Keith Whyte @keith@tic-ac.org

After 2 years of negotiations with Microsoft, the German Data Protection Conference issued a damning statement: German schools must not use MS365 due to privacy violations.

Fortunately, Linux, LibreOffice & Tutanota are very good alternatives. 💪🔐

https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/microsoft-office-365-email-alternative

#OpenSource #FOSS #privacy #GDPR

Again, a quick and dirty analysis, but if I have no bugs then the 1% largest #Mastodon instances accounts for 84% of all users.

The top 5% accounts for 97% of all users.

We can say that the system is effectively centralizing around a few instances, and this might be a problem for the overall stability and sustainability.

@tiago @lmrocha @estebanmoro @hirokisayama @PessoaBrain @danielemarinazzo

#MastoStat #ComplexSystems

I wrote a bot that parses the current #Mastodon instances and assigns them to the respective #ASN (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASN).

Interesting is the concentration on a few top ASN. Here for example the 10 most frequent ASNs as Pie Chart (as of 11/25/2022).

❤️ Thanks to @TheKinrar for the nice API for receiving the current mastodon instances.

#networking #network #mastoadmin #mastoadmins #research #bot #instance

it's four years later and everyone is still favoriting this post which must mean that everyone agrees it is good advice and yet nobody is following it

the safest way to use computers is still abstinence

Still breathing | https://www.reddit.com/r/heyokyay/

I remember seeing Halliburton employees hiding their badges at a tech conference because they were ashamed of it. (Not conjecture, by the way, I asked them why and that’s exactly what they told me.) And that’s exactly as it should be. They, at least, had some situational awareness. I can’t say the same thing for folks who proudly work at surveillance capitalists now parading themselves on the fediverse like prized peacocks.

3/n

#surveillanceCapitalism #fediverse #corporateCapture #activism

XLT Alert > 20 Years of Morgenrot Cafe in #btropolis 2nite .... 20 years of a worker-owned oasis cafe, that survived the grim pberg gentrifork ! 🍴 Good reasons to celebrate ! Plus it is in a haus project bought by a miet syndikat strategy, so it's off the immobilien marketplace for the next 99 Years ( at least ). if we live that long haha. ;))))) 🍾🍷#workerowned #kollectiv #anarchism #antifá #kiezkultur

Feeling Rough...

"Mastodon Is 'Antiviral' Design"

My essay on this: https://clivethompson.medium.com/mastodon-is-antiviral-design-42f090ab8d51

Twitter (and most big social media) is laser-focused on creating virality -- i.e. training the joint attention of millions of people on one hot post/meme/story/event happening *right this instant* ... and doing it over and over and over again

Mastodon really isn't -- for lots of rich and interesting reasons

It's why some emigres from Twitter find Mastodon so baffling

This place embraces slowness and useful friction

Juhuu, he cancelado mi infinitum @Telmex! En @JobNetworks me atiende un ser humano amable. Por el contrario, el robot de @Telmex me quiere vender paquetes de videos (solo 99$ el primer mes) que en lugar de contestar preguntas y resolver mis problemas de conexión (3 días sin red).

Out Of Steam

I very recently learned that the term “boycott” comes from someone’s actual name: Charles Boycott. Boycott was an English land agent who tried, in 1880, to collect unpayable rents from Irish peasants on behalf of an English aristocrat landlord. When he failed to collect the rents, he tried evicting the tenants. The Irish Land League responded with a campaign to ignore Boycott’s orders and isolate him socially and economically.

They not only ignored his eviction orders and threw manure at his process servers, but refused to deliver his mail or sell him food.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott

It was pretty effective—the British government eventually had to deploy a thousand soldiers (naturally, because the state works for the propertied class and none more than the 19th century British state) at a cost of some £10,000 to harvest £500 worth of crops. Boycott had to be evacuated by the soldiers, who even had to drive him out, as no locals would agree to drive his carriage out of the region.

Imagine being cancelled so hard that your name becomes permanently associated with getting cancelled.

It's important to know that when certain grifters see the Fediverse, they don't see a better way of building the Internet.

They see unexploited resources -- ready for the taking.