Toots for dynamic@hub.netzgemeinde.eu account

Written by dynamic_hubzilla on 2025-01-14 at 13:28

Help me out!

What is your favorite #XMPP / #Jabber client and why?

(boosts welcome)

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Written by dynamic_hubzilla on 2025-01-07 at 14:26

Just a few quick thoughts on making sense of science linking vegetarianism with depression.

[#]^https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/display/7510e48f-e867-4712-8fec-6cff05f83523

dynamic_hubzilla schrieb den folgenden Beitrag Tue, 07 Jan 2025 15:22:03 +0100 @David Ho

Regarding the association between veganism and depression, correlation is not causation.  There are probably dozens of reasonable hypotheses for how differing psychological profiles could lead to differences in dietary choices.

A casual DuckDuckGo search also turns up this interesting piece on meat-reducers having higher depression than either meat-eaters or vegetarians and vegans, which the author hypothesize might be linked to the cognitive dissonance of opposing the meat industry but continuing to eat meat: #^https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950329322001549

It's also worth noting that the Telegraph has a history of a pro-meat stance.

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Written by dynamic_hubzilla on 2025-01-04 at 13:19

Have you (knowingly) had COVID?  If so, when did you have your first case?

(boosts welcome)

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Written by dynamic_hubzilla on 2024-12-17 at 12:39

Petition:

[#]^https://actionnetwork.org/forms/urge-delegates-elect-ben-wikler-chair-of-the-dnc/

Quote:

"...

There’s no way the Party can speak for the majority of working people in America when it’s reluctant to bite the hands that feed it.

"Wikler gets this key ingredient, the thing that sets the Democrats apart from Republicans and makes us the ones who can truly stand up for the working class, as he says: “Democrats win when voters know that we’re the ones fighting for them against those who will seek to rip them off to add an extra billion dollars to their bank account.”

"Tell the DNC: Become the anti-establishment party and shake up the system on behalf of the vast majority of Americans! Vote for Ben Wikler for DNC Chair!"

(boosts welcome)

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Written by dynamic_hubzilla on 2024-12-13 at 12:19

Icons icons everywhere.

Without stopping to think, what do they mean?

(boosts welcome)

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Written by dynamic_hubzilla on 2024-12-03 at 03:50

Themes of resistance are coming up a lot lately, and also the simultaneous acknowledgment that we all need to prioritize self preservation, with also the duty of those of us in relative safety to stand up and speak out.

Some time ago, a friend of mine posted a meme you may have seen: "Be yourself, unless you can be a dragon.  Then be a dragon."

A few days ago, a different friend posted a link to this (heartbreaking) essay on cockroach mode: #^https://www.everywhereist.com/2024/11/it-is-time-for-our-cockroach-era/

But a lot of us have a duty to do more, actions big and small, and Saturday night I awoke in the night with the phrase "time to be awesome" already in my head, and a moment later my heart was racing.

So here a message for anyone who needs to hear it:

If you need to be a cockroach, then be a cockroach.  If you don't need to be a cockroach, be awesome.  (If you can be an awesome cockroach, that's cool too.)

Anyway, here's Rainbow Dash from My Little Pony:

[#]^https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rgBWhNIDOE

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Written by dynamic_hubzilla on 2024-11-17 at 01:59

Quote:

[#]^https://news.mongabay.com/2024/11/as-global-fire-risk-rises-modern-homes-become-toxic-plastic-traps/

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Written by dynamic_hubzilla on 2024-11-15 at 23:48

Found this pinto potato in our stash today.

=> View attached media

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Written by dynamic_hubzilla on 2024-10-27 at 16:46

Back in March I did a quick test drive of #Hubzilla, which I wrote about here:

[#]^https://social.coop/@dynamic/112116628610243658

with an addendum here:

[#]^https://social.coop/@dynamic/112123974569355483

There are a lot of details that I didn't get quite right in that first Mastodon thread, and I'm not going to attempt to make systemic corrections here.  However, after using Hubzilla as my primary Fediverse platform for two weeks, I'm somewhat better informed, and I'm providing some of my observations here.  

For starters, a reminder that Hubzilla has a ton of features and is highly configurable.  This is not a "deep dive" and I am not an expert on Hubzilla, nor do I expect to be in the near future, there's just too much to learn.  What I can describe is my own experiences after a week of settling in and configuration.

Updated Comparison between Hubzilla and #Mastodon

• Connections: Mastodon provides one type of connection in each direction - "follows" and "followers";  connections on Hubzilla are two-way, with multiple levels of consent in each direction
• Privacy: On Mastodon the only privacy levels for Mastodon posts are "public", "unlisted" (public-lite?), "followers", and "mentioned people only"; Hubzilla permits fully customizable privacy levels, which I think can be managed through a couple of different platform "apps".  I've been using an app called Privacy Groups.
• Content organization: All Mastodon posts, whether top-level or as replies, are owned by the person posting them, can be boosted in isolation, and will have privacy levels determined by the author of the post; Hubzilla posts are structured as "Conversations", which are generally kept together as coherent pieces, and (if I understand things correctly, which I might not) the privacy level of a Conversation is determined by the original poster.  However, individual replies to Hubzilla conversations can still be boosted by readers in a Mastodon/Twitter-like manner
• Moderation: On Mastodon the only real moderation tools are the privacy levels noted above, which determine who can see which posts, as well as the ability to block or limit specific accounts or instances, which changes which logged-in accounts can view your content and whose content you can see; Hubzilla offers much more powerful moderation tools, evidently including comment screening (the ability to look at incoming comments before determining whether they should be visible to other readers), although I haven't tried it out.  You can also evidently disallow commenting entirely.  It should be noted these Hubzilla moderation features only work internally to Hubzilla (or possibly Hubzilla and '(streams)'); if you federate with Mastodon, there's nothing to stop people from interacting with your posts the same way they would with any other toot.
• Content warnings and summaries: If you want to hide the main content of a Mastodon toot, you use the "content warning" field.  Canonically, content warnings are to enable users to hide content they might not want to see either because of emotional load, unwanted spoilers, or for long content, but the field is also sometimes used for post titles.  The Hubzilla equivalent of content warnings is the "summary" field.  Hubzilla also provides a "title" field, which specifies header text that appears at the top of the post (only on Hubzilla, not on the view from Mastodon).  The title field does not hide content.  The summary field does.
• Broken threads: As best I can tell, broken threads/conversations can happen on both Mastodon and Hubzilla, although because most of my connections are on Mastodon, I'm not sure to what degree the issues I've seen on the Hubzilla end are a direct consequence of federating with Mastodon/ActivityPub
• Display of images: Mastodon allows the attachment of up to four images to each toot, which are displayed below the toot as thumbnails.  Hubzilla has an internal markup language that allows the inclusion of in-line images linked from outside sources, which (if you have the Photos platform app installed) can include links to photos in your Hubzilla image collection.  When Hubzilla posts are federated to Mastodon, the inline images show up as image attachments below the post.  When Mastodon posts are federated to Hubzilla, attached images show up full size at the top of the post.  This is taking some getting used to, especially because with my "maximum post height" settings, the result is that any text included with the images is hidden until I click on the "expand" link.
• Alt-text: On both Mastodon and Hubzilla, you need to know what you're doing in order to add alt-text to images.  On Mastodon, you first attach the image to a toot, and then use the graphical "edit" interface to add alt text.  On Hubzilla, image links are created with the 'zmg' tag in Hubzillas markup language.  The zmg tags are vaguely analogous to a the 'img' tag in html.  The alt text should be entered between the open-tag and the close-tag.  The graphical interface provides a tool for linking to images but does not provide a tool to help you add alt-text.
• Typesetting: Mastodon doesn't have typesetting beyond carriage returns.  Hubzilla has its own markup language---which vaguely resembles html but with square brackets instead of angle brackets---that includes boldface, italics, underlining, quotes, and code.
• Polls: Mastodon poll features vary by instance, but the instances I've experienced allow up to 4 or 5 poll options, and the creator can specify whether multiple response are permitted through a fairly obscure interface.  Mastodon polls remain active for 1-7 days depending on settings selected by the poll-creator from a drop-down menu.  Hubzilla polls can have arbitrary numbers of options and there is an intuitive toggle to determine whether multiple selections are permitted.  The period for which Hubzilla polls remain active can be arbitrarily determined by the poll-creator, although I don't think (?) it's possible to create an infinite-duration poll.
• Post length: Base Mastodon allows posts up to 500 characters long, although some forks of Mastodon can be configured to allow longer posts.  Post lengths on Hubzilla are determined by the user, an can be specified at the "channel" level if desired.
• Tags: Mastodon post content can be labeled with in-line hashtags, starting with '#', which count toward post length.  Depending on your configuration settings, the Hubzilla post-editor can include a "Categories" field, in which post categories are listed as words or phrases separated by commas.  These are separate from the main body of the text.  Hubzilla also has tags, which is somewhat confusing, and as you can see in the left margin of the Hubzilla Support Forum (#^https://hubzilla.org/channel/adminsforum), there is not consistency as to whether Categories begin with a hash symbol or not.
• Forums: Forums are not a thing on Mastodon.  Tags and tools like Guppe groups (#^https://a.gup.pe/) have been used to create workarounds for people to exchange ideas on predetermined topics, but ultimately everything is still organized as individual toots.  Hubzilla "channels" can be set up as Forums that allow members to make posts that are only visible to other members of the forum.  These forums can be followed in the same manner as individual user accounts.
• Configuration: On Mastodon, I use the multi-column interface through the default web client.  Configuration tools that are not available through the main interface can be accessed through the gear icon on the upper left portion of the interface.  This includes things like filters and block lists.  Hubzilla a number of different interaction screens, which increases with the more platform "apps" you have installed.  There are separate controls for the account level (how you log onto the system), the channel level (one or more identities that you manage per account), or the app level (which need to be configured for each channel separately).  There are also a number of different ways of bookmarking access to apps and configuration tools.  There's a definite learning curve to figuring out where all of the controls are, and it really helps to have people you can ask for advice (e.g. the Hubzilla Support Forum linked to above).  I have not mastered this yet.

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Written by dynamic_hubzilla on 2024-10-20 at 14:46

Yesterday I did some phone banking, calling "persuadable voters" in a swing district to encourage them to vote for the Democratic congressional candidate rather than the "MAGA" incumbent.  I volunteer through Swing Blue Alliance (SBA), and the organizers said that this particular bank is the hardest one that SBA hosts.  Below are some thoughts how these calls go, with some thoughts on things the caller and receiver can do to improve outcomes.

tl;dr: When and how you identify yourself matters, although in a world shared with telemarketers and scam artists, I'm not sure there's a single best answer.

Yesterday's phone bank

As noted above, yesterday I was calling "persuadable" voters, which means the list includes Republicans and independents as well as Democrats who might or might not vote.  Combined with the fact that most people don't want phone calls from strangers to begin with and the fact that this is a swing district, there were a lot of hang-ups, a lot of "why do you keep calling me", and a lot of "I'm voting for the other candidate," and a decent amount of "I don't vote."  

Believe it or not, not all phone banks are like this.  Volunteer-recruiting phone banks are particularly pleasant, because it's volunteers calling other volunteers, often people who have asked to be contacted.  But get-out-the-vote (GOTV) phone banks are often not too bad either, because GOTV lists target sympathetic voters.  That doesn't mean the experience is stress-free, of course.

Phone-banking process and tradeoffs for the people being called

The instructions that we as phone bankers get can vary, but we are usually instructed to be very conservative in who gets removed from the list:

• No answer -> call back later
• Immediate hang-up -> call back later
• Hangs up on hearing who is calling -> maybe remove from the list (this can vary by phone bank), but usually only if we've also confirmed that we're talking to the correct person

It's in the interest of the political organizations to have well-curated lists, with wrong numbers removed, as well as the numbers of people who will never accept one of these calls.  In theory, well-curated lists can also produce better outcomes for the people being called (including not getting called as much if they don't want to be), although I can understand reservations about being forthcoming.  

The upshot is that if you want to reduce the number of political calls you receive, it can sometimes be helpful to take a moment to engage, particularly if the call is coming from a legitimate political campaign.  Confirming your identity and and explicitly saying that you want to be removed from the list can substantially reduce the number of future calls you'll receive.

On the other hand, I don't want to make blanket recommendations.  I'm fairly certain that there are also telemarketers and scammers out there who would be all too delighted to have confirmation that they have the correct match between name and phone number.  So that sucks.  I wish I had a magic formula for recognizing legitimate political calls but the best I can say is that I think volunteers are more likely to treat you like a human being.  It's tricky.

Wrong numbers

I think it's usually pretty safe to let callers know if they have the wrong number, though.

• "Hi, is this Sam?" "You have the wrong number." -> Gets flagged as wrong number
• "Hi, is this Sam?" "No." [hang up] -> Call back later

The phone banking script

This brings me around to the phone banking scripts, and how we as phone bankers start the call.  There are two general approaches:

• "Hi, am I speaking to Sam?" or
• "Hi, my name is [NAME] and I'm a volunteer for [XYZ CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGN].  Am I speaking to Sam?" (or alternatively "is Sam available")

I tend to much prefer receiving calls that start with the second template.  When a stranger calls me and asks whether I'm me without identifying themselves, my first thought is "Who the f*ck are you?"

But I tried both approaches at the phone bank yesterday, and I ended up feeling better about the first template.

• "Hi, my name is [NAME] and I'm a volunteer for [XYZ CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGN].  Am I speaking to Sam?" [immediate hangup] -> No idea whether I reached the right person, code as "call back" or "no answer" (that number will get another call)

• "Hi, am I speaking to Sam?" "Yes, who is this?" "I'm a volunteer for [XYZ CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGN]..." [immediate hangup] -> Sam doesn't want to talk to us, maybe code as "refused" (i.e. remove from the list)

There's no guarantee that an immediate hangup will end up being coded as "refused".  A clear statement of wanting to be removed is more likely to be coded correctly.

I still feel ambivalent about the two versions of the script, the tradeoff courtesy (identifying myself first) and saving everyone's time (trying to confirm their identity first), but I'm leaning more toward efficiency at the moment.

Bottom line for people receiving political calls

If your sense is that you're getting a call from a legitimate political campaign, it can really help to confirm your identity and clearly express your preferences.  If the call is a wrong number, I think it's almost always best to say so.

There's unfortunately no response that will absolutely guarantee against future calls, partly because each campaign usually has multiple organizations calling for them, and partly because mistakes happen.  Caller interfaces and instructions can also vary, which also produces inconsistent results.  Some lists also have duplicate entries, which is complicated further if multiple people share a phone number.

Closing thoughts

If you live in a U.S. swing district, I send you my sympathies.  It's really not sane that the U.S. political system favors strategies where the whole country focuses money and volunteer efforts onto a small number of swing districts.  I don't think this system is at all good for democracy nor for political engagement, and I'd really like to see this change.  I'm not sure what the best path is for getting there, although I know there are a number of ideas out there, and I'll have an ear to the ground for possible strategies moving forward.

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Written by dynamic_hubzilla on 2024-10-19 at 13:38

So... avatar images.  And also a chance to test out how Hubzilla-to-Mastodon federated polling works.

When I first joined the cybre.space Mastodon instance in 2019 I resisted setting up a profile.  This is kind of a thing with me when joining new platforms, and I'm not sure exactly why.  I think it's partly nostalgia for AOL Instant Messenger, partly a feeling that social media really shouldn't be taken seriously, and partly a pushback against the whole Facebook-style real-names-or-else corporate communications culture.  In any case, it happened.

When I migrated to social.coop, I set up a profile (as mandated by instance policies), but never got around to creating an avatar image that felt right for the account, so I continued with no avatar image.  And now it kind of feels like... a thing.  Like no-avatar-image is part of my identity.

Poll allows multiple responses, and has an expiration date in 100 days.

So, with all of that in mind, if I were to decide to double-down on non-brand branding for avatar images, what do you think I should do?

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