Skip to main content


Someone was making the "rapture pet insurance" joke (which entertainingly enough such businesses do exist and aren't scams)...

But it randomly made me think of a business idea that I think would be incredible:

Death and Incapacitance Pet Insurance

Basic gist is it's a digital dead-man's switch service, you routinely check in to establish you're still there taking care of your pet. If you stop checking in, then someone reaches out, if they can't get ahold of you they come out and take care of your pet.

One thing I've been worried about for ages is what will happen to Lizzie if something happens to me... With how isolated I am most of the time, it could easily be days or weeks before someone came around to check on her... she could easily die of starvation or dehydration before anyone even knew I was dead.

... It honestly terrifies me.

So the idea of a service with someone in the area who has a copy of my key, and if I stop responding they'll come out, make sure she has adequate food and water for a while, notify family, and eventually take her to a foster or shelter if no family can take her (it'd be truly awful, but it'd be better than her just dying slowly as no-one cares for her).

It strikes me that it would be a pretty easy business to make profitable given that it would so rarely be used. Most customers would never use it given that we typically outlive our pets.

It would just need a retainer paid out to contractors in the area to handle check ins if the automatic check in fails, then if they have to go take care of a pet they get a reasonable payout for the work involved. (If someone just uses it as a sitter for a vacation then they get a significant bill)

#Ideas #Pets



Add this to the pile of ideas I'm unlikely to ever make, not because it's super hard but just because I'm so constantly exhausted and out of spoons... steal away if you want to make it:

There's basically the "big server" problem on the fediverse, where a super large open registration server has so many people on it you don't want to block it and lose all those people... but it inherently is less effectively moderated. Or even on smaller instances there's so many cases of "this wouldn't be acceptable on my instance, but isn't bad enough to defederate a whole instance over".

It's manageable, but has limitations that get worse as the network grows. It's even one of the concerns people have with bridges and corporate platforms adding support (ie. bluesky and threads respectively).

But there's an idea in Bluesky I kinda like that feels like it could be tweaked and imported over here. Which is subscribable moderation.

I'm not proposing just subscribing to all sorts of block lists from strangers, but a way of having shared moderation that people can team up on.

Basic idea I had was an open source platform (so others can run it for both redundancy and cutting down on smaller censorship disputes). On that platform, someone can create and become the admin of a moderation group. Then they can invite other people to that group as moderators (or in the case of private groups, members).

Then basically have auditable moderation lists made by the groups (showing which moderator took which action and when... especially good for undoing things if problems arise, but also for checking the list before you import an update), then server admins and users can follow a list and subscribe/import it.

Was even thinking this could be improved with things like public reporting, where reporting it to the server would send the report to all lists that haven't already blocked them (servers could even share this between eachother easily enough). Additionally admins could piggyback their list off of others (basically lists that are less restrictive than yours, so you might pull from "We only block Nazis" because you know anyone they're blocking isn't going to be in question).

#FediMeta #Meta #Ideas #Idea #Suggestion #Suggestions #Moderation

Shannon Prickett reshared this.

in reply to Shiri Bailem

Yea, part of the AP protocol is you have to tell the server of the user you are blocking. When you unblock you have to also tell the server as well. If those messages are not processed correctly the block isn't lifted.

Now normally, you'd just manually block and unblock again to send a fresh message. But when you are dealing with lists there are UX challenges there. How do you communicate to the user that a block/unblock didn't go through and they need to retry? Or do you just keep retrying with exponential backoff? None of this is insurmountable, but distributed networks are hard 😅

in reply to ראַף 🟣

Oh and there is some disagreement over what a standards-compliant server should do about Block messages

socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/…

in reply to ראַף 🟣

@ראַף 🟣 I honestly wasn't imagining integrating with the protocol itself at all, I was just picturing it exporting an importable block list and leaving it to the platforms to support importing it, or other tools to handle importing and applying it.
in reply to Shiri Bailem

Well right now at least on GTS and Mastodon you can import block and mute lists. But it's a one-off. There isn't what I think we both want which is a subscription to a block list where we can periodically diff against and undo/redo blocks and mutes.
in reply to ראַף 🟣

@ראַף 🟣 I definitely agree that there isn't an explicit subscription option, and that's entirely down to toolkits on the instance side imo.

I imagined manual imports, but with convenient links for those who might want to build tools to automate those imports. Maybe an option to also email updates as a way to notify, but that's kinda secondary imo.

I just pictured along the lines of:
example.com/modlists/Punch-All… for raw importable blocklist
example.com/modlists/Punch-All… for a simple history that shows the blocklist stuff, plus add/remove, who, and when.

Then others can build tools to handle much of it, (like on friendica it would take barely any effort to write such a tool for server admins).

And basically just take unix methodology for the tools that import into other instances, focus on providing the list and a separate tool can be used to automate it.



With the nonsense about gup.pe getting hijacked, honestly has me thinking again about secondary tools for the network...

Bright spot is that they probably can't imitate the server, as far as I understand it AP has keys for the servers to prevent that (which is also part of why you can't readily swap platforms, want to run something different you need to use a different domain).

Still, it has me thinking about maybe some secondary registry to track instance information. Maybe make these sort of events less disruptive.

This is entirely off the cuff idea, so think of this as spaghetti at the wall:

I was just imagining a signed file on servers that gave extended, non-platform specific, meta for the server, kinda like robots.txt.

I was just thinking information like:
* My IP is static, so if the IP changes without an updated signed file, then it's not safe (or it's dynamic, so don't worry if it changes)
* Remember my nameservers and do the same if the nameservers change
* Here's a moderator email for reporting posts (because the system mastodon has for sending reports to other servers is non-standard and not universal... I have to find moderator emails on about pages when I need to report something...)
* Maybe some tags if someone wants to make non-platform specific server directories
* Some flags like robots for nicer more compliant services, like bridges allowed/denied

And then maybe a dns middle-man service to toss on your server that checks these things periodically. So if something happens like with gup.pe there's a notice to admins and maybe it doesn't get cut off immediately, maybe letting admins give some final notices in more permanent situations.

#fedimeta #ideas



One of the things that pisses me off the most is the people always saying "violence is not the answer".

Do you know why Nazi punching is a thing? Why it goes beyond just "fuck nazis"?

Let me break it down a little:

Is violence in self defense okay when someone is attacking you? Obviously, because they're attacking you and "please stop killing me" isn't going to make much difference to someone in the process of killing you.

How about when they're just pointing a gun at you but haven't fired? Yes, because if they pull that trigger you're going to die.

What about when they're just threatening you? Like if someone says "I have a knife and the moment no-one is looking I'm going to stab you"... do you just ask them nicely not to? Do you wait for them to start stabbing before you think it's okay to fight back? You probably recognize that words can be violence then.

Let's go a bit further... let's say someone is stealing and destroying a diabetic's insulin? This is a life saving drug, do you think it's valid to use violence to stop them even though it's not directly killing them? Then you probably recognize that violence isn't just physical attacks on a person.

How about someone rallying people to get together and kill someone? Do you just debate them or do you stop them?

So if someone says they believe trans people shouldn't be allowed to exist? That we shouldn't have access to basic rights like being ourselves in public, or access to our medications? These are people rallying others to attack us, to destroy the things that keep us alive. They may not be actively stabbing us in the moment, but it's still violence against us.

Nazi speech, Terf speech, etc. IS violence. And violence is the appropriate response to violence.

Note how we're not talking about punching someone for just being capitalist, for shouting about free market bullshit. We're talking about punching people calling for our eradication.

Again: violence is the appropriate response to violence.

#PunchNazis #MakeNazisAfraidAgain #LGBT #LGBTQIA



99% of the time "Judeo-Christian" is antisemitic. And yes, I will absolutely elaborate on this if asked.

Credit: @Rabbit Cohen

Edit because this blew up far more than I expected and multiple people have asked for me to elaborate, here's a copy of my elaboration with follow up questions encouraged:

It's a messy topic and it's late here (I'm a bit sleepy), so feel free to ask follow up questions.

The short version of it is that Judeo-Christian is almost always used in one of two harmful ways:

1) To try and give more credibility and weight to something that is purely Christian by claiming that it's part of Judaism as well when it's not (like the above example, because Judaism explicitly permits abortions)
2) To try and talk about broader groupings of related faiths while ignoring the many other Abrahamic faiths (the proper term, though that one more often hurts the lesser known groups, don't use it unless you also know it applies to groups like the Baháʼí, which I'll admit even I know next to nothing about, but it's valid here because all I'm doing is naming their religious family)

Because many (cough most cough) teach a bastardized form of Judaism through the lens of Christianity, and because that's the only exposure many get to our faith... they get skewed harmful and hurtful ideas about us.

Some highlight examples:
* We don't have an established afterlife (we don't say there isn't one, we just have zero information on it if there is)
* We don't seek "eternal reward", the reward for our faith is being a better person than we were the day before
* We have forgiveness baked into our faith, and no it doesn't require animal sacrifice (it requires you to actually ask the person you wronged...)
* We thoroughly encourage arguing any topic with anyone (right time and place of course), and that includes picking a fight with God if you think they're wrong about something (you have a 99.9% chance of being wrong... but we commend the effort and every once in a while someone wins the argument)
* We have a rule, Pikuach Nefesh, roughly meaning that life is the highest commandment. Your well being takes precedence over your faith, if it would hurt you or others to be observant than you are exempt from that requirement. It's unacceptable to hurt others for your faith, and for yourself it's frowned upon
* We actively discourage conversion, it's allowed but it's not a trivial process. We don't want people to become Jews, we just want people to be better.

Unknown parent

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
Shiri Bailem

@Shannon (she/her) @Pedestriansfirst I suppose you're technically correct, I guess I usually never think about it because there's always more apt descriptions (ie. Nazis are often Zionists because "Blood And Soil").

And yes on the antisemitism of it, I just chose not to say anything about that in favor of a chance at education. (Also a love for getting into arguments with aggressive militant atheists because it's so fun to see their talking points shatter and the confusion that comes from it)

And I didn't bring it up later because I felt from the conversation that it wasn't going to be a problem again from them because they learned some things about Judaism, Jewish Culture, and that religions people can in fact own and acknowledge bad behaviors in their own communities.

Unknown parent

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
Shiri Bailem

@Shannon (she/her) I don't think believing all zionists are jews isn't that messy of a idea because it impacts so little, especially since the zionist behavior of non-jews is already easily discernible on it's own as awful anyways.

And keep in mind that the comparison is that this started from assuming that all Jews condoned the atrocities committed by the Israeli government and has walked away knowing that it's not uniform.



This is a long article, but the theory hits *hard* with me and connects really well.

The basic gist is that autistics almost always define our identities by what we do and our personal traits, while non-autistics almost always define their identities by their relationships (in particular to social groups)

If you don't have it in you to read all of it, definitely read the section: "How does having an experientially-constructed identity impact relationships?".

neuroclastic.com/the-identity-…

Mandi reshared this.

Unknown parent

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
Shiri Bailem

@bike I suspect it isn't that much different. Collectivist societies can be awful in their own ways.

They're still better imo, but they have a tendency to focus too hard on traditions and conformity on top of the ideals of communal responsibility.

But in all cases it's a mesh of peer pressure and group identity vs our value identity.

Unknown parent

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
Shiri Bailem
@bike I get that, I mostly mention that so I don't come across as bashing collectivist societies incidentally. My point was more that I doubt there's that much difference for us, just swap out one set of rules that don't make sense for another set that don't make sense for a different reason.


Why You Must Keep The Monsters Human


*(Reposting because my node crashed and lost all my posts and I want to keep this one pinned)*

I've been mulling over making this post for a little bit, but I think it's really **really** important.

It's critically important that you remember and acknowledge the humanity of monsters. Not for their benefit, but for *everyone else's* benefit.

When someone commits a monstrous act or shares a monstrous belief, we want to think of them as an inherently vile and non-human thing.

But doing so shields and protects other monsters.

When you make a Nazi, or any kind of abuser, into a one-dimensional monster. When you make their whole existence *center* on this monstrous act or belief... you make it hard to see their humanity. And that's the point, you don't *want* to see their humanity.

*** You Don't Want To Believe That Someone You Know And Trust (Maybe Even Love) Is Capable Of Such Atrocity. ***

And that's the problem. Because when you reject their humanity, that humanity becomes their shield. Your friend Bob can't possibly be a Nazi or a child-abuser, he's such a loving father and he helped you move!

Because you see their humanity, you can't possibly imagine them as monsters because the monsters have no humanity in your eyes.

There's a reason that when serial killers get caught their neighbors say they couldn't imagine them doing such things.

So don't ignore their humanity, keep it in your mind... so the next one can't use it as a shield.

reshared this