing he found is that it changes the way people behave. I asked him if he could give an example. He said that there is a Muslim tailor who has a shop in the apartment building of his wife’s family’s Mumbai home. A Muslim tailor in a building with no other Muslims, in a political climate that is worsening for Muslims. Nowadays, whenever he is there he makes a point of consciously going to sit and spend time with him, because he knows that nobody else will. So what might be a normal human response becomes a political act. That’s how bad it’s getting there.

Here in our village the connections between the different identities are much more normal. The conscious act is to keep alive connections with Palestinians in the West Bank.

Links

Netanyahu to Agree to ‘Soft Annexation’ of West Bank, In Breach of ‘Abraham Accords’ – Palestine Chronicle

It ain’t lookin’ good around here. A “soft” annexation. Also Yuval Noah Harari is saying that Israelis are replacing the vision of the “two state solution” with the vision of a land with three classes of people: Jews with all the rights; Palestinian citizens of Israel with some rights; and other Palestinians with very few rights. Full-on apartheid, in other words. My wife thinks maybe that’s not a bad thing, as eventually it will force change. Unlike the current stasis, which leads nowhere, a civil rights struggle. But 21st century realities are unlike those that preceded them. States are much savvier about quelling or subverting phenomena like nonviolent activism, and Israel is extremely sophisticated about managing reactions in the international press.

Germany Forces a Microsoft 365 Ban Due to Privacy Concerns – Best of Privacy

Europe may yet keep the world sane, at least they have a healthier understanding of the dangers of tech imperialism. They are pushing back in a similar way to which Americans push back against China.

The tathatā of time-wasting

Usually when we choose the title of an article, or a network, or a domain name, we want something that will express the essence, the spirit, the suchness or tathatā of the thing we are naming. Or we are being humorous. There’s a new instance on the Fediverse called the “godpod”, whose owner has chosen a god-avatar for himself and makes bold declarations, such as that it was a mistake of his not to include mastodons in the ark. Well, “godpod” has a certain ring to it. Whereas Mike McGirvin – the author of several social networks and social networking protocols and of attempts to bridge between them and others, was expressing the suchness of his despair when naming his instance “unfediverse”.

When I chose the name for my own domain it was also with a certain irony. Vikshepa is usually a negative trait in Brahmanism and Buddhism. It implies mental confusion and the tendency of the mind to run towards distraction. We sit down for meditation and instantly the mind rebels and runs all over the place: anywhere but where we are attempting to focus it.

It seemed to me when choosing that name that it is much the same with the internet. We sit down at our keyboard intending to write something, or read one thing, and instantly we are swept on the current of some new developing news story. It’s especially true when we look at microblogs. It’s like willful distraction. Or, if we personally get involved in the discussion, it can be much worse. It’s not for nothing that people call Twitter the “hellsite” – though it’s psychologically interesting that we keep going back to it for more.

So, when thinking for a name for a subdomain for a new personal social networking instance, I am thinking along the lines of “antisocial.vikshepa.com”. I know that usually people are choosing something benign like “social.mastodon.org”. But maybe another ironic name to match the vikshepa is better suited? I wouldn’t be the first to use such a title. Maciej Ceglowski called his Pinboard.in site a place for “antisocial bookmarking”, when his main competitors like Delicious, were calling their sites “social bookmarking sites” – with the idea that people would share their bookmarks for a certain subject.

But why a name like “antisocial” for a personal fediverse instance? Because there is something vaguely antisocial about doing one’s own personal microblog server, rather than choosing a mass-user instance with a few hundred thousand soles. The instance’s public timeline, for one thing would be decidedly dull.

Unless one is a celebrity or an authority with something interesting to say on a certain subject, there is also something vaguely antisocial about blogging itself, or at least thrusting one’s blog before the eyeballs of others. Even bestselling authors of novels, for example, can be tedious writers of superfluous essays. I was recently listening to a podcast of an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, who spoke about this. He said that although sometimes novelists bring out an anthology of their essays, he was not planning to do so, because he didn’t believe that essay writing was his forte. Indeed, I remember being disappointed by the weekly Guardian column of the Italian novelist Elena Ferente. It continued for a year or so, before she or the Guardian had had enough. It was, I think, a wise decision to stop, because however good a novelist she proved herself to be a poor columnist. At least, that was my impression.

In any case, as I was saying, there is something impertinent about offering to occupy a reader’s time with matters that are often quite inconsequential – to them. To me it might be important to write, even at length. But there’s no guarantee that others will find it the same. So it’s at least as impertinent as trolling someone on Twitter or its alternatives, or not trolling – just being a bore, an asshole, a time waster.

For me, writing is an exercise in trying to see the world in a new way. It comes across, maybe, in some of the posts, but certainly not in all of them. And even when the exercise works for me, it may not for others.

Changes in perception occur sometimes in a split second. The best composers of tweets are occasionally able to summon up such a change deftly, in one witty line. Twitter, with its original 128 characters was really an art form, like Haiku. Not everyone could tweet well. But some were great at it. There should be a book titled “Tweets that shook the world”.

Mastodon, and Twitter itself, have become such a mess due to their wider range of word limits and long and short utterances, but especially those interminable threads. How many jokes can we hear about Elon Musk, or ironic statements about his shocking behaviour, before they cease to be entertaining? We got the message long ago. It’s turning a medium intended for short, pithy expressions of thought, into the opposite. Reading through the thread is as bad as reading a book of memorable quotes from cover to cover. We were hoping to remember a few of them – but eventually they merge together into a kind of wise-ass drone and we remember nothing. I used to have a book of Hallmark Haiku. It was better to read two or three poems, and then put the book down.

Books, and essays, don’t always achieve their effect within a few syllables. Sometimes a novel requires its thousand pages, and sometimes an essay requires its thousand lines. A friend, on reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance said that it was good but that the writer could have achieved the same effect with a much shorter book. Maybe. But for me that book is ingrained in my memory due to its length, and the gradual unfolding of its events. Mistry has written shorter books, and short stories, but nothing quite compares to Balance in its effect, which is cumulative, building from chapter to chapter.

There are master-essayists like the 19th century writer Ruskin, who were wonderful thanks to the richness and colour of their prose. It isn’t so much what he says, but the way that he says it, that gives value to the essay, and becomes the reason we continue to read those essays today.

Anyway, time to go back to bed. I’ve wasted some time. Hopefully only my own time.

Diary

I’m still suffering from my by cold. We had a couple of guests over the weekend. C H, a Canadian citizen, who is associated with the Thich Nhat Hanh sanghas – a former “boat person” who escaped from Vietnam just after the war. She is a member of a Buddhist practice centre in Ontario, and on her way back to Canada, was about to visit another practice centre in Italy.

Our other visitors were G with his son. G is an Italian married to a Parsi woman from Bombay. They met years ago when on a bus to volunteer at the Freedom Theatre of the late Juliano Mir Khamees, in Jenin. G has been participating in a Feldenkreis course for the last four years, because he finds the therapy helpful for their son, who suffers from CP. They have been living partly in India and partly in Hongkong, but will be moving to the UK in the summer, as his wife has accepted an academic position there. When he was visiting the UK with his son, to find out about schools, he was amazed by the rough treatment they received at the airport – basically they were shut in a room and interrogated. That was because he had made the mistake of not purchasing onward tickets. A warm welcome to post-Brexit Britain.

The situation has been a bit tense in the Palestinian village Hares that we often visit, after a young person from the village went on a rampage in the settlement of Ariel and killed three Israelis, before eventually being shot dead by the army. One immediate result was that other members of the village were denied entry permits to their jobs at the nearby large Israeli industrial park there – where the culprit, Muhammad Souf, had been working. Our friend in Hares, Issa, happens to be a distant relative, with the same family name – and he also has a son called Muhammad. Issa is in a wheel chair for the last 20 years after being shot by an Israeli soldier’s bullet on his doorstep, during the second intifada. He is paralyzed from the waste down. But he was and has continued to be a peace activist. Like-minded Israelis are always welcome in his home and C.H., the Canadian Buddhist mentioned above, had just a few days prior to the current events, facilitated a day of mindfulness for Israelis and Palestinians there.

Hares is for the most part a peaceful village, but no one should be surprised that the desperation felt by the vast majority of Palestinians under military occupation results in occasional desperate acts of violence. In many cases it is simply an “honourable” way to commit suicide – though at terrible cost because the perpetrator knows that punishment will be visited on his entire family; all his loved ones, who in many cases have no idea of his intentions. As of Wednesday, the army was preparing to demolish the family home.

The way in which the violence of the occupation poisons the futures of Palestinian young people can be understood from the video Arna’s Children, a heartbreaking feature-length movie that can be watched on YouTube (I could not get it to load in Invidious). The movie was made by Juliano, mentioned above, about the work of his mother, a Jewish Israeli married to a Palestinian, with young people in Jenin. Juliano himself was assassinated some time afterwards by an unknown assailant.

COP 27

I haven’t been keeping up so well with COP 27, which has been running for two weeks and is being extended due to a deadlock. In the news from today the “good news” is that

Annual electric car sales are on track to exceed 10m in 2022, up more than 60% year on year and more than triple the 3.1m sold in 2020.

More than 13% of new cars sold globally in the first half of 2022 were electric, up from 8.7% in 2021, and 4.3% in 2020.

Electric vehicle use in 2022 will avoid the burning of 1.7m barrels of oil per day – more than the total oil consumption of France or Mexico, both G20 economies.

I think that is good news only if the electricity itself is not coming from fossil fuels. This isn’t happening here.

The article also points out that electric vehicles are cheaper to maintain; and yesterday I read that they require less labour to produce (because less moving parts). So this will mean eventually that buying and owning them will be cheaper. That’s not necessarily good news for the environment though. I think that governments should be prioritizing and subsidizing public transportation.

Looking further down the Guardian’s live-blog for the conference there’s this:

Surprisingly large number of gas deals struck at Egyptian summit.

The announced deals include an agreement between Tanzania and Shell for an LNG export facility, a move by the French oil and gas giant Total to drill in Lebanon, a partnership between Saudi Arabia and Indonesia on oil and gas extraction and a deal spearheaded by the US to provide new renewable energy investment to Egypt, in return for gas exports to Europe.

It seems that over “600 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended, a record…” have attended the conference.

There have similarly been more than a doubling of representatives of Big Agriculture from the previous conference.

Meat, dairy and pesticide producers were all present at the climate conference, which this year had a focus on biodiversity.

Many have complained that there has been little discussion of how meat and dairy production is responsible for a large portion of both emissions and biodiversity degradation.

…the number of delegates linked to such businesses rose from 76 in 2021 to at least 160 this year – double the presence at COP26 in Glasgow. The world’s top five pesticide producers sent 27 representatives, according to the research, which is more than some country delegations.

There were 35 delegates linked to the biggest meat and dairy companies and associated industry lobby groups, which DeSmog worked out is greater than the combined delegations of the Philippines and Haiti, which are among the countries most affected by climate breakdown.

So it’s really amazing: the COPs have become annual opportunities for lobbyists from the oil companies and agrobusiness to do business and make deals that instead of mitigating climate change, help to accelerate it instead.

Pleroma and Streams

Maybe my last post was a little harsh. I modified it slightly afterwards. Anyway, I felt an urge not to be directly on the social network that everyone’s currently talking about. Disroot’s instance runs on Pleroma. (Update: or rather “Soapbox”. Is Soapbox still a front-end for Pleroma or a fork of it? – it isn’t so clear). Anyway, for now, I’m squatting there. Yesterday I also read about Mike McGirvin’s new effort, Streams, about which he says

From day one the question was how to build a federated/decentralised communication stack that provides more control over your privacy, and respects all people and cultures – including those which have a different political bias; while allowing them to all co-exist in the same space (and without killing each other).

and:

The current name of this repository [Streams] implies fluidity. As a brand or product it technically does not exist. This is also intentional.

This implies openness; the openness of the open web, and I like that. Human beings are clannish. That’s always going to be the case. I dislike this quality when we gather around meeting points such as nationhood, religion, party politics, gender… and also social network brands.

The way it plays out is exemplified in the current gathering around Mastodon. Mastodon did not invent the idea of federated social networks. There existed StatusNet and GnuSocial (based on the StatusNet protocol), Friendica and Red Matrix. Then came the ActivityPub protocol and Mastodon (which initially also supported GnuSocial). Since Mastodon had the flavour and the brand identity that people were looking for, it proved to be a greater success. The above narrative leaves out developments such as Diaspora, SSB and other networks that do not easily federate with each other.

Social networking should be something as generic and white-label as email and XMPP. It should be possible to read and participate through various means, such as commercial networks, community websites and phone and desktop applications.

Links

The 1.5C climate target is dead – to prevent total catastrophe, Cop27 must admit it | Bill McGuire | The Guardian

Israel will not cooperate with FBI inquiry into killing of Palestinian American journalist | Israel | The Guardian

Israel is therefore kindly saving the FBI the trouble of conducting an inquiry and confirming what has been obvious from the start. The only question is whether this was an act of an individual soldier or whether he was obeying orders.

Instance blocking; the open web

After so many years in the Fediverse, I thought that I understood it well by now. But looking lately at the landscape, through the portal of Mastodon, I’m not so sure. What I see there is a culture where blocking becomes the solution for whatever you don’t like, particularly instance blocking.

On the conventional social networks, you can block a person. On Mastodon, if you don’t like somebody, you can block the whole instance. While I initially felt some sympathy for blocking instances like Gab, now I’m beginning to see how far this can go. Last week, someone set up an instance to “onboard journalists”, without vetting so well who could join up there. A couple of days later, other instances began blocking that one due to the presence of a few unsavoury members. Today I read that another Mastodon instance decided, in the name of free speech, to allow persons with controversial opinions, so people on other instances are urging to block that instance.

I can imagine that eventually someone will decide that it’s advisable to block all instances that aren’t on some kind of a master-list whose member instances endorse a particular constitution – perhaps one that is similar to that of mastodon.social* (I have only heard about these, but haven’t read them). And why not block instances on the basis of their geographical location while we are at it? Russia? Ukraine? Israel? Palestine? Africa?

Update: What there currently is, is the list maintained at joinmastodon.org that is governed by the criteria of the Mastodon server covenant:

Thus, we are proud to announce the creation of the Mastodon Server Covenant. By highlighting those communities that are high quality and best align with our values, we hope to foster a friendly and better moderated online space. Any server that we link to from joinmastodon.org commits to actively moderating against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

In practice, it’s very demanding for volunteer moderators to perform such moderation, but super easy to block an entire instance.

In an environment of hair trigger instance-blocking, we’re arguably better off in one of the mainstream social networks, where we’re chucked out mainly for egregiously bad behaviour – but our own behaviour, not that of our neighbours or due to our affiliation with some group – say, the US Republican Party.

Although it’s very tempting to filter out all the voices that we don’t want to hear, the consequence is that we live in an ever more intolerant society.

I’m not going to change the world, but I’m in favour of a return to the open web, in combination with RSS news feeds and email newsletters. The need to set up a personal site, or to be published to an existing journal sets a high bar, but maybe that’s a good thing. There are many problems yet to solve, such as discovery, comment spam, payment issues, government censorship, etc. but there are also advantages: returning control and responsibility to the individual; independence from any kind of control or banishment by corporations, billionaires, groups, cliques, etc.

What the Indieweb people propose is, as always, a pragmatic and favourable compromise: publish first to our own site, and then to everywhere else: we don’t have to be in love with the networks we use in order to benefit from their reach. So we publish where we can and if we get blocked we get blocked.

Because I happen to be not-so-interested in spreading my germs far and wide, I try to keep my site out of the search engines and don’t publish to Facebook and Twitter, hardly even to the Fediverse. So I probably won’t take that advice.

Earl Grey tea

I was making Earl Grey with the quantity needed for milk tea, so it came out too bitter. Just a flat teaspoon, then three or four minutes brewing time, is enough. I still add half a teaspoon of sugar. But I’m happy to get rid of the milk (anyway it’s always milk substitute in our case).

Mastodon

Is the fediverse about to get Fryed? (Or, “Why every toot is also a potential denial of service attack”) – Aral Balkan

” decentralisation begins at decentring yourself”

A good article, though it doesn’t touch on the fact that concentrating so much of Mastodon in the servers of Masto.host, which hosts Balkan’s (and this) instance, is also a danger to the decentralization of the Fediverse.

It also doesn’t mention the energy that all this distribution must require. This could be an issue with decentralization, as it is with blockchain technology (though to a much lesser extent).

While it is evident that part of the problem is a result of the way the protocols work and interact with servers, it doesn’t suggest a solution.

From the perspective of resource and energy usage, I have no doubt that the old methods of blogging + RSS news feed make more sense, though I tend to be more attentive to my Fediverse timeline than to my newsfeed subscriptions.

Exodus continues at Twitter as Elon Musk hints at possible bankruptcy | Twitter | The Guardian

“Messages seeking comment were left with Twitter, but it is unlikely someone will respond as the communications department has been laid off.”

Energy use of a home server vs paying for a VPS

A person in my time-line had tried to estimate the cost of running a Raspberry server from his home. It came out to something like €1.10 per month. Running a server from an old laptop, as I was doing till recently, must cost quite a bit more; maybe as much as the VPS I now pay for.

Since some hosting companies use renewable energy, maybe it makes greater sense to use one of those. But there too there is a calculation involved. For example, if the VPS server with the green energy is at a location that is geographically distant from oneself or one’s potential audience, is it more energy efficient to use such a server? Does it depend upon whether CDNs are employed by the hosting company?

At a certain level, without lots of research, the way the internet works and its environmental costs are still very opaque for most of us.

Kerala

Indian police investigating film that portrays Kerala as Islamic terrorism hub | India | The Guardian

There’s apparently zero evidence. But it’s not surprising that the film industry would seek to ride the wave of right-wing populism sweeping the country.

Freedom of speech

Was reading about what happened when Stephen Fry offended Poland, and it made me think that there’s an advantage to being a nobody – with few followers you can be yourself and say whatever you want, at least more so than when you are a celebrity figure.

“Telegram has launched the ability to buy and sell short recognizable @ usernames for personal accounts, public groups and channels.” I need to get rid of this centralized service, but a messaging platform, even more than a social networking service, depends upon obtaining a critical mass of people that use it. Some of my contacts don’t even have Telegram or, if they do, use it only in order to send messages. They can’t be depended upon to see mine.

Diary; thoughts of the day

Spent some time reading through my fediverse stream and catching up on various kinds of terminology, gender relationships, human relationships… Sometimes it seems like I’ve been hiding in a cave all these years… words like swerf and terf were new to me, and what’s harder, understanding them often requires going more deeply into what people say about them, and then trying to make an evaluation. Then I learned, also from my stream, about Glenn Greenwald’s mutual embrace with right-wing media, and the acrimony between him and Micah lee and others. Again, hiding in a cave.

But that’s exactly why I make the effort to follow alternative social media, in order to become familiar with ideas, attitudes and happenings that I might not pick up in my normal reading of the news, where I often read just the main stories or those in my special areas of interest.

Meanwhile, even following just 45 people from my Mastodon account, I’m growing weary of all the back-and-forth resulting from the minor exodus from Twitter and the major ripple it’s causing for all the Mastodon people.

Part of my weariness comes from the fact that I don’t relate to Mastodon as a well-loved community. For me, it’s mainly a source of information. On Hubzilla there was a greater sense of community, actually. Maybe I should go back there, because although theoretically it’s all one Fediverse, some of those I knew on Hubzilla don’t interact much with the Mastodon crowd; in fact don’t particularly appreciate Mastodon at all. And since ActivityPub is just one of the protocols that Hubzilla can interact with, there isn’t the conception that ActivityPub itself constitutes the Fediverse. I like that.

Anyway, getting back to those gender words, I think I choose to be liberal… and catholic (in its older definition): two much-maligned terms. I don’t really care how people choose to self-identify. Their gender-identity is their own business; their sexuality, or lack of it, is their own concern too. From one of the articles I read, I liked one of the definitions for “queer”, i.e. we are are all “queer” – in that, to a greater or a lesser extent, our gender-identity and sexual responses are all located at different places on various spectrums, such as kind, quality, degree, taste, quantity, etc. and as such we are all unique: based partly on our genes, partly on our conditioning.

We can ask questions, as some radical feminists apparently do, about why a trans person might mimic and reinforce ingrained feminine or masculine stereotypes. We can wonder, for example, how men often adopt sexual behaviour that demeans women (or vice versa). Maybe we should add a subclause that “our sexuality is our own business – but only as long as doesn’t cause harm“?

But it’s hard to make such categorical statements about an area where we are all hurting each other constantly, either physically, emotionally or psychologically. Who can actually say that they have never hurt another person as a result of a love relationship? All we can do is expand our understanding, tolerance and compassion. Also our vigilance: because pedophiles, rapists and other abusers do still need to be locked up or rehabilitated – that’s for everyone’s safety.

Returning to the question of those ornery journalists; it’s like with other professions. There are ideals, and then there are various forms of pollution like money and ego, pride and prestige. It seems that all you need to do to create poison is to add a billionaire or two to the mixture. That’s sure to wake up all the sleeping demons. The Midas touch.

Carbon Cola

At the office, I saw Avigail was back at her desk.

“You were on vacation – did you have a good time?”

“Sure, how else could it be – Thailand!”

“No idea. I’ve never been; For me it’s either Europe or India.”

“There were lots of Indians there in Thailand – they had some kind of a holiday I think.”

“That would be Diwali; but I didn’t know Thailand was popular with Indians.”

“Well it’s nearby for them after all.”

“That’s true.”

The “Muskopalypse”

Yesterday was the first time I thought that the Fediverse might actually become mainstream. I watched as Greta Thunberg came on board, and saw her follower count go up to around 15,000 within the space of a few hours. On the other hand, she has 5,000,000 followers on Twitter, so I realized that I should calm down. Numbers are hard. Will the sea rise 30 meters by the end of the century or 2 meters over the space of the next 5,000 years? Will the Twitter permafrost really melt and mastodon clones roam the earth? I’ll leave it to the experts. Anyway, in my excitement, I wrote the following.

I think we will all want to thank Elon Musk, whatever we think about him, for what he has accomplished.

Masses of people are finally beginning to turn their back on one of the big commercial social networks while simultaneously joining a non-commercial federated one. I really hope that Mastodon and ActivityPub can hold together through this crush of new users and not piss them off too much, because the world really does need a safe, viable protocol for social media connection, and it also needs social media to be interoperable – regardless of whether we prefer commercial or non-commercial variants.

If a critical mass join Mastodon, and they and are happy with it, three things may eventually happen.

First, it could bring a chain reaction, causing people to discover the other ActivityPub flavours that offer alternatives to Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, etc – and possibly new ones that compete with other commercial social media providers.

Second, when, as we see already beginning to happen, the European Union becomes invested in the Fediverse, it may begin to legislate for interoperability, forcing the commercial social networks to open their walled gardens and allowing, for example, people on Mastodon to follow people on Twitter or Facebook and for people on Twitter to follow people on Facebook or the fediverse, all without leaving their chosen social media provider.

Third, the same rules regarding the limits of “free speech” will be enforced across the Fediverse, requiring Fediverse instance operators to moderate content. This is a huge problem because operators of large instances do not have the means to employ workers to moderate content. As far as I know, the Fediverse lacks even the ability to conduct AI assisted moderation.

Small instances have less of a problem because they are easier to moderate. Governments may not even enforce their laws over small instances with few users. (If so, there’s the question of the break-off point between “small” and “large” – a few hundred users?, a few thousand?, a million? Twitter has over 200 million active users, by comparison with which the whole of Mastodon is tiny.)

In any case, the necessity to moderate and block content could have implications for both large and small instances.

First, moderation is reported to be difficult by the maintainers of Mastodon’s larger instances. As instances grow, and especially if they need to comply with state-imposed moderation rules, they would need to employ workers to moderate content. This cost would need to be covered – probably by user subscriptions, though possibly (cringe) by the introduction of ads.

Second, we could imagine a scenario similar to what has happened with email: large instances could block small instances by default. With email, the big email servers like Gmail routinely discriminate against small and independent email servers in order to prevent the proliferation of spam.

With the Fediverse, it could happen that large instances would eventually block small instances by default, due to the headache and expense of moderation.

The Fediverse is still taking its first baby steps. We have no idea how it will be as a teenager or as an adult.

What is Mastodon, the social network users are leaving Twitter for? Everything you need to know | Twitter | The Guardian

Saturday

On Saturday morning I fixed a few broken items with epoxy glue, but not a pair of shoes, whose sole has become partly detached. From watching a couple of YouTube videos, it looks like it will be better to buy a specialized glue for that – one that’s waterproof and flexible.

In the afternoon I met with a German group, who have been touring NGOs and civil rights groups in the country. They were very interested and asked lots of questions about the village.

In the evening I continued to watch some more video interviews with Gregory David Roberts. Some of them were filmed a few years ago – like the CNN story – he toured around Mumbai with the reporter, visiting some of the places featured in the novel – including the Colaba Slum, where his character – and Roberts – had lived. He says in the interview that this particular slum, near the “World Trade Center” would soon be cleared and the residents relocated. That didn’t happen, however the slum shown in the TV series based Shantaram was not filmed there on location. It was instead filmed near Bangkok, where “Shantaram’s crew rebuilt a shantytown, complete with a river running through the middle.” I guess it’s a lot easier to find money to create a fake slum than to re-house the residents of a real one.

Today’s links

Ethiopian civil war: parties agree on end to hostilities | Ethiopia | The Guardian

Another war you never heard of may be over.

Rishi Sunak scraps plans to move embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem | Foreign policy | The Guardian

US group campaigning against Australia’s reversal of recognition of West Jerusalem as Israeli capital | Australian politics | The Guardian

Simple proposal to foreign governments: offer to move your embassy from Tel Aviv to West Jerusalem but condition that upon building a parallel embassy for Palestine in East Jerusalem.

Big Tech’s Algorithms Are Built With Invisible Labor

“Artificial artificial intelligence.”

UN chief warns ‘we will be doomed’ without historic climate pact | Cop27 | The Guardian

Doomsayer.

Revealed: The Former Israeli Spies Working in Top Jobs at Google, Facebook and Microsoft

Only the best and the brightest.