Scott Boehmer

Author: Scott Boehmer

  • How Decentralized is Bluesky?

    The physical world equivalent for a fully decentralized fediverse then is that every user sends mail to every other user’s house, as needed, similar to how sending letters works in the physical world. This is decidedly not the case with a fully decentralized ATProto. The physical world equivalent would be that every user had their own house at which they stored a copy of every piece of mail delivered to every other user at their house.

    If this sounds infeasible to do in our metaphorical domestic environment, that’s because it is. A world of full self-hosting is not possible with Bluesky. In fact, it is worse than the storage requirements, because the message delivery requirements become quadratic at the scale of full decentralization: to send a message to one user is to send a message to all. Rather than writing one letter, a copy of that letter must be made and delivered to every person on earth.

    Christine Lemmer-Webber

    How decentralized is Bluesky really? (Dusty Cloud)

  • Have Mercy

    Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They…may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people. Good of all people in this nation and the world. Amen.

    Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde

    I didn’t think it was a good service.

    President Donald Trump

    Trump demands apology after bishop asked him to ‘have mercy’ on LGBTQ+ people and migrants (PBS)

  • The New Colossus

    Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
    With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
    Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
    A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
    Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
    Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
    Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
    The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

    “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
    With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

    “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

    The New Colossus (Wikipedia)

  • The Search for Manatees

    During the cold months of winter, manatees in Florida swim up rivers towards warm springs in order to stay warm. Stefanie has wanted to take a trip to see them at the springs for a few years now, and last weekend, we made that trip.

    We visited three state parks: De Leon Springs, Blue Springs, and Wekiwa Springs. We saw manatees at the first two while at the third we saw fish and soaked our feet in the warm water. It was a great trip made possible by public parks and environmental protections.

  • Meta’s Policy Changes Pave the Way for Mass Deportations

    Multiple speech and content moderation experts 404 Media spoke to drew some parallels between these recent changes and when Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar in 2017, in which Facebook was used to spread anti-Rohingya hate and the country’s military ultimately led a campaign of murder, torture, and rape against the Muslim minority population. Although there are some key differences, Meta’s changes in the U.S. will also likely lead to the spread of more hate speech across Meta’s sites, with the real world consequences that can bring.

    Joseph Cox

    Meta Is Laying the Narrative Groundwork for Trump’s Mass Deportations (404 Media)

  • Emulating Trump’s Lack of Decency

    Even the way people on Wall Street talk and interact is changing. Bankers and financiers say Trump’s victory has emboldened those who chafed at “woke doctrine” and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people.

    “I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘r****d’ and ‘p***y’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”

    Some Wall Streeters also feel able to embrace making money openly, without nodding to any broader social goals. “Most of us don’t have to kiss ass because, like Trump, we love America and capitalism,” one said.

    FT Reporters

    Is corporate America going Maga? (Financial Times)

  • The Three Evils of Society

    And so the collision course is set. The people cry for freedom and the congress attempts to legislate repression. Millions, yes billions, are appropriated for mass murder; but the most meager pittance for foreign aid for international development is crushed in the surge of reaction. Unemployment rages at a major depression level in the black ghettos, but the bi-partisan response is an anti-riot bill rather than a serious poverty program. The modest proposals for model cities, rent supplement and rat control, pitiful as they were to began with, get caught in the maze of congressional inaction. And I submit to you tonight, that a congress that proves to be more anti-negro than anti-rat needs to be dismissed.

    It seems that our legislative assemblies have adopted Nero as their patron saint and are bent on fiddling while our cities burn.

    …

    Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world, declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism.

    Martin Luther King, Jr. “The Three Evils of Society” 1967

    MLK: The Three Evils of Society (The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change)

  • By “Personal Responsibility” We Meant “Impunity”

    Decades ago, people in Trump’s orbit, such as Roy Cohn and Roger Stone, taught him that rules are malleable, that winning is all that matters. Democrats, however, are by and large a party of rule followers. Despite being forced out of the race by his own party, President Joe Biden is still an institutionalist. There he was, smiling next to Trump, the man whom he had characterized as an “existential threat.” Biden’s courtesies, his adherence to norms, extend all the way down. Susie Wiles, Trump’s former co–campaign manager, said that Biden’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, has been “very helpful” to her, and that he has gone so far as to host a dinner for her and others at his home.

    Opposition party this is not. The Democrats are playing one game, and Trump is playing another. Trump is winning.

    John Hendrickson

    Trump’s Rule-Breaking Keeps Working (The Atlantic)

    As Republicans whitewashed January 6 and the legal system failed to hold Trump to account, the importance of Trump’s attack on our democracy seemed to fade. Even the Trump v. U.S. Supreme Court decision, which undermined the key principle that all Americans are equal before the law by declaring Trump above it, got less attention than its astonishingly revolutionary position warranted, coming as it did just four days after President Joe Biden looked and sounded old in a televised presidential debate.

    Heather Cox Richardson

    January 6, 2025 (Letters from an American)

    A federal judge dismissed the Jan. 6 election interference case against Donald Trump hours after federal prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss both that case and the Mar-a-Lago documents cases against Trump.

    Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the case without prejudice.

    The move was widely expected. Just a day after the election, special counsel Jack Smith, who headed the investigations, began to unwind the federal cases against Trump: the first for clinging to power in 2020, events that resulted in the storming of the U.S. Capitol; the second for hoarding classified documents and obstructing FBI efforts to retrieve them.

    NPR Washington Desk

    Judge grants dismissal of Jan. 6 case against Trump (NPR)

    There is little in the part of the report covering Trump’s behavior that was not already public information. The report explains how Trump lied that he won the 2020 presidential election and continued to lie even when his own appointees and employees told him he had lost. It lays out how he pressured state officials to throw out votes for his opponent, then-president-elect Joe Biden, and how he and his cronies recruited false electors in key states Trump lost to create slates of false electoral votes.

    It explains how Trump tried to force Justice Department officials to support his lie and to trick states into rescinding their electoral votes for Biden and how, finally, he pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to either throw out votes for Biden or send state counts back to the states. When Pence refused, correctly asserting that he had no such power, Trump urged his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol. He refused to call them off for hours.

    Smith explained that the Justice Department concluded that Trump was guilty on four counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States by trying “to interfere with or obstruct one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest”; obstruction and conspiracy to obstruct by creating false evidence; and conspiracy against rights by trying to take away people’s right to vote for president.

    Heather Cox Richardson

    January 14, 2025 (Letters from an American)

    Appearing in court virtually from his Mar-a-Lago home Friday [10 January 2025], President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced for his crimes in the New York “hush money” case and released with no restrictions.

    Justice Juan Merchan followed through on a promise made one week ago to give Trump a sentence of unconditional discharge, which includes neither jail time nor any other restriction that might impede Trump after his inauguration on Jan. 20.

    Graham Kates, Kathryn Watson, Katrina Kaufman, Shawna Mizelle, Nathalie Nieves

    Far from expressing any kind of remorse for his criminal conduct, the defendant has purposefully bred disdain for our judicial institutions and the rule of law, and he’s done this to serve his own ends, and to encourage others to reject the jury verdict that he finds so distasteful.

    Joshua Steinglass, Prosecutor

    Trump sentenced in felony “hush money” case, released with no restrictions (CBS News)

    In a historic decision, a divided Supreme Court on Monday [1 July 2024] ruled that former presidents can never be prosecuted for actions relating to the core powers of their office, and that there is at least a presumption that they have immunity for their official acts more broadly.

    Amy Howe

    Justices rule Trump has some immunity from prosecution (SCOTUSblog)

  • Social Media and Me

    Twitter was my favorite social media site. It was a great way to stay up-to-date on just about anything. I could get news of all sorts there from big headline news to news for my relatively niche hobbies. I never really used it to interact with friends and family (that was what I used Facebook and Instagram for), but it had been my most used of social sites for years by a wide margin.

    It wasn’t perfect though, There were lots of trolls on the site who would pounce on you when you said something they wanted to be controversial like “bigotry is bad”. It also offered some of the best tools to moderate your own timeline though. It was easy to block people. There were tools to block everyone who liked a particularly asinine tweet.

    When Elon Musk bought the site with the clear intention of making it more friendly towards its trolls, I deleted my account.

    I first made an Instagram account for testing when I was working on Windows Phone. It ended up being a great app. I could open it up and see photos from my friends. I even made a second account to have a public one to post miniature photos too, and a third for sharing my collection of LEGO minifigures.

    During the summer of 2023, the fact that I would open up the app and only see photos and video clips from people I didn’t follow and had no interest in ever following rather than the photos I wanted to see from friends and family wore me out. I haven’t posted anything to my personal account since then.

    Facebook has been a background social network for me. When I first started using it, I friended friends from school and family members and got a pretty good timeline to stay up-to-date on all those people. Over time, it too has morphed away from feeling like a place where I see things from my friends into one where Facebook shows me a random assortment of pages, communities I’m not part of, and ads. Pictures I posted to Instagram got cross-posted to Facebook for folks there to see, but like I said, I haven’t posted personal pictures in about a year and a half now. I have shared some news stories I’ve found interesting, but like other social networks, I’m pretty sure Facebook tries to minimize how many people see posts that are links to outside sites.

    With Mark Zuckerberg and Meta going all-in on accommodating the far right, I think the end of my accounts on Facebook and Instagram is quickly approaching.

    I’m not going to disappear though. I enjoy sharing things on the internet and seeing what others share. It’s just that the tools we’ve all been using for that are no longer doing a good job of it. Luckily, there are alternatives.

    Mastodon, an open-source, federated alternative to Twitter, has done an okay job filling my Twitter-shaped hole. It doesn’t have anywhere near the user base that Twitter once did, but it has enough people in areas I care about that I’ve got a useful timeline to follow for politics, tech news, and tabletop gaming discussions. If you’re on Mastodon, you can find me at @scottboehmer@mastodon.online.

    I’ve tried a shared album on Google Photos as a replacement for sharing photos with friends and family, but that hasn’t been working out as well. I haven’t been particularly good about advertising its existence, and not many of my family members seem interested in using the service. I’ve been meaning to look around more for a better alternative. For public sharing of things like pictures of my painted miniatures, I’m looking into Pixelfed, but I have yet to find something that looks like a good solution for more personal photos. If you have a photo sharing service that you like using, please let me know.

    Then I have my own websites for sharing things. This site is where I’ll be sharing articles and videos that I find interesting – the sort of things I might have once retweeted or posted to my Facebook page. Then I’ve had my gaming blog for years now, and that won’t be going anywhere. Both sites have RSS feeds and e-mail subscriptions to make them easy to follow. I also pay for hosting plans that allow both sites to not have any ads.

    For following other people, I’ve been prioritizing RSS and email subscriptions depending on what’s available. I’ve even set up an email account to use just for newsletter subscriptions so that I can keep them separate from my primary inbox. For following RSS feeds, I’ve been using Feedly for years, but I’m not particularly happy with their more recent embrace of AI. It’s another place where I have a todo list item to see if I can find a better alternative.

    I’d love to have the web feel like it’s easy to follow and share with all the people I care about in one convenient place again, but with the anti-human incentives of targeted digital ads, I feel that experience is now a thing of the past.

  • When Trump Invades Canada

    Get the women and children and the maple syrup to safety.

    Julie Nolke, Canadian

    When Trump Invades Canada (Julie Nolke)