Thank you for passing this along! 
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Thank you so much for putting that here. I really appreciate you helping me keep up with the developments 
This has done wonders for my own faith in Johannes.
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Not sure if you saw TImnit’s post at Timnit Gebru (she/her): "Friends, I'm pulling out of @fediforum@mastodon.s…" - Distributed AI Research Community (there’s more context in the replies) but if you decided to do a separate session I can share what we’re thinking of for logistics.
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Even if the situation might be complex, my personal position is simple: I just want to contribute to events that are explicitly and unapologetically antidiscriminatory, and, whenever possible, driven by people who suffer discrimination. And I want to avoid anything and anyone ambiguous about all that until they are pushed, and even then.
Therefore, seeing the current situation including the reaction after yesterday’s announcements (as far as I can see in unofficial channels and invisible in the FediForum website?), I’ll skip this event.
When I registered, I expressed this interest: How to build a fun & sustainable scene for musicians and music lovers. If anyone wants to discuss anytime anywhere about this topic and/or about The Social Music Network, I’m interested.
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Thank you for sharing this.
I’m going to skip the event, as well.
If there’s a group of people cooperating to create a people-first forum, I’m raising my hand to help. Skipping Fediforum is a good action. But I think it’ll go mostly unnoticed by the larger community without a positive counter action.
I’d love to be part of a gathering that’s focused on making the Fedi the place we want it to be vs being technology-centric.
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Yeah the reason we decided to go ahead with our sessions outside the FediForum context is that they’re discussions that would be great to have happen – and there’s no reason to let FediForum organizers’ screwups prevent that. The same’s true with making fedi great for musicians and the music scene (or more generally creatives)!
Would tomorrow (Tuesday) at 11:30 am Pacific time (1830 UTC) work for people?
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Speaking for myself… Is this alternative program being discussed somewhere public? It’s just to understand the context and who plans to attend so far. I had originally signed up as an unconference participant ready to join groups, not as someone who would run a session. There are great artists and skilled developers in this new community – but I’m not one of them. I just built this forum with a lot of help. 
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I could do that time, but I’d have to go to mobile connection at noon PT to go pick my kids up from school. 12:30pm PT would be a little easier. But I’ll participate either way
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It’s not particulalry being discussed publically yet – in fact this is the most public mention of it so far Basically it started as Timnit and me feeling like maybe it was worth having our sessions go ahead anyhow (she had been thinking of doing one on Genocide prevention on Wednesday and I was planningdoing one on Organizing, Mutual Aid and Activism tomorrow), and I’m talking with a couple of other people who are pulling out of FediForum to see if they’re also interested. Hard to know how many people will attend, but we’ve reached out to a few people we knew were interested and once the logistics are nailed down (probably this evening) we’ll reach out more broadly – although not sure about a public post; we don’t have time to do any kind of registration but just posting a link publicly seems like a recipe for disaster. It’s not a great solution, and I’m up for suggestions how to make it better, but as a last-minute stop-gap it’ll probably work okay. Hopefully.
But in chaos there is opportunity, and since we’re doing that it would be easy enough to add a few more sessions if there’s interest. If it doesn’t make sense to add anything else that’s fine too. There’s a lot of interest in a a better-planned alternative, and I see that as very complementary, but obviously that needs more lead time. My perspective is that well, people have the time blocked off on their schedules, so it’s worth trying something in the short term.
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12:30 PT on Tuesday could work if that’s good for others; that gets very late for Europeans, but I think the value of having you be able to be fully present outweighs that. Really though whatever time works best for people is fine – right now there’s stuff tentatively from 9 -11:30 PT on Tuesday, and 9-10:15 or 10:30 on Wednesday.
In terms of @icaria36’s point about not wanting to run a session, a couple thoughts. A mostly-agendaless session – people introing and demoing their projects, and unstructured discussions about what they’d like to see, and exploring synergies and gaps. And/or, if one or more people were planning on leading sessions at FediForum, that could work too.
Again though if it doesn’t make sense that’s fine too!
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Deep breath
I am trans, I am a musician, I run a Fedi instance. I am not attending Fediforum. Not because one of the organizers is a terf, but because the whole enterprise smells of futurism grifters.
The (remaining) organizer, Johannes, does not prioritize a safe Fedi. His milquetoast announcement that Kaliya is “transitioning away” (did he have to use that word? wow), the fact that his single-user instance doesn’t suspend well-known terf instances (check the replies) means that the revelation that his friend is a cryptoterf is at most an inconvenient irritant. He had one shot at repairing his reputation and he chose to hedge.
It’s been educational watching the replies here. So many of you wanted to give Fediforum the benefit of the doubt. Sorry.
Edit: Johannes has done a lot of learning over the last few hours and has addressed some of my criticisms. Good.
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OK, maybe I’d like play it by ear (heh, pun there) in terms of being the host of a music/arts themed session.
If you’d be willing to share the info to join Tuesday’s activities, that’ll provide an opportunity to see if there are enough people involved who’d want to participate in a session on the topic. Does that seem like a good approach to you?
Thanks so much!
It does seem like a good approach, I just need to get a few more things nailed down before doing that, so it’ll probably be late this afternoon or early this evening.
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I appreciate you!
I’ve attended once. It def felt like many (or even most) of the people who’re really making the Fedi a good place, weren’t there.
I think I’m driven by the desire for there to be some kind of Fediforum. And I was feebly hoping the existing one could be wrestled into something better.
Here’s a question I’d ask if you felt like answering (and totally get it if you don’t feel like it): would you be interested in participating in an alternate real-time forum focused on the needs of music artists in the fedi? Or do we have everything we need in our existing various channels to exchange ideas?
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I’m in UTC+10. Real-time events are a non-starter because any event that includes UTC+1 and UTC-7 (most do) excludes me. There are permutations of this argument.
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Looks like FediForum’s cancelled. So, I hereby withdraw my suggestion for counter-programming.
I’m still going to do a session tomorrow at 9:30 am on Organizing, Mutual Aid, and Activism – if anybody’s interested, feel free to DM me here or at @jdp23@neuromatch.social and I’ll share the lnfo.
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FediForum is cancelled indeed. I’ll request a refund. Curious about what they will do next, and especially curious whether a social-social alternative comes out of this.
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A post was split to a new topic: Interest in organizing a “FediMusicForum”?
Wow, these 90 minutes were very productive! Looking forward to what comes next.
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