Erin Kissane

Working on governance, risk, and social patterns across federated systems. Previously: COVID Tracking Project + Mozilla Foundation + editorial and community advocacy in tech and culture orgs.

I want our tools and networks to be better in more ways for more people in more places. Also: Books, care, plants, very old bones, humane journalism, magic as technology.

geo: in the woods by the sea (PNW US)
web: https://erinkissane.com
meta in myanmar series: https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series
verification: https://erinkissane.com/about

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npub1sacl4yvfyeurcng493dnfsq4w0hnelqcs9fzk2fk60rn3mpj49ds90kcpe

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsgwu06jxyjv7puf52jcke5cq2h8meulsvgz53t9ymd83ecase2jkcykc8gz

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1sacl4yvfyeurcng493dnfsq4w0hnelqcs9fzk2fk60rn3mpj49ds90kcpe

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Last Notes

2024-06-26 00:07:34

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This is awesome, please post your papers when they’re up!

2024-06-20 16:28:11

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Yeah there are so many available patterns of human communication and it seems to me that a lot of the arguments against gating require settling on just one or two, which is kind of a bummer.

2024-06-20 05:58:35

Men I don’t know have been yelling at me for about 24 hours about how I am promoting toxicity and misinformation and am a narcissist and a bully in replies to my short thread about how it would be super nice to have control over replies here. To accommodate people who for some reason don’t find people yelling at them to be the highest form of online communication a way to participate in public life online.
Many perfectly reasonable comments agreeing and disagreeing, but like…lordy.

2024-06-19 05:24:39

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Yeah. I don’t think everyone who holds that stance is abusive, but it does rhyme.

2024-06-19 05:12:00

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Anyway the big fedi research project I’ve been on for six months is nearly ready for publication and there’s so much I’m excited about in it.
Having Mastodon be so central to the fediverse by the numbers means we could really use attention to these safety/humane conversation/good experience features here. I hope that happens.

2024-06-19 05:07:46

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Someone else will say that if you don’t want everyone to be able to say whatever they want in your thread whenever they want to say it, you shouldn’t post in public because that’s the bargain.
But like…I don’t want the old bargain. The old bargain is kind of shit! We have a million ways to contain and shelter even “public” conversations offline, let’s have that in the good online places, too.

2024-06-19 05:02:11

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Believing you are morally entitled to reply directly to someone because they speak in public is…definitely a position, I guess, but I think being able to specify how you want to be interacted with is deeply humane. (And being able to do it after a thread starts to go sour is so important.)
Someone will ask why blocking doesn’t make this unnecessary and the short answer is that prevention is better than picking off unwanted interactions one by one, and having to process each one as you do it.

2024-06-19 04:56:57

Bluesky has reply-gating (you can set who can reply to a post, like people you follow or a given list or no one) and is now testing out post-publication reply locking.
I just want to yell for a second about how humane and consent-forward these features are, especially after seeing some people here losing their minds when someone asked for gating recently because they felt (alas, not a paraphrase) entitled to always be able to respond.

2024-06-18 16:05:09

From a few months ago
https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2023-10/racism-germany-afd-migration-musa-okwonga-english
[ht @propcazhpm on 🦋]

2024-06-18 01:16:15

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Full agreement, and fwiw I’ve also found that having alcohol (and alternatives) *around* during, say, an evening conference activity, is really different from “now we have the sponsored happy hour where the activity is just drinking.”
(My worst tech conference experience was in London and they had an open bar serving ONLY alcohol when everyone was tired and hungry and hot—you had to go find a water fountain if you didn’t want wine or beer. It got messy fast.)

2024-06-15 01:57:47

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Wishing you speedy passage through and a quick and complete recovery. ❤️‍🩹

2024-06-14 00:56:15

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This is so great, wish I could come! Please high-five Alexis for me!

2024-06-13 07:06:15

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I mean I don’t think it’s a *good* implementation of ActivityPub integration, just that “scraping” is hard to define except via relatively diffuse social norms, in this system. (I don’t have a list of previous incidents on my phone but this is a pattern that repeats.)

2024-06-13 02:21:44

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I don't love a prerecord, myself. The conference today had *zero* talks and even less presentation-type stuff than the usual unconference, and was very rigidly orchestrated. And it worked extremely well!

2024-06-13 02:19:52

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I think what we're dealing with every time this happens (several times a year, at the moment) is a clash between what's technically possible and some of the emergent social norms of the Fediverse. Which are simultaneously uncodified, hotly contested, and fiercely protected by their promoters.

2024-06-13 02:17:38

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I mean, this is an oversimplification, but the Fediverse is essentially a network of websites that make copies of information that originated on other websites and link them together into feeds, so whether a site using ActivityPub to ingest messages is "scraping" or not is…largely in the eye of the beholder.
Mastodon accounts also have RSS feeds, so distribution is really built in—but also public information is going just always going to get indexed and scraped, here in 2024.

2024-06-12 23:24:50

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*Extremely* curious about what happened here.

2024-06-12 23:15:21

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I would like to read in to the record that I am much more curious about all of this than I am interested in issuing a take. :blobcatnerd:
@npub1vl7…f6g0 @npub1zu5…pytj

2024-06-12 22:38:14

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Last thing before I re-submerge—I think big emotional/instinctive reactions are so interesting and worthy of examination and usually point to meaningful low-level structural problems or disjunctures even when they seem to be about something else. (By low-level here I mean lower than protocol. Social contract stuff.)
@npub175v…g8tr's look at similar things here is really interesting
https://www.techpolicy.press/context-consent-and-control-the-three-cs-of-data-participation-in-the-age-of-ai/

2024-06-12 22:05:39

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tx @npub1jhf…35pm for permission to include

2024-06-12 22:05:20

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Another POV I like a lot from Robert Gehl, who did a whole blog post:
https://aoir.social/@rwg/112605036119768467
https://fossacademic.tech/2024/06/12/Maven.html

2024-06-12 20:46:41

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<whispervoice>I think protocols largely try to exclude vibes but they get through anyway, just in weird/uncanny ways</whispervoice>

2024-06-12 20:43:46

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I think this formulation matches my own sense of why some things feel weird and others don't, and I'm really interested in pinning down what it is about some implementations that produce that impression.
(I think obviously it's more than one thing.)
https://tenforward.social/@noracodes/112604903437836956

2024-06-12 20:22:37

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Do you mind if I link to this post in a thread? (https://mas.to/@kissane/112605002686353554)
I think your sense of it matches mine but I know there are several framings knocking around and I don't think I understand them all

2024-06-12 20:13:03

It's not completely clear to me how various zones of the Fediverse distinguish "scraping" from "non-Mastodon ActivityPub services functioning according to spec in ways I didn't expect."
Given how frequently protocol behaviors act as ethical markers ("if you *can* do it, it's fine") this seems like a fruitful territory to try to map…
(I say this as someone who has myself been surprised more than once by AP implementations that put Fedi posts into unfamiliar-to-me contexts, don't eat me.)

2024-06-12 01:03:32

Huge relief to see today’s ruling in Florida. (That moral arc bends toward justice if and when we bend it.)
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna156589
https://media.mas.to/media_attachments/files/112/600/474/659/127/127/original/1b85bc0e47070d10.jpeg

2024-06-08 00:26:14

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Yeah, really the whole spectrum of platform-news org entanglement. But especially those.

2024-06-08 00:21:09

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one of you just sent a lead and then deleted it before I could track it down please come back I promise to be nice(r than I was on twitter)

2024-06-08 00:10:55

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Oh no, I mean when journalists collect up a bunch of e.g. tweets and post them with a couple of paragraphs and call it a story. (Really I mean when editors assign this kind of story.)
"Aggregate" is just how I've heard it talked about within journalism.

2024-06-08 00:05:47

Is there a canonical essay about (the problems with and complexities of) social media aggregation as journalism that I can just link to so I don't have to break down the angles and weirdnesses myself?
There *has* to be, right?

2024-06-07 19:00:45

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…but without attaching behaviors to names, a story like that Krebs post would be nothing but an unverifiable conspiracy theory.
(If BI had also published his photo, phone number, and home address, that would strike me as an unjustified disclosure of private info and flip this from investigative journalism into doxxing.)

2024-06-07 18:57:31

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So on the most practical level, if she obscured his name, there would be zero verifiable evidence for her identification. Providing a name means other people can check the work, and potentially build on it.
On the social level, attaching behavior to names is one of the principal ways investigations (journalistic and legal) work because legal identifiers let us trace connections.
Like, I'd argue that this is classic investigative journalism: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/05/stark-industries-solutions-an-iron-hammer-in-the-cloud/

2024-06-07 03:39:58

the puppy just barked at a piece of sweet potato I dropped while cooking
(then he ran off with it to his lair on the hearth rug and now they are friends)
https://media.mas.to/media_attachments/files/112/572/778/986/236/614/original/ea53e7367bcbdd60.jpeg

2024-06-06 20:04:17

Welp.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-fiatjaf-nostr-donation-2024-6
(https://archive.ph/uXdXN#selection-2141.0-2157.353)
https://media.mas.to/media_attachments/files/112/570/990/970/411/577/original/710dcf7bc00fbbdf.png

2024-05-25 02:36:45

This @npub1vc3…axsh story is so wild
“As detailed by researchers at Radware, NoName has effectively gamified DDoS attacks, recruiting hacktivists via its Telegram channel and offering to pay people who agree to install a piece of software called DDoSia. That program allows NoName to commandeer the host computers and their Internet connections in coordinated DDoS campaigns, and DDoSia users with the most attacks can win cash prizes.”
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/05/stark-industries-solutions-an-iron-hammer-in-the-cloud/

2024-05-13 03:07:30

Every box of beans I order from Backporch Roasters comes with a handwritten note that reads “I hope this coffee finds you well” and I receive this wish with a sincere belief in its earnestness because instead of an email *they sent me my favorite coffee beans* and I will hear nothing against them