@mhoye remote events are also good for our planet.

Speaking of events #wikimania conference by #wikimedia movement is really great. During pandemic it was just online but they brought the local culture in by showing us e.g. how to buy and make food.

They have brought real time translators into the webinars to give us easier access to the knowledge of our global movement.

I think we appreciate the #globalsouth in our movement but maybe the people living there dissagree. Nevertheless this year the event is in #Kenya and I'm doing it remotely. Last year I travelled from Finland to Poland by bus&train so now I appreciate the time I save.

@pluralistic
A theory of change [for the #EU, and the #GlobalSouth]: Ditch #IPlaws and #copyprotection, and set #interoperability free!!

"America's robust GDP figures are a mirage, artificially buoyed up by the monopoly rents extracted by #USBigTech, who prey on Americans AND foreigners.
But foreigners don't have to tolerate this nonsense. Governments around the world signed up to protect giant American companies from small domestic competitors (from local app stores—for phones, games consoles, and IoT gadgets—to local printer cartridge remanufacturers) on the promise of tariff-free access to US markets. With #Trump imposing tariffs will-ye or nill-ye on America's trading partners large and small, there is no reason to go on delivering rents to US Big Tech."

So I don’t believe that (even parts of) the #Fediverse will have an “algorithm”. And I myself don’t have the bandwidth or the resources or even the will and the motivation to push for these changes.

Nonetheless, as a denizen of the #GlobalSouth, I would be happy if (by some miracle) the Fediverse gets universal discoverability AND an algorithmic feed tailored to each user.

As a direct consequence, the majority of #GlobalSouth users who drift into the #Fediverse get disillusioned, and return/move on to #Facebook or #Twitter or #Threads.

The #GlobalNorth users on the Fediverse never even become aware of this loss; though many of them perceive the monotony of voices/topics, and silently move out; leaving behind a tiny, malnourished social medium.

That’s it, that’s the mechanism.

Forget #GlobalNorth users, even #GlobalSouth users cannot find fellow users from their regions, or find posts about the global south, even if both exist.

This happens with most global south users, and with an overwhelming majority of the posts on global south topics.

That’s how #Mastodon, and the rest of the #Fediverse, invisiblize the global south.

(continues)

So the user X in the above example could be any account focussed on #GlobalSouth topics. Replace #Namibia with any other country or topic concerning the global south.

The dynamic described above will play out in all these cases.

(continues)

An overwhelming majority of #GlobalNorth users have no interest in #GlobalSouth topics. They neither follow users focussed on global south issues, nor boost or like posts on global south topics.

That’s their prerogative, of course; but that is also the root cause underlying the above dynamic. There is no obvious resolution to it, at least not within the narrow confines of the #Fediverse.

(continues)

A relay may complicate the above picture slightly. But if server Y in the above example is an isolated #GlobalSouth instance, or if it is running software (such as Hubzilla) not based on #ActivityPub, then the relay will most likely not be pulling posts from there, so the example will still hold.

In this context, remember many instances do not add relays because the additional posts pulled in through the relay increase the storage and processing costs.

(continues)