I'm no historian, but I think what we are experiencing has a lot of similarities to the gilded age and Industrial Revolution. Eventually, the government stepped in and set up regulations and protections for consumers and workers. But not before there was egregious profiteering and tragic exploitation. That sounds awfully familiar to me. Right now, we are in a period where the businesses have become monolithic in size and scale, their focus is on growth and acceleration at all costs, and the government is actually removing the guardrails (many of which were antiquated) for consumers. Like I said, I'm not a historian, but I generally believe that history repeats. Maybe a close study of that period and the things that led to change would reveal ideas for how to affect change in what is essentially a second gilded age.

I keep coming back to one central idea that is foundational to see real change. We need participation not delegation. Anyone that tells you to “send money and we will fight for you” is advocating for delegation, and with it, a natural attrition of participation. We don’t need freedom as a service! We need to be free! So that is the central tenet of what I want to build. Get asses out of seats and moving, talking, interacting without corporate interests chaperoning the whole affair.

Heres an example flier that i think does a few things well. I want ours to be more geared towards the how and less the why, but with elements of both. I need to go down the rabbit hole and see what materials Robert is linking to: https://masto.ai/@rbreich/115617561527528527

Another balanced review of proton: https://thedroidguy.com/longtime-proton-users-are-leaving-over-broken-promises-ai-hype-and-neglected-features-1269075

Options for federated auth in kagi are apple, google, microsoft and github (microsoft) but they also allow for creating your own name and password. Inside a link under this email field, entitled “Why do we need an email address?” Kagi suggests possibly using : https://simplelogin.io/ to alias your email. We should look further into that as well.

I was thinking we could start pinning a weekly goal thread with the current goal. Like right now we can work on a graphic that shows “small ways to uns***ify Christmas shopping while keeping your sanity intact” and show people how to avoid lining Amazons pockets, etc.

https://indivisible.org/ does some recommended boycotts as well as protests. For instance, a proposed boycott of Amazon, Target, and Home Depot for black Friday weekend. I think part of the idea is that more targeted boycotts tied to specific objectionable actions in the news might work better as a message

So check this out @skeet . These are the current overrides I have set. They allow me to override any css i want, so what i did was i went through the site briefly in chrome, saw a few things that looked like they could be improved, right clicked on those elements and chose inspect, then copied the selector, pasted it in chatgpt and told it: override this selectors color with light brown, or make the text in this selector bigger, etc. then i tweaked its output. If you gave me a list of overrides like this back i would be happy to try them out. Gemini should work fine for this too: .brand-container { background-color: #e9dfd3 !important; } [component="siteTitle"] h1 { color: #2f5e43 !important; font-size: 1.25rem !important; /* adjust size */ line-height: 1.2 !important; } .btn-close { filter: brightness(0) saturate(100%) invert(33%) sepia(11%) saturate(1122%) hue-rotate(96deg) brightness(92%) contrast(90%) !important; }

This new version of the board has the concept or remote categories and federated content. Going to look into that because maybe other people are using it for similar things. Im mulling over ideas about using web vs something like discord, and also if both things can live in harmony without bifurcating a community. Distributed anonymous systems are less corruptable, but hosting our own server(s) is also less corruptable.