Thank you. I missed this one yesterday. Banned them for spamming.

This is a brainstorm post, not a peer-reviewed paper on moderating fediverse :) Mods with finite resources cannot compete with automated systems. The signal to noise ratio will keep increasing if a new account can post 10 items immediately they join. The alternative could be restricted signups (signups by invitations, recommendations) even though a low hanging fruit could be temporal throttling for new users. Something got to give in the long run.

I agree on the need for a technical friction on new users ability to post – and especially on the main communities that are federated with other instances.

Good stuff @dessalines@lemmy.ml. Successful upgrade on these shores.

If you look at their funding sources – and therefore the structure they are constrained in – you will notice there is a certain pro-American, anti-other sensibility. Philanthropies, while they look all well meaning (and most evolve into reasonable places for social change), they also serve to ‘launder’ the shady histories of their founders. Chen Zuckerburg Foundation does not sound as ironic promoting privacy compared to if this was done by Facebook.

Funding is a VERY tough position to figure out in human rights work, and while I know people need to be paid even when they are in so called non-profit (my preferred word here would be non-monetary gains, since profits could generally be social benefits, but I digress), I also believe wherever you knowingly take money from models you in strategic ways.

Also, consider this recent post on how social indexology reproduces hegemonic relations at the global stage: https://baraza.africa/post/10070

The article critically examines how the neoliberal ethos has influenced the racialised ranking of countries using indexes, or what I propose to call social indexology (SI). SI refers to the use of quantitative metrics to measure the performance of countries based on selected indicators, often drawn from a pool of Western and neoliberal variables associated with governance, corruption, development and other value-loaded concepts. The article critically examines the methodological, ideological and cultural shortcomings of SI and how it reinforces existing racial stereotypes about the presumed natural differences between ‘advanced’ European societies and ‘backward’ Global South countries. These racialised imageries have continued since the time of Enlightenment, colonialism and slavery and persist even under global neoliberal hegemony today. The use of SI metrics for the purpose of quantified measurement and ranking gives it the appearance of being ‘scientific’ and as such has the implicit ideological power of making the racialised inequality of peoples and countries much more acceptable and natural.

I have a very tough time decoupling these lists from their market-led and sponsored base.

Indeed, it would be quite a whole discourse. When network effects are not gated in a private company, perhaps we could be on to other issues like quality of service, and selling things, not behavior. Things like storage standards, backups, portability etc. But here we are, asking how to make WhatsApp better, and Amazon more diverse.

Ironic how after every public crisis, these centralized platforms emerge stronger and more accepted in the everyday life. Perhaps because the issues that are framed as problematic are not against their existence – like EE2E debate, Cambridge Analytica, 2020/2021 censorship tirade linked to COVID and US Elections.

The other point, Twitter in Nambia :), I think we should not assume it would be better. The point, as I see it, is centralization, not nationalism. A Nambia billionaire may be just as worse as a Silicon Valley billionaire. Individual <> Individual, Individual <> State: The market wants to mediate those relations and I think not all domains need the market. Other mediation strategies like collective ownership at the community level can succeed, given time and good will.

Thank you for the article. Renata (the author) has been very consistent on the asymmetrical global relations of technology we contend with. part of me feels the privacy agenda has created a lot of blindspots in public discourse and issues of technological self determination (at the individual and collective level) have been put on the backburner. Fediverse and its enabling protocols offer both networked value AND reasonable sense of independence. Definitely a small piece of the bigger puzzle but yeah, surveillance discourse without (de)centralization aspects is a major blindspot in popular discourse. E2EE on Facebook apps sounds quite an oxymoron.

See this too:

In 1984, Palestinian American intellectual and Columbia University Professor Edward Said famously argued that Palestinians are denied “permission to narrate”.

More than 30 years later, in 2020, Maha Nassar, a Palestinian American Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, analysed opinion articles published in two daily newspapers – The New York Times and The Washington Post – and two weekly news magazines – The New Republic and The Nation – over a 50-year period, from 1970 to 2019. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she found that “Editorial boards and columnists seem to have been quite consumed with talking about the Palestinians, often in condescending and even racist ways – yet they somehow did not feel the need to hear much from Palestinians themselves.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/13/social-media-companies-are-trying-to-silence-palestinian-voices

The good thing with science is that new evidence leads to change in belief systems. The trouble, in these times, is instead of acknowledging the ‘metastable’ state of what we know, and hence recommendations, there is an assumption of absolute knowledge.

Is this a case of people getting what they deserve? Persistent poor service delivery as a result of blind support to/for ANC?

Welcome to Baraza, and hopefully you will share more about the safaris you have been to or would recommend.

However, by focusing so much on kingdoms to counteract this lie - I think that we have swallowed another, more subtle kind of lie. This is the idea that societies with centralised and hierarchical political power structures - such as monarchies - are more advanced and noble than those with decentralised, horizontal power structures.

This is so important.

As someone who grew up in an African country and spent sometime in North America, I would say there are various reasons one can point to [language, economic conditions, nature of available technology etc]. Most conversations in my growing up were ephemeral + oral. Mobile phones started changing the landscape. Facebook and Messaging apps like Telegram, Viber, and WhatsApp changed a lot of conversations from peer-to-peer to ‘mediated’ ones. I would say that most African-based folks are every social and active in discussions. They are just not in the platforms Westerns frequent, and increasingly so with closed-messaging platforms like WhatsApp groups.

There are quite a few others. On this page, https://baraza.africa/communities, any entry with a single name is primarily local (belongs to this instance) and anything with @ is primarily federated from other instances.

Some others include:

• https://baraza.africa/c/publichealth
• https://baraza.africa/c/identification
• https://baraza.africa/c/music
• https://baraza.africa/c/fishing
• https://baraza.africa/c/podcasts

This instance has been intentionally quiet and as more mod tools mature, we will start reaching out, for example to African-focused subreddits and Twitter spaces. Anything you see here is 100% organic. If you feel there are ways we can improve, please propose it.

I would be happy to have it in a data center somewhere in Africa to reduce the hair-pinning and also give it the fullness of Africa. However, when I checked options (like Angani), it was not easy to set up a VPS. Will look harder next time. Do you have recommendations for reliable VPS hosts?

“I think whistleblowers are punished for doing good in a system that says it needs them but does not act that way,” says Dr Victor Munnik, a research associate at the society, work and politics institute at Wits University, who wrote about Van Eeden in his 2012 PhD thesis.

I suppose you mean this news item: https://mg.co.za/environment/2021-03-27-its-absolutely-terrifying-to-be-a-whistleblower-in-sasol/

100% agree. Too many lives lost or significantly degraded because of corruption. Health Care budgets have been hemorrhaged for decades and now that the pandemic exposed the hospitals, it is clear no corruption is ‘small’. The long term effects are disastrous.

Interesting. I have not checked how the ID component is wired to ensure it is both anonymous BUT verifiable, especially seeing how Kenya Revenue authority kind of lowered account setup anonymity: https://iwhistle.kra.go.ke/welcome/