Here's a little project I want to work on, and it involves this little solid state drive in my hand.
Everyone knows what sneakernet is, right? Pop data onto a storage medium of any sort; pass it onto another person? Throw a bunch of tapes and/or disks into a box; drive them down the highway to another location? Easy way of passing forbidden/banned/hot materials around without drawing attention by using the internet?
What I want to do is gather various media... banned books, counterculture zines, punk music (or any kind of music that can be subversive!), underground movies, underground comics, hacker knowledge, the works... gather it all onto this drive, and be able to share and pass it around to others. All without having to worry about a site going down, being inaccessible due to lack of network access, or having to flounder through tons of bookmarks. Just plug it in, copy the goods to another USB stick, or add the books and zines to an eBook reader or whatever, or add that music to a phone.
But there's one thing: I'm seeking some help in gathering materials for this project, so I'm asking my friends here if they can help out with providing materials!
Send me links to stuff you think would be great for this Sneakernet project! I have 500GB to work with currently but will be bumping that to 1 or 2TB soon!
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.
A little exprriment... I wanna see how far this post can go & how many people are on what software. Repost for exposure pls
#Poll #Fedi #Fediverse #Software #Experiment
Sad to see people bringing their ideological blinders and extreme blocking behavior and suggestions over from birdsite.
I see some complete nonsense under the #fediblock hashtag for example. Someone using the dictionary definition of a common word; an instance stating that they are pro privacy and free speech (but do forbid harassment). Things that merely trip up some overeager zealot's taste buds really.
Be very careful with using someone else's block list instead of creating your own!
Public Money, Public Code 🇪🇺
Why is software created using taxpayers’ money not released as Free Software?
We want legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. If it is public money, it should be public code as well.
Code paid by the people should be available to the people!
I have encountered more image descriptions on Mastodon in 24 hours than I have in Twitter in a couple of years. Seriously. I'm not exaggerating.
As a blind person, this means a lot to me. If you read this and you describe your images, thank you so, so, so much on behalf of all of us. If you don't, now you know you'll be helping random Internet strangers make sense of your posts by typing in a few more words than usual.
SUGGESTION
Spend your time here but cross-post your toots FROM here TO the #Birdsite (disable reply ability there)
This will encourage your followers to, well, follow you here 🐘🐘🐘
Pic1 is what it looks like there when I share to #Twitter in my app (Fedilab)
Pic2 is what it looks like if a Twitter user clicks through
#TwitterMigration
since a lot of folks are becoming newly interested in escaping corporate silos and moving to community-based services, are you aware of @matrix?
Matrix is to Slack and Discord, what Mastodon is to Twitter: a decentralized, federated network based on open standards/specs. It also supports full end-to-end encryption, just like Signal, so you can exchange messages privately!
If you find the fediverse interesting/inspiring, I recommend giving matrix a whirl. The quickest way to get started is to head over to https://app.element.io/ and make a (free!) account (although you can also join any number of other home servers, or host your own--they all talk to each other!).
If you _do_ end up checking it out, please do say hi! I'm @zkat:zkat.tech over there. I also manage a "space" (a group of channels, kinda like a Discord server) that you can join by clicking here: https://matrix.to/#/!tKdDSgQTxQzcOuTXqV:matrix.org?via=zkat.tech&via=matrix.org&via=envs.net
I hope this sparks your interest! I'd love to see you over there, too!
Almost entirely removing news from my life was the best choice I made this year.
You can’t avoid the actual big important things, but you can turn off the outrage engine they call news.
People that are on #Mastodon since a few days because of Musk and his antics, writing long essays on how Mastodon is better or worse - don't. Please don't. Your first impression mixed with your hopes and fears are not the objective view you think it is. Give it some time.