The sooner the better! I can't even lie, BlueSky, as mentioned in https://todon.eu/@Zee@social.coop/110437000963243438 is in the best place to have this just work.

I think there's a project trying to do this! It's in Python (and the name is escaping) but you're right — these parts of the process need to be separated!

Real question: who's working on a visual editor that could rival things like Instagram or TikTok? I know this is the text land, but this space is going to (slowly) die out in twenty years if it doesn't try to align with the graphical space that we're in when it comes to sharing media. I picked up Instagram today and the simple means of making a text post or overlaying it over a video felt more … it felt way more human. You can hear my voice and see my face (though just my voice makes it more human IMO). Having auto-transcriptions/captioning is a big boon as well.

That "system" is Nostr. And frankly, I do not trust anything Jack Dorsey explicitly endorses. That man has passively caused more harm to people and the Web than most people are willing to admit (especially because he still has the ears of the celebrity class). And because of the inability to break away from these abusive systems, we're going to find new ones pop up with more of these things embedded in them, rinse the history of the past mistakes and deepen the grooves of the damages from before.

I'm going to switch to digest mode for the SWICG mailing list. Despite's Evan earnest (and successful) attempts to move it back into a functional state, there are other folks (mainly one, Melvin) on there that have been passively pulling in the kind of ideas and technology that run counter to a safe Web. Because they also have a louder voice (and the passive backing of a [abuse-enabling built system, IMO]), it's not worth engaging it anymore.

It shouldn't also be lost on anyone that I've slowly moved away from open social Web things in recent years as I've gotten more involved in activism (and I do plan to return to this space because it is vital to the health of the Web) but I'll be doing it from afar.

I'm not going to act like an expert on labor organizing. I didn't have that term in my vocabulary four years ago. Now it's one of the anchoring aspects of my life and something I'm deeply passionate about. My first foray into it with when I worked at Glitch, and it was both an exhilarating and humbling experience - I learned way more about my colleagues, their lives and experiences than I expected. It's something that was required - in order to build with people, you also have to learn about them. We ended up winning a contract - one of the first of its kind! But not long after, layoffs happened, and I was knocked into the wind, as layoffs tend to go.

I wasn't terribly disillusioned that it couldn't happen again. In fact, I ended up just going head first into understanding why was labor organizing so difficult in the United States (unironically, it almost always leads back to the elites of America's discontent with distributed autonomy - that's for another blog post, but Kim Kelly has a book on this, if you want something sooner). I did (and am still doing) a lot of reading, asking questions to get more answers, that led me into even more loops. Eventually, I redirected a lot of my energy into a thesis that was more poignant to my position with this as a whole - the advent of capitalism and how it's poisoned everything we engage with. My thesis is going to be focused on Black people (Black being defined as indigenous African people, descents thereof and kin of these people moved throughout the globe either through chattel slavery, voluntary or involuntary migration from the continent of Africa) - I posted about it on Mastodon.

What does that have to do with labor organizing? That's for another post. But what this is more about is what's been going on with Code for America (or labor movements within tech as a whole). Frankly, I've written most of my thoughts with the Tech Workers Coalition in a newsletter entry with them named "Why Our Union Contract is Stalled at Code for America". If you're reading this, there's a good chance you've read it already, otherwise definitely give it a quick read; it'll catch you up to where we are today.

I've been posting a lot online about our NLRB hearing around unit clarification (a bit on the nose, but this is where a NLRB agent aims to define the members of the union based on testimonies from multiple folks). It has been both eye-opening and extremely draining (it is not fun to sit and pay attention to an eight-hour Zoom call while working on an open source project to optimize tax filing - among other things I do) but it has given the public a chance to see what's been going on internally and how confusing this process has been (as shown here, here, here and here). I don't like strife (believe it or not) and this process has felt like that (both internally and externally).

What's the importance of all of this? Well, the Tech Workers Coalition has something about how ChatGPT's heavily necessary dependency on human annotation, all the while tech giants like Microsoft push these tools into every Windows machine. It's not clear to people using it, but these tools augment human knowledge (to a degree of degrading and reducing the need for independent knowledge discovery, but instead of either weirdly synthesizing information or completely making it up) all for "free". Amazon workers rose up to fight against the abuse they've been seeing internally - workers are dying for two-day shipping - and frankly, the greedy growth of that organization is going to be its downfall.

I'm in no way comparing the violent behaviors of hyper-capitalist organizations to the things I've seen and heard at Code for America. In fact, I'm happy to say that I have enjoyed my time here and can see myself here for years (something I've only said before for one other company, especially since I don't dream of labor the way our parents did). I say this because the importance of labor organizing is the natural step towards everyone forming a truly just society where work can be our first step towards understanding even more powerful concepts like mutual aid, collective organizing outside of work (did you know tenants can have a union? Things like that could provide rent stabilization and security - as a New Yorker at heart, this rings home) and deeper movement work like building autonomous spaces for folks chronically under attack (either by the State or from extremists groups). If we can form a truly representative and inclusive union at an organization poised to help improve government services for the American public, imagine what kind of moves we could make for other places trying to fight for their first contract - we can only provoke change by demonstrating and leading it.

All of this starts at the place we spend a third (or more) of our day at all. We have to organize and work together if we want to see a better and bolder world. It starts by forming a union at your place of work. If you ever want to ask for help with it, my DMs are open - but there's plenty of smarter people who can help.

Okay, figured out how to reset my stream key for Owncast while running it under Dokku.

You have to do the following:

• Stop the process: dokku ps:stop $APP_NAME
• Run the token reset command in a container mounted with its data (this command mirrors my setup): docker run -v /var/lib/dokku/data/live:/app/data dokku/live -streamkey "YOUR_NEW_STREAM_KEY"
• Start it up: dokku ps:start $APP_NAME

Done! Love the work that @owncast@fosstodon.org has been cranking out.

Now, I feel more comfortable picking streaming back up. Just want to work on more window isolation — it's a bit tricky to stream on a single monitor.

Can this be done on a global basis? Not just per-project?

Oh my goodness. The frequency at which Zoom crashes on my laptop is frustrating, and I can't NOT use it (thanks capitalism and pseudo-monopolization). I wish I could convince more folks to use things like Jitsi.

Let's go! After two long years, the New York Times Guild managed to get a contract! About 1,500 workers were involved in the making of this contract - a TRUE demonstration of collective power.

More info on the birdsite at https://twitter.com/NYTimesGuild/status/1661171608533311488

(does the guild have an account on fedi? if not, https://union.place is a great option!)

If I end up leaving tech, it's 100% going to be the people that does it. And the industry as a whole, but I definitely stay in spite of that. I'll probably leave when I realize that the majority of tech will use every and any in favor of capitalism (and their own platform).

Too afraid to read this because I already know who these people are targeting. https://grist.org/extreme-weather/boots-on-the-ground-fema-oath-keepers-natural-disaster/

@haymarketbooks@mastodon.social is doing a sale on "Let this Radicalize You" at 30%! And the paperback comes with a free e-book! https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1922-let-this-radicalize-you

I've read the foreward and have been in awe of the authors — a strong recommendation to anyone who believes that we need to get free.

The class of folks in the electoral college, those in other complimentary services like a parliament and lords of a land of serfs are all the same; please try to change my mind.

Is it possible to reimagine a Web without JavaScript? Frankly, and again, this is from a cursory observation, but this does not seem like a priority of functionality for any Web engine maker (like WebKit, Gecko, Servo or Blink). Why?

So Intuit is giving money to politicians (or lobbying as neoliberalism defines it) to fight against the work I do at Code for America around free (and open source!) tax filing. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/intuit-lobbying-taxes_n_64623a10e4b018d846bf3e59. Private companies engaging and working like this are always no good (despite the coating of goodness they give you).

Please don't apologize: you've written code and shared it for free on the Web. You owe me nothing, and I appreciate you still spending time to maintain this project. Thanks, this'll make apps easier to debug.

So glad this came RIGHT before I take off tonight for DC! I'm fighting the urge to start reading this now.

This recent acquisition of Activision by Microsoft is still distasteful to me, and I'm hoping the affected teams are doing okay. XBox's not looking too hot right now.

A profile piece about the new CEO of Twitter. https://fortune.com/2023/05/14/new-twitter-ceo-linda-yaccarino-ad-industry-skills-but-challenge-elon-musk-leash/