Meliorism (Latin melior, better): the idea that progress is a real concept and humans can interfere with natural processes to improve the world.
What would it look like to embrace pragmatic meliorism instead of cynicism?
Acknowledging problems while focusing on solutions
Learning from history without being imprisoned by it
Maintaining high standards while accepting incremental progress
Combining skeptical analysis with constructive action
This is harder than cynicism by orders of magnitude. It takes nuance, effort, and (critically) emotional risk. But it’s also more likely to actually improve things.
Just read into Keybase documentation. Mastodon software supports Keybase, per-instance. However, due to what I’m guessing is massive proliferation, Keybase isn’t adding more instances at the current time.
I’ve waffled on Twitter. Disabled, re-enabled, and again just diabled cross-posting. Before the edict on barring Mastodon links in profiles, I had used Debirdify to learn that about 106 of the accounts I follow had federated accounts elsewhere. That’s less than 10 percent of the total number of accounts I follow there. The news escaping the Twitter bubble about the owner and his policies and his actions don’t really give me hope.
The interesting thing right this minute is dipping into the full federated Mastodon feed to see things I would otherwise have no idea how to find. The no-algorithm thing is cool in that sense.
I do think that things like boosting and likes will lead to much of the same “interaction-seeking” behavior from Twitter that can be leveraged in manipulative ways. I already see accounts whose output is primarily boosted toots, or broadcasting memes. My fear is that it’s just a matter of time until accounts are stolen and instances get weaponized as long as there is a financial or political incentive.
I worry about a commercial platform hosting speech and owning access to it, when the owner talks both about free speech and lawful speech. My sense is that culturally we will be now also facing battles over what is lawful speech, and protecting a specific point of view as lawful and anything other as not.
Nevertheless, I do see more and more accounts coming over into non-Twitter spaces. I find that interesting and exciting. I think there is value in having more than one path to information. And I fully support an individual’s right to own their words and their art.
I’m about half way through @manton’s Indie Microblogging book. I see the wisdom of using the web itself and protocols we already have as the social network. Weird, right? Using the interconnected network we already use, itself, as the social network?
In the end, I’m seeing aggregation sites (networks) as a single point of failure, and I’m seeing diaspora as the best hope for preservation and posterity.
It takes more work to run my own ship, but I like that I can head to the ports of my own choosing with hosting, email, DNS, RSS, blogging, and Mastodon instance. Further, I’m happy to pay the people in those ports that are helping me and providing value.
Yesterday I found about 8 Twitter accounts that I follow mentioned or listed a Mastodon address. Did a quick Twitter search for “mastodon” on followed accounts. Today I learned of Debirdify, which helped me to find about 100 more accounts I could follow directly from Micro.blog.
A playlist I’m developing. Track order needs sorting. Linking or uniting the tracks is what I would call a rhythmic complexity, even if the time signatures aren’t unusual. If you get lost, the beat will bring you back. You’ll need a tolerance for ‘90’s and 2000’s Electronica, but other genres are included.
There are some low notes. I recommend over-the-ear cans or a place you can feel the noise.
Apologies to Gaping Void for the theft of his artwork. Art on the back of business cards was a thing when I needed it.
I do not have a subscription to read the Washington Post, where the source article appeared, but I appreciate the quotes pulled out at 9TO5Mac. This seems like an appropriate stance for technology companies to take, and I appreciate it.
So that’s what they do. In secret. By serving search warrants on companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft to obtain emails and messages that belong to our customers.
Contact interoperability via VCF or CSV file is simply terrible. It could be as simple as export/import. But that’s not the case. It’s export/translate/edit/import/edit
Long story short:
Don’t use files to exchange this data. Use services.
To get contacts from Outlook (Exchange) into iOS, I used the macOS-native Contacts app. I connected to the Exchange account that had the contacts needed. Then I connected to the empty iCloud account. I selected the Exchange account, selected all of the contacts, and dragged them en masse to the iCloud account. In a few minutes, all of the contacts appeared in iCloud with the correct data in the correct fields. A few minutes after that, they were on the destination iPhone.