I can't even boost my posts from my other account here any more =/
Please follow me at @panos@catodon.social if you haven't, thanks!

This is the official #Catodon logo, made by the amazing @safespace@electricrequiem.com. Contact her if you're in need of a great graphics designer (or if you're in Athens and want a tattoo!). Meow!

Alright, let me quote this to say a few more things! I'm super excited about it, this is the new platform I've been telling you about, which we're working on in cooperation with @namekuji@its.waah.day. We'll be doing some things a little differently there, but maybe I should save some of that for later, once we open registrations and you can see for yourselves what we're cooking. Can't say much more right now, but any questions are welcome.

PS: I will also probably be using @panos@catodon.social from now on - sadly some technical issues are currently making this server hard to use, so please follow me there.

RE: https://catodon.social/notes/9mtgh9jbns4q1p7f

I read a lot of posts on here from what might be called capitalist reformers. They admit that actually existing capitalism has serious problems but propose to solve them by modifying various aspects. Maybe we need more regulation, or a better social safety net, or some such things. I saw one recently who thinks corporate shareholders are the root of all capitalist evil and wants to reinvent corporations to eliminate them.

Setting aside the serious issue that none of these theorists seem to understand what capitalism actually is, two other things they have in common are an unbelievable naivete about the mechanics of political change and a complete inability to see the unspeakable violence required on a daily basis to maintain capitalism.

Listen to this brilliant idea! Everyone's been thinking about things wrong since capitalism started! We all want to do the right thing but powerful people are just confused about what it is! All we have to do is convince enough people of the right way to do capitalism and blammo! Utopia!

For the sake of argument assume that all these capitalist reform ideas are actually reasonable. It doesn't matter. If you have any practical experience with the American legislative process at any level you'll know that good ideas have fuck-all to do with which laws are enacted. Legislators legislate to promote the needs of the powerful people whose interests they represent. There are people in every jurisdiction who can get custom-made laws written and enacted within weeks. For these oligarchs, and I don't use the word metaphorically, bespoke legislation is a frictionless part of their daily business. The quality of the ideas behind it are less than irrelevant. There are no ideas behind it. This is how laws are made in America.

Now think about the laws these oligarchs enact. They don't sit around thinking about what ordinary people want or need. They don't worry about implementing abstractly beneficial reforms of capitalism or anything else for that matter. They increase police powers. They make police weaponry more deadly. They continually ramp up oppression and exploitation. They build more prisons and criminalize more and more normal human activities to keep them full. Think about the laws they could very easily enact but they don't. Universal health care, free housing, free food, free education, public transportation, environmental protection. The list of non-existent good laws is endless. Legislators do whatever the hell oligarchs tell them to do and this is what gets done.

And oligarchs have to use their power this way. They aren't fooling around trying to improve anyone's lives but their own. Without violent control of everyone else, without police to implement it, capitalism would collapse immediately. Why would anyone pay landlords or let bosses keep most of the money they earn without police violence forcing them to do it? With public housing, free food, free medical care, why would anyone choose to work for a boss? How would the bosses make money if people had the realistic choice not to work for them?

So, dear capitalist reformers, even if your brilliant ideas would really do what you think they'd do, so what? Look at the people you're asking to implement them, look at the violence they choose every day, the violence they must to choose if their entire way of life isn't to collapse. These vampires are the people you hope to convince to change everything just because it's a good idea. Maybe your theories really are the right thing to do, maybe your ideas really are good, but it doesn't matter. No one with the power to do things within the system wants to do the right thing. They want to drink your blood and have the cops kill you if you fight back. Until your brilliant ideas take that evident fact into account I for one don't see any reason to take them seriously

#Capitalism #Anarchism #Anarchy

Soon we'll be revealing the name of a new #fediverse platform based on #firefish with @namekuji@its.waah.day! Stay tuned, we're setting things up!

#Fedi is this place with the #anticapitalist weirdos. Can't not love it.

I have some very exciting news to share - or at least they are exciting to me! Drumroll... we've started working with @namekuji@its.waah.day on a new #fediverse project! It will be based on #firefish but the idea is not to create an "improved firefish" (or #misskey), but more or less a new platform. We wanna get creative with it! That's all I can say at this point - we'll have more info to share soon. I can tell you one thing: This will be an amazing ride!

Democrats be like "Well Biden might be killing children in Gaza but at least he's not a fascist like Trump".

Alrighty then 🙄

@PrivateCake what they say =)
percentage of day, month and year that has passed

@getimiskon@fedi.getimiskon.xyz έχουν πολλά μηχανήματα, δεν επηρεάζεται απαραίτητα όλο το datacenter.

Update on our greek fedi server situation: We are sadly still offline since Monday, and we weren't even given an estimation from Contabo as to when we'll be back online. We are obviously looking into alternative hosts, but we need to get back online first.

Καλημέρα, μικρή ενημέρωση για το Electric Requiem: Η εταιρεία στην οποία έχουμε τον server, η Contabo, μας έχει offline από προχτές λόγω (δικών τους) τεχνικών προβλημάτων και δεν έχουμε καν ενημέρωση για το πότε υπολογίζουν να τα διορθώσουν. Κοιτάμε εναλλακτικές για να μεταφέρουμε τον server, αλλά αυτή τη στιγμή δεν μπορούμε να κάνουμε τίποτα, αν δεν μας επαναφέρει πρώτα η Contabo. Συγνώμη για όλο αυτό, αυτή τη στιγμή δυστυχώς δεν μπορούμε να κάνουμε τίποτα εκτός από υπομονή.

A message for my greek friends&followers: Our server, Electric Requiem, has been offline since yesterday evening due to technical problems of our hosting service, Contabo. Extremely sorry for the inconvenience but it's out of our control. We'll be back online as soon as they fix it.

Although the account suspension of palestinian news site #Mondoweiss from mastodon.social has been lifted, this unavoidably brings us back to the discussion about Mastodon's decision to suggest its own server for new registrations on its app. What happened to Mondoweiss (to be banned from a server with over 1.6M members - so a large slice of total #fediverse members) is a reminder of how problematic centralization can be. The intention might have been to offer easier onboarding, but even if the goal was to not ask users to choose for a server, maybe they could at least have gone for example with "Random server" by default, and choose out of a list of trusted and long lasting servers. What they are doing now is practically use the software's success to make one privately owned server disproportionately bigger than thousands of servers combined, controlling a significant percentage of fediverse users.

I'm not questioning #Mastodon's intentions, but in practice this is what happens, as a factual result. I can't help but point out that this can be problematic. Power and control over users should be minimized in the fediverse - this is one of the main things that we should be trying to avoid by being here, and it's a matter of numbers as well. Support smaller servers. Move to smaller servers (with a good reputation, if possible). Host your own server, if you know how to, or sign up for a managed hosting solution, if you can afford it. We should be spread out, for this to work as well as it should.

@pfefferle@mastodon.social @mattwiebe@mastodon.social Great news! Cheers to everyone who worked on this! ​:blobbonelove:​

I have some strong feelings about the social web (aka “the fediverse”) right now. I don’t aways communicate them well, because they feel so essential to me, which can be frustrating for my friends, colleagues and allies. I want to set out some steps for my reasoning.

• I think the social web is very important. Distributing the locus of control on social computing from monolithic services to individuals, families, clubs, civic groups, universities, coops, and a competitive market is important for everyone.
• We are at the cusp of exponential growth of the social web. The current time is like no other we’ve ever had.
• We get exponential growth based on having one protocol, not a half dozen. I think Blue Sky, Nostr, and others are a threat to ActivityPub breaking out and becoming ubiquitous. There can’t be multiple winners. I often reference Metcalfe’s Law in this regard; one big connected internetwork is much better than 3 or 4 disconnected ones.
• ActivityPub has a claim to being The Social Network Protocol, because it was standardized by the W3C. Protocols are not a meritocracy; it’s not like the best protocols always win. Usually, just the opposite. Protocols with a claim to official sanction, and wide adoption, win.
• Keeping a clean line of legitimacy for AP, and a good relationship with the W3C, is key. The SocialCG is the designated steward of the spec. People know to come to the CG to participate in the spec. That’s good. We want that to keep happening.
• Any proposals that talk about taking AP away from the CG, or forking it, or making experimental versions, are really, really bad for the fediverse. There is no improvement you could make to ActivityPub that justifies breaking backwards compatibility, undercutting the protocol’s legitimacy, and splitting the network. Everything needs to be incremental, backwards compatible, W3C- and SocialCG-led, and support rather than inhibit growth.

A lot of people don’t agree with me on these. They may think that it’s great to have lots of protocols competing, in the same way it’s great to have lots of vendors competing in a market; that competition makes protocols better. But that’s not the case; standards aren’t about competition. They’re about cooperation. A compatible, connected internetwork makes all implementations more popular and better used; see the aforementioned Metcalfe’s Law. We need to agree on standards, and compete on implementations.

Some people also think that changing the way a Collection is represented in ActivityPub will make the whole thing “better” because if you are reading the JSON-LD on the wire, it will be more elegant and conceptually sound. This is a bad definition of “better”. “Better” for ActivityPub should mean, it helps more people connect to more other people they care about. And sometimes that means using the existing, well-implemented methods, even if they’re not as beautiful to you when you’re writing code as your own ideas are.

Others think that there’s still time for incompatible changes to AP — hitting the big “reset” button and getting the dozens of implementations on the fediverse today to rewrite their federation code to reject Note objects and only accept Microblog ones, or something similar. There is not, in fact, time for that.

Finally, some people think that a casual specification, without a standards organisation behind it, will be more responsive to developers and users. I definitely think there is room to develop experimental protocols on top of AP, but we have an extension mechanism for that. We can have a stable, dependable core, and have cool, new, fast-moving extensions. They’re not incompatible.

I want to see ActivityPub win, so we can have a great social web. I’m going to keep trying to make AP, the SocialCG, and the social web stable, dependable, and iteratively developing. I hope others agree and will do the same.

https://evanp.me/2023/10/06/activitypub-the-socialcg-and-the-social-web/

@ArtBear I've been vegetarian for 15 years, vegan for a couple of months now, for ethical reasons. I understand that the impact of eating meat on the climate is also significant, but I am also kinda triggered when the blame for the climate crisis is passed on to the lower classes (I don't mean that this is what you're doing, just taking the opportunity to express this). No matter what we do as individuals will save the climate, if governments and huge companies don't change their policies. After all, a vegan diet is usually more expensive, so it's not affordable for everyone. So it's kind of a victim blaming situation if we start thinking that the climate is destroyed because the lower classes (the vast majority of global population) didn't care/spend enough to adopt to a more environment-friendly diet. The chase for profit is what destroys the climate. Capitalism is not a viable system, and the climate crisis shows that in the most obvious way. I hope we can see that clearly and decide to do something about it before it's too late (if it isn't already).
All that said, go vegan anyway =)

Good to be back on firefish.social! Still getting some errors now and then, but I hope things will smooth out soon. Good morning from Athens! 🥱

That sound you hear is the fediverse expanding!

"ActivityPub 1.0.0 for WordPress has been released allowing WordPress blogs to be followed by others on apps like Mastodon and others in the fediverse and then receive replies back as comments on their own sites."

https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/14/wordpress-blogs-can-now-be-followed-in-the-fediverse-including-mastodon/

Download here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

/by @Sarahp s/o @pfefferle.wordpress.com @pfefferle #ActivityPub #DiSo

@Miriamm@mastodon.social depends on what you think their job is. Their job in a capitalist society is to keep the capitalist production running and protect the rich and their interests. They're doing their job just fine.

Just watched "This world can't tear me down", a short italian animation series by Zerocalcare, who also did "Tear along the dotted line" on netflix a couple of years ago. Highy recommend both of them!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27440006/