social.cloudless.world

Technofeudalism. Rentseeking. Exploitation. Varoufakis putts Surveillance Capitalism into perspective in this Wired article. @pluralistic calls it "cloud capital".

The world is toiling on the land of Meta and Google, trapped in their walled gardens, increasing their bottom line, one like, post and search at a time.

Braking free can be inconvenient, but when people start to realize the gravity of the situation, they might just take some action. I have seen it happening more and more lately, and not only among the techies!

Anyway, does #Varoufakis have an account in the fediverse? I could not find it 🙃

«One of the darkest possibilities facing us right now is that our phones may be like trojan horses invited into realms we may want protected from commodification.»

The War on Informality by Brett Scott
https://www.asomo.co/p/the-war-on-informality

War forces pragmatic and practial decisionmaking: Zelensky urges medical marijuana legalization for Ukrainians with 'trauma of war'.

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2023/06/28/ukraine-president-volodymyr-zelensky-medical-marijuana-cannabis/6051687990393/ #Cannabis

Has anyone tried running the official Posh spin of the latest Fedora 38 on a Librem 5 yet? @fedora @purism

The #Scandinavian countries wants to loosen #BigTech's grip on the public debate and the #Nordic Council of Ministers now recommend member nations to go all in on #ActivityPub! A big thanks to @carl for contributing to the recommendations!

https://pub.norden.org/nord2023-004/3-access-to-diverse-and-credible-digital-platforms-and-communities.html

I also submitted this to #HackerNews, for those who want to participate in the conversation there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35625517

cc: @aral

I'm playing around with gpt4all (a local AI) and had this rather terrifying interaction 🫣

#Medium is announcing an exclusive Mastodon server for its premium members. Some might think this runs counter to the free and open ethos of the #Fediverse, but I think there is room for arrangements like this.

As long as we stay away from ads, data collection and algorithmically driven feeds, we're good. The CEO of Medium makes a solid case of why Twitters dominance is unraveling and the Fediverse keeps expanding–niche communities that is not siloed, but interconnected with a vast universe of other communities.

“I think there’s this unbundling of social media going on right now,” he continues. “And what that gives us is the opportunity to be more opinionated. For me, that’s exciting — I don’t want to be a town square for the entire world. I want to be the town square for people that love reading and writing — and a certain type of reading and writing — thoughtful reading and writing"

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/06/medium-launches-a-premium-mastodon-instance-as-a-membership-perk/

We started planting early this year and as the #plants grew and got re-potted we did not have enough space inside anymore. Since we still get #frost during the nights, we made small mini #greenhouse inside our (already small) greenhouse and use a heater to keep them warm at night. It has worked really well so far!

#Gardening in #Norway can be challenging – but fun!

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.

— Bertrand Russell

«What’s attractive about Mastodon isn’t the software,[...] it’s the values of the platform. No one is trying to hack the attention of Mastodon users for profit, no one is bombarding us with ads. It’s just a community of people, communicating.»

https://worldhistory.medium.com/tech-journalism-doesnt-know-what-to-do-with-mastodon-df1309f088a0