Océane

It already happened. They sent their emails just in the middle of the Reddit migration. According to Foucault, powerful individuals use psychiatry, psychoanalysis, sociology, and social sciences to “discipline bodies and minds and make them obedient and submissive”. He called this concept “biopower”. For example, my most read blog post (which is French-speaking) details how it works in the scope of digital abuse and I’ve only started it two months ago, with almost 500 views on this one alone; it has 6 references and I’ve found other dispositives of power since.

There’s no reason to give them the benefit of doubt over not conducting experiments on unconsenting subjects precisely to drive us mad and (1) make instances defederate, (2) put large Mastodon instance admins under pressure and encourage them to defect, (3) cap the Reddit migration.

Facebook has probably exerced biopower without even starting its #Threads app. It was only a first strike and we can only expect more to come and damage control, especially by moving to Bonfire Networks ASAP and develop a culture of deescalating conflicts. Kinda difficult with so many abuse survivors here – Mastodon users are first and foremost Twitter “refugees”, and not only does Twitter abuse its users, it also monetizes real-life abuse. (Its addictive character can be used as an illusion of solidarity as part of a “flight” coping mechanism, and how do you max out this illusion? Through moral judgements (gossiping). This especially makes sense in the context of a deliberate scarcity in attention, to put its users in concurrence, also leading to conflictual relationships. And so on.)

You could use Himitsu and sync your passwords across devices with Syncthing, instead of encouraging people to confuse security with pedantry. Cybersecurity measures should be as transparent as possible, and nowadays cumbersome solutions also tend to be insecure. See, for example, pass(1): totally not secure, and also cumbersome to use. Compare that with SSH, developed by the OpenBSD project: it just works, especially by delegating complexity, i.e. by letting users and admins set up another secure channel, via HTTPS, to drop the SSH key.

The OpenBSD project has also developed doas, signify, libtls, scp, which are all no-brainers. Mastering doas is literally one blog post away.

I think having to use a different password for each website but struggling to remember it is determinant to the centralization of the internet, but have an anecdote as well:

Trying to send a Marshall Rosenberg video to a homeless I’ve sent him my health coverage instead. I immediately changed it and nothing else happened. It only took me a few minutes.

Yes, and this will foster large instances, similarly to the Mastodon project, which means a concentration of power, which means easy targets for billionaires.

This is similar to presidential regimes: they can be useful temporarily in a “move fast, break things” motto (see France trying to be perceived as a “winner” of the Second World war after having constitutionally given the full powers to the Pétain Marshall, who then decided to collaborate with Nazis) but they’re much easier to corrupt and they make it much easier to say, privatize every public service than a parliamentary one.

You don’t want power concentration or the billionaires will come for you.

If they run Linux, “Podcasts”, for GNOME. https://circle.gnome.org

If they don’t, well they can install it, e.g. https://fedoraproject.org or https://linuxmint.com, and sync their usual folders (~/Documents, ~/Images, etc.) to their phones by using Syncthing, so they could just check if their data is properly synchronized, and then directly install Windows, and pair back their computers to their phones.

Most people see installing GNU/Linux as a sort of long-term commitment. It isn’t. We don’t need to be fluent English speakers, or learn the CLI, or read books about system administration or software development now. It’s just a tool.