I recently discovered J.L. Gatewood writing but his last blog posts about the GitHub kerfuffle over connecting two social media platforms has been spot on with my thinking about the subject.
The preamble to On The Subject Of Connecting Federate Social Media Networks sets up the rest of his post:
The past few days on the Fediverse have served to remind me a few things:
- The internet is as smart and as ignorant (and everything in between) as the macrocosm known as “human civilization” reflects upon it.
- Sometimes the victims will become the victimizers in any given situation, usually without them being aware of it.
- Upon pointing it out to said type above, instead of working to acknowledge and understand, they will double-down under the guise of righteousness, again unwittingly using the exact playbook that they had been persecuted under at some point in the past.
- As usual, any attempt by a rational third party to diffuse whatever situation breaking out on the internet will lead to a wider conflict/argument/brigade session where everyone winds up digging their heels in and missing entirely the point.
- And finally, as usual, there’s a 95% chance it was started by someone who was all to ready to be triggered by anything and everything so they could start some shit on the internet at that moment.
Read Ryan’s reflection on the experience:
The scope of the fediverse has been hotly debated recently. Are we a big fedi? Or a small fedi? Are instances just nodes? Or networked communities? Which Camp of Mastodon are we in? How far should our replies travel? How about our blog posts and Bluesky skeets? Should we welcome Threads? Or block them?
Should we open the fediverse to everyone, let them exercise freedom of association, embrace the inevitable Eternal September, and get good at managing the problems? Or should we learn from Twitter that a “global town square” has big downsides, try to prevent those harms from the beginning, and only expand online communities once we have their consent?
Should there be one internet? Or multiple, sometimes separate internets?
What is an oligarch and why has the USA become one? What happened to "...government of the people, by the people, for the people"? In part 7 of his series, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich writes about how concentrated wealth and power are undermining US democracy.
The “OLIGARCHY” comes from the Greek word oligarkhes, meaning “few to rule or command.” It refers to a government of and by a few exceedingly rich people or families who control the major institutions of society, and therefore have the most power over other people’s lives. - How America’s oligarchy has paved the road to fascism (Why American capitalism is so rotten, Part 7)
Writer James Shelly asks a very important question: "What’s the fun in writing on the internet anymore?"
You could copy and paste this article into ChatGPT and say, “Please rewrite and paraphrase this blog post in such a way as to keep its main points and observations, but substantively reconfigure the text to make the original version undetectable.” And then, just like that, you have content for your own blog. So easy.
Or you could just copy the contents of this page and paste it into a site like plagiarism-remover.com so you could, as advertised, “Easily Convert Your Plagiarism article Into Plagiarism Free article.” Or you could use Spinbot. Or Jasper. Or QuillBot. Or Paraphraser. And so on.
, that's the hook!