This should be the top comment.

Sunlight only works reasonably well for waterborne pathogens, and only when you've got time.

As with disinfecting anything, and especially for societal issues, we need more than sunlight alone.

Life in an authoritarian hellhole almost by definition means technology won't save you. If they can haul you off when you're walking down the street, who cares whether your stuff is encrypted? They'll make something up.

Even if you're innocent, they'll make something up. I lived for a year in one of those authoritarian hellholes and in that time knew two people who were arrested and hauled from station to station til someone paid a bribe- these weren't the dissidents either, just some guys. The dissident was stabbed to death on his doorstep.

Encryption is good to save us from marketing, from megacorps making our lives hell. Laws and norms constrain the rest.

Authoritarian hellholes will make something up when they don't like you, but they'll also spy on everyone to decide who they don't like. At which point anyone attempting to resist them is going to want to get extremely familiar with operational security before they get dead, and a big part of that is things like encryption and steganography.

Encryption will not keep you hidden from an authoritarian government for long, and certainly not for long if you're trying to build a movement with any sort of wide-spread support.

Authoritarian hellholes don't have human rights and if they find out that you're using encryption - that's enough for them to arrest you.

Hence steganography.

> Most users don't care about the alignment and spacing and so on in isolation, but they do get a sense of quality from the overall impact. This stuff really matters in aggregate.

Red Letter Media has a great phrase that rolls around in my head to describe situations like this (they use it for media analysis), "You might not recognize it, but your brain did."

Where you might not be able to point to a problem, but you instinctively know something is off.

Organizing and demanding pay collectively seems to help in negotiations, so good for them for taking this approach. It's not like Stanford can move its grad programs to Mexico like a US car maker and its factories.

Democracy isn't perfect, but checking out is the quickest route to ensuring your interests are only minimally represented. True at all levels of democratic organization.

Checking out and moving to an environment that represents your interests well is a way to see that your interests are met, though.

What happens when there is no where left to move, or the cost of moving is too high?

Solidarity, not freedom, is the opposite of tyranny.

Neutrality and running away implicitly supports the injustice you are running away from. Flight-ing instead of fighting leaves those left behind to the wolves.

Political change only happens once people are willing to put themselves at risk.

Not every battle is mine to fight.

I've spent plenty of time tilting at windmills. But there are limits to how much effort I'll put in for collective good.

Your lack of solidarity for others means they will have a lack of solidarity for you.

The mindset guarantees your exhaustion, loss, and ultimately your oppression.

You don't have to fight the battle, but you should at least support those who self sacrifice and hold it in high regard and equally you should feel shame for running away.

Your privilege let you run away, but others aren't so lucky.

How do you know how much I've run away from compared to you?

Maybe it's been less.

But I sure don't stick around in every shitty situation hoping that I can turn it better with enough sweat of the brow and sufficient persuasion to others to play nice. Hopefully you don't, either.

The thread we're talking about is a classic tyranny of the majority situation: something that democracies handle poorly. If you're outnumbered by a large factor by people with drastically different interests than you, and it's going to be decided by voting, you're in for a bad time if you stick around.

I don't think you'd find a single woodworker anywhere who, if they could afford it, wouldn't prefer a table saw with Sawstop. How much are your fingers worth to you?

Or as the great Stafford Beer put it, the purpose of a system is what it does.

I would rather businesses take a hit on efficiency and have our 15-hour work weeks. Maybe that'd provide an incentive for businesses to pursue making project management and hand-off among staff more efficient.

There seems to be an assumption in your writing that people should use social media to challenge themselves, be exposed to different views, to "discourse" and so on. Nearly everyone I know via social media wants to hang out with their friends, not debate people. Whether something is an echo chamber is sort of beside their goal, they want to have fun.

If one seeks out something that explicitly isn't an echo chamber, I'm sure there are many places for that. I'm just not seeing that as, really, at all desirable for a lot of people.

The problem is that Mastodon puts a second filter bubble on top of the old who-do-I-follow filter bubble. Except this additional filter bubble isn't controlled by yourself.

There is always a second filter bubble. In the case of non-federated sites, that filter is in the form of the policy of the site and also the algorithms used to sort feeds and replies.

With federated solutions, users have a choice.

They have a choice? Is it transparent for average users what is withheld from them and where? And where their own posts are withheld? If no, they don't really have a choice. If such a choice even exists.

Twitter is fairly lightly moderated I think, and the "following" tab gives a raw timeline.

Average users will leave toxic environments, and be attracted toward content that is compelling to them.

If federated services pick up steam, they will pick between a few popular options.

I'm not being snarky--in the context of people wanting a place to make jokes and have fun with their friends, how is that a problem?

It's probably not, but it isn't on Twitter or so either.