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I recently came up with a new way to get people involved in Matrix.

You know how people tend to make new group chats to keep in touch with people they met under specific circumstances, like holidays or conferences etc.

Some people even have specific group chats from their gym or sports team.

I thought this can be an opportunity to spread Matrix.

You can recommend going on Matrix when this moment comes up, and help people get set up on the spot.

Or if you are friends you can just pop over and say "let's set you up for this group chat I have going."

Don't get me wrong, it might sound shady and weird at times, especially if you seem too eager to interact with their phones.

But in principle I think it might be a time and place that people might be motivated to procrastinate less, and be more likely to use it. After all such group chats are always silly.

Downsides I already forsee

• Don't forget to make them store the secret key somewhere safe, where they will also remember storing after the hangover.
• You have to be well-prepared, know exactly what client and homeserver you will point people to, create the group chat yourself, and have the QR-code handy.
• You have to avoid talking points about all the technical advantages and privacy aspect, and stay with the silliness, so choose a client that has an abundance of pre-installed stickers.

Pretty much what the title says

Tate is currently facing several legal investigations in Romania and the U.K. for rape and child sex trafficking charges. In recent comments, he has said men who enjoy heterosexual sex purely for pleasure (rather than for creating children) are actually gay. He has also said that women belong in the home, are men’s property, and bear responsibility for when they are raped.

Near the end of last month, hackers reportedly said they were able to access The Real World’s data through a site “vulnerability” — they described the site’s cybersecurity as “hilariously insecure.” The hackers then gained access to the site’s 221 public and 395 private chat servers and also “to upload emojis, delete attachments, crash everyone’s clients, and temporarily ban people,” the group said in a statement shared by The Daily Dot.

One chatroom user’s comments complained about the “LGBTQ agenda,” and others complained that the chat servers are “useless” due to “all the spam.”

I have met a couple of them in real life, and a few I have met online. The sample is not significant enough to draw any conclusions about their point of view and background.

I am more than interested in your opinions about the personality and political makeup of people who express this type of pro-C bigotry.

This one was kind of harrowing to watch. It seems that YouTube uses a number of methods to suppress speech for LGBTQIA+ creators. Demonetization, Age Restriction, Strikes, Copyright Takedowns, let alone undue ones. What's worse, the same fascist demagoges who claim "They won't debate me" use IP laws to silence criticism, and violate community guidelines by spreading vile hate speech against minorities, earning money in the process! It is infuriating, and also keep in mind there is CW:Transphobia and Racism mentioned in the video.

Folks, let me share some random observations with you, because I can't wrap my mind around those.

1. People have Zoom, Teams, Slack, Discord, Messenger, Telegram, and Viber, all happily installed on their phones at the same time. When you then invite them to Matrix they are like "Is this necessary? Why install yet another one of those?"

2. People who use Chrome by default without ad blockers, and you just hint there is a massive intelligence and surveillance operation are quick to respond that "I am getting this services for free, so it is fine to give something back" [^1].

3. People thinking that OSS is not secure enough for their devices. Surprise surprise, it is the exact same people who fall for obvious scams and their devices are ad-ridden, bloated horrors that have not been updated in a million years, but they think that Libre Office will break their computer and lose their emails.

4. People thinking that privacy and anonymity enthusiasts are shady freaks who want to go live in the woods and possibly terrorists. There is a slightly insane take here that we are against technology because we refuse to "just" install an app to make our lives easier[^2].

So they do not complain about being exploited and disrespected, while ripped off and offered crap services, as long it is a capitalist corporation shaking them down with vendor lock-in and network effects. They are grateful even. But just the idea of installing a single free/libre OSS app or extension to protect their privacy is a red flag and pushes their buttons big time, even for just suggesting it.

So, what are your own examples of anti-OSS stupidity, and how do you explain its prevalence in society?

[^1]: It is how quick they are in responding that way, which makes me think that the idea is already crystalized in their minds, by some "anti-OSS" discourse.

[^2]: But just installing a Matrix client is a big deal.

I am interested in a community of people of faith who are at the same time on the political left, particularly anarchism, and lgbtq+ inclusion, particularly transgender. I am kinda sick and tired of atheists harassing everyone religious. I don't care much about the philosophy surrounding it, it is just that their collective behavior is arguably harassment, not a bit different to typical transphobic harassment about delusions etc. I believe that freedom of religious belief is a very basic right for people of all convictions. At the moment there is a huge divide: religious lgbtq+ people who are also anarchist (and might have been ostracized by their religious community on top of everything else) have no place to go without facing atheist harassment, and this is how there is no place to discuss faith together with politics and identity. So, here goes, I want to start this discussion with people who would like to see sth like this happening.

Recently some group published an interactive, javascript based, website, to graphically explore data broker companies. This is just one group doing similar research work in different fields. I applaud the cause, but I take issue with the format.

An organization, that is, or group that frequently needs to provide structured data. In turn, developers might want said data, in order to deliver apps.

Interactive websites seem flaky to me, since no one guarantees they will still be there two years from now. I think it is only natural that groups doing important work would do a great service to communities if they served a RESTful or GraphQL API, depending on the complexity of the data.

But even in this case, when the group stops serving the API let alone be coerced to stop, or access to the API is blocked, this great service will be discontinued. Obviously the raw data must be shared for this to work.

Lately I was thinking about these edge cases. Journalists or activists doing this type of work may lack the sophistication to structure the data in useful ways. They probably do the journalist work and then have some developer they either hire, or is part of the group, make the important backend decisions, including structuring the raw data.

Regarding the retention of the data in case the group disbands or goes away, there are some existing solutions like torrenting or IPFSing the datasets. Both methods can help the data be online forever, but what about content integrity and versions? They would still need a static webpage or something to provide the hashes, and IPFS is by its design not very well suited for versioning.

There are no clean cut guidelines on how to go about this, or at least, what is a handful of good ways to go about this, so that a current or future group can rely on to deliver this type of work.

Another idea that popped into my head is that the ecosystems of repositories and package managers are very mature in all major distributions. Structured data could be uploaded to distro repositories (including FDroid and the like), just like any other software with underlying data structures. Hashing and versioning would be then natively taken care of by existing package managers. But the question still remains, what data structure is the best for this kind of relational data, and what kind of API should best be exposed to the user.

So, if you feel like it, I would like to hear your thoughts on:

1. Skills and preparations required by investigative teams to publish structured data to the world.
2. Assessment of the torrenting and IPFS solutions to ensure recovery of the data in perpetuity.
3. Assessment of the RESTful or GraphQL format to disseminate investigative data.
4. Assessment of using established package managers and repositories to disseminate investigative data.
5. Ideas on what should be eventually exposed to the user, who can be assumed to be a developer as well.
6. Further comments.

I would be glad to get some feedback on these thoughts.

Archived

Is this for real? I can't draw no other conclusion than US defaultism in trans activism gives a free pass to TERF politics in Europe. This kind of news from Germany cannot mean anything good.

According to Wikipedia:

In 2019, the German Language Association VDS (Verein Deutsche Sprache; not to be confused with the Association for the German Language Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache, GfdS) launched a petition against the use of the gender star, saying it was a "destructive intrusion" into the German language and created "ridiculous linguistic structures". It was signed by over 100 writers and scholars.[11] Luise F. Pusch, a German feminist linguist, criticises the gender star as it still makes women the 'second choice' by the use of the feminine suffix.[12] In 2020, the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache declared Gendersternchen to be one of the 10 German Words of the Year.[13]

In 2023, the state of Saxony banned the use of gender stars and gender gaps in schools and education, which marks students' use of the gender stars as incorrect.[14][15] In March 2024, Bavaria banned gender-neutral language in schools, universities and several other public authorities.[16][17] In April 2024, Hesse banned the use of gender neutral language, including gender stars, in administrative language.[18]

Here are the original Wikipedia references

11. "Der Aufruf und seine Erstunterzeichner". Verein Deutsche Sprache (in German). 6 March 2019. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
12. Schlüter, Nadja (22 April 2019). ""Das Gendersternchen ist nicht die richtige Lösung"". Jetzt.de (in German). Retrieved 5 April 2020. "GfdS Wort des Jahres" (in German). Retrieved 13 December 2020.
13. Jones, Sam; Willsher, Kim; Oltermann, Philip; Giuffrida, Angela (2023-11-04). "What's in a word? How less-gendered language is faring across Europe". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
14. "Schools in Saxony are forbidden to use gender language". cne.news. Retrieved 2024-04-05.

I got into this rabbit hole from this news article

News article in German

Archived