don’t attract individuals, attract entire groups of people. The idea of moving humans one by one when all of their friends are on centralized platforms will only attract lonely people, who won’t be able to promote the platform. The growth will eventually halt.

Move entire communities that are already connected: specific identities, followers of famous people (which should be onboard with the plan), specific subreddits and so on.

People don’t use forums anymore. Union organizing requires big numbers and being comfortable with being visible.

The URL shortener for sure could be addressed and I invite you to join and contribute to improve that part of the stack. Nonetheless, TWC is not a hacker space or a space for tech experts. You need to use the tools people already use and meet them where they are at. Using niche tools people are not familiar with introduces friction and barriers, that filter out people without tech skills, or without the attention and time to learn a new tool and incorporate it in their routines. Most tech workers are not programmers, remember that. Also people who are too privacy-focused and tech-focused tend to be bad organizers: union organizing implies risks and exposure, and you have to be comfortable with that, while privacy-focused people want to minimize individual risk by staying hidden. For sure privacy of your communication from the employer or the government plays an important role, because it might give sensitive information to your enemy, but if retaining privacy prevents you from having impact, it’s pointless to even start.

I’m part of TWC and the organization of this call and I’m Italian. There are different timezones but it’s obviously hard to include all of them. Including UTC wouldn’t help most people.

The very fact that there are two events for two distinct timezones doesn’t suggest there’s an attempt to reach out to a bigger crowd?

Because self-hosting adds complexity and friction, something that impact-oriented organizations might not be able to afford. TWC uses self hosting on more sensitive data anyway, just not on these tools.

The Global chapter of Tech Workers Coalition

The Session A time zone is good for Europeans too. Session B I guess could work for East Asia.

Why do you see this as USA-only?

Also consider the form of these savings. Keeping everything in financial assets might be very dangerous on the very long term. The chances of a world war and/or a financial collapse of the West are relatively high and you don’t want a hyperinflation crisis to destroy all your savings. It happened in Germany, it is happening again in some parts of the world, it will happen again.

Hello. Thanks for the input. We know most of these and TWC is globally under a process of moving towards a self-hosted infrastructure. We have a self-hosted url shortener, but we still have to structure a process to guarantee that the social media teams use them.

For the calls, Zoom is pretty entrenched in our infrastructure, but we plan to eventually replace it. For obvious reasons of hardware performance, we are keeping it as one of the last steps, because we often organize webinars with 100+ people, and our current infrastructure probably wouldn’t handle it with like a jitsi instance or similar.

The security party is also intended as a way to attract people who could bring more expertise on these topics into the infrastructure team and accelerate this transition.

yes. The event is on an American time zone so I kept the American format. We might repeat it on an European time zone if there’s interest.

Inshallah

It’s that time of the year again when tankies will side with a theocratic government before supporting a revolt that is not 100% up to their standards of purity.

Freedom of information is freedom for the most powerful to use that information for their profit. The more powerful you are, the more tools you have to harness common goods for profit.

God forbid a technical person becomes an adult and starts understanding power, money, and politics. Engineers should be babies playing with their toys and being idealistic and irresponsible about their impact on the world.

We don’t need to involve racism, an American pseudo-science, to consider Americans barbarians. That’s what an American would do: to reduce everything about race when it has nothing to do with it.

Also, it’s white guilt, we all know American liberals and leftists enjoy this stuff.

If in 2026 you’re on X, I don’t think privacy would matter much to you. People will go to platforms that give them what X was giving them. Mastodon doesn’t offer porn, it doesn’t offer visibility to journalists, it does offer a little of bit of arguing with strangers, but definitely nowhere near the levels of X, where you can do it at any time of the day. Bluesky is still the best alternative on all these points.

We cut ties with American people because they are annoying, puritanical and self-entitled.

Saying shit like this is very American, for example.

Include anche la lingua inglese. Da adesso su Lemmy si parla solo Italiano.

The issue with this line of reasoning, which is correct and the only reasonable way to approach protests, is that protests are sold to participants as if they are actions that do something in the world, because at some point in history, they did. The people attracted by protests are people who want to protest. Even if you attract them into your org, they will still carry that mindset that politics is about words, expression and dissent, rather than power, leverage, change, and impact.

Probably most potential good organizers avoid protests actively because they do understand intuitivelyy they don’t work and why they don’t work.

Met two people from Transnistria, one from the Isle of Man and one from Micronesia. I wouldn’t say they are super rare but I’m quite sure most American would consider these fictional countries.