@Limerick1914@mastodon.ie

Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 05, 2023

James Walvin: By the 1820s “of the 11 million people - Europeans and Africans - who had crossed the Atlantic to settle in the Americas, only 2.5 million were European: the rest, more than 8 million, were African. And all of those Africans had crossed the Atlantic on slave ships.”

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Oct 27, 2023

I post this article each #Halloween in the vain hope that the complexity of its origins and customs is more widely appreciated. 🎃

https://limerick1914.medium.com/customs-vary-wi-the-times-at-hallowe-en-6137752ed653

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Aug 20, 2023

W.E.B Du Bois: “Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel - not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God.”

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 06, 2022

Replying to @plambrechtsen@mastodon.nz

@plambrechtsen@mastodon.nz definitely. I’ve only been here a couple of days but already there are hundreds of us financially backing this instance because it is so well managed. This should have always been the model. It just took the plutocratic tech giants to self-combust for us to see that.

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 06, 2022

Replying to @fionndempsey@mastodon.ie

@fionndempsey@mastodon.ie thanks Fionn.

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 06, 2022

Replying to @ColmDonoghue@mastodon.ie

@ColmDonoghue@mastodon.ie thanks Colm, that’s good to know.

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 06, 2022

Replying to @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie

So I guess that was my first thread on Mastodon. Did I do that correctly? 🙂

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 06, 2022

Replying to @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie

I think I also forget just how much work it took to make Twitter a bearable place to be. I ended up blocking something like 55,000 different accounts, received death threats, constant trolling, spam, &c. It took years for any semblance of meaningful and consistent moderation to exist. It was in essence a libertarian website that had to dragged kicking towards reform. We had invested so much effort over the years for it to be useful & now it is being torn apart heedlessly at pace. Final straw.

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 06, 2022

Replying to @clarinette@mastodon.online

@clarinette@mastodon.online no, we need to pay for it by financially supporting whatever instance/server you are on (and are happy with)

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 05, 2022

Replying to @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie

Twitter has become more and more like a type of outrage engine. In Mastodon there are no quote tweets, the oxygen of the pile-on. The metrics of reshares/likes are also dampened so that they are not prominent at all beneath a post in your feed. It’s a very different place. And I like it.

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 05, 2022

Replying to @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie

The admins reacted quickly, opened an open collective financial contribution page (opencollective.com/mastodonie) and within a couple of hours they had raised enough funds to upgrade the server/service and sustain functionality and speed. And everyone who contributed is now a stakeholder. Because I think we see the potential for a better way to do this. And that community is growing. I also appreciate that Mastodon has decided on an interesting ‘viral dampening’ approach to their UI design.

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 05, 2022

Replying to @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie

Mastodon is not a panacea (nor does it claim to be) but it is a non-profit, ad-less, localised and federated social media platform. ‘instances’ are administrated and moderated by volunteers. When the #twitterexodus started yesterday this Irish instance (mastodon.ie) was clearly, and ofc understandably, overwhelmed by the huge influx of new applications and traffic.

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 05, 2022

Replying to @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie

We should demand that our social media platforms reflect and serve their communities rather than exploit them. Currently billion dollar tech companies engage a suite of psychological and algorithmic techniques to manipulate what we see in our feeds to boost advertising metrics. That’s not a conspiracy theory btw, it’s a long established business model.

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 05, 2022

Replying to @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie

Some further thoughts on my Mastodon experience: it has made me step back and reevaluate how social media should operate. We built entire communities on Twitter but were ultimately treated like a product for trade. It does not have to be like this.

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 05, 2022

Replying to @larrycebula@mstdn.social

@larrycebula@mstdn.social nothing that was suitable or as easy to use.

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 05, 2022

Replying to @ainenilionsigh@mastodon.ie

@ainenilionsigh@mastodon.ie thanks for this.

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 05, 2022

Replying to @clickhere@mastodon.ie

@clickhere@mastodon.ie @faduda@mastodon.ie absolutely. I learned that lesson the hard way.

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 05, 2022

Replying to @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie

Then in 2019 Google erased this product. Just gone forever. I realised then that these companies are the antithesis of libraries, cultural institutions and the open source movement. They see culture, and our free labour in using their (temporary) tools, as instantly and permanently disposable ephemera to attract attention for the purpose of advertising. All that power and wealth put to use to fulfil such an empty mission.

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 04, 2022

Replying to @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie

Remember Google Fusion Tables? I spent many months building digital humanities resources around it. One was a WW1 map that identified the final resting place of the over 1,000 people from Limerick who lost their lives in that conflict. The other was a resource that mapped the sites of Collective Punishment of African American communities in the U.S. Many other historians built fantastic resources using it as a way to visually and spatially educate about the past. It was accessible and effective.

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 04, 2022

Replying to @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie

Then again such social media companies are not, and have never been, a “public forum”. They are privately owned networks that have a single priority: harvesting profits. Primarily from selling their users’ information to those who which to target them. Everything else is secondary. They have shown that they cannot be trusted in any meaningful sense. We deserve much better.

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 04, 2022

Replying to @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie

It’s clear to me that Musk purchased twitter in order to destroy it. The blue checkmark is a verification mark for authenticity. This is particularly important in terms of identifying sources. To make it pay-to-play is to burn twitter's reliability as a news source, and it's reliability in general, to the ground.

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Liam Hogan @Limerick1914@mastodon.ie · Nov 04, 2022

Hello world. Twitter migrant and new #histodon #librarian here possibly leaving behind approx 60k good souls on the platform that sold us all out to Musk. I put in a lot of time and work on that site for over 10 years and made many great friends & contacts, so it’s sad and a bit surreal to have to start again.
 But such is the nature of the unregulated social media industry, where global information systems can be upended on the whim of an erratic, uncurious and narcissistic billionaire.

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Liam Hogan

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