@riley He would probably give you the honor of calling you an idiot.
You know you've really arrived when esr deems you idiotic.
>.>
@swampgas @the_etrain ...but we've got to keep the price of bullshit down, so we don't get voted off of fedi in the November midterms!
Clearly it's time to panic, and lie about stuff for no good reason.
Either way, the person defending DHH is not thinking their argument through very carefully.
How can an argument "come from a place of caring" when it is talking about killing people just because of their origins?
The only way that can be seen as "caring" is if one agrees that some people are inherently and significantly more deserving than others, depending entirely on their prior geographic location.
...and that is pretty much straight-up unredeemable racism, it seems to me.
This seems related to one of the things I was trying to do (will be trying to do) with Issuepedia. I think.
(Any particular reason you have quote-boosts turned off, @IX?)
Written by Dirk Slater with the help of the Rise Against Big Tech Coordinating Group and Community.
Starting and managing an online community used to require significant labor, whether that meant running a bulletin board system or hosting a web forum yourself. Big Tech platforms like Facebook Groups and Reddit have made starting a community far simpler, but they complicate the development of ones that can steer their own future. A company’s priorities can shift, critical platform features can vanish, and the knowledge generated by a community can become trapped within systems it does not control.
This was the foundation for “Strengthening Online Communities,” a 90-minute workshop organized by Rise Against Big Tech, held on July 29. Around 90 participants from a diverse range of movements, organizations, and locations attended, sharing their experiences in areas such as mutual aid, labor organizing, human rights advocacy, community technology, environmental action, feminist and disability justice, digital rights, and local organizing.
Feminist perspectives on digital justice and tech
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The goal was not to identify a single “best” tool for organizing or community building, but rather to explore how communities can make more intentional decisions about the forums, mailing lists, group chats, and other digital spaces they use. Additionally, the workshop examined how these choices can influence culture, participation, memory, and power within the community.
Online communities facilitate various forms of collective work, such as sharing information, coordinating actions, learning together, providing mutual support, making decisions, and maintaining relationships that extend to in-person gatherings. Notably, no one described their community in terms of the platform or software they use. Participants at the workshop described communities based in neighborhoods, regions, professional practices, social movements, and transnational solidarity.
This highlights a simple but crucial point: technology itself is not a community. While a platform can support relationships and collaborative efforts, it cannot provide a purpose, build trust, or replace the people who welcome newcomers, facilitate discussions, and address conflicts.
Therefore, the practical starting questions are fundamentally human: Who is this space intended for? What do people need to collaborate on? What would motivate them to return and actively participate?
The workshop began from the idea that tools make some forms of community more likely than others. Mailing lists can support slower, more reflective exchanges while building an archive over time. Forums can organize conversation by topic, make earlier discussion easier to find and turn recurring topics into ongoing threads. Real-time chat tools can create responsive and conversational spaces that facilitate quick coordination and foster a sense of closeness among participants. However, many people have pointed out that important decisions, context, and learning can be difficult to retrieve once they are lost in a busy scroll.
The key consideration then is whether the tools used by the community align with the type of knowledge, relationships, and participation it aims to nurture.
The workshop itself illustrated a significant challenge when choosing alternative platforms. When participants were divided into small groups, a malfunction in the Jitsi breakout room feature resulted in many people being placed in rooms alone, rather than with their fellow participants.
It was frustrating, and a reminder that community-controlled, independently hosted technology can have real usability and reliability issues. However, participants were remarkably patient. Instead of leaving, many continued to answer the workshop questions in the shared Etherpad, exchanging messages, and transforming the written space into a collaborative discussion.
Although the breakout rooms failed, the session showed that a community’s resilience doesn’t rest on its infrastructure alone. It also depends on the willingness of participants to adapt, support one another, and keep contributing when plans fall apart.
Participants made it clear that people often stay on corporate platforms for practical reasons. Tools like WhatsApp, Zoom, Google Workspace, Facebook groups, Slack, and Discord are familiar, widely used, and often more accessible across devices, languages, and varying levels of digital confidence.
For communities working with people under pressure, across borders, or with limited connectivity, the cost of switching to a new platform can be high. Challenges such as creating a new login, navigating an unfamiliar interface, the absence of a mobile app, missing captions, inadequate translation support, or additional security steps can all become barriers to participation.
Consequently, the workshop rejected the notion that migration to a new platform is simply a matter of selecting a better tool. Transitioning between platforms is an organizational process that requires a shared purpose, time, patient onboarding, clear guidance, and individuals who can support others through the change.
Privacy, autonomy, and control are crucial, especially for communities facing surveillance, repression, discrimination, or retaliation. A space cannot be considered aligned with these values if it is inaccessible to those who rely on mobile access, assistive technology, captions, translations, low-bandwidth connections, or plain-language support.
This should not be viewed as a reason to accept the status quo. Instead, it highlights the need to make accessibility a non-negotiable aspect of platform selection, implementation, and resource allocation. Communities must evaluate not only the features of a tool but also the support they can provide, which includes guides, practice sessions, one-on-one assistance, facilitation, and moderation.
As expressed by one participant, the additional effort required to make alternative solutions effective often involves human labor. This effort deserves recognition, sharing, and funding.
Participants described their efforts to move from Big Tech platforms to alternatives. Some groups successfully transitioned from one messaging platform to another, while others found that even well-designed alternatives struggled to gain traction in their organizations. The reasons for these differences were rarely purely technical. Factors included whether people were already familiar with the new tool, whether the community had a strong motivation to move, and whether trusted members were available to support the transition.
A helpful approach is to treat migration as a shared project rather than just a technical handover:
Participants frequently expressed a desire for online spaces that people can revisit, search, shape, and ultimately leave in a better condition than they found them. This is one reason why forums and mailing lists remain appealing. They allow for a slower pace, giving ideas the time to develop while also making knowledge easier to rediscover and build upon.
One participant described this process as “gardening” a community space: tending to contributions, organizing and moving material, welcoming newcomers, and ensuring that the space remains useful rather than becoming a disordered collection of messages.
This presents an opportunity for RABT as it works to develop its own platform. The goal is not to replicate the features of corporate platforms one-for-one. Instead, it is to create a digital home where people can learn, collaborate, disagree, organize, and establish a lasting collective memory—on terms they can shape together.
As Rise Against Big Tech prepares its own community space, we have been working through many of the same questions faced by groups trying to build online spaces that are useful, safe, accessible and sustainable over time.
We are exploring how a forum-based platform such as Discourse might work alongside open-source chat tools such as Mattermost or Zulip: making room for both immediate exchange and a longer-term, searchable collective memory. But the important starting point is to understand what the community needs the space to do.
If you are thinking about starting or strengthening an online community, these are some of the questions we have been wrestling with:
There may not be one perfect tool, and there is rarely a once-and-for-all answer. A good choice fits the community’s purpose, members’ access needs, safety requirements, and available capacity—and can be revisited as the community grows and changes. The work does not end when a platform is chosen: it continues through welcoming people, supporting participation, moderating with care, organizing shared knowledge and collectively adapting the space over time.
Rise Against Big Tech’s new community forum, howto.riseagainstbig.tech, is a space to exchange practical experience, questions and resources on building more autonomous, decentralized and sustainable digital infrastructure. Join to learn from others navigating migration, free and open-source software, federated services, self-hosting, digital security and the everyday work of making community-controlled tools usable and sustainable. Whether you are just beginning to explore alternatives or already maintaining them, you are welcome to contribute and learn alongside others
We are grateful to everyone who participated in the session. Below are the names of some of them.
Tobias Eigen (he/him) tobias@tobiaseigen.org / https://digitallysovereign.org. Sierra (she/they); Co-chair, Asheville DSA; Citizens Against Mass Surveillance (CAMS); WNC Alignment Table. Robert Smith (he/they), Better together Solutions/Community Engine, https://bettertogethersolutions.com. Hapee de Groot, Front Line Defenders. Xavier Dutoit https://fixthestatusquo.com opensource online campaigns tool. Joel Izlar (he/him) (deaf) The University of Georgia. kathleen azali, Numun Fund. Laura Atkins, Word to the Wise. Quintessence Anx (she/her) quintessence@nivenly; Board Chair of Stichting Nivenly Foundation (Executive Director of Nivenly Foundation. Jacob Dybvald Ludvigsen (he/they), papiris🏴🇵🇸 (@papiris@hachyderm.io) - Hachyderm.io. organizer with the working group for digital autonomy in the Red Party of Nordland region in Norway (Rødt Nordland · Nordsalten Sosiale Kooperativ), organizer with Digital Sovereignty Collective (https://matrix.to/#/#disco-space:data.coop), member of datakollektivet (https://datakollektivet.no). Kati LeTourneau (she/her). Inroads (https://www.makeinroads.org/). Fe Román Muniz (they) - Network Lead at The SylC Project / hola@sylc-pr.org. Ana Barahona (https://ana.aktivix.org). Mardoz Chron.
The Italian technology collective Autistici/Inventati (A/I) announced that it will shut down after the US government declared it a terrorist organization and imposed sanctions. Founded in 2001 on anti-capitalist, anti-fascist principles, A/I offered free privacy-focused services, including roughly 16,000 email accounts, 1,500 websites, and the Noblogs blogging network.
The State Department didn't accuse A/I of organizing violence. It targeted the collective for providing services that some alleged extremists used. Digital policy advisor Ann Roth, who started a blog on Noblogs in 2007 points out that “Just because the US decides that someone is a terrorist — without any judicial procedure, without anything that one can legally go against — so just a decision by the State Department, and then all this internet governance structure falls apart,”
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@Raeyn For some reason, headaches feel like an Eternal State of Being; it takes practice to remember otherwise...
@servelan Has anyone used the phrase "digital blackface" yet? ...'cuz that's kinda what shrieks across the room and latches onto my particular throat...
It’s entirely possible to have a world with guaranteed housing for everyone, solar and wind powered energy, fast and free public transit, high quality education and healthcare for all, well-funded libraries, healthier food, and a shorter work week. Those things are achievable now. Today.
...and Stranger Danger is a total myth invented by the police, in case anyone didn't already know...
@blogdiva I learned of the phrase "third space" only last year. (That's the category you're describing, in case it's also unfamiliar to you too.)
Hellzyeah, we need much more of these... and ways for kids in car-centric places to reach them. I propose diverting ~half the money we spend on car infra into third spaces and non-car transit infra.
@anarchademic I'm still skeptical that it is. The article talks about the risks of being hit while indoors, and does mention that indoor hits are generally less severe, but doesn't give any data about incidents of people being struck by lightning while in the shower.
It seems to me that in order for the lightning to try to reach ground through you, it would have to avoid the many other routes between the plumbing (whichever system -- fresh water and wastewater -- it somehow managed to strike) and ground.
Obviously that's no guarantee -- but what are the numbers? Is PVC plumbing safer or more dangerous (with regard to this one very uncommon occurrence)? What if you're showering in a cast-iron bathtub?
For now, I'm continuing to ignore this risk (not that it comes up a lot anyway).
@kity Could be; certainly my concentration is shot. The CO2 must have taken it all and there is none left for anyone else.
@kity Oh right, that whole "400ppm" thing...
It's been a disconcerting day, so it's unsurprising to find myself forgetting known things.
@aud "Yes friends we got trouble! With a capital T which rhymes with P that stands for People!"
Inside you there are two* lungs.
Feed them both a mixture of O2 and Nitrogen, with maybe 2% CO2 (I think?) and optionally a few trace amounts of other non-toxic gases.
(WARNING: The above describes a process known as "breathing", which can lead to death or other adverse side-effects. Consult a doctor or pharmacist to determine the exact amounts of O2, Nitrogen, and CO2 that are right for you. Offer void where prohibited by laws of physics; not available in some states of matter.)
(* If the actual number is less, then I'm sorry life has treated you like that. Truly. Fully-repairable bodies when.)
You're not wrong.
The problem then becomes communication -- I have yet to successfully get across the idea that they might want a better platform, and that I can help with that.
The usual reaction is that anything else would be too new, so nobody would use it.
I should probably try again... but kinda overloaded in general right now.