dwither

dwither

@dwither.bsky.social

Resilience, adaptation and disaster management. Ōtepoti/Dunedin, Aotearoa 🇳🇿

896 followers1K following1.4K posts

This is an exceptional thread. Well worth the time and effort.

Eliot Higgins@eliothiggins.bsky.social

🧵 Democracy feels like it's in a rough state at the moment across the globe, and we hear various explanations, like polarisation, extremism, disinformation, and loss of trust. But what if those explanations are mainly symptoms and we've been trying to treat them rather than the underlying causes?

dwither reposted

🧵 Democracy feels like it's in a rough state at the moment across the globe, and we hear various explanations, like polarisation, extremism, disinformation, and loss of trust. But what if those explanations are mainly symptoms and we've been trying to treat them rather than the underlying causes?

dwither reposted

😳 #nzpol “The economy is an energy system using money, not a financial system using energy. Money is a claim on energy. It has no intrinsic value. Central banks cannot print physical resources into existence.”

dwither reposted

I kind of hate to say it, but I think the Will Stancil saga has become important to pay attention to in that it illustrates something that's gone very wrong with the behavior of purported adults using social media

dwither reposted

it's really Noticeable how people trust will stancil's account of his discussions with the verge way more than any of the verge's employees. (to be clear, I think this is the correct position)

dwither reposted

🧵 People don't have any inkling of how social media (& regular media; all sorts of media) influences their attitudes. But what we see is who we become. (Get off of X!) In this study, subjects were randomly assigned to view a chronological or algorithmic X feed. Exposure to the latter led users "to

Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD@elizabethjacobs.bsky.social

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right. Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement. This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

The biggest challenge here, is figuring out a way to define and ascertain bad faith. There is no measurable part of a post that you can see and go 'ahah, thats bad faith'. There are a bunch of other harder to measure factors involved. If you solve that, you can solve a LOT of the problems we have.

Will Stancil@whstancil.bsky.social

Ultimately, as has been independently discovered by countless online forums/legal systems/societies, you need someone who can look at bad faith trolls gaming the rules and say “No. You are a troll. You are not acting in good faith. You are excluded from this process and we will sanction you.”

Engaging in good faith with someone who is acting in bad faith is a recipe to get hurt. Will is quite correct here.

Will Stancil@whstancil.bsky.social

This game should be intensely familiar to everyone by now. You can either let them lead you around by the nose until they make you into a lunatic, or you can say “No, this is bad-faith ritual abuse and I won’t participate.”

dwither reposted

I see a lot of well meaning people (not OP) who like to talk about countries (usually the ones they're from or have an affinity with) as being steadfast bastions in the new cold war and I cannot stress enough that you have failed the assignment if you think this

Reconstructionist@unavaleable.bsky.social

i think, however, this is a crystal clear example that the next cold war is actually democracy vs autocracy and the battle lines run right through every single advanced democracy. there aren't really any safe harbors.

and in ‘evidence based policy’ at the governance level, we only act on evidence. if we can’t measure or model it, it doesn’t exist. that’s problematic, as there’s a lot of important stuff for resilience we can’t easily model

Berna Devezer@devezer.bsky.social

we're too quick to mistake `what i know how to easily model' for `what is' and even `what should be'.

dwither reposted

Benefits monthly data day 🧵 Blimey. We're busting above the grim forecasts Treasury and MSD put out two months ago (again). That's despite 120 kiwis leaving the country every day (net). Buckle in, there's more... [1/n]

dwither reposted

Given this week’s events Assad's regime is finished & it’s a race to Damascus. The Russian position in Syria, and MENA region writ large is consequently in deep trouble, because of Syria’s importance as a logistics hub for Russian operations. Short thread. 1/

Took me some time to think this way. When I was younger I’d always finish what I started. Nowadays, if it ain’t catching me, I’ll drop it without any compunctions.

The Whimsical Muse@whimsicalmuse.bsky.social

You’re not violating a reading rule if you opt not to finish a book that's not resonating with you. Life is finite and we thus have a finite number of books to read. Reading shouldn’t be a chore. You needn’t feel guilty for ensuring that your time reading is spent reading things that you love.

dwither reposted

💻 Remember, if you're on a Mac, you can clean up your desktop by having screenshots sent to another folder: defaults write com.apple.screencapture location whatever-the-pwd-of-folder-is (then do killall SystemUIServer)

I want to post bluesky links into discord and other chats, and have the embed include pics and vids. It does it with twitter. How hard would it be to make this a thing?

I am starting to see more and more screenshots from bluesky posted on twitter, often with really high engagement. That seems to bode well for Bluesky as a place of influence.

dwither reposted

Stuff like this is why we need more locked-open social infrastructure If you get banned on Twitter, you have no way to contact your audience, there's no credible exit, there's no way to keep your posts and identity and go somewhere else Open infrastructure and protocols are the first step

Max Kennerly@maxkennerly.bsky.social

Elon Musk suspended the White Dudes for Harris account because it raised a bunch of money for Harris. apnews.com/article/harr...

This is the hardest thing about being pro democracy right now. There’s no actual vision beyond the status quo. We need to vote FOR something, not just against something. David Graeber gave a good description of the problems we have in this regard. m.youtube.com/watch?v=-9af...

m.youtube.comDavid Graeber on the Extreme 'Centre'“It strikes me that what’s called the moderates are the most immoderate people possible”Previously unreleased video of David Graeber talking about liberalism...
Peter W🤓@wang.social

Sure he activated a lot of racist etc. But he also acknowledged the failure of the neoliberal mode of politics to prevent the hollowing out of the lower SES strata. Myopically reducing his appeal as mere racism is why Dems & modern progressives have lost Black Hispanic & Asian voters to Trump.

dwither reposted

If you've come here from X we're not having the same issue on this platform as we have there. The link to this article is still being miscategorized as spam despite our reports to X. The link to the investigation below should work on Bluesky as it appears to be an X only issue.

Bellingcat@bellingcat.com

Latest: An analysis of open source evidence, as well as multiple missile experts, have pointed to a Russian launched Kh-101 cruise missile being the weapon that struck a children’s hospital in Kyiv www.bellingcat.com/news/2024/07...

Yeah, this will get weaponised at some point. It's probably fine for now, as it gets started, but at some point we're going to need notifications and the capacity to remove/block in the cases of harassment.

Xun-ling Au 歐迅灵 🏴@xunlingau.bsky.social

Ngl this strikes me as a bit problematic.. Will someone even get a notification that they been added to a starter pack? Cause its a hell of tool to use to build a harassment campaign with 😬 A least over there I get notified & can just block getting added to a list (Has happened more than once)

dwither reposted

👇 Bluesky moderator drama still better than Mastodon moderator drama, because at least you don't need to migrate your account and identity to a new server…

Thomas Dickerson@elfprince13.mumak.app

Well the difference is….Aegis mods getting in a personal beef and nuking their service didn’t delete anyone’s account. The interpersonal dynamics of community moderation might not change but the stakes have changed

So, a real QOL change here over places like twitter will be the capacity to label accounts that cold outreach with spammy scams rapidly, and then offer a mechanism for people to filter them automatically.

If anyone wants this type of functionality, check out bsky.app/profile/aegi...! Labels profiles for a whole bunch of different things.

bsky.appbsky.app
dwither@dwither.bsky.social

Can we get a profile labeller we can subscribe to which labels followers who are trying to sell something in their bio? Ie their follow is completely random, unconnected to anything your interacted with, and designed to direct your attention to something their selling or advertising in their bio.

Can we get a profile labeller we can subscribe to which labels followers who are trying to sell something in their bio? Ie their follow is completely random, unconnected to anything your interacted with, and designed to direct your attention to something their selling or advertising in their bio.

dwither reposted

Hello newskies who might have found me from me liking your first post! The killer feature here is Custom Feeds. It’s the hashtag button on the left column (desktop) or bottom (mobile). Check some out! And make sure your “home feed preferences” settings look like this:

dwither reposted

Replying to @jay.bsky.team

Why a butterfly? Well, of course, it flies. But more importantly, it is a symbol of change and transformation. Early on, people started using the 🦋 emoji to indicate they were on Bluesky. We’ve now officially adopted it, as it speaks to our mission of transforming social media into something new.

dwither reposted

Russia was actively preparing to steal grain supplies and starve the Ukrainian population of food for months before Putin ordered last year’s invasion, according to new evidence compiled by human rights experts which will be provided to the ICC. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/e...

independent.co.ukPutin could face new war crime case over ‘planned’ starvation of UkrainePurchases by Russian defence contractor suggest Moscow was planning to steal vast quantities of Ukrainian grain months before troops ever crossed the border

One of the biggest risks I see for the upcoming El Niño cycle is wildfire, especially on the South Island. We tend to get a lot of hot gusty norwestwers which are amplified by the Foehn effect. And the wet conditions from the preceding La Niña mean there’s a lot of dried out recent plant growth.

Hayley@writagal.bsky.social

Um, the prevailing narrative of “yay, the long-awaited kiwi summer is arriving” might also want to consider that the forecast map is bright red. Last year was the 3rd-hottest on record. We’re expected to get 40°C days. The highest last year was 35.6°C. We should be talking about navigating this.

dwither reposted

I think we need a name for the opposite of fair weather friends. People who show up only when things are so bad at the other place that they remember we exist.