Have you seen the "About" page on instances? It lists exactly what you want: what instances are defederated by the instance. Here's the page for the instance I reside in:
> But admins can still choose to block instances in the future that I might have interest interacting with. It is like a gamble choosing an instance.
Then have multiple accounts and abide by each instances' rules.
> Making an instance is tedious, and once someone in charge finds out who you hangout with, your domain name gets blocked. Such is socializing.
You can still hang out with the folks you were hanging out with. They blocking you has no bearing over who you hang out with, unless you let them get under your skin.
Based on your responses here and elsewhere it sounds like you have a bone to pick with Mastodon because you can't find a solution where you get to be heard by everyone all the time, from the far-left to the far-right. That's not a right and that's not "free speech", that's trampling on others' freedom of association and their right to build communities as they see fit: Not every person is welcome in every community. Who are you and I to dictate what a "correct, healthy community" is?
Please don't put words in my mouth, personally I don't have anything worthy of being heard.
I really wanted Mastodon to be where I can find everyone. To be free of censorship, ads and algorithm-induced bubbles. I am lucky to have the "right" mentality (in regard to the tech industry), so I am not often suppressed, but everyone is different.
I don't want to impose on someone a "correct, healthy community". Blocking an instance seems to do so.
"I really wanted Mastodon to be where I can find everyone."
That's Facebook and Twitter. And even then you can't find everyone.
People go to the Fediverse to build the community they want, not be subjected to "everyone". It's this clash of collective rights vs individualism that seems to drive so many of these ridiculous arguments. It's no different (or, in fact, it may be better now) than getting banned from one of the many phpBB forums of 20 years ago. Those communities thrived and the banned didn't even have an instance leftover to call a home: everything was gone when they got banned.
Just because you want to find everyone, doesn't mean everyone wants you to find them.
Hmm, maybe I should see the fediverse as multiple loosely-connected Twitter clones, rather than one place maybe? I seemed to have a malformed expectation regarding Mastodon. Thanks for clarifying that for me.
"Mastodon is a decentralized network! Remember, regardless of server choice you can talk to and follow anyone on Mastodon!"
-- mastodon.social
I was perhaps misreading the developer's intentions.
Mastodon is just one ActivityPub software. PeerTube and Pixelfed let your loosely-connected Twitter clones also be loosely connected to Instagram clones. It's a big world.
So I wouldn't get too hung up on one developer (me included).
Everything for this is in place. No changes or features outside of AP are needed.
Mastodon even has a simple key-value table that any profile can enable and fill with details such as "website: example.com", "twitter: @jack" and so on.
This feature already has "verifications". Meaning that you can add proof that example.com, keybase etc are really yours.
This could easily[1] be expanded to verify ownership of SMS, or messenger apps. Provided those apps have some form or authentication/proof in place.
I have this on our roadmap for our "fediverse linkedin" project (another story for another time) so would gladly offer help here; keybase with my contact details in my hn profile.
--
[1] It would be easy after a refactoring. The code handling this in Mastodon is not ugly persé, but rather unfortunate. Tightly coupled to the God-Model "User" (which seems to happen with every rails project at some point) and spread over some json-store, model and unrelated controllers.
> social distancing NOT correlating with a reduced death rate.
The point is to reduce the infection rate so that the total number of hospitalizations (Covid19 or otherwise) does not exceed the healthcare system's capacity. I doubt your uncited claim here is comparing apples to apples.
Hey don't feel bad, you're in great company. In NC we've also got the gerrymandering, anti-trans bathroom-bill, state-legislature-hates-the-governor partisanship (state R's would rather burn the state constitution than let the D's participate), and pro-Republican election fraud to top it off. Just think how many other states can still join in!
In what way does assigning any blame help? Magically US citizens will be able to successfully sue China for lost wages? Magically there will be less deaths?
Accountability matters. When things go wrong it's important to assign blame to understand why things went wrong and how to prevent them in the future.
So in this particular case, a way blaming might help would be to recognize those organizations and governments that were incapable of preventing the spread of the disease and to recognize in the future a quicker need to mitigate and not to assume China will take care of it, assuming China deserves blame. It may also help by recuperating the economic loss by holding those responsible for it and requiring payments. These are common things that happen in all walks of life and the international context is no different. People and countries shouldn't get to walk away from massive fuck ups if it is possible to hold them to account. At least we can try.
There are ways to understand why things went wrong and how to prevent them in the future, without assigning blame. Blameless post-mortem.
I'm a reasonable man, I find accountability a positive virtue. I'm also not a foolish one, for I understand trying to assign blame for an act of god is definitely NOT normal. And I understand the "blameless post-mortem" is a tech-industry standard well understood, so I am surprised to find the "blame game" card being played here. Consider:
Every time a hurricane rolls off the coast of west Africa and trashes the Eastern seaboard, you don't see the US blaming west Africa.
You don't see Missouri trying to pin the Joplin tornado onto neighboring Kansas/Oklahoma in order to recoup billions of dollars of damages and loss of human life. You DO get a technical NIST report that is blameless (I have worked with this particular data) [0].
When an earthquake originates in one country but flattens the city in a neighboring country, you don't see one sue the other.
When a typhoon hits SE Asia, they aren't trying to readily assign blame.
What can be assigned blame is a nation's reaction to this force majeure. At that point the people should be holding their own leaders accountable, as the assumption should always be that the neighbors are incompetent, and our own leaders are the best. That is inconvenient for the current President precisely because he politicized the disease. If he had not politicized it, his followers would be more amenable for blameless post-mortems (literal post-mortems, let's remember people are dying). Unfortunately his response was lackluster, and rather than taking accountability (you know, the virtue I agreed w/ y'all on at the beginning), he would rather shift blame. But this implies that he was relying on China to do its part. Which then begs the question: If the US President wants to blame China, why was he sitting back and relying on China on good faith when no other nation was?
To summarize why I don't believe the bullshit that is "assigning blame" for SARS-Cov-2:
- Accountability is a virtue
- Blameless postmortem is a huge cross-industry technical standard, so abandoning that is immediately suspect
- US President politicized the disease; due to this he has political motivations to avoid the virtue of accountability and how he guided the US response (making the act of "blaming" even more suspect as being a political reaction)
- Doublethink of "Did the US President really rely on the Chinese response? Blame them, not him!" (only enabled because of politicization)
There are ways to understand why things went wrong and how to prevent them in the future, without assigning blame. Blameless post-mortem. But that's now been politicized.
How do you prevent a hurricane? The coronavirus could have been stopped. The wildlife markets could have been shut down. The spread could have been prevented. The transparency could have been better. I'm not saying China actually does deserve blame, maybe it was way out of control before it was possible to do anything, but this has been a horrible disaster the likes we normally don't see and we need to do what we can to prevent it from ever happening again or if it does to handle it better. Blame is a useful tool, it feels like you're trying to avoid it for unstated reasons when it seems entirely useful in this context.
> Blame is a useful tool, it feels like you're trying to avoid it for unstated reasons when it seems entirely useful in this context.
I've demonstrated that everything except blame is useful when doing analyses of engineering failures or disaster analysis. I have professional experience in this both in the computer science world and in the traditional engineering world.
Identifying root causes like "lack of testing prevented deployment of limited resources optimally which exacerbated these effects: X, Y, ..." is a useful and actionable way to identify and address problems. And then people can look at these blameless analyses and make their tough decision, and then go beyond and demonstrate accountability for their choice. This can be repeated as many times as necessary all around the world, within nations or across nations in a collaborative response (such as the joint vaccine development initiatives).
Adding "blame" just exacerbates emotions (political or personal or what have you), clouds judgement, and usually results in a worse outcome by whatever measure of the disaster (usually number of deaths). That's my "unstated reason": blaming is an active choice that leads to more deaths as history has shown repeatedly, whether by famine due to supply chain issues plus political rejection of food aid, or a "not invented here syndrome" of rejecting medical supplies, or societal instability resulting in mass protest and political revolution (and more death and starvation), for example.
I don't blame Trump for Covid. Just like I don't blame China for Covid. There are a set of things China could have done differently, just like Trump could have done things differently. "Blame" is really saying "Trump should have never had to do any preparation differently because China should have done things differently," which is the definition of living in an alternate reality. Life says "tough shit" and doesn't treat him like a special snowflake. Plus it does not inspire confidence in the kind of leadership principles the President is following: just how many other things is he relying on others like China to do so that he doesn't have to make any preparations?
If I were inclined to distrust China, instead of blaming them I would be crapping my pants with how emphatic the President repeatedly assures the American people that he relied on them to manage such a disaster for him (and us). That is what he is saying when he tries to blame them.
I think China did as well as they could -- it was a bad outcome because it escaped -- but shutting down their entire society for a few months to bring their new cases down to 0 was effective for them. Sucks it escaped their borders but it's no longer their problem at that point. And it is scary that the whole free world is looking at the authoritarian regieme and going "gee they got down to 0 new cases" and then look at the Leader of Free World USA's high daily new case load and cringing. And then looking in horror at Want-To-Be European Leader Of Free World Germany reopening and watching their daily case rate rise.
This is a false equivalence and you even hint at that very fact yourself ("Spanish Flu" => Spanish first broke worldwide censorship vs "Wuhan Flu" => Place of origination).
There was no worldwide censorship of Covid-19. So what must be "interesting" is the lack of any real argument being made in your post, instead leaving a convenient gap where an argument should be so everyone can get into a trollsy debate about projecting their own political feelings upon this awful contentless comment.
Correct, my comment was devoid of opinion or arguments, it was just that, a comment. I also don’t see how your last paragraph contributes any better to a healthy debate though.
Regarding the false equivalence though, I didn’t imply that, since I don’t think you need to go so deep into the interpretation of words. If any point was to be made in my comment is just the plain wording “Spanish/Chinese flu” associates the location and its people to the stigma. This, repeated over time, contributes to the social imaginary. Not every one knows the historical facts so well, and many people hearing the words “Spanish flu”, missing the context, will still make the negative associations. And let’s not forget that for a considerable part of the population in USA (not in Europe though), Spanish means “speaks Spanish”.
Yes. HIPAA provides the government's law enforcement a large amount of conditions under which they are able to acquire an individual's medical records without a warrant.
See 45 C.F.R. § 164.512(f).
Furthermore, the ACLU's position is that HIPAA does not do a good job protecting people's privacy from the government and may be a violation of the people's 4th amendment rights. Unfortunately, it hasn't really been challenged Constitutionally to date, so we don't know.
What we do know is that HIPAA is probably not a good example to "dunk on" someone else, due to these concerns.
When we first moved to a Gemeinde just outside of Zürich, my wife and I were amazed to see these cat ladders coming down from balconies. We pass by cats on our walks occasionally, so they definitely use them. It probably helps that we're on the edge of the Gemeinde on a rolling hillside next to cow fields, fields used by sheep, and forest. Very little car traffic. On the other hand, in Zürich city proper I have not seen these ladders as I imagine it is not safe for a cat to be outdoors there.
I haven't seen outside cat ladders in Zürich, but I've definitely seen them in the gardens at the back of buildings. Perhaps "public" cat ladders are not allowed?
I´ve seen plenty of them in Zurich. Not at Bahnhofstrasse of course but in Wipkingen for example they are everywhere. I had one in my backyard and there were multiple street facing ones as well.
