Do you realize that calling it “Koscher” implies that any billionaire would secretly be a Jew? It’s antisemitic propaganda.
Anyway, I don’t think you got me. I implied that I was plugging peripherals on my Raspberry Pi, working on my university campus with better ergonomics than on a laptop.
A Raspberry Pi. I bought it out of a whim and now I use it as a portable desktop computer, I can use Alpine Linux with my files and my setup on virtually any system that doesn’t whitelist MAC addresses.
Especially handy when your university has contracts with Microsoft so you aren’t supposed to use competitive software, I feel like I’m breaking the law.
It already happened. They sent their emails just in the middle of the Reddit migration. According to Foucault, powerful individuals use psychiatry, psychoanalysis, sociology, and social sciences to “discipline bodies and minds and make them obedient and submissive”. He called this concept “biopower”. For example, my most read blog post (which is French-speaking) details how it works in the scope of digital abuse and I’ve only started it two months ago, with almost 500 views on this one alone; it has 6 references and I’ve found other dispositives of power since.
There’s no reason to give them the benefit of doubt over not conducting experiments on unconsenting subjects precisely to drive us mad and (1) make instances defederate, (2) put large Mastodon instance admins under pressure and encourage them to defect, (3) cap the Reddit migration.
Facebook has probably exerced biopower without even starting its #Threads app. It was only a first strike and we can only expect more to come and damage control, especially by moving to Bonfire Networks ASAP and develop a culture of deescalating conflicts. Kinda difficult with so many abuse survivors here – Mastodon users are first and foremost Twitter “refugees”, and not only does Twitter abuse its users, it also monetizes real-life abuse. (Its addictive character can be used as an illusion of solidarity as part of a “flight” coping mechanism, and how do you max out this illusion? Through moral judgements (gossiping). This especially makes sense in the context of a deliberate scarcity in attention, to put its users in concurrence, also leading to conflictual relationships. And so on.)
You could use Himitsu and sync your passwords across devices with Syncthing, instead of encouraging people to confuse security with pedantry. Cybersecurity measures should be as transparent as possible, and nowadays cumbersome solutions also tend to be insecure. See, for example, pass(1): totally not secure, and also cumbersome to use. Compare that with SSH, developed by the OpenBSD project: it just works, especially by delegating complexity, i.e. by letting users and admins set up another secure channel, via HTTPS, to drop the SSH key.
The OpenBSD project has also developed doas, signify, libtls, scp, which are all no-brainers. Mastering doas is literally one blog post away.
I think having to use a different password for each website but struggling to remember it is determinant to the centralization of the internet, but have an anecdote as well:
Trying to send a Marshall Rosenberg video to a homeless I’ve sent him my health coverage instead. I immediately changed it and nothing else happened. It only took me a few minutes.
I’m concerned about being able to run GNU/Linux on computers with Pluton chips, but I shouldn’t get this hardware at home before the next decade. I’m trying to buy as much second-hand commodities as possible.
Yes, and this will foster large instances, similarly to the Mastodon project, which means a concentration of power, which means easy targets for billionaires.
This is similar to presidential regimes: they can be useful temporarily in a “move fast, break things” motto (see France trying to be perceived as a “winner” of the Second World war after having constitutionally given the full powers to the Pétain Marshall, who then decided to collaborate with Nazis) but they’re much easier to corrupt and they make it much easier to say, privatize every public service than a parliamentary one.
You don’t want power concentration or the billionaires will come for you.
It was a joke :)
The sentence “if you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product” might be accurate, but it would make more sense to me to say that if you’re not the customer, you’re the worker.
Facebook and Twitter run on unpaid labor, mostly made by abuse survivors and especially teenagers. Twitter has been enshittified pretty fast so this has been the case since at least 2012. These aren’t just scam, the long-running relationship between the scammer and his victims imply most components that you would find in a standard definition of abuse, including limiting their ability to conceptualize what’s happening to them, for example with hard or hidden characters limits.
Edit : I’ve forgot to mention that, but Mastodon also optimizes for engagement, I believe that we needed that to get attention from the media and thus to gradually build migration waves. There are good reasons to use Mastodon, but there are also forms of abuse there, total institutions as would say Goffman – defined by their inmates’ isolation within a differentiated society. So there’s a lot of bullshit. If we want to get rid of that, we need people to use software that won’t abuse them, such as https://bonfirenetworks.org.
Oh, definitely not a purchase, but Emacs. My life was a mess because of Twitter and it was anti-Twitter in every way – no characters limit, offline, insanely powerful. While Twitter would prevent me from prioritizing, Org-mode could handle task lists, spreadsheets, text documents, with academic citations support, and could export them to .ics, .odt, .pdf, .md, etc. Ideas are affordances and Emacs has let me focus on these instead of trying to build a picture perfect online profile.
Whereas Twitter isn’t meant for most people’s use cases so it runs a long-term scam called “optimization for engagement” (which is actually abuse by definition), doing everything it can to prevent its victims from taking hindsight on and conceptualizing what’s happening to them, Emacs is letting me channel all of this frustration into reading and writing my master thesis. Which deals with how social media increase social inequalities. Highly recommended.