Lyssa Dawson @squeakycheetah@awoo.space

Remember when we were younger, and we fantasized that cyberpunk was this awesome desired thing?

Where you could plug yourself in and digitally craft your entire everything, or have some spliced organo-mechano body sculpt so that you could appear outwardly as well as you felt inwardly, or just how much your overall appearance was modifiable?

Remember how excited you got inside when you fantasized that all these things were completely normal in that world, and that it would be worth it despite the utterly bleak dystopian backdrop that leeched all of the empathy, compassion, and civility out of being alive?

We're not there... we've DEFINITELY got the latter dystopian part, and we're still working on the first half, but the general world is not qvite as receptive to our crafting of our own images as would be ideal.

Hold on to those that are accepting of it. Hold on to them tightly.

This is how we survive the problems of the latter... how we navigate the dystopia.

We are better than the inhumanity of this world, because inside we are bright-neon, rainbow colored, shiny metallic, soft and comforting, hard and unflinching, loud and proud, qviet and caring, glowy-eyed beings.

We craft our existence despite being surrounded by these crumbling ruins of society, because who we are is all we have. They cannot take that away, because we won't let them.

You are worth every last gasp of breath that's inside you, every tear of sorrow, every dazzling spark of elation, and every shred of compassion.

I don't know if you needed that reminder or not... I just know that I did, today.

*Hugs softly*

Every time you write code that requires Chrome or CEF or Electron, just remember: you are giving Google control over you and your users.

You are letting them dictate what you can and cannot do. You are letting them view your user's potentially private activities (URLs are always sent to Google without Debian's patch set).

You are becoming a part of their toxic culture, their neocapitalism.

Remember that.

"We block them!" is the obvious response. Masto lets both #mastoadmins and users block/silence both individuals and instances. And that’s good for now. But what’s gonna happen when we’re big enough to get large scale attacks?

Should admins be automatically alerted if multiple folks on their instance start blocking a person? Or an instance? Or if, say, five different people on your instance blocked five different people from badactor.donuts? Hell, maybe you want to automatically defederate with badactor.donuts when that happens, and tell the admin so they can rescind the block when they get a chance to investigate.

This is hopefully a long way away from happening. But it feels like a thing we should start thinking about. How do we give people who are running an instance as a hobby the tool to quickly detect and deal with attacks?

(This probably also goes with my musings on "friend" instances potentially watching what each other block, and alerting their admin/autoblocking when enough friends are blocking the saame thing. It’s kind of the same idea on a lower level.)

In the year 2040, humanity lands on Mars for the first time. When leaving the shuttle, and to their shock, the astronauts find a familiar red and gold flag planted on the surface. "SPQR"
#writingprompts #writing