I am an immunocompromised person living in America and a forced vaccination program under this current administration sounds like my worst nightmare. You have plenty of very well-spoken responses in that thread from both Keld and queermunist by now, but…

please explain to me why mass forced vaccination is a tool of the bourgeoisie

We can (must) be dialectical about this: what do you think the current ruling class in America would do with the power to forcibly “vaccinate” people?

These people enjoy comfortable lives, yet I have 15 yoe as a SWE and have been unemployed for 3 years because I am a “controversial identity” (i.e. a woman) in a field that has a 10:1 gender ratio full of the shittiest men on the planet who are now emboldened to be even shittier to people like me. Very, very difficult to have hope in this era. I have zero interest in “AI”, negative interest even. I am the digital Lorax.

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A lot of clients don’t have encryption enabled by default since they’ve been around for quite a long time, before this was a primary consideration in web communication standards. In these cases, like with Gajim, it is a simple toggle in the client options. I don’t use it but I assume Movim is similar.

Conversations is my preferred Android client.

Movim has supported OMEMO since 2021 from the looks of it.

Prosody is what I use on my current server, which is just a really ancient Dell sitting in my closet. It could not handle Synapse+federation whatsoever. Prosody (and really anything XMPP) has been an absolute breeze in comparison.

I used to think that people were massively overreacting about all this

Genuine question, why? What proof is there that companies like this don’t do these things when given even an inch of leeway?

It’s ok! Your thread is a lot better anyway, I am not very good at posting and just linked the Twitter thread. Yours has the actual content which matters front and center.

I have offered to do a lot of education and technical effort surrounding this, e.g. helping groups migrate in some of the circles I’m involved with and all it’s really gotten me is abuse and condescension, bafflingly. No one cares and if they do it’s mostly superficial and they want the easiest way out—someone/something do everything for me, and I mean everything. I don’t want to click more than two buttons and even that is pushing it, buster. Sometimes there aren’t easy solutions, though, and I think this is one of those times. Big Tech is massive and in the world we live in now we cannot have all of the things it promises without immense tradeoff, and for the most part it just isn’t worth it. The modern web being almost completely centralized around Discord is really harmful, like what happened with Facebook years ago. What used to be simple, publicly accessible websites for all these groups, locations and interests with email, forums and chat rooms for asynchronous as well as real-time communication is now entirely on Discord or Facebook. It’s disastrous. Neither of those things are easily accessible or friendly to archival…why do I need to be in a Discord chat room or Facebook group for community events around my public library? It’s absurd. I hate all of this so much, and basically no one around me agrees with me so we’ll just circle the drain forever while the “pet cameras” start calling DHS on our neighbors.

I’m just going back to xmpp, maybe mumble for voice calls. They’re both friendly and simple and xmpp supports modern features just fine. I can host it for myself and my friends who care; I don’t have much hope for the masses anymore. I don’t really like how bloated Matrix/Synapse is, and everything else is riding coattails we don’t need to ride. I don’t care about video games or streaming to people in a chat room or anything like that, and if I did I’m sure something like Jitsi handles that well enough. Oh no, a second program!! We are all so dependent on tech in our lives but it seems like so many want nothing to do with being informed about it on any level…I just don’t get it.

in that it’s endemic now. It will never be over. That’s what a disease is.

Not what any of that means either.

But realistically it is over, because it’s not currently killing off a third of Europe (right now, inshallah), because we can treat it.

The only treatment that exists for anything COVID-related is for symptoms, and the vaccination just means you probably won’t die of acute illness anymore. There is no evidence the virus is ever cleared from the body, vaccinated or otherwise.

The Bubonic Plague comparison is nonsense. It is not even “realistically over” because COVID is still something like the third most transmitted disease around, period, and is the most transmitted for children!

or be somewhere that you know immunocompromised people will be

So everywhere, all the time? I have to use the same buses, go to the same grocery stores, and work the same jobs as everyone else. Unless you think people like me only exist sometimes, in some places? Or do you mean that everyone can tell with complete certainty at a glance who is particularly at risk?

This is such a weird instance of agreeing with the right things (sort of) for all of the wrong reasons. You should wear a mask if you feel sick, but also if you don’t, because modern strains of COVID manifest asymptomatically for nearly half of all infections, and masking is just as much a preventative measure for illness, too, not just reactive.

Well, glad to get that cleared up, then!

Really? There’s one right here. I wanted to say two but calling him “pro-labor” is not exactly the same as calling him a “comrade”…there is plenty of whitewashing going on in that thread. It was only three days ago. You don’t remember it at all?

It is interesting to see the responses here when the thread about this game from a few days ago was everyone convincing themselves McMillen was “a comrade”…

Hang on, let me ask my Mobilek…

Personally, I am…not hopeful for people overcoming ableism on the whole. There is nothing in my nearly two decades of activism that tells me they will, and I don’t expect this to improve in my lifetime. I would be blown away. Everywhere in the world stigmatizes disability, despite it being one of the only things guaranteed to come to everyone as they age, along with death. It is a fact of life no matter how healthy one is while they live. There is still a very unhealthy relationship with death in many places in the world, especially in western culture, and so it is with disability. Regardless I feel like I have no choice but to keep trying to move the needle.

Not to be a dick, but it kind of sounds like you all need to refine your approach to talking to people about masking and figure out how to develop a lot more patience because pushing people to change is really hard.

We have had 6 years and many, many events to refine and tailor our approach. I can tell you with confidence there is no approach that works better than any of the others. If there was something, anything that worked, we would know and would be doing it by now. We’ve tried being militant, we’ve tried being patient, we’ve tried “meeting people where they are,” and all of this has had the same efficacy and staying power: zero. We provide everything along with guidance, and we are ignored while business goes on as usual. We give the means to independently assess and handle risk to each individual or group, and we are ignored while business goes on as usual. I am all ears for any actual experience you may have with this!

Are you telling me or American Society in whole? I mask, you think you’re gonna tell me something I don’t already know?

Did you know that? By the rest of your posts you seem more concerned about “scolds” on the wrong side of the fence correctly criticizing a blind spot in your movements than the fact that these cadres exist and do this work you are now telling me is impossible and also not happening. Are you helping to make it happen?

Well you better hope that’s not the case, cause if it’s a battle between your will and the dumb atomized mass of American society, then you’re gonna lose

…and they say I’m a “doomer”! Then what’s the point of any of this? You’ve proven the scolds right.

And the reality is that masks are easily procured and distributed where it is possible, which is a fair amount of places! You can read my other posts in this thread about what this looks like “in reality” if you are actually curious about this and not just doing the abrasive internet argument thing, which I am not hopeful is the case. Just about every urban center in the US and then some has a COVID-aware mask bloc very eager to help any group or demonstration with logistics, supply, and education when it is wanted. Guess when it is wanted, and by which organizations? The answer is never, and none. That is not a matter of logistics and lack of holistic analysis, but a matter of will. None of you think this matters enough to do something about it when the doing is indeed very doable. When’s the last time you wore a mask, or did anything to help mitigate the spread of COVID in your organizing? I can probably make a good guess: not anytime in the last…I’ll say 4 years, at least? But nothing has materially changed since then, except that disease has gotten even worse around the board, which sounds like even more of an argument in favor of being militant about the prevention of its spread. Respirators are in fact easier than ever to come by. They practically give them away surplus now, and there’s nothing functionally wrong with them. Where is your analysis? Where is your action?

“Society doesn’t do it so we can’t be expected to either” is not the justification I would use when talking about supposed groups of revolutionaries.