Texas-based writer and hol.ogra.ph co-admin

Feel free to follow me at @gil@hol.ogra.ph

(he/they)

  • 6 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Just a side note - I would caution about directing non-Black folks to spaces like # BlackMastodon and @ blackfedi, just because those spaces might not be intentioned for non-Black people to look at, directing us there might be encouraging our participation in spaces where it’s not necessarily invited or wanted, etc. Great spaces to direct Black folks to if they’re looking to build a community for themselves on fedi, but I would just say it’s best for non-Black people to not look/participate unless the space is specifically inviting that.

    The other thing about the “just listen more to more Black people” discourse is that while it may fix representational issues of whom you’re choosing to listen to, it won’t help if there’s no intention to work on racial biases or challenge one’s own racist behaviors - so I would even implore that type of introspective work. Connected to that would be, even if a white person starts doing these things and working on this practice, that work of interrogating your own biases/behaviors never stops. I feel that white people (especially on fedi) often need reminding that just because you’re doing X, Y, Z, etc. doesn’t mean that you’re done working on your own racism or that your reasons for doing X, Y, Z, etc. are all genuine.

    You might also want to mention how having some marginalized identity even as a white person doesn’t excuse you from doing this work - there’s a lot of harm done on fedi by people who use their own oppressed identities as a way to avert accountability for being racist. In your piece, you already mentioned that supporting Black people and fighting anti-Blackness means supporting all Black people - you could make that understanding of how anti-Blackness is interconnected/intertwined with other oppressions more apparent by appealing to white people who might consider themselves staunch advocates for other communities but refuse to confront racism.

    This is kind of a mess of different comments but those are just my raw thoughts after reading what you wrote.









  • I personally disagree with the sentiment that going child-free is the solution to ecological catastrophe. Any individual’s decision to have children, or not, hardly compares to the systemic issues within agriculture and natural resource management which are causing it.

    I thought beehaw was supposed to be the “nice” instance. You and others have done a wonderful job proving that otherwise today.

    Well, the original comment in this thread which upset you came from your own instance. From where I’m sitting, that comment has been pretty much the only not-really-nice interaction you’ve had all day on here. Don’t really see where this strawman is coming from.




  • I agree - my main reason for sharing with this post in particular is because the tie-in it has with Beehaw’s recent decision to, at least temporarily, defederate with .world and sh.itjust.works; I just found the framing about decentralization, esp. the fact that the Fediverse is not a monolithic entity mandating a uniformly aligned approach, useful.

    On the whole, I do think either ActivityPub’s protocol spec would need some kind of privacy revision, seeing as it’s already been a Problem where microblogging admins have had to block access by servers dedicated to mirroring Mastodon posts which don’t delete their copies after posts are deleted by the user, or the software itself, Lemmy in our case, will have to make adjustments to its implementation of federation like you said. Of course, I’m mostly just conjecturing here and I don’t actually know what either of these might look like 😅

    The main part of this which I problematize are the people who are sticking their necks out for Meta and suggesting instances shouldn’t be quick to defederate because this is, supposedly, a good opportunity to bring federated social media into the mainstream. Yet, in my opinion, they’re not making enough of the fact that, even with their open-source contributions, Meta’s software manufactures discord and bigotry on a massive scale. Letting them federate with an instance opens floodgates on that and for the stealing and selling of Fediverse participants’ data.








  • “Unlike President Biden’s student loan schemes, this plan addresses the root causes of the student debt crisis. It puts downward pressure on tuition and empowers students to make the educational decisions that put them on track to academically and financially succeed,” he added.

    Lowering people’s ability to borrow doesn’t really address the other problems which underlie high tuition costs - such as newer facilities costs, more administrative staff (both of which, IMO, heavily relate to the competition between schools to provide the most services to their students and court new student admissions), and decreases in federal and state funding coming from tax revenue which has led to much of the financial burden being passed onto individual students.

    Plus, as @misguidedfunk mentioned, we already tell students their upfront cost of attendance - multiple times even before they decide to enroll or start classes - and they have to acknowledge it as part of receiving aid.