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So, there's this concept of "implicit feudalism" in online communities. Essentially, the vast majority of online communities - from old-school forums, to facebook groups, to large platforms like Twitter and Facebook themselves, even to fediverse instances - they're all run as dictatorships by default. It's built into the software - you'll have a top admin who has full, unconstrained power, they might delegate mods who have some limited powers, and anyone else has to listen to what these dictators and lords tell them. We talk about "federating" here in the fediverse, but each individual community - as far as I'm aware of - is a little dictatorship. A federation of dictatorships is not a free society, anymore than the UN, an international body composed of "liberal democracies" and authoritarian regimes is truly democratic. We need a way to start governing online communities through actual forms of democracy.

boosts++

RT @atulkasbekar@twitter.activitypub.actor
An astrophotographer has clicked an exceptional video, wherein we can feel the rotation of the earth

Using a tracking mount, aligned with North Star, he kept clicking images every 12 seconds for the next 3 hours.
The camera is looking at the same portion of the Milky Way

Fab!

Anyway facts about "people in general" or "the human race" are most often about people who aren't and have never been in the margins

@DissidentKitty along with the work of Heron of Alexandria and the rest of the treasure in the Toledo Library.

oh hey janelle monáe tweeted that they're nb. good for them and for others

@bryceyoungquist @DissidentKitty that book, by the way, would spread across the Arab world into what is now Spain. Sometime in the 12th or 13th century CE it made its way to a young man called Fibonacci, who was influential in spreading it across Europe and reviving the mathematical tradition on the continent which had been dead for well over a millennium.

@DissidentKitty fun trivia: the two words are closely linked

Mohammed Al-Khwarizim was the writer of the book titled On Restoring What Has Been Separated Into Parts. bit of a clunky title, so people truncated it to On Restoring: Al Jabra.

so thinking about things like he did, in the anglosphere, became Al-Khwarizimic

So, yes, there was an Al Gorithm, and his name was Mohammed, and yes, he wrote the book on algebra

@lyliawisteria @DissidentKitty like a third of the stars in the sky have Arabic names. Because guess who discovered them

@DissidentKitty Al-Khwarizmi was, without doubt, one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived.

@DissidentKitty Algol, zenith ('zamt' originally, followed by some misspellings), nadir (anti-zenith), too.

@DissidentKitty Aldeberan, Altair, Altinak, and a whole bunch of bright star names also originally from arabic

blaring alarm at the power plant: WARNING. CATASTROPHIC FAILURE. GENDER CRITICAL.

me: no aleksandr you can't go in, there's too much gender!

aleksandr, sacrificing himself to close the gender valves and save us all: прощай брат

@DissidentKitty You would be a naughty person if you downloaded PDFs and EPUBs of books illegally on b-ok.org

a family can be two enbies, a sword, and a plushie of a korok

Holy shit. Someone named Isabel Fall took "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" as a writing prompt and produced one of the most fabulous cyberpunk, post-human, trans-human mindfucks I've read in a long time. This is extremely my shit

clarkesworldmagazine.com/fall_

apparently a decent contingent of our polycule is actually seriously considering founding a queer commune on lesbos just because it's lesbos

magic: the gathering 

also, the best combo is immortal coil + elixir of immortality to instantly die

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@DissidentKitty also if you need textbooks you definitely shouldn't pirate them from librarygenesis.net/ because it would be bad for capitalism

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Computer Fairies is a Mastodon instance that aims to be as queer, friendly and furry as possible. We welcome all kinds of computer fairies!