literature.cafe

So all we need to do is find a way to put people in prison!

Win-win!

There were some posts over the holiday season asking for projects to donate to, and for those who have the means to comfortably do so, this is an important gift to consider.

If there's only a limited amount each of us is able to give, I assume there's no point giving it all to, for one example, The Linux Foundation, because a small personal donation is trivial next to the ~$15,000,000 USD they receive from sponsors dependent on them[1]. I understand that funding sources can be a major and profound source of bias[2] and ideally we would be, for example, helping to make Firefox independent of Google, but until we have more collective power, it's not worth letting smaller important projects struggle instead.

So, which important projects should we leave to the sponsors, and which really need our support?

Name countries to travel from the Start Country to the End Country. Try to get there in the fewest guesses!

Premieres July, 2025. The new PV is here. Check out the ANN article for additional information. Synopsis from AniList:

Ryou is delighted to be reincarnated into the fantastical world of Phi, where he thinks he’ll get to live a quiet life learning to use his newfound water magic. Going with the flow here, however, means something very different. Ryou is immediately pitted against the wild lands he winds up in and the slew of deadly monsters that call the remote subcontinent home. You’d think he’d forget about taking it easy when he’s stuck fighting for his life, but lucky for Ryou, he’s naturally optimistic, clever, and blessed with the hidden “Eternal Youth” trait. Twenty years pass in the blink of an eye, and each encounter along the way pushes him one step closer to the pinnacle of human magic. Little does he realize that’s only the opening chapter of his tale. A fateful meeting soon thrusts Ryou to the forefront of history, forever changing the course of his life... Thus begins the adventures of the strongest water magician the world has ever seen—who also likes to do things at his own pace!

Francisco Ferrer (1859 - 1909)

Mon Jan 10, 1859

Francisco Ferrer, born on this day in 1859, was an anarchist educator who founded a network of secular libertarian schools in and around Barcelona, Spain. Following a sham trial in 1909, Ferrer was executed by the state.

In 1901, Ferrer founded the Barcelona Modern School, "Escuela Moderna", which sought to provide a secular, libertarian curriculum as an alternative to the religious dogma and compulsory lessons common within Spanish schools. His school eschewed punishments and rewards, and encouraged practical experience over academic study.

In mid-1909, Ferrer was arrested and accused of orchestrating a week of insurrection in Barcelona known as the "Tragic Week". He was convicted in a show trial and executed by firing squad on October 13th, 1909.

Ferrer's death triggered international outcry, and his life was prominently memorialized in writing, monuments, and demonstrations across three continents. His last words before being shot were "Aim well, my friends. You are not responsible. I am innocent. Long live the Modern School!"

"Let no more gods or exploiters be served Let us learn rather to love one another."

- Francisco Ferrer

• Date: 1859-01-10
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, theanarchistlibrary.org, www.marxists.org.
• Tags: #Birthdays.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

When nature calls, Masana Izawa has followed the same routine for more than 50 years: heading out to the woods in Japan, dropping his pants and doing as bears do.

"We survive by eating other living things. But you can give faeces back to nature so that organisms in the soil can decompose them," the 74-year-old told AFP.

"This means you are giving life back. What could be a more sublime act?"

"Fundo-shi" ("poop-soil master") Izawa is something of a celebrity in Japan, publishing books, delivering lectures and appearing in a documentary.

People flock to his "Poopland" and centuries-old wooden "Fundo-an" ("poop-soil house") in Sakuragawa north of Tokyo, sometimes dozens of them a month.

There, in his 7,000-square-metre (1.7-acre) woodland -- about the size of a football pitch -- visitors get tips for open-air best practice.

"Noguso", as it is known in Japanese, requires digging a hole, a leaf or two for wiping, a bottle of water to wash up, and twigs to mark the spot.

The sticks ensure he doesn't use the same place twice and can later return to keep precise records of the decomposition process.

"Feel the back of these. Can you tell how soft they are?" he said, showing palm-sized silver poplar leaves picked from a branch.

"(It's) more comfortable than paper."

Izawa is a former nature photographer who specialised in mushrooms before retiring in 2006. His excrement epiphany came at age 20 when he saw a protest against the construction of a sewage plant.

"We all produce faeces, but (the demonstrators) wanted the treatment plant somewhere far away and out of sight," he says. "People who believed they were absolutely right made such an egocentric argument." He concluded that to alleviate his own conscience at least, outdoor defecating was the answer.

Toilets, toilet paper and wastewater facilities require huge amounts of water, energy and chemicals. Letting soil do the work is much better for the environment, says Izawa, who believes more people should follow his lead.

Human waste -- more than other animals' -- can contain bacteria that are potentially harmful to the environment, and defecating outside is banned in Japan. But since Izawa owns the forest around his centuries-old house, he has not fallen foul of the authorities.

Izawa's iron beliefs have cost him dearly, not least his second marriage after an incident involving Machu Picchu, the popular tourist site in Peru. He cancelled a leg of their honeymoon trip to the site after learning he would have to use the facilities..

But Fujii^*^ warns Izawa that his methods may not be as safe as he thinks, particularly his habit of tasting the soil from Poopland to demonstrate how safe it is. The city of Edo, as pre-modern Tokyo was known, used human excrement to fertilise farmland, but "some 70 percent of residents suffered from parasite infection," Fujii said.

^*^ Kazumichi Fujii, 43, a soil scientist at the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute (FFPRI) in Japan

He now strongly hopes that his body will also be decomposed in the forest instead of being cremated as is customary in Japan.

🔖 Minute Maze, quanti labirinti superi in un minuto?

@lealternative@feddit.it

Un gioco molto semplice ma altrettanto simpatico: quanti labirinti riuscirete a completare in un solo minuto? …

🔗 https://www.lealternative.net/2025/01/10/minute-maze-quanti-labirinti-superi-in-un-minuto/

You shouldn't say anything about the dead unless it's good. So she's dead. Good!

Eigenaren van de fors in waarde gedaalde certificaten van duurzame bank Triodos kunnen een compensatie krijgen van 10 euro per certificaat. Die certificaten, een soort aandelen, waren ooit 84 euro waard. Nu is dat nog maar 26 euro.

Er is al jarenlang gedoe over de certificaten. Ook voerden [...]

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17961250

Archived link

[This is an opinionated piece by Renée DiResta, associate research professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown in the U.S.]

[...]

Today [...] user exodus [from large platforms like Facebook and Twitter] to smaller platforms has become increasingly common — especially from X, the once-undisputed home of The Discourse. X refugees have scattered and settled again and again: to Gab and Truth Social, to Mastodon and Bluesky.

What ultimately splintered social media wasn’t a killer app or the Federal Trade Commission — it was content moderation. Partisan users clashed with “referees” tasked with defining and enforcing rules like no hate speech, or making calls about how to handle Covid-19 content. Principles like “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” — which proposed that “borderline” content (posts that fell into grey areas around hate speech, for example) remain visible but unamplified — attempted to articulate a middle ground. However, even nuanced efforts were reframed as unreasonable suppression by ideologues who recognized the power of dominating online discourse. Efforts to moderate became flashpoints, fueling a feedback loop where online norms fed offline polarization — and vice versa.

And so, in successive waves, users departed for alternatives: platforms where the referees were lax (Truth Social), nearly nonexistent (Telegram) or self-appointed (Mastodon). Much of this fracturing occurred along political lines. Today the Great Decentralization is accelerating, with newspapers of record, Luke Skywalker and others as the latest high-profile refugees to lead fresh retreats.

[...]

The federated nature of emerging alternatives, like Mastodon and Bluesky — platforms structured as a network of independently-run servers with their own users and rules, connected by a common technological protocol — offers a potential future in which communities spin up their own instances (or servers) with their own rules.

[...]

It was once novel features … that drew users to social media sites. Now, it’s frequently ideological alignment.

[...]

For years, loyalty to major platforms was less about affection and more about structural realities; monopolistic dominance and powerful network effects left social media users with few realistic alternatives. There weren’t many apps with the features, critical mass or reach to fulfill users’ needs for entertainment, connection or influence. Politicians and ideologues, too, relied on the platforms’ scale to propagate their messages. People stayed, even as their dissatisfaction simmered.

And so, voice was the answer. Politicians and advocacy groups pressured companies to change policies to suit their side’s needs — a process known as “working the refs” (referees) among those who study content moderation. In 2016, for example, “Trending Topicsgate” saw right-wing influencers and partisan media chastise Facebook for allegedly downranking conservative headlines on its trending topics feature. The outrage cycle worked: Facebook fired its human news curators and remade the system. (Their replacement, an algorithm, quickly busied itself spreading outrageous and untrue headlines, including from Macedonian troll factories, until the company ultimately decided to kill the feature.) Left-leaning organizations ref-worked over the years as well, applying pressure to maximize their interests.

[...]

The Great Decentralization — the migration away from large, centralized one-size-fits-all platforms to smaller, ideologically distinct spaces — is fueled by political identity and dissatisfaction. [...] These [decentralized] platforms prioritize something foundationally distinct from their predecessors: federation. Unlike centralized platforms, where curation and moderation are controlled from the top down, federation relies on decentralized protocols — ActivityPub for Mastodon (which Threads also supports) and the AT Protocol for Bluesky — that enable user-controlled servers and devolve moderation (and in some cases, curation) to that community level. This approach doesn’t just redefine moderation; it restructures online governance itself. And that is because, writ large, there are no refs to work.

The trade-offs are important to understand. If centralized platforms with their centrally controlled rules and algorithms are “walled gardens,” federated social media might best be described as “community gardens,” shaped by members connected through loose social or geographical ties and a shared interest in maintaining a pleasant community space.

In the fediverse, users can join or create servers aligned with their interests or communities. They are usually run by volunteers, who manage costs and set rules locally. Governance is federated as well: While all ActivityPub servers, for example, share a common technological protocol, each sets its own rules and norms, and decides whether to interact with — or isolate from — the broader network. For example, when the avowedly Nazi-friendly platform Gab adopted Mastodon’s protocol in 2019, other servers defederated from it en masse, cutting ties and preventing Gab’s content from reaching their users. Yet Gab persisted and continued to grow, highlighting one of federation’s important limitations: defederation can isolate bad actors, but it doesn’t eliminate them.

[...]

Protocol-based platforms offer a significant potential future for social media: digital federalism, where local governance aligns with specific community norms, yet remains loosely connected to a broader whole. For some users, the smaller scale and greater control possible on federated platforms is compelling.

[...]

While federation offers users more autonomy and fosters diversity, it makes it significantly harder to combat systemic harms or coordinate responses to threats like disinformation, harassment or exploitation. Moreover, because server administrators can only moderate locally — for example, they can only hide content on the server they operate — posts from one server can spread across the network onto others, with little recourse.

Posts promoting harmful pseudoscience (“drinking bleach cures autism”) or doxxing can persist unchecked on some servers, even if others reject or block the content. People who have become convinced that “moderation is censorship” may feel that this is an unmitigated win, but users across the political spectrum have consistently expressed a desire for platforms to address fake accounts and false or violent content.

[...]

There is also the looming question of economics [with regard to federated networks]. Federated alternatives must be financially sustainable if they intend to persist. Right now, Bluesky is primarily fueled by venture capital; it has broached having paid subscriptions and features in the future. But if the last two decades of social media experimentation have taught us anything, it’s that economic incentives inevitably have an outsized impact on governance and user experience.

[...]

Federated platforms will give us the freedom to curate our online experience, and to create communities where we feel comfortable. They represent more than a technological shift — they’re an opportunity for democratic renewal in the digital public sphere. By returning governance to users and communities, they have the potential to rebuild trust and legitimacy in ways that centralized platforms no longer can. However, they also run the risk of further splintering our society, as users abandon those shared spaces where broader social cohesion may be forged.

The Great Decentralization is a digitalized reflection of our polarized politics that, going forward, will also shape them.

To give you a sense of the minefield this means we're entering

My post on hosting Tailscale got removed for rule three though it is directly related to selfhosting. I’ve messaged three mods more than once. This is sort of a let down for one of the biggest communities here to be like this… :/

Summary

The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, rejected President-elect Donald Trump’s request to delay his sentencing in the New York hush money case.

Trump was convicted of falsifying business records tied to a $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels.

The majority, including Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett, ruled the sentencing won’t interfere with the presidential transition since no jail time is expected.

Trump plans to appeal, claiming presidential immunity.

The ruling highlights ongoing legal challenges as Trump prepares to return to the White House.