Jaap Stronks @jaapstronks@wings.dev

@jaapstronks I never understood why/how work hours reduction has disappeared from the (radical) left agenda - especially in times of climate crisis (which urges for economic degrowth) this strikes me as a deeply important eco-socialist demand.

Mijn laatste stuk is hier te lezen https://www.versbeton.nl/2022/11/onleefbaar-rotterdam-de-boetehoofdstad-van-nederland/

Het nieuws hier
https://nos.nl/artikel/2451845-rotterdam-schrijft-meeste-gemeentelijke-boetes-uit-wildplassen-bovenaan

De video hier
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ylfN_jfDG0

Succes!

How the recent influx of users to the #fediverse – a space with an anarchist foundation, designed “to elude monopolistic capture” – is decidedly exciting yet problematic, by @hugh.

“The tools, protocols and culture of the fediverse were built by trans and queer feminists. Those people had already started to feel sidelined from their own project when people like me started turning up a few year ago.”

A mandatory read:

https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/

The collapse of Twitter is a system breakdown. Mastodon and the fediverse represent something different: _system change_. From for-profit "Big Tech" to nonprofit, open source, community-owned public spaces.

System change is always harder than you think. It always incurs short-term costs, with hoped for long-term benefits.

The next few weeks will be really tough for the fediverse. Stick around, vibe with it, and you just might help us put a huge part of the web back in community hands. <3

With #Twitter's change in ownership last week, I'm probably in the clear to talk about the most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter.

By Steve Krenzel, former Twitter engineer

🧵
To set the stage, this was the 2015-2016 era. @dickc was just ousted, though he was wonderful and made us feel like family. came in as part-time CEO. Twitter had been near death for a while and was desperately trying to find a buyer. SFacebook and #Google both refused.
Most people don't really appreciate how close Twitter was to shutting down. The 2016 election was the only thing that saved them and made them relevant again (to the detriment of us all). But I digress...
I worked as a software engineer on a team with a charter to make Twitter work better for people in emerging markets (Brazil, India, Nigeria, etc...). This meant a lot of mobile work. And was mostly non-visual stuff - reducing bandwidth, memory usage, battery consumption.
Oh and app size... we fought tooth and nail to keep the app under 10MB. FB had the money to zero-rate for people in India to d/l a 100MB app, but we did not. We finally lost the 10MB battle when Twitter Video launched (iirc). After that, all discipline around app size was lost.
One of the first areas I worked on was improving the way our mobile apps uploaded logs. Twitter, like most mobile apps, logs *everything* users do – every swipe, tap, edit, delay, etc… – for debugging, metrics, and experiments.

The size of logs adds up quickly.
In the app, HTTP responses were compressed, but requests weren't. Logs are highly compressible, so I wired up support to gzip HTTP requests, and tweaked our log ingestion server to handle these.

(That reduced mobile bandwidth consumption by ~40% iirc. It was absurd.)
So I became known as the mobile logs guy. And that sets the stage for why I was pulled into a Sales conversation. Twitter was on its death bed and was desperate for money. A large telco wanted to pay us to log signal strength data in N. America and send it to them.
My plan was to aggregate signal strength by carrier / by location. I worked with Data Science to find a granularity – minimum area size and minimum distinct users per area – that would preserve anonymity even when combined with other sources of data (differential privacy).
When we sent this data to the telco they said the data was useless. They switched their request and said they want to be able to tell how many of our users are entering their competitors’ stores.

A bit sketchier, but maybe workable in a #privacy respecting way?
We ran an alternative by the telco. They didn’t like it and were frustrated. So was Sales. I was asked to go to telco’s HQ and figure out exactly what they want.

The subsequent request was absurd.
I wound up meeting with a Director who came in huffing and puffing.

The Director said “We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.”
I responded with some variant of “No fucking way”.

There was no universe where I was going to help sell granular identifiable user #location #data.

This led to more internal meetings. Legal said the request was fine – none of it violated the user ToS.
Normally they might find another engineer to do this work, but my whole team was aligned with the privacy concerns. Twitter had also just done layoffs (aside: time is a flat circle), so there were no spare engineers around.
My team wasn’t touched by layoffs, but half of them had quit anyway. Twitter was having a mass exodus.

I had done what I could, but Twitter was no longer a place to do good work. I decided to join the exodus and would pull any levers to kill this on my way out.
One random anecdote:

In the middle of this, I had gotten a new manager who, in a retention attempt I’ll never forget, said “If we filled a dump truck with money and dumped it on you, would you stay and build this?”

I wasn’t really sure how to respond to that… but no dice.
My last email written at Twitter was to Jack. To his credit, he responded quickly with something to the effect of “Let me look into that and make sure there isn’t a misunderstanding. It doesn’t seem right. We wouldn’t want to do that.”

It was in his hands now.
As far as I know, the project actually got canned. Jack genuinely didn’t like it.

I don’t know if this mindset will hold true with the new owner of Twitter though. I would assume #Elon will do far worse things with the data.
And, for the any employees still at Twitter, don’t underestimate the power of a pocket veto.

Sometimes it doesn’t work out, or you have to escalate and risk it back firing, but a good pocket veto is a tool to learn to wield well.

A year ago my book "Privacy Is Hard and Seven Other Myths. Achieving Privacy through Careful Design" appeared. It is still one of the few books discussing *how* to protect privacy (among the many books that discuss *why* privacy must be protected). See

https://xot.nl/privacy-is-hard/

If you read it, I would love to hear your feedback.

Welcome to my Mastodon home. Get a drink and flop down on one of the beanbags as we watch Elon's controlled demolition of Twitter on the big screen.

Some people think Mastodon is too weird to become popular:

I joined Twitter in 2008. We had to put a "d" in front of a tweet to convert it to a direct message and every other day you had some embarrassing private moments exposed because someone forgot about the “d”. Hashtags were just a community hack, introduced by Chris Messina to somehow tag content. Search? Hah, you wish! Tweets via SMS were supposed to be a thing. Oh, and the daily meet and greet with the failwhale. Totally not weird.

This one is for all the new people on #Mastodon: did you know that the #fediverse has more than just a microblogging replacement? And that they can all interoperate with your Mastodon account?

Check them out!

Facebook replacement: Friendica
Instagram replacement: Pixelfed
YouTube replacement: PeerTube
Spotify replacement: Funkwhale
MeetUp replacement: Mobilizon
Reddit replacement: Lemmy
Podcasting replacement: Castopod
GoodReads replacement: BookWyrm

Semispicy take: David Bowie was *never* cool. What he *was*, was an extremely talented arbitrageur of material from different sub- or non-Western- cultures, with exquisite antennae. He built a second-hand career on the talent, expression and experience of the actual originators, be they racialized sexual minorities, lumpen degenerates like Iggy, or “exotic” Others, knit it all together with cringe references (“hey droogie,” etc. etc.) and successfully vended it to the masses as the real thing.

A fun and beautiful find from our archive; Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld, designs for swimming caps. ⁠🏊️⁠
Collection of Het Nieuwe Instituut, Wijdeveld Archive. ⁠
⁠
Images by Johannes Schwartz.

👇WORKSHOP DETAILS 👇

(please booooost!)

🗓 This SUNDAY November 13th at 11am ET we're presenting our workshop "Alternative Social Media for Anarchists - An Anarchist Introduction to the Fediverse"

The workshop is ONLINE on zoom, as part of the Boston Anarchist Bookfair: https://bostonanarchistbookfair.org/2022-workshops/

🤓 First we will explain what the Fediverse is, how it works, and why anarchists should embrace it.

Then we will invite participants to register for an account at an instance and do a guided walkthrough/tutorial of how to use Mastodon! 🐘🤔

Please BOOST! 🗣 and share far and wide both on and off Fedi. This will be a great way for new or curious users to understand the Fediverse and how to get started on here! It will be a very nice and safe hand holding workshop! If you just got here and are lost and confused, come! And bring a friend who is curious!

✅ You need to register in advance with the bookfair to get a link to the zoom on Sunday. Registration link: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0pdeqtpj4iH9yKSngS_fb5eklLt6SMj8gx

👉 (please do not reply complaining about how the workshop is on zoom! The Boston Anarchist Bookfair is the host, and so we are beholden to their choice of platform. They are running their bookfair as they see fit to reach and accommodate their audience. We already know why zoom is evil. Don't bother @ ing us to tell us. We will happily give the workshop again on Jitsi or another platform if another org would like to host and promote it, so just get in touch!)

lees dit

Ik heb eigenlijk allemaal serieuze dingen te doen maar ik heb nu een account voor @versbeton opgezet en roep nu de hele tijd door de redactie: Onze eerste toot! Wow volgers! We hebben al 5 boosts!

Seriously though, fedi was *built* by furries, trans and queer folk, disabled neurodivergent people.

This is *the reason* the culture here is what it is. Why CWs are a thing. Why image descriptions are a thing. Why privacy matters here. Why moderation tools not only exist, but are usable — and used.

If you had joined and asked yourself "wow, how come this place is so chill and kinda… nice?" — that's thanks to all the nice people from communities some people call "weird".

So #KeepFediWeird.

Can European public broadcasters please setup instances and share all their media out into the fediverse?

The main conversation on Twitter is news and tv anyway, so let’s get that going here in a self-owned, journalistically sound, self-hosted way.