"There are good reasons for expanding affordable childcare and funding proper parental leave; not because this might increase the fertility rate but because such policies are good for women, for children and for society. There are good reasons for thinking more concretely about the consequences of falling birthrates and the policies needed to respond to it; and to acknowledge, too, that immigration cannot be the sole answer, but is likely to be part of it.

"There are, though, no good reasons for using concern about birthrates to exacerbate hostility to immigration, to project divisive notions of identity and to restrict the rights of women and gay people. That is to enclose iniquity in a “family friendly” wrapping"

"Last week we got a letter from Elon Musk’s X. Corp threatening CCDH with legal action over our work, exposing the proliferation of hate and lies on Twitter since he became the owner. Elon Musk’s actions represent a brazen attempt to silence honest criticism and independent research in the desperate hope that he can stem the tide of negative stories and rebuild his relationship with advertisers."

[With apologies to anyone who dislikes endless Musk/Huffman spam in this community. I put it here because misusing the law to silence independent tech researchers this has wider implications.]

"As the social media landscape ebbs and flows, the team at BBC Research & Development are researching social technologies and exploring possibilities for the BBC. One part of our work is to establish a BBC presence in the distributed collection of social networks known as the Fediverse, a collection of social media applications all linked together by common protocols. The most common software used in this area is Mastodon, a Twitter-like social networking service with around 2 million active monthly users. We are now running an experimental BBC Mastodon server at https://social.bbc where you can follow some of the BBC’s social media accounts, including BBC R&D, Radio 4 and 5 Live. We hope to be able to add more accounts from other areas of the BBC at some point."

And, at the risk of crossing subLemmy boundaries, here's Mekka Okereke (@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io) on that achievement, and Mastadon's loss:

"And when she tried to join the Fediverse, she was greeted with a barrage of hate, sexism, racism, and anti-semitism that should have never been allowed to happen.

"So now no one on Fediverse gets to interact with her directly about her work on here. Our loss. 😢

"Which is why we'll make it so that this type of terrible welcome is unlikely to happen again. Allowing it to happen to her was a choice. We will make better ones."

#BlackMastodon

https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/110793385293203842

"After my last long post, I got into some frustrating conversations, among them one in which an open-source guy repeatedly scoffed at the idea of being able to learn anything useful from people on other, less ideologically correct networks. Instead of telling him to go fuck himself, I went to talk to about fedi experiences with people on the very impure Bluesky, where I had seen people casually talking about Mastodon being confusing and weird.

"My purpose in gathering this informal, conversational feedback is to bring voices into the “how should Mastodon be” conversation that don’t otherwise get much attention—which I do because I hope it will help designers and developers and community leaders who genuinely want Mastodon to work for more kinds of people refine their understanding of the problem space."

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn't its cars, it's Tesla's business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

More toilet hysteria.

A manufactured panic about trans people using the toilets they feel safest in, making them (and any other gender non-conforming individual) unsafe regardless of which choice they make, also makes it unsafe for parents to take their young or disabled children to the toilet if the child happens to be a different sex from the parent.

We need to bury these establishments in costly litigation that force these laws to be repealed. Ridiculous people.

Every right-wing accusation is a confession.

It is expected to be 2-3 months before Threads is ready to federate (see link). There will, inevitably, be five different reactions from instances:

1. Federate regardless (mostly the toxic instances everyone else blocks)

2. Federate with extreme caution and good preparation (some instances with the resources and remit from their users)

3. Defederate (wait and see)

4. Defederate with the intention of staying defederated

5. Defederate with all Threads-federated instances too

It's all good. Instances should do what works best for them and people should make their home with the instances that have the moderation policies they want.

In the interests of instances which choose options 2 or 3, perhaps we could start to build a pre-emptive block list for known bad actors on Threads?

I'm not on it but I think a fair few people are? And there are various commentaries which name some of the obvious offenders.

False and misleading posts about the Ukraine conflict continue to go viral on major social media platforms, as Russia's invasion of the country extends beyond 500 days.

Some of the most widely shared examples can be found on Twitter, posted by subscribers with a blue tick, who pay for their content to be promoted to other users.

Useful Masto thread on strategy.