Should we block Vivaldi.net?

Oh, I definitely think you should. : . )

@AG please be kinder :)

@Océane I appreciate you bringing the topic up, the whole purpose of online social media is to discuss things that are important to us ❤️

I appreciate the concern and discussion. I would leave it up. I am concerned about keeping the fediverse up and going, and not having capitalist interests try to sabotage it. These discussions seem valuable to me.

To be honest I had a difficult time following the reasoning in the thread (what does vivaldi.net have to do with pedophilia and abuse against disabled people?). I feel a bit bad about that, as you obviously care deeply about the topic and spent the time to type this out.

Anyway, to the point, I strongly oppose blocking vivaldi.net.

As others have pointed out here, Vivaldi is a very small company (I don't think they're even public?) and I'd have no reason to suspect negative intentions on their part. You can read more about their decision to start a Mastodon instance here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2022/12/09/how-musk-made-vivaldi-build-a-mastodon-server-in-a-fortnight/?sh=32f0fa5438ed

One of the critiques of Mastodon is that it can be difficult to get started, especially picking a server, figuring out if you can trust the admins, etc. If Vivaldi wants to make it easy for their users to get on Mastodon, I applaud that.

I also agree with what @Boris Mann said:

I think there will be a mix of personal servers, community servers, co-op servers, and "commercial" servers of various flavours over time. In fact, I would hope that this is exactly how it plays out!

Maybe it's naive of me, but as long as the commercial entities aren't trying to abuse the fediverse (for example, turning it into a walled garden by preventing users from migrating to other servers), I see zero problem with them being part of the fediverse. They just need to play by our rules, rather than the other way around.

The whole reasoning was Occam's razor → ChatControl example → Doctorow citing Lessig → normative problem, normative solution → there's a pattern with shady companies investing in positive messages to avoid controversy

thank you for the most interesting fediblock proposal I've ever read

You clearly have a lot to say on this and I’m sorry to hear about your bad experiences.

That said, I deeply agree with others’ dissent on this - and I’m encouraged about the calm and collected way (broadly) the opinions have been expressed.

I do not think we should block vivaldi.

I don't want to too much pile on here. I disagree with the proposal to specifically block Vivaldi, but it seems like there's a deeper motivation here to be wary of federating with any corporate instances, which I think is a more interesting conversation.

Personally I favor federating with corporate instances (I think the mix of profit and non-profit models will be good for the Fediverse in general) and even corporate ActivityPub implementations (like the promised Tumblr integration) but I think it could be a substantive discussion that social.coop might have a diversity of opinions on.

I agree with some others that there doesn't seem to be an immediate threat from this, but I do feel it's a valid concern in general. Embrace & extend is a known thing and it makes sense to keep alert about it.

As a collective, we shouldn't to rush to block a particular Instance since the Fediverse is theoretically self-healing. If a particular Instance proves itself to be a problem then defederation is always an option at any time. There is nothing to stop individual users from blocking, should they so choose.

At this time, I oppose blocking vivaldi.net.

While I don't think that blocking vivaldi.net is necessarily the right move at this point, I am very happy that @Océane prompted the discussion, and I hope as a cooperative we can always be open to receiving and valuing different perspectives and ideas.

As someone who has struggled with an evolving and uncertain cognitive status since my last cancer treatment more than ten years ago, I often find myself second-guessing myself, lacking the confidence to put my thoughts in writing, in a way that was never a problem before. This last year has been particularly hard, and have posted very little here. There have even been Loomio discussions where I had most of a comment drafted, and then decided that what I to say wasn't important/significant/valuable...who knows.

I just wanted to add my voice to say that, regardless of your thoughts on the merits of a comment or proposal, please be kind and understanding. For the most part, it's probably safe to assume we're participating here in good faith, and that there are likely real concerns and experiences behind what is written.

I hope I'm not out of line in adding this to this thread. Take care.

I've been very happy with this community's response. Aside from one other user (who was called out), I've been very impressed, so much so that I believe that my response was out of line.

There have even been Loomio discussions where I had most of a comment drafted, and then decided that what I to say wasn't important/significant/valuable...who knows.

usually the most interesting perspectives to me come from these kind of situations, I think precisely because they don't necessarily neatly fit into the conventional discourse, they widen it.

we have such a narrow range of perspectives expressed compared to the diversity of experiences.

to me, the beauty is to hear each perspective as sacred and wonderful in it's own terms, ... without needing to bring every experience into a grand unification.

(how well we can really be present like this with each other in a somewhat impersonal online environment seems to limit this however)

Thanks to Océane and everyone who contributed to this very interesting topic. I believe we should watch closely what the commercial instances are doing. Although no action seems necessary in this case at the moment, I welcome ongoing evaluation, especially whether a response is needed and how it could look like.

Hi @Océane. I'm a late arrival here, but this caught my attention, as I used to use the Vivaldi browser, since I found the feature set incredible. I'm a poor person though with a computer that is older than my nephews who - since you mentioned Minecraft (apparently, now a tool for an evil corporation [see note below] to do evil) above - I was playing the game with in the beginning of the pandemic, upon their request, and then which got me to realizing that they were old enough to begin learning computer programming (as I did when I was their age) and fun experiments that they could do on the Raspberry Pi (evil corporation, according to a very loud Mastodon set). So we had some fun using Python (surprisingly not considered evil yet) in Minecraft via a Raspberry Pi and doing Raspberry Pi and Arduino (ostensibly, borderline evil and one social media post away from being full blown evil). As this computer is so old, I wound up experiencing constant instability issues with Vivaldi, and so I've been using Brave (another evil corporation, according to a very loud Mastodon set, who also have made quite clear that users of Brave have horrible moral characters, are fools, and intellectual charlatans who are too cowardly to fight to make their cases on silly schoolyard social media threads). There was a post some months back on YCombinator/Hacker News (a foul space according to yet another Mastodon post) about how a corporation like Microsoft (I'm actually not being ironic here. This is the one of all of them which really needs to be destroyed and is legitimately evil, IMO and has for well over a generation now been pumping and dumping on to the masses legitimately foul software and operating systems) could do this very EEE maneuver. And, it was all plausible, but it's still not clear how probable it would be. In my experiences, I see digital spaces being toxic more by how much we're so ready to demonize others and accuse them of being immoral and a threat than I have seen any real threat to our spaces we've created for ourselves posed by the slimy corporations always trying to figure out how to make a buck and increase their market share and dominance. I didn't include all the parenthetical clauses above in order to mock you, but just to go through how much space this threat narrative takes up in our collective mental space. And since you mentioned Cory Doctorow above, I'll share that I think he's part of the problem with these threat narratives. It's lamentable that the way that some people expressed themselves above in the comments was dismissive, and I'm glad to see that in the end, support was shown to you, and that you decided not to delete your post. It wasn't a mistake for you to post, IMO, and what you wrote is all valuable information and a perspective for us to consider.

Hi @M. Page-Lieberman - jotaemeisocial.coop, I don't find the button to reply to your comment, so I'll reply in the mainline thread – I hope this isn't inappropriate.

First, this message was inappropriate towards the Vivaldi devs. I've been told that they were a small team, which I didn't expect, and honestly given how complex the web stack is, criticizing their choice of making their browser proprietary had also shown an embarrassing amount of ignorance (and entitlement) from my part.

The social.coop's community has been incredibly positive; as you've noted, @AG has mocked me but I'm pretty sure that he didn't mean to hurt me in any way, and that he could have found many better ways to do so. I'm going to express it poorly, sorry, but even if @Nick Sellen has asked him to "please be kinder :)", that's about everything there was to say, and so to speak, there were no hard feelings on either side, apparently; I wasn't upset or anything. Actually, at the time, I was just realizing that I'd fucked up and that I wasn't being "canceled" (i.e. kicked out by some mod on powertrip, something which has happened in the Mageia community and contributed to ruining my life, many years ago), so I was just grateful).

Now on Mastodon. As you've noted, there are "communities" (I prefer to call them "cluster", by reference to the form posts are shared within a cluster and between several ones) in which there's a sort of performative way to demonize or discard free software projects and communities, and I'll tell more about it below, but there's something deeply self-depreciating in attributing this trend to a "human nature" and not to the social media infrastructures that permit and, to some extent, force our ideologies upon ourselves.

My post was characteristic of Mastodon. A notable Boer et al. study (2020) has found a correlation between social media use (SMU) problems (such as your family asking you to put down your phone, failing to give back assignments in time, sleep problems, etc. in 2015) and attention deficit, as well as another one between SMU problems in 2016 and attention deficit and impulsivity in 2017. Although it took me 4 hours to post this, my proposal was impulsive. I can't overstate how reassuring and faith-in-life-restoring the social.coop reaction has been to me. For example, right now I'm getting late on my assignments so I think about it and it gives me solace. I'm pretty sure (and I have some competence to say) that it represents the human nature much better than current social media do, for some part because the human nature shows in activities that make sense for people, not in those that disgust them from themselves. And even then, there would be true consciousness and false consciousness, but this isn't even the case here.

Social media can be considered as an infrastructure for some part because in both the marxian meaning and what I make of it, they can be considered from the point of view of privation. It's obviously true for the working class in the XIXth century, which would read Les mystères de Paris as a form of consolation ideology, but also for the current situation of (1) a deliberately sustained feeling of attention deprivation, and (2) an actual, artificial attention scarcity.

For example, these infrastructures produce ideologies by intellectually impoverishing their users, e.g. by degrading hyperlinks, brutally shortening our messages, etc., even compared to the web and to the internet, which is a crappy cyberspace already (according to stman, a hardware researcher who's also paranoid and definitely falls into the caveats I'm listing below, but who's also a friend who I believe is actually targeted (for some part by triggering his paranoia and making him discredit himself) and whose works does make sense from my understanding, it could be so much more with a different hardware architecture). Generally without intellectual resources at all, all that's left to antagonistic perspectives (that would stem anyway, because of the society we live in) is a message of hate and violence, which might be targeted at oppressors, but only trickles down to minorities.

For example, I've read many messages on Twitter mocking cisgender men and diminishing them, and they've only trickled down on me as a disabled person first, who would have to "take on" (because of the way she perceives herself as a "disgusting", disabled person) cisgenderness and masculinity, so basically I'm 27 and I'll never experiment and dress the way I would if I was younger. (My partner tells me that they follow 40-years old, 50-years old hot goths, but well, I don't want to be 50 years-old yet, I'd just want to be younger, just for one day.) That sad story was just here to illustrate that Twitter shapes the way its users think, which falls right into the definition of an infrastructure/superstructure relationship.

Social media interfaces are anti-social, and to make this point, I could just mention the fact that as a good Twitter clone, Mastodon provides us affordances to produce and to consume contents, but not to make any use of it (e.g. not to plan and assign tasks, not to sell goods and services, not to organize events, etc.). This is very different from Bonfire Networks, which are co-founded by Mayel, a social.coop co-founder. This is probably the Loomio equivalent to Mastodon, i.e. social media when decisions are taken by its workers instead of its renters.

Social media incite us to a caution principle towards each other. This is a fundamentally anti-social behavior, that prevents us from freely associating and collaborating with others. For example, even Wikipedia expects its contributors to assume good faith, because this is needed for collaboration, be it writing an encyclopedia, developing free software, organizing a strike, etc. From this point of view, bad faith should be established following concrete facts (instead of basically trying to (and failing at) reinventing humanities).

This caution principle is found in some parts of activism, e.g. I've heard just last week a union member reminding students at a general assembly that "autonomous activists aren't our enemies". Which definitely felt required to start the current students movement on sane bases! I know enough about human nature to guess it comes from political memes Facebook groups, which are populated by a(n intellectually poor) form of caution principle performance. And this principle is actually destroying its victims' lives!

This principle is just the way billionaires want us to think. But which anti-social affordances could one find in Mastodon? Well, first, it's still optimizing for engagement with its notifications.

First let's briefly remember Pierre Bourdieu's theory :

1. There are social classes (the lower class, the higher class, the middle class), which are split in class fractions (e.g. liberal professions, wealthy industrials, employees, blue-collar workers, white-collar workers, etc.). These social classes may be represented in a three-dimensional social space, which is defined by the global volume of capital, the cultural/economic structure of capital, and the intergenerational course (ascending, in decline, stable). There's the established petty bourgeoisie, the declining petty bourgeoisie, and the ascending petty bourgeoisie; these are three different class fractions, whose members have different dispositions, different tastes, etc. according to whether they're reaching higher, lower, or equal positions than their parents.

2. The cultural capital has three states: the incorporated one, which takes a lot of free time to incorporate. Just my opinion here, but from this point of view, "gifted" or "hard-working" students can merely be considered as having more pre-selection experience; they don't necessarily become better workers, researchers, etc. by having some advance in the "race to the titles", but they get the best ones anyway, because they then get the power to make the system in a way that they've understood and can pass along to their children.

3. The objectived state (pardon my Bourdieu) which can be art that someone owns and has the incorporated cultural to decode and enjoy, and that they can show – as well as the natural and confident way in which they can decode it and discuss about it – to their guests, or machines that they can use because of their incorporated cultural capital, which explains, says Bourdieu, that white-collar workers can either be seen as the ruling class (because their incorporated cultural capital enables them to operate the machines) or as the working class (because they don't own them).

4. The institutionalized state, which is how cultural capital is ratified as titles, e.g. diplomas, grades, etc., in its incorporated form (e.g. acquired taste) and in its objectived one (e.g. by references to the La Pléiade edition of Proust, which is the most expensive, around 85€).

Now let's get back to Mastodon. IMO, it's frequent for students lacking cultural capital to be degraded by our societies and notably by the school and family institutions. They can see in social metrics a sort of pipeline to becoming influencers and thus having a high level of institutionalized cultural capital.

For these students, becoming "popular" or influencers is a matter of mental health. Getting some acknowledgment, especially through institutionalized cultural capital, is perceived as a way to recover from the mental health problems that prevent them from incorporating it in the first place. Notifications incite them to publish at a (literally) industrial cadence, drawing from contents that they read in their timelines.

These people's brains are lured into getting a few followers or having their posts shared a few times, without realizing that they'll only catch influencers' interest by making incorporated cultural capital accessible to them. This is happening, massively, on Mastodon; the lack of real-life affordances (it only rewards the time spent in front of a screen) is part of this "dispositive of power" (Foucault, 1975). They'll notably post poorly documented hot takes corresponding to a caution principle.

That's by trying to institutionalize their cultural capital that these users are getting stuck in a loop that will prevent them from incorporating it in the first place. Thus they're trying to get some cultural capital institutionalized in order to incorporate it in the state that they're lacking in the first place, but in return you can't institutionalized cultural capital without having incorporated it first!

Firstly because social media make them develop an attention deficit and impulsivity (Boer et al., 2020), secondly because you need a varying amount of free time to incorporate cultural capital (the more free time it needs, the rarer and the more valuable this cultural capital is, especially before graduating). So, as I said on my social.coop account it reminds me the "whale hunt" scene in Avatar II. It feels similar to poaching: separate the mother from the baby.

As a conclusion, I'm feeling extremely grateful to have found such a community here on Loomio, but even if Mastodon feels like a sanitized form of Twitter, it still makes us think in the way that billionaires want us to. I'm much more interested by Bonfire networks, and I hope we'll turn social.coop into one after the core software reaches its first stable version.

I'm sorry for this grand conspiracy theory. On Minecraft, it's a good video game, it's developed by the same team as before the Microsoft takeover, but the then-indie creators community has moved to other activities. Besides, I'm not trying to argue about the ethics of playing to a video game, and even less as a Nintendo Switch owner (rare minerals exhaustion) but even if I was, our mental health was at stake during the pandemic, so I'm glad you got to play to it with your nephew. I definitely have fond memories of this game. And I'm also glad that your nephew is learning programming, I wish I had when I was younger, instead of just being mocked by some user on some crappy forum, but I don't really see how it all relates to Vivaldi. I've tried to answer to your comments on, indeed, this caution culture by showing that it's shaped by our interfaces, and in this case, Mastodon. Also you definitely should unfollow people sharing crap into your timeline, you won't miss it, and you can't do much for the people sharing it. Believe me, I've tried.

> I'm glad you got to play to [Mindcraft] with your nephew [sic] I definitely have fond memories of this game. And I'm also glad that your nephew [sic] is learning programming, I wish I had when I was younger, instead of just being mocked by some user on some crappy forum, but I don't really see how it all relates to Vivaldi.

The confusion of how Minecraft relates to Vivaldi is a question that I feel you are more in a position to resolve than I am. It may help if you review your original post to understand that context that I was responding to. I’ve had a long day and have recently left City Hall, where I spoke to various human beings while having sustained eye contact, and though I’ve had 2 layers of face masks on all this time, continually smiling back and forth during these conversations with real people I’ve known for years and have friendly, cordial, lovely relationships with.

That is not the kind of information I generally feel salient to share in responses to others online, but various elements in your reply here and your original post remind me of the texts of a few friends I’ve had in the past who have seemed to be going through some very similar challenges that I sense you’ve been grappling with.

With them, I’ve felt a very helpful first step would be to start with interacting with real human beings, making genuine contact with them, and being less concerned with lecturing others about how broken the state of the world is, and how many texts these friends can cite showing how smart they are in a single directionality.

I wrote “[sic]” twice above when I referenced your message, as I have 2 nephews. They’re twins, though not identical. Those kinds of details about my saying I have 2 nephews - rather than just 1 - are the kinds of things we pick up on when we are really interested in listening to others and not just running through their texts in a race to next speak at them.

Em seg., 27 de fev. de 2023 às 17:07, Océane (via Loomio) escreveu:

I think there's a misunderstanding. My goal isn't to be listened to. Actually I don't have the time to write blog posts and writing the message you're replying to has cost me time I could have spent working on my master thesis, on which I'm late already. You're mostly wrong when you say that I'm not interacting with human beings, but probably right about your friends; these are just ideas that are adjacent to my sociology master thesis and that I've had by coincidence, and I think your advice is good but that you're missing my point, which is that social media are habits-forming, and that your friends, I believe, feel pressured to post things and look interesting because they've been brainwashed into socially existing through third parties' approval.

And I didn't infer that your nephews were twins from your use of the plural form because I thought it could be a typo or that they could be plural and, in both cases, non-binary, this was ambiguous. You seem to assume many things about me, based on the assumption that I'd have improvised this post, but I'd drafted it in Emacs, it was quite boring to write, and it took me a few hours.

Please don't be condescending and then pretend that you weren't. Unless you would work for Vivaldi, you seem to be the one picking up on me, for some part because you'd project your own past struggles and couldn't refrain from trying to help me, which is something that I value and that I'm also trying to do, but on my blog, with my readers' consent, and in a more articulated form. Either way, of course we need to assume things about the people we're interacting with, but in sociology we also learn not to assume people's values, ways of life, and anything that we're paid to discover (i.e. social phenomenons). It's very nice of you to try to help me, but you don't know my way of life or the people I'm seeing every day, which is why I (or other people) try to become influencers, at least to let the people who might need the resources we can produce know that they exist. It's much more sensible to e.g. write a blog post that will be read by about 200 persons than to give unsolicited advice to people you don't really know, not because it would be morally wrong, or because it would make you a bad person, but merely because it would be inefficient.

I'm going to pay attention to the lecture to which I'm attending. I just hate to postpone following-up because then I usually forget about it.