Let me put the unbearable pain of mass shootings into its’ proper prospective. As a retired federal agent, I have had the sad misfortune of cleaning up after a few of these “events” as they were called. Try to lift a dead child (or adult) from the ground to put on a gurney, and their head falls from their body. Or you have to collect body parts to “complete” a victim for analysis. It hurts the strongest of us. Let republicans come into scenes and do this job. Not one would last a minute.

—@AliensAbound

Toot Global, Browse Local

The Local Timeline is key to the #Mastodon experience. It’s a community of like-minded individuals sharing what they find interesting. Local is a human-curated alternative to the infamous #algorithm for discovering the best content. When a toot goes viral, it’s usually because people saw it on Local and boosted it hard! To make the most of it, find a server that focuses on topics of interest to you and migrate there.

—@baruch

Publishers Get One Step Closer To Killing Libraries by Mike MasnickMike Masnick (techdirt.com)
Last Monday was the day of the oral arguments in the Big Publishers’ lawsuit against libraries in the form of the Internet Archive. As we noted mid-week, publishers won’t quit until libraries are dead. And they got one step closer to that goal on Friday, when Judge John Koetl wasted no time in rejecting every […]
Twitter is dying by Natasha LomasNatasha Lomas (techcrunch.com)
It’s five months since Elon Musk overpaid for a relatively small microblogging platform called Twitter. The platform had punched above its weight in pure user numbers thanks to an unrivaled ability to both distribute real-time information and make expertise available. Combine these elements with your own critical faculty — to weed out the usual spam […]