blaine

https://mastodon.social/@blaine

Public Key

npub1l49jpek7fm0h6m393hlrpfat8u8h5he58e2e8k35g85qrt7j04ks03z4au

NIP-05 Address

blaine_at_mastodon.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs06jequm0yahmadcjcml3s574n7rm6tu6ru4vnmg6yr6qp4lf86mgduymey

Author Public Key

npub1l49jpek7fm0h6m393hlrpfat8u8h5he58e2e8k35g85qrt7j04ks03z4au

Show more details

Last Notes

2025-03-26 23:39:00

- reply

it is 100% ai slop. See also this thread https://bsky.app/profile/dame.is/post/3llces4rnas22 – I couldn't resist making the cuts deeper. 😅🙈

2025-03-26 23:21:53

- reply

I am so sorry.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/231/297/419/479/689/original/911acddc215020a3.png

2024-10-25 19:00:21

- reply

it's so great to see, I love having these conversations! There was a long time while virtually all the commentary out there were breathlessly following how Facebook Appification was going to be The One True Future and it was just depressing as hell. It's so inspiring to see how many folks are both really thoughtful but also, critically, building and experimenting with really amazing alternatives. (ps did you see Erin Kissane's XOXO talk? https://erinkissane.com/xoxo 😍)

2024-10-25 18:50:03

- reply

hopefully we can find good solutions! The challenges are very lightly technical, rather almost entirely social and political.
On the plus side, the conversation is happening! By contrast, very few people run alternative phone infrastructures that refuse to peer with monopolistic behemoths like T-Mobile or AT&T, or email servers that wholesale block gmail.com. 😅

2024-10-25 18:46:52

- reply

💯 I'm definitely guilty of hand-waving on that. I'd love to see more nuanced forms of moderation because instance-level blocking is the nuclear option.
e.g. As much as I despise Facebook, I recognize what a challenge it is to overcome something like Threads. We need tools that give flexible control, or as you say we end up with a fragmented network (and, by default, one that's centralizing for most, silencing for a few, which is both good and bad).

2024-10-25 18:36:47

- reply

(to bring it back to bluesky, I think Jonny's reflections are really important – flexible identity and networks are certainly *possible* with atproto, but the question of whether the "social architecture" in practice tends towards surveillance, advertising, or de-facto centralization is an excellent one.)

2024-10-25 18:31:51

- reply

The key thing imho that any decentralized social network should provide is that you should be able to move to a new context without having to convince everyone you know to do the same. Creating a new online persona likely means the cast of folks you interact with is going to be different, and *that's a good thing*! I'd love to see us optimize for diversity, privacy, and discovery, rather than building catalogues of people-we-know.

2024-10-25 18:27:59

- reply

our "accounts", or more specifically individual "feeds" are situated – the data in them makes sense only in the context of the community (e.g. "followers") and wider conversation the social objects were posted in. We might want to back it up for archival purposes, and that's great and should be possible, but not an intrinsic property of decentralized networks. i.e., I have "takeout" backups of my twitter feeds and google data, but I don't need that data *here*; it's not relevant.

2024-10-25 18:21:51

- reply

good thread! The atproto folks are great, and Jack's origin narrative is "a bit frustrating" to say the least, but one point I've always differed on, that I think Jonny calls out really well, is that _data_ portability doesn't matter, and has been a red herring for technologists in the space forever.
e.g., I have zero desire to back-port all my Flickr posts into my Pixelfed account. No more than I want the posters I had on my walls when I was 15 up on my walls today.

2024-10-23 01:54:18

I'm a massive @npub1sac…kcpe fanboi, but don't take this with a grain of salt:
Please go watch/read her XOXO talk here: https://mas.to/@kissane/113353287668829352
I'm not going to even try to summarize, because I think she shares everything I've felt but failed to communicate about the need for our online communities to evolve for the past 15 years with profound intelligence, care, and humility. Just watch (or read) it, please. ❤️

2024-09-25 19:50:33

What's the state of the art for maintaining a single account that surfaces in both Bluesky and Mastodon? Just bridgy? (not a slight against bridgy, just the only one I'm aware of right now 😊)

2024-09-24 00:18:24

- reply

there's got to be some deep law about the relative utility of technologies that can be inferred from the contrast between the incredible resilience of DNS and the utter *state* of DNS management tools.

2024-09-20 00:32:03

- reply

Maybe we could go with:
"Climate Terrorism", a wanton act of climate destruction, e.g. flying in a private jet.
versus
"Climate Counter-terrorism", an act against a Climate Terrorist, e.g. blowing up a private jet.

2024-09-20 00:20:10

We need a word like "arson" but for acts that have egregious climate impacts. Private jets (for example) aren't just tools of arson, they also cause floods and other extreme weather.
The word should be cognate with arson, because at this point, with vanishingly few exceptions, flying in a private jet is a willful act of terrorism. Despite other options, some people choose violence.

2024-09-05 14:39:49

- reply

eep! Sounds very stressful. I hope your friends are ok! Is there a separate emergency beacon that would get activated if something bad had happened?

2024-08-27 04:03:56

- reply

I'm eager to read Dan Davies' "The Unaccountability Machine" that argues that over-protective and broken bureaucracies that restrict people from engaging in care for their community *result in* populism.

2024-08-27 03:50:18

As we (at least in Canada) move towards a situation where government organizations are not* (in general, locally at least) engaged in direct suppression of less privileged people in support of more privileged people (i.e., as things get better), the state monopoly on violence is at risk of migrating to a state monopoly on care. When bureaucrats have jurisdiction over civic things that provide safety and security, a lack of capacity or will in government becomes an implicitly hostile gate.

2024-08-03 17:22:15

- reply

This article is a bit bleak, but it's clear to me that we need to fess up to the reality of the situation: it's bad out there. This quote in particular:
"the amount of energy being trapped by CO2 emissions ... equals the force of 800,000 Hiroshima bombs every day."
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2024/07/30/Wildfires-Grief-Paralysis/
This doesn't get better soon, sadly. We need to adapt to this new reality faster than any of us think. Paradise, Jasper, Lytton, Fort McMurray, Lahaina, Marshall, Santa Rosa, and many others: just the start.

2024-08-03 17:15:35

Now two weeks in to evacuation from my home due to wildfires; we're fine, and despite "communication that could be better" from local authorities, our understanding is that so far our home has been protected and safe. Grateful beyond words to the fire crews. ❤️
The experience has really driven home for me how deep a hole we're in. We live in the woods, and are in that sense a canary - but we're not the first, and won't be the last. Jasper is high profile, but this is happening everywhere.

2024-07-22 14:49:23

The world needs better mapping tools for simple sketching of "pirate maps." If you know of one, I would be very grateful right now to also know about it.
QGIS 🙅‍♀️ (crashes doing simple things)
Google Earth 🙅‍♀️ (seventy clicks to do one thing)
ArcGIS 🤑 (expensive)
Gaia 😖 (layer management is ... not fun)
Google My Maps isn't terrible, so that's what I'm using for now, but it's layer capabilities are fairly minimal. Any other pointers would be amazing. 🙏

2024-05-16 00:18:16

I'm not sure it's ever going to be a "thing" like #mosstodon but here's my contribution to #moosetodon.
This absolute unit (actually kind of small for a moose, but still) visited our yard yesterday. No sign of Rocky. 🫎
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/447/885/017/920/776/original/62b6a525cdc49f59.mp4

2024-04-21 17:50:22

The back-woods, working class, remote rural community near where I live, whose primary employers are a zinc/lead smelter and a pulp mill, just elected amazing queer hero, Birkley Valks, to the local school board of trustees. He soundly won the election against a hate-mongering anti-trans bully.
Love wins! 🎉🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️❤️
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/310/467/369/297/119/original/3d4576d31c217dcc.jpg

2024-04-03 19:37:44

On instagram, which I only use these days to follow friends who are on there, the most frequent "notification" is from obvious spam (presumably phishing) accounts. Meta has thus far been unable to stem the never-ending flow.
Except these accounts are all brand new. I don't know anyone who's not on instagram in 2024 that will decide to sign up and follow *me*
If Instagram had a flag that said "don't let new accounts follow me", it would stop the spam dead.
Fediverse apps should do this.