We're Wiki Workers United, a global solidarity union for the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation.
This account will share updates on our organizing effort, relevant news/info, and maybe the occasional meme. We promise to keep posting volume reasonably chill.
We are Wiki Workers United, a global union for the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation. We are the people who do the work to provide a platform, services, and funds to support the Wikimedia movement.
@boffbowsh less talk and more action. They better start firing the union busting law firm they have im their payroll and hire the union organizers back.
I do not trust a single word of their bullshit coorporate union busting law firm written statements.
I support you, not the corrupt foundation that kept telling me I need to donate, but then got rich off AI training and immeditately started firing union organisers .. ✊
Family guy meme in which a policeman holds a skin color chart in front of several pictures of historical monuments from History Channel. The top pictures associated with light skin tones are the Pont du Gard in France, the Colosseum in Italy, and the Parthenon in Greece. They're labelled "engineering marvels". The bottom pictures associated with dark skin tones are the Temple of the Sun at Machu Picchu, the Easter statues in Rapa Nui, and the Great Sphinx and the pyramid of Giza. They're labelled "aliens".
Seems easy to solve, but since our database is massive, around 80GB, it took around 20 hours to restore....
I understand that it totally sucks for a Social Network to be down for almost a day. People may be put off and not want to use Friendica anymore. Or our instance at least. But our instance has been very reliable for the past years and I always email people to tell them about updating it, so they are aware such things can happen.
Also, our budget for TROM.tf is around €0, compared to the billions floating around Facebook and the like. So please understand that.
Today we will give the update another try, and it is likely to work. If it doesn't at least thanks to @YunoHost a backup will be automatically restored.
@Tio I had a similar issue based on PHP key errors and it was fixed through one of those amazing YH help chat session. Details are now not available, have to move to my PC. @YunoHost
No worries, some of us enjoy Friendica and TROM.tf for reasons that a day's worth of downtime couldn't sway. And I'd like to think there's more folk around here than just me who very much appreciate the hard work you and your team put in on our behalf. Plus, there's only one thing that could ever drag me away from this instance, and we all know I just can't be trusted to do the upkeep on one of my own.
@Tio @YunoHost Thanks for all you do. I hope the issue gets resolved soon, but fortunately, Friendica 2026.01 is already working wonderfully, and yours is one of the best instances out there, and certainly the most well-maintained English-language Friendica instance.
Regarding that upgrade failure - I ran this: sudo apt-get update --fix-missing with that key errors: Err:6 dl.yarnpkg.com/debian stable InRelease The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 62D54FD4003F6525 Err:7 packages.sury.org/php bookworm InRelease The following signatures were invalid: EXPKEYSIG B188E2B695BD4743 DEB.SURY.ORG Automatic Signing Key <deb@sury.org>
Now livestreaming at joystick.tv/u/toplesstopics and in our Discord chatroom (join at toptopicstv.org/chat ) while I continue editing these "reaction" videos to nudist / naturist articles!
I asked the furry con if they’d let me host a Ryanair Furs meetup, but they were only willing to schedule it at 4:45am in a village hall 40 miles away from the main hotel 🙁
on cis allyship, definitely Boost this one please :3
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I write a lot about my ongoing discovery of just how good cis women are to trans girls when they have not been preemptively made to fear us.
I write about how easy it is to get accepted as a trans woman, because I think a lot of transfems really have this fear of imposing. Because we have impostor syndrome for womanhood as social performance.
It is something that newly transitioning women need to hear. Our struggle and hangups and fears are parallel and often the same as those of cis women's.
They do not always understand the specifics of our circumstances, but the underlying struggle? They know.
And that's an important message.
But there's another angle I'm realising.
Cis women don't know that we don't know they know.
I'll give you a second to parse that one.
I think cis women do not fully understand our fear. They are welcoming, but I've seen them react to me gushing about how welcome I feel with slight surprise and minimising the things they said and did to make me feel welcome.
The reason is that they do not fully understand how fucking STARVED I've been of this stuff all my life.
A few years ago, here on Fedi, I read something that stayed with me. About how people who've been in an abusive relationship can burst out crying and have a huge outpour of loud gratitude after something absurdly trivial like their new partner offering them a glass of water or something. They act like nobody ever did something like that for them, to the bafflement of the other person. It's just a glass of water.
The reason being, of course, that in some sense they never DID receive this kind of small kindness.
A person that's been abused has a completely broken barometer of what is "normal". Treating people with basic kindness is the baseline, but to a person that's been victimised it feels like extreme, saintly goodness, at least initially. Because it's hard to realise that no, the horrors were not how people normally interact.
Same has been written about people leaving cults, abusive families, abusive communities.
Why am I mentioning this? Because trans people in general, and trans women in the specific, are kind of a demographic-wide example of that.
Like any abuser, a transphobe will make it seem like there's nowhere and no one to run to. Like they are the best we can get. Heck, some transphobic rhetoric will pose as the 'phobes doing us a kindness.
Here's the thing. Cis women do not necessarily fully realise that we never had a normal girlhood or, for many of us, any interactions with women in women-dominated settings, AS women.
I mean, sometimes they know, but they don't KNOW, know.
Yesterday I wrote about a nice time spent with a few girls that I am only getting to know. And I was gushing, both here on Fedi and to the girl that invited me to the thing. And I thought about that and I am realising that she probably doesn't understand how big a deal this is, *even* when I say how big a deal it is.
Because she, presumably, had a relatively normal time being a woman. So she doesn't understand why women interacting in a friendly and casual way is blowing my mind.
Because it's hard to convey that all my life I was primed to think cis women would reject me and treat me like not just a man, but a predatory, dishonest man pretending to be a woman. I know it's not true, but I've not *experienced* it being untrue.
Transphobes badly need to convince us (and themselves) that all, or most, cis women do not want us to live as women.
Most cis women don't *know* these words are being put in their mouths.
re: on cis allyship, definitely Boost this one please :3
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This is one reason why I talk so much about being trans, both to cis and trans people.
(I mean, other than the fact that I'm an attention whore /hj )
People are not mind readers. They will only know your experience - be it one particular to you or shared with one group of people or another - if you tell them how it is for you.
I didn't know how much I had in common with other trans women before I started having conversations with trans women about their experiences and mine.
And that helped me realise I'm a woman.
And later, I didn't know (and maybe still don't know) how much I have in common with cis women, too. And that knowledge is making me more bold, happier and I think a better person to others.
So I know super well that this kind of sharing can be a game changer for a lot of people. Some people figure things out looking at others, but some do need to share, or to hear someone share, before they realise "oh! So that's how it is. So that's how I am the same/similar/different to that other person".
The best way to defeat "divide and conquer" tactics by evil people is to communicate. As taught by every shitty TV sitcom from the 80s and 90s.
It makes me very happy to hear that my fellow cis women are treating you well, Alicja! There are a lot of paths to womanhood, none of them easy, and we should support each other when we can. 🫂
It’s obviously different, but as a cis woman I empathise deeply with this.
I was diagnosed autistic in my late 40s and spent most of my life feeling like an alien, especially among women - not like I wanted to be a man, but like I lacked whatever quality made womanhood come naturally to others. I never felt like I fit in, or was interesting to be around, and I was genuinely astonished, if a woman wanted to know me.
@GoingDownWithSundial Im AMAB and trans and autistic and if i remember my childhood correctly, i always felt alienated and cast out from my peers due to being autistic (and their ableism) so the expectation on my part wasnt even there to fit in in a gender way or a sexuality way. So what you are saying makes sense to me, being autistic can make you feel alien to your peers in similar ways that being trans can.
on cis allyship, definitely Boost this one please :3
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yes, In my experience, my interactions with cis women were some of the most positive ones amongst cis people in general, which surprised me at first too! I've maybe only had like 1 or 2 bad actors from their side, otherwise the reaction was always an overwhelming support :o
Despite attending an all-girls school, I mostly had groups of guy friends as a child and teenager. Only since my mid-30's / early 40s have I begun to deliberately cultivate groups of women friends. The love and acceptance that I find in these groups is nothing like I experienced in my childhood. I know that it can't compare to not having a girl childhood, but I also find it wonderful and precious to be accepted in groups of women. ❤️
on cis allyship, definitely Boost this one please :3
I made quite similar experiences actually.
Most clueless cis people I met sure weren't very sensible about word choices and reading the room ("so i was wondering, ehh, are you a boy or a girl??"), but once you gave them an answer to whatever they were wondering, they just would shrug, accept it and move on with our activity at hand.
They'd then include me in gendered activities and spaces without any awkwardness or second thoughts at all, they'd be super relaxed about it, they'd clearly just take my gender as truth, and they'd get irate on my behalf if people misgendered or excluded me because they were genuinely baffled why people would mistreat me that way. It was as natural to them as anything else that I was a woman, it didn't even occur to them that it could be "wrong".
It took my middle-aged, cranky, Yugoslavian coworker who never heard of trans people exactly two days to completely understand my womanhood. When I eventually talked to her about the whole thing, she was surprised I brought it up, but said something that stuck to me ever since:
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I made quite similar experiences actually.
Most clueless cis people I met sure weren't very sensible about word choices and reading the room ("so i was wondering, ehh, are you a boy or a girl??"), but once you gave them an answer to whatever they were wondering, they just would shrug, accept it and move on with our activity at hand.
They'd then include me in gendered activities and spaces without any awkwardness or second thoughts at all, they'd be super relaxed about it, they'd clearly just take my gender as truth, and they'd get irate on my behalf if people misgendered or excluded me because they were genuinely baffled why people would mistreat me that way. It was as natural to them as anything else that I was a woman, it didn't even occur to them that it could be "wrong".
It took my middle-aged, cranky, Yugoslavian coworker who never heard of trans people exactly two days to completely understand my womanhood. When I eventually talked to her about the whole thing, she was surprised I brought it up, but said something that stuck to me ever since:
That she met a lot of unique and surprising people in her life, and that you learn things about the world and other people every day. And that it was just an interesting medical fun fact about me. And that's all. She said that to her, it was no different than when she met a black guy in our village and then found out he and his family are actually natively German. She compared me to her grandma, who apparently had a lot of facial hair, which ran in her family. It was just a fun fact about me that I'm trans, nothing more.
The validity of my womanhood was never in question to her, just whether I was a woman at all. That's the main thing really.
You really hit the nail on the head: transphobes really, really want to make us think that we're alone. That everyone naturally sees us as freaks by default, except those we have successfully 'convinced of our ideology'.
It's actually the same mechanic at play as with conspiracy types, crazy conservatives or elderly people refusing to go with the times.
They want to use "common sense" as a backup to try to convince you that their irrational fears are actually normal and how everyone else thinks. They're super afraid of having to change their world view, of being wrong about something. They want to make us feel like we have no support, not necessarily to hurt us directly, but because they themselves secretly feel ashamed and insecure about the world moving past them or judging them for something they don't understand. (Ideological transphobes who know what they're doing nonwithstanding, they're doing it on purpose).
That's also why allies can sometimes be insidiously worse than clueless folks. Allies might just as well have the same thought patterns as transphobes, but end the thought process on "...but it would be mean to misgender them, I should be nice and supportive."
They still fundamentally think we're freaks, they just think it's ethically good to be nice to freaks.
Before my coworker experience, I always felt that even if cis people accept us, they at best mentally create a third category: women, men and "trans". Or that they'd always see me as a guy who wants to be a woman and who they needed to be respectful of not to hurt their feelings. But that isn't the case. They just see me as a woman with a medical history.
Transphobes are the only ones questioning people's genders' validity. Normal people don't even have that thought process, because validity isn't an idea they associate with gender.
This instance, atomicpoet.org, is itself a social experiment:
What will happen if I exit a mainstream social media platform, fly free of corporate and institutional overseers, and just say whatever the hell I want on my own damn platform?
What I find amusing is that BIPOC, LGBT+, and women are often accused of trying to de-platform whatever isn't in their favour. But at least for me, that hasn't been the case.
The biggest snowflakes have been cis white hetero men who really can't stand it when I say anything remotely political and demand that I start using CWs to censor myself.
And it's not as though I've never had a disagreement with someone from a marginalized community. But they've definitely been more civil.
The only time I—a white cis gender hetero man—was ever called a “colonizer” at a university was when a white cis gender hetero woman disapproved of me dating a woman of colour.
The only time I—a white cis gender hetero man—was ever called a “colonizer” at a university was when a white cis gender hetero woman disapproved of me dating a woman of colour.
This instance, atomicpoet.org, is itself a social experiment:
What will happen if I exit a mainstream social media platform, fly free of corporate and institutional overseers, and just say whatever the hell I want on my own damn platform?
What I find amusing is that BIPOC, LGBT+, and women are often accused of trying to de-platform whatever isn't in their favour. But at least for me, that hasn't been the case.
The biggest snowflakes have been cis white hetero men who really can't stand it when I say anything remotely political and demand that I start using CWs to censor myself.
And it's not as though I've never had a disagreement with someone from a marginalized community. But they've definitely been more civil.
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Seen near Holborn Station, on the route of the Unite the Kingdom rally. By the artist Frank Riot.
The poster says it better than most speeches:
When the scapegoats are gone, the borders are fortified, and the hatred has done its damage, the cost of living will still rise, the NHS will still be dying, and corporate vultures will still be picking our lives apart.
Who will they blame then?
What will they have gained?
A badge for barbarism against a backdrop of decay.
When you've got rid off all the mosques but the costs of life still rise and you've built your fortressed borders but the NHS still dies and the muslims are all gone and your town's a wall of white but corporate vultures are still pillaging every facet of our lives who will you blame then? what will you have gained? a badge for barbarism against a backdrop of decay.
Obviously, if things do not improve there must be Internal enemies sabotaging the project and a purge is needed (repeat ad nauseam) (based on previous similar occurrences)
never heard anybody blaming mosques for economic problems. Maybe, massive immigration forcing wages down, but that is not limited to one group of people.
If anything, it's all about colonizing and replacing the British culture by one that is completely different and adversarial to the western values.
people want to feel like they are doing something, idiots get bored, can't find a way to participate so they invent problems and then realize they can't solve them even the slightest and they're going to be interesting at last
Billionaires fear a 99% that wakes up to the fact that blameshifting bigotry solves nothing real in their lives.
Bigotry is distraction.
It doesn't provide affordable housing. It doesn't create jobs. It doesn't fund public services. It doesn't lower prices for gas or groceries. It doesn't stop fascism in government. It doesn't stop wars. It doesn't stop public corruption in business. It doesn't educate the young or support seniors.
this is filled with partial truths. The professional display is certainly not “street”. Whether it’s actual art is at the viewer’s discretion, but doesn’t meet most criteria. Post it elsewhere, please; perhaps on a “public screed utopia” account.
I hope in the near future people will understand that the only reason which makes corporation/right wing do their thing is that millions of people keep using their products, therefor financially supporting them to make the next lobbying advertisement.
choosing local shops will get rid of this. That's why we've build a worldwide map to easily find those places, while corporate and chains are noted with a grey dot and no information appart from 'we don't support this place'.
In the middle of it all a woman in a scuba mask is submerged in a tank connected to two portaloos. Go on, go in and do your business. Your urine is filtered and fed back into the tank. She is swimming in your processed piss, and she stays in there for hours.
That moment when you’re wondering whether you’re reading a story written by @mindpersephone or an actual review of a serious art installation. I hope they didn’t have trouble finding volunteers for this.
The theme of earth’s biggest art extravaganza – spiritual rest – felt wildly wrong for our crisis-hit planet. Thank goodness for the pavilions, from fake babies to hi-tech sperm banks to a chocolate Russell Crowe
Seeing Cloudflare do a 20% layoff doesn't bode well for the tech industry which already has a problem of too many overqualified people looking for too few jobs.
@uvok And then the same industry is crying that it's falling apart. Seriously, the "leadership" people are the kind who empties their car tank before driving off and then wonder why the hell the car doesn't want to start
@soatok, they are shooting themselves in the foot. AI can automate processes, but if you don't have qualified people behind it, it can lead to many security breaches. We will see over time how their product evolves and whether they end up rehiring the same folks. IMHO The reality is that AI, by itself, is not efficient; it is not AI. Needs a lot of context, and people are the ones who provide it.
@pastorinni Exactly. And for a company like CloudFlare which is such a load-bearing fixture of how the internet works right now, that is... harrowing. Not exactly unprecedented though, given recent history for both AWS and Github.
I think we're on the tipping point of something parallel to the sovereignty movement away from US tech companies, where people understand that the theoretical risk of massive central services just became a practical one. And I think "smolnet" is part of that movement, but maybe not the full scope of it. I dunno, guess we'll see.
@soatok@furry.engineer Nope. It was bad enough when I was laid off at the start of 2025. Pretty glad I decided to exit instead of keep trying to fight for a job.
working in academia is looking better and better these days. The pay sucks, but the quality of life is excellent! Tragically, there are so few of these positions available.
@baka Probably quite well. You fire 1000 highly qualified and therefore well paid engineers and replace them with 1111 unqualified, therefore lowly paid prompt monkeys. C suite bonuses go up.
@ck "C suite" should mean "the place where you stick the C programmers, and nobody ever goes there unless the tower of pizza boxes really needs to be cleared out" @baka @soatok
It seems absurd that I even need to say this, but there are only two cases where I will ever submit to an authority: 1) to prevent me from causing harm to someone else 2) to ensure everyone's basic needs are met (e.g. taxes)
That's it. Everyone else can fuck off, ESPECIALLY about porn.
I don't care if you're left, right, center, up, down, or sideways, the only moral authority anyone can ever hold over another sentient being is to either prevent causing harm to someone else (not themselves, ONLY someone else), or uphold a social contract to ensure everyone in a particular society has their basic needs met.
If I EVER hear someone bitching about someone else's "problematic fantasies", at this point I'm just going to assume they're a cop, even if they call themselves a leftist, or a progressive, or whatever.
I'm so fucking tired of cops.
This entry was edited (Wednesday 6 May 2026, 22:21)
the issue with saying to have e.g. a nation-state is okay as long as it only serves to uphold these two points is that they’re up to subjective interpretation. “harm” and “basic needs” are up to a lot of interpretation and reinterpretation until you’ve got a value system that’s cruel and detached from reality; and that’s practically inevitable with centralized governance, democratic processes while a good thing can only do so much to offset it. the solution is to decentralize so that decision-making happens on a personal scale, without a detached single person or class making decisions on behalf of a whole population
my point is that there is no that good a reason to “scale” a government; for projects that have to involve several local communities, all you need is a temporary separate organization, not a permanent massive hiearchical nation-state that will inevitably rot and betray everyone then explode and bury everyone in shit as they tend to do
it is quite unfortunate that when another big state creates a shit-explosion most people hurt but learn nothing, opting to follow yet another grand authority instead of maybe not structuring society in such a self-destructive manner
no matter how long the project takes, the point is that a given organization does not aim to persist indefinitely, nor consolidate more influence than it strictly requires, and that people know better than to attempt that
you are fallaciously assuming society’s mindset towards authority cannot change. it can. the mindset change of recognizing and rejecting any attempt at wide-reaching control is possible and nessesary, people would know better than to try or tolerate that
statism is not an inherent and inevitable trait of humanity
mind you there doesnt have to be a time limit, some projects are geniunely indefinite, the emphasis is on recognizing and firmly rejecting attempts at building up anything resembling the kind of generalized authority nation-states practice
gotta be trying to miss so badly no no no a local community is no more than a couple hundred, ideally less. there is then no need for representatives because it is viable for every member to directly participate in coordinating decisions. if you need a “representative” system, you’ve already failed to some degree
“If it’s purely a “mindset” difference then that’s just another kind of representative government” feels like it has a massive logical leap in the middle that my comprehension is unable to intuit
btw statism means advocacy for a wide-spanning centralized state with borders cops prisons and a military that operates via coercion and monopolizing violence
that’s literally fiction, and not that of anything practical at that. by the point technology advances enough for that to be possible and worth considering over making better use of the space on Earth and planetary colonies, we’ll have significantly more physical automation at our disposal
the research and organizational work can be done by a few thousand individuals at the very most, and i doubt oh so much manual labor would be nessesary. take a less pessimistic estimate of 1 million, divide it by 1000 segments, bam, 1000 people per segment. build the segments separately with a loose oversight committee ensuring they’re all compatible, then put them together
then again, this is very impractical as compared to just building 1000 self-sufficent stations. you don’t need a single station equivalent to a whole planet in population capacity to have real estate in space
@hsza i love how any means of structuring society that isn't hierarchical just magically 'doesnt work' for some reason (but of course having hierarchies 'works' .. .. except it doesn't;)
also lol wtf you mean decentralization scales really well, centralized environments scale terribly and result in a single points of failure that when they break down or are overloaded or whatever, causes everything to break down, decentralized systems are also more resistant to authoritarian control and such;
not one that aims to regulate people’s entire lives and desperately cling on to power for as long as it can
and anyhow only really nessesary for a very impractical edge case scenario. easier and better not to attempt building such a single massive structure. and of course chances are a better world would not serve as a breeding ground for elons and zucks who’d push for it regardless
I never implied that I supported a government that aims to regulate people’s lives, only that I believed the concept of representative governance is necessary.
you do appear to be in support of regulating people’s lives if the two points in the OP are used as justification for it
maintaining a large colony either on the moon
keyword large. why large
even if just to coordinate trade between smaller sub-sections.
why does trade between moon colonies have to work any different to trade on earth
This entry was edited (Thursday 7 May 2026, 13:14)
@Li @hsza The problem is we are conditioned and experienced to only see the world through a hierarchical lens. Until we can see and accept the idea of human solidarity we will struggle to imagine a better future.
@hsza you could setup a anarchist communes on the moon or mars; where everyone goes and does stuff that actually works for them instead of trying to force them all to live under the same system for some reason; you could also just have a flat system where no one explicitly has power over anyone can can do things how they want,
also i dont think you can go on about 'social contracts' that i never signed and 'enforcement & policing' of them; and not have it 'regulate peoples lives' but sure ..
what i think is funny is that hierachical social structures literally decentralize in order to stay even remotely afloat; otherwise thered be one single hospital, one single food store, and one single library, we decentralize everything; they largely operate independantly from all the others too; but when it comes to structuring people and de(structuring) power, now suddenly it cant possibly work --
meanwhile in centralization land you get half the internet going down whenever google/amazon/etc's servers break;
decentralization scales; the people in power just want to stay in power-
@Li social contracts is a very very broad term, another way of saying it is basically like social expectations, which will exist to some extent if any culture exists, but they can be oppressive just the same as a state’s laws. and if there’s enforcement then thats simply just a law lol
those social expectations can also be a good thing however, its part of how anarchism can be robust, as ive brought up upthread a society would need to know better than to allow itself to be contained by anything like a state
tho theres a good chance im not using those words quite right
@Li @hsza I don’t fundamentally disagree with this at all. Decentralization is survivable. But even in decentralization, hierarchies currently exist (see root servers). From a social/state point of view, we have to be able to imagine a non-hobbesian world in which humans are not focused on garnering land and resources from one another. This is the ultimate challenge, as fish has no awareness of water, most have no awareness of of the breadth of systemic hierarchies.
@hsza i disagree their the same thing, a 'contract' implies a "consentual agreement" which doesn't exist, (this is also considering that 'contracts' are generally a tool for manufacturing consent to do coercion)
and if its the exact same thing just called something else then i would reject them for the same reason;
i reject the state and all authority for the same reasons too,
(i also somewhat disagree that they would always exist to some extent (though if not having them is desirable is another topic some other time-)
its like saying the only possible way to scale anything is by building hierarchy lol
but also- tbh id be more likely to help people by choice, if you try to force me im likely to try avoid doing it, likewise if you try force me to not hurt im more likely too hurt you
instead of appealing to ableism to excuse prisons- and trying to force me to work; you could just, have a culture of actually understanding and working on things;
@steff @hsza i mean i think im maybe a bit less kind to this kind of thing;
and just consider alot of "anarchism cant work" rethoric as just dismissing anything that isn't hierachical power structures, and to itself be just another way to enforce such power structures
(especially when you say its "either just creating a mini-state or that" implies you've heard ppl explain how you'd it and just gone 'no' and decided to reject it as "unattainable"-- or whatever, like what even constitutes 'working' in this case ???)
it reminds me of a lot of 'capitalism is the only system that works' level shit;
(also tbh; DNS is i think a poor example mainly in part because its run by a few 'regististars' who have to have 'iCANN' permission;
its a mildly decentralized thing but power is still centralized; which was kind of my point, it does scale, (heck centralized powers do not scale well at all xS-) .. they just want to stay in control-)
@Li @hsza Again, I don’t disagree with you. DNS is a good example, because it was/is meant to be distributed, but still hierarchical; however, the greater social structures created a centralized authority management because they couldn’t imagine anything else. Contrast this with the of RFC system in which working groups designed and specified services and protocols for the Internet without a central authority. Again, I believe a significant portion of the problem lies in imagining anything beyond the capitalist or per-capitalist hierarchies we are all immersed and rationalized into from birth.
and people do not harm other people at random for no reason. people are naturally inclined to help one another and to do the opposite there’s always some sort of external motivation. and capitalism is pretty much the primary driver there. without the ever hostile enviroment of capitalism driving people into desperation there would be much less theft and violence going on
LMFAO youre calling a fucking electrocution stick “non-violent”??? how much copaganda is there dancing around in your brain at the moment this is ridiculous
assume someone in that community starts randomly beating the shit out of someone else for no apparent reason. How does the society deal with this?
THAT IS NOT A REAL THING THAT CAN HAPPEN lmaooooo what the hell are you talking about im sorry youre grasping at really really silly straws now my reading comprehension is marking the entirety of this last reply as silly nonsense
cant help but think some of this notion is coming from an inability to imagine a better world
sadistic sociopaths do not appear out of thin air as such. as any person they get made into what they are by society. if society gets better - and especially if systems of abuse and coercion like compulsory schooling and cops/borders/prisons are abolished - i doubt there’ll be people developing these sorts of values
@Li @steff Steffie already pointed this out, but when I say you need at least some kind of hierarchy, this does not imply centralization, and I'm not entirely sure why you think it does. It's simply a consequence of needing to keep group size to several hundred members in order for them to be able to discuss things sensibly, which always implies some form of representative governance. It can still be distributed.
@Li @steff hierarchy here is to solve the problem of having 50000 members of a single decision making body because it's impossible for the 50000 members of that body to come to any decisions directly, so it breaks into inevitable subgroups with representatives that debate things at the highest level, and then confer with their representatives when necessary. Large groups already display this behavior naturally because having layers of decision making is the only way to scale things. It doesn't imply centralization.
@Li @steff this keeps happening, I keep saying "what if you need a bunch of people to decide something" and the response is "why would you want to do that"
there are plenty of reasons! Even a small city of 50000 people has to decide whether or not to invest in a recycling center for plastics or whatever. Many actions inherently require the cooperation of lots of people and potentially require making many decisions that will affect everyone, like the size of the standardized recycling bins so that the recycling machine can come pick it up.
@steff (i am mainly saying this as a plural system, whoever ends up in front for awhile ends up practically making decisions for stuff; sometimes they try to ask the others what they want about stuff (uh, i do this(?)) but we also sometimes just kinda go do our own thing at a time-
anyway none of us really holds power over anyone, so its not really a hierarchy its kinda just we do things when they come up,
perhaps you could have some luck talking to polyfragmented plural systems here-)
but to an extent i think this might be an issue with trying to have 50,000 people trying to make a single decision making body for them; in general-
like why are you making decisions for 50,000 people? that is itself a kind of power structure to begin with
like just let them make their own decisions??
i think the issue might be that your trying to scale what is basically a hierachy to begin with which like; why are you trying to control what they do- exactly? -- the real issue i think
hm,you could have anyone person make decisions in any given moment, like i dont know just whoever ends up having an answer first or just whoever actually goes and does the thing or .. something ends up deciding that way there is no implicit power structures are not a given,
.. also dont think we naturally do this,; but ig that'd come down to what counts as natural and that isn't something im too interested in discussing tbh, as it wouldn't be too useful-
@steff why are you talking about a city of people as if its just one people though .. ? why are you conflating organizing with hierachy and control those are different things;
people who want to build a recycling center can go build a recycling center the people who do not want to build one can not do that; and cooperation without any given power structures behind them happens all the time;
the size of the thing is just whatever largest number someone says, since larger will inevitably fit everyone elses usecase in this situation anyway (or better yet, actually have some tolerances on the machine so you can go off standard a bit- if needed ;)
also last i checked recycling is largely a scam by plastics companies and ends up not really solving alot- it ends up using more resources than it actually saves,
we should just build things that are meant to be disposable out of bio-degradable materials
anyways
as usual; if it cant be done consentually, then it shouldn't be done-
@steff (also at what point are you just describing 'authority of the bootmaker' -- (i.e the person who makes boots, gets to decide how the boots are made-)
which tbh i have always thought it just a bit of wordplay because i kinda feel like these are different concepts (its like comparing say, cops,to a directory tree on a computer, which is technically 'hierachical'; in the sense that there is an 'upper' tree and a 'lower' part of the tree,
but .. no folder is treated as 'greater' or 'more important' than the other folders, i.e there is no 'power' to any of them-)
(like e.g; i could always build my own boots, or i could not wear boots, as there is no real enforcement of it-- and if there isn't really enforcement then )
@Li @steff Again, I think the problem here is what's implied by the word "government" or what people think a "government" is. Like, some people might consider "the current collection of community leaders" a "government". The fact that a government can be *anything* makes discussions difficult when people project their own definitions of what they think a "government" involves onto the word.
@steff tbh my issue is more with power and control over people than it is with organizing, im fine with people willingly organizing and making things that they think will benefit the community as a whole, and i think it makes sense to get community input on such projects,
.. we dont need government for that though .. you'd just need to (in that example you gave-) ask around what ppl think of it, and find some people who'd be willing to to try create such a thing, and then make it that way,
i just don't (really) consider that hierarchical too much, or otherwise i think your using the word in a kind of different way;
unless you try force compliance with whatever it is,
this also isn't at all what your originally said in this thread at all, but i digress,
Earlier today @gsuberland reminded me of the Darwinia soundtrack and the fact that I had an unfinished remix of Visitors from Dreams. My wrist won't let me type much today so instead I finished it: soundcloud.com/erik_mcclure/vi…
Ho, ho, hold the fuck up, I understand hierarchies and their uses, I just don't see what you fuckmuppet with the skills and spine of a wet sponge do all the way up there, and the people working their asses off knowing their shit are doing down there.
I also don't see why the person responsible with their decisions isn't the one taking the consequences for their decisions if they're bad - like, isn't that 95% of your fucking job description, carrying the risk and responsibility?
i understand hierarchies perfectly clear, i'm just calling them bullshit
i see them as much a systemic tool as other things, and i will (ab)use it to get things done
("you" = generic you) if you care that much about the hierarchy, explain to me why it exists in its current form, why that's important, and why i should care
if not, or if you don't want to, then i will take it upon myself to see if it stands the test of time, and/or if it should even exist or not
one of the most interesting things to me is that, while working in a company that essentially has flat structure, i start to see the need for hierarchy, or at least the motes for it, and why it exists conventionally
learning hierarchies from first principles, how they are supposed to function, and most crucially; how they can become gears that crush people between them
i want to make sure that if i ever am in charge of making something like that, i inject as much humanity in it, because while hierarchies increase efficiency, they systemically lose sight of certain things, if not built into their design, or if/when removed, and so you can VERY easily fuck that up, and blind yourself institutionally
and also; hierarchies are a guiding tool, not an iron mould. if someone breaks them, for a good reason, then be open and receptive.
a hierarchy that people need to rage against is one that is not legitimate, and needs to be reconstructed.
I'm sometimes wondering if this boils down to trust.
And that many autistic people developed an absence of trust (not mistrust) due to systematic oppression and spend more time thinking about if a system makes sense or not and therefore find flaws in almost every hierarchical structure.
Where NT people simply "trust" and move forward with whatever they find and don't bother thinking about it.
I thought about this just today, but what I thought was that we have no "instinctive" understanding of human pack hierarchy. Heck, it was only recently I figured out normally people care about things like feeling socially dominant, to a degree where people actually feel someone high in a corporate hierarchy deserve more benefits and less responsibility solely on the merit of their rank. If you don't feel that way but stop and think about it it's seen as not understanding it.
We not only understand the hierarchy, we also understand how the organizational structure is being abused in a way that those who are doing the abuse would prefer not to be scrutinized or explained. We understand how to repair the intentional brokenness of the hierarchy that would--coincidentally, I'm sure--reduce the hierarchal influence of the person saying we don't understand. We also understand unfounded smear rumors used to discredit opposition.
More condescending & hopelessly wrong bullshit about #autistic people! I'm fed up with it! Who are these idiots who claim we "don't understand hierarchies"?
idm that much about hierarchies, tho a lot of times hierarchies are very bloated (sometimes with a reason, because "too big company at the point where higher ups should probably be replaced by athenisian election lottery")
i have more issues with bureaucracy, even tho i underatand why it exists, just really annoys me really
I would very much like to know what threat intel their assertion that this is needed is based on. I was rather of the understanding that phishing in all it's forms was working just fine these days.
That's a really niche threat model. If it works at all and isn't just snake oil.
Now not only do I know which are the terminals best selected to monitor HDMI on but I know what to make my device look like so it blends in (and it's a decent size box too).
Watching Tom Scott's latest video on Nebula, about realistic patient mannequins. This training centre has the world's only FtM mannequin and they say they wanted to get a MtF one too but the company that made them was taken over by a US company and... they didn't want to make them anymore.
This entry was edited (Tuesday 21 April 2026, 20:07)
Hmm... I haven't been seeing these. I came by to check in, because I hadn't seen anything from you in a while. Probably just timing though, I've been busy off the network lately.
@Nuki idk I've been keeping up my tuesday and friday streams pretty faithfully so I've been around, and the tuesday vods are up on my website for patreon donors and promo squad members if you wanted to watch them, they go up free a month later for everyone else if you wanted to wait until then too 😀
Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8) is a managed network protocol
suite that transforms how networks of every scale -- from home
networks to the global internet -- are operated, secured, and
monitored.
my partner works for prpl foundation, so I've heard (bad things) about WiFi 6, and she skipped over 7, but told me that there's rumours of WiFi 8 already.
I didn't realise that there's a whole rat's tail of other midlife crisis sounding stuff attached to it
"Devices communicate only with their designated service gateway. The service gateway communicates only with the designated cloud service. Lateral movement between devices or zones is architecturally prevented by the absence of any permitted route to any other destination." WTF
Now livestreaming at joystick.tv/u/toplesstopics and through our discord server at toplesstopics.org/chat ! Gonna discuss the intersection between feminism and naturism, then edit some more "artistic newed photos" for sale to pay for video hosting etc!
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People sometimes think of a #kink dynamic only in terms of power exchange. It's more like a trust exchange. One party may choose to trust another to provide safety, tranquility, comfort, etc. That gift of trust is what is infused with power. The offering should be made with an appropriate expression of limits and bounds. The entity to which the offer is made is often, but not always a practitioner of the arts. They etch and line the boundaries, ideally capturing the intent of the supplicant. Once sealed, the ritual begins, and can manifest in many forms.
Within the circle, there is safety, accompanied by an outpouring of vulnerability, droplets of which harbor the essence of the devotee. These are cared for and woven into the ritual. The threads can undo a person altogether as the essence is drawn out into the aether. A mind set free to wander the void, leaving the consciousness intact within its vessel. It's a vulnerable state, and it leaves the beings highly suggestible, sometimes devoid of purpose, and easily put to good use.
The entity in control, the weaver, the witch, the queen of the hive; they have discretion as to what choices to make. As you are allowed to peek out of your enclosure after quite a rest, you see a snippet of such a ritual in action... Continued in the #AltText
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Drone 9382 is pre-bundled with a photography module, and I'd say the editing task ran on these images is pretty nice
I intend to write up an educational piece building off my existing ones to explore the aspects involving de-identification. I feel like it's one of the many things that are not well understood about kink spaces. But ego dissolution as a whole is difficult for some folks to grasp so I'm not sure how well it'll work.
In the meantime I finally broke the seal on posting the backlog of latex+rope pics I've been collecting. I'm looking forward to getting some shoots in with a vacbed and rope sometime in the near to medium future.
I’ll be very interested to read this! Recently I started heavily getting into pet play, and realising that absolute trust of my Handler is key to getting into the right headspace. I was never able to just go blank like that before…
the UK has had some new legislation enacted which improves renters' rights [edit: initially with England; housing is a devolved matter] [edit2: apparently England is lagging behind here] by a lot:
there are no more fixed rental contracts; everything is done on a rolling basis with a generous multiple-month notice
no-fault evictions are gone
after an eviction without reason landlords couldn't re-list it as a rental property for a year
rent can be increased once a year with a 2-month notice
rent increases can be challenged by a tenant
"rental bidding" where you try to give the landlord a higher price than other tenants is made illegal (this was the single biggest WTF moment i had arriving to the UK)
pets must be accepted by default, unless there is a good reason not to ("I don't want to" is not a good reason)
hell yeah.
This entry was edited (Tuesday 14 April 2026, 16:08)
Most of these sound like EU-wide rules in general (or at least in effect in most EU-countries) but one stood out:
"rental bidding" where you try to give the landlord a higher price than other tenants is made illegal (this was the single biggest WTF moment i had arriving to the UK)
What the fuck is this and who in their right might thought that this was a good idea
@exec rent bidding has started becoming the norm here in Australia ;_;
wanted to ask about UK/EU stuff tho, how many months notice for landlords ending a rolling contract?
here fixed term is standard and we (tenants) preferred it because it at least gave you 12-24 months of stability at same rent rather than them giving 2-month notice to end so they could relist it at a price higher than they could increase your rent by
Order a copy of our magazine Too Long: https://toolong.news/collections/tl007With the new Renters Rights Act coming into effect in just under a months time, ...
the bidding thing feels like a recent development, we encountered it for the first time in 2023. every time I moved before this, you made an offer and the landlord said yes/no. after, it was your bid got put in a big pot, you had to write a grovelling personal statement, etc
very glad that it's stopped, it made moving impossible. that year and the year after our landlord put rent up over 10% each year so I'd like to know what effect these laws actually end up having on rent rises
@jcoglan it's completely normal in Australia - some places have rules against the real estate agent asking if you'd like to pay more than someone else, but as far as I know it's still legal for you to make and for them to accept a higher-than-advertised price
Yesterday i had to do something really fucking stupid.
I wanted to try out a new desktop fedi client, but the windows version is only released in the microsoft store. so i go to download it from the MS Store only for it and all the other store exclusive apps i use. to fail to download/update. it kept giving an error, so i google that error and all the results for it are related to the windows firewall not working.
So i check the windows firewall and its related services and theyre all working fine. my next guess its probably something fucky with the microsoft store. so i clear out the cache and it doesnt fix it. i check the microsoft store services and theyre still working, restarting them doesnt help. so i think maybe the store itself is broken so i open power shell and uninstall it. as im going to reinstall the microsoft store it keeps failing saying it cannot find the files, even as i explicitly point to them or try to redownload from microsofts servers. i cant even re-download it from winget because it uses the store as a repo for that. oh and microsoft removed the
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Yesterday i had to do something really fucking stupid.
I wanted to try out a new desktop fedi client, but the windows version is only released in the microsoft store. so i go to download it from the MS Store only for it and all the other store exclusive apps i use. to fail to download/update. it kept giving an error, so i google that error and all the results for it are related to the windows firewall not working.
So i check the windows firewall and its related services and theyre all working fine. my next guess its probably something fucky with the microsoft store. so i clear out the cache and it doesnt fix it. i check the microsoft store services and theyre still working, restarting them doesnt help. so i think maybe the store itself is broken so i open power shell and uninstall it. as im going to reinstall the microsoft store it keeps failing saying it cannot find the files, even as i explicitly point to them or try to redownload from microsofts servers. i cant even re-download it from winget because it uses the store as a repo for that. oh and microsoft removed the MSI installer to manualy install the store, you can only get it from the store or windows update. AND WINDOWS UPDATE IS NOW BROKEN TOO!!!
So at this point im thinking i need to do the usual SFC/DISM fixes in powershell, except when it goes to repair things it still cannot find the repositorys. maybe i can try the offline fix method? so i download a W11 25H2 iso, mount it, point DISM to it, and it STILL cannot find it.
Now at this point im kinda livid. this windows 11 install has survived 6 years of updates, across 3 different machines, and even the jump up from windows 10. I have kept this frankenwindows install running for so long i get a sick perverse pleasure from keeping it alive. I really do not want to have to nuke this drive. so i go for broke and do an in-place reset of 25H2. AND IT STILL DIDNT FIX IT.
But the in place reset did do something! after that i was able to use powershell to reinstall and reset the store. and when i finally open the store im greeted with "WinAppRuntime.Main.1.8 Updated Today"
So you're telling me that the runtime environment necessary for the microsoft store and related apps to update and function, updates through the store? and if it breaks it cant update itself to unbreak? is there not a way to manually install this? well apparently not that i can fucking find. you need to do an inplace windows reset because apparently nothing short of that will fix how badly it fubars the repositorys and app database.
doing linux levels of repair effort to windows isnt my favorite passtime because of how annoying it is, but it is entertaining to see what breaks and why.
@DjBRINE1 it is, but spending time building windows applications is not something i really enjoy doing. at least the linux version is released in a sane way.
Tons of people inside microsoft had been complaining how bad windows update was for years when I started working there... 10 years ago. The team I was on actually broke windows update over the weekend once because we pushed too many internal OS images into their pipeline, after they explicitly told us we could do that without causing a problem, which also took out the entire windows store, which included all of xbox!
When I went back 5 years ago they had to patch the Windows Store just to support Halo Infinite having two possible executables, and there was also a bug where every time you installed the game the icon would get 1 pixel smaller. We had multiple issues with the Halo Infinite install on the windows store. Everyone hated it (and we didn't have any issues with Steam). The entire windows ecosystem is a catastrophe, microsoft employees don't even like it, and eventually the inertia the company thinks it can ride on forever will run out, very abruptly.
@cloudhop my uncle worked on drivers at ms during the win7 era and he fucking hated it back then too. ive never heard good things from ex ms employees about the state of windows.
PS: if you tell me to use linux instead of windows for this machine, which for various reasons i wont get into i cannot do, they will never find your body.
This entry was edited (Tuesday 14 April 2026, 09:22)
Today, someone on the Fediverse told me, “Your free speech is not important to me.”
Ironic—because my free speech bothered them enough to send me a message about it.
But I don’t say things because they’re important to you. I say things because they’re important to me.
So important that I pay for the privilege of owning and managing atomicpoet.org. Which means my free speech doesn’t depend on the whims of someone else—or whatever their mood is at the moment. It’s based upon my own personal integrity.
My personal integrity says, “Speak the truth even when others are bothered by it”—which they are.
Specifically, the truth is that Trumpism is a religious cult. It’s a cult—talking about that shouldn’t be isolated to a #uspol hashtag because it’s actually #worldpol.
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Today, someone on the Fediverse told me, “Your free speech is not important to me.”
Ironic—because my free speech bothered them enough to send me a message about it.
But I don’t say things because they’re important to you. I say things because they’re important to me.
So important that I pay for the privilege of owning and managing atomicpoet.org. Which means my free speech doesn’t depend on the whims of someone else—or whatever their mood is at the moment. It’s based upon my own personal integrity.
My personal integrity says, “Speak the truth even when others are bothered by it”—which they are.
Specifically, the truth is that Trumpism is a religious cult. It’s a cult—talking about that shouldn’t be isolated to a #uspol hashtag because it’s actually #worldpol.
And this isn’t merely politics anymore. It’s religion. Trump comparing himself to Jesus Christ is beyond political propaganda—it’s religious proselytism in a literal sense.
Everyone should know this. I make no apologies for saying it in the most public way possible.
There’s just something poetic about white colonizers who believe they should dominate online spaces they don’t control because they’re simply used to getting what they want.
Is it just me, or do the bulk of “no Trump” complainers on the Fediverse happen to be white dudes from Australia—living literally on the other side of the world from the USA? It just seems pretty ...
These days, nude = sex. So I have sex watching TV, I have sex making a sandwich and I often have sex doing my job. Wow... I knew I was too sexy for my shirt. - P.Z. Walker
This TDOV I am very grateful to have trans friends. I have never met a trans person who was unhappy about transition and achieving their chosen gender identity.
I am also continuing to question my own gender. A lot of the things associated with masculinity make me deeply uncomfortable.
I'm a naturist at heart,' she says, 'I love being on beaches where everyone is naked. Ugly young people, beautiful old people, whatever. It's so unsexual and so liberating' - Dame Helen Mirren.
@Eetschrijver dat klopt. Het zou in heel veel opzichten goed zijn als de 1960er jaren weer terugkwamen. Toen was ook niet alles rozegeur en maneschijn maar terugkijkend...
![[ˈJuɦo̞ ˈMæn̪t̪yˈs̠ɑ̝lo̞]](photo/contact/80/6606?ts=1779359493)
Very well put. Thank you for putting words on this.
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![[FWGS]DjBRINE1](photo/contact/80/176819?ts=1738218875)
LMR 🇦🇹🇪🇺🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🏴☠️
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