ALYSSA ALYSSA ANTIFASCISTA @qyliss@mastodon.social

But I would not join any software developers’ union that does not recognise the freedom of users of software to be just as important as the rights of the people who made it.

I would not join any union that would not strike for software freedom.

Free software is a fight between users and bosses, and we’re stuck in the middle of it. Whose side are you on?

ACAB

And so I want to go away. I will apologise for mistakes (of which I am sure I will make many), but I will not hide who I am.

I will get on with doing the things I desire to do and that feel important to me.

I do not give a fuck what you think of me. If I manage to do any good in this world, it will be because of my actions. Not because the right set of strangers can happily nod along to every opinion I feel is important and novel enough to share.

Mastodon and Twitter and probably other things will drive you into a constant state of fear about how you’re perceived by strangers. It’s not healthy.

This is what it really means to have an echo chamber. Not by shutting out the trolls and the fascists, but by punishing anybody from deviating at all from the consensus and making dissent in the ranks terrifying. Democratic centralism was a bad idea when Lenin did it and it’s a bad idea how.

Mastodon is a bit better mostly because that consensus is less controlled by tech liberals and tankies, and you can’t keyword search for dissent to punish, but it’s fundamentally the same shit.

I looked at twitter tonight to see what that was like nowadays and gods the depression from years ago came right back. Everybody being extremely angry and the arguments being de-facto won by whoever had the biggest follower count while being vaguely sympathetic to social justice. How careful I’d have to be if I participated to not end up being cancelled myself for having thoughts beyond “X is bad”. People endorse this! Say “if you’re worried about being cancelled maybe you should be” or whatever

I might take a social media break. The blog will continue.

especially if they’re stallman

(before somebody does not understand what this means: I am not suggesting literally murdering anybody, but rather killing the concept of having heroes that you unconditionally look up to and defend rather than acknowledging that people who do some good things can be extremely bad in other ways. Idolisation is setting yourself up for disappointment)

kill your heroes

SOLAR 👏 POWERED 👏 TANKS

If you don’t shut them down early, before you know it you’ll be overrun with them and the group won’t be against getting rid of them any more. This has apparently happened to a formerly promising group around here and I’m very sad to hear about it.

Breaking away from a group infiltrated by tankies is much more difficult than making your group not welcoming to them in the first place, btw. Make it clear from day one that they’re not welcome, and talk about it regularly to make sure new members are aware of the danger

actually, one more thing. tankies frequently try to spread the narrative that we’re not that dissimilar, we can overcome this rift, whatever. They’ll make jokes or serious points highlighting our common enemies.

Don’t fall for it.

@embr (while you’re at it, I strongly recommend including your full key fingerprint rather than just 64 bits of it)