Digital Foundry provided another look at FSR 4 and generally agree with HUB’s conclusions: YouTube

The mbin equivalent (which is relevant to the OP) is More -> Open original URL or Copy original URL

Unfortunately seems to not work for mbin (which fedia.io runs)

I didn’t see any examples of inspection failures for Fair Trade.

From the article (with emphasis added)

On one estate, listed as a supplier for Lipton and Twinings, we met estate worker Darshini.

The estate had Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade certification. While Lipton only sources tea from Rainforest Alliance-certified estates, Twinings has its own set of ethical standards.

Darshini has been a tea plucker for nearly three decades, since she was a teenager, and knows the meaning of a hard day’s work. A map showing Sri Lanka’s tea growing regions.

She was one of dozens of women plucking tea in a remote field on the day the ABC visited.

The work is arduous. To receive the minimum wage she needs to pluck 18kg of tea before the daily weigh-in to meet her quota.

“I have only plucked 6kg so far. I have to pick another 12 kilos,” she said. “If it’s 15 kilos or less I’ll get half pay.”

When the workers finish plucking for the day they must march several kilometres to the weigh-in, with heavy sacks of tea leaves on their backs.

Tea plucker Darshini has to pick 18kg of tea a day or risk being paid less than the minimum wage.

Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade certification is intended to ease some of the harsh conditions inherent in this kind of work.

For workers on this estate, it should guarantee they “always have access to safe and sufficient drinking water” and “sufficient, clean and functioning toilets” either in the fields or close by.

But the workers here told the ABC the plantation had provided neither.

“We do not have these facilities while we are in the field,” said tea plucker Maheswarie. “There is no toilet in the field.”

They also said that they regularly lost access to drinking water in their houses on the estate.

Breaches of Rainforest Alliance standards should be uncovered through routine audits, but according to Maheswarie, the auditors come but managers “don’t allow us to talk to them”.

“Maybe the auditors don’t get to talk to us because we might tell them the truth,” she said.

Haha, it happens!

Reading submission titles is woke

I can’t believe Daniel Andrews did this to us

It sounds like The Shovel is participating in anti-semantic attacks and should be reported to the appropriate authorities (Weird Al, maybe?).

But (it sounds like) you’re talking about voluntary grouping, where if you dump 100 people together at a party or networking event or whatever, theoretical-person Amy will vibe best with certain types of people, and so ends up chatting up Cleo, Ming, and Kiara because they share similar interests / humor / whatever – but there’s nothing actually stopping someone from outside of that from walking up and chatting with the newly-formed group. That’s kind of what (I thought) we had now in the fediverse, where for example I can go talk about Australian news on aussie.zone, jump to lemmy.world to talk about fediverse stuff, swing by redd.that to look at Unraid updates (all communities I’m part of), but then browse the incoming feed of everything coming into my instance and view a whole lot of communities which I’m not part of, most of which I never will be. It’s (nearly) all open-by-default. Yes, there’s some blocking / defederation etc, but the default state is that users on one instance can (whether or not they actually choose to) talk to other instances.

If a new user randomly picks any instance from the top 50 (of any fediverse software, excluding maybe Pixelfed since that’s probably the least interoperable with the others) to join up on, chances are very good (but will vary based on personal interest) they’ll be able to participate in like >=90% of the conversations that they want to in the sense that their instance is federating with all the people and communities they’re interested in.

What I’m thinking-out-loud-ing (“arguing” sounds a bit more assertive than what I’m aiming for) is that this might not be how ActivityPub would optimally be used; maybe just because ActivityPub could allow 90% of users to talk to 90% of users, it doesn’t mean that’s actually the best way to use it. Maybe it serves the user’s interests better if there are clusters of “sub-fediverses” instead.

As a grounded example: Beehaw partially self-isolates from the wider fediverse (it’s not just that users could communicate but don’t; the connection is severed) in an effort to better maintain its vibe and values. I had always viewed that as the exception to the norm, but maybe having (e.g.,) clusters of instances that only communicate with a comparatively smaller amount of other instances, say the other instances in its “cluster” plus a few other clusters only (as opposed to most instances communicating with most other instances) is a different – and potentially healthier – way to architect things. So I guess partial, selective federation rather than (what felt to me like) the current goal of “if it uses ActivityPub, we want to communicate with it*”. * with obvious exclusions for spam etc.

but the fediverse is equally suited to federated islands as to one fediverse, right? Most people will want the full fediverse but people can also create their separate spaces if desired.

I guess, yeah, but it has tradeoffs. Each island loses even more diversity of perspective (e.g., political echo-chamber, or building fedi tools that might work well for their island but make no sense for other islands), and making it harder to use as replacements for Xitter / reddit etc.

Like, a lot of discussion happens on topics like “how can we make Mastodon better for former Xitter users?” or the same thing but for lemmy and reddit. Maybe they’re fundamentally not the right questions to ask if the endgame state of federated social media is that it isn’t a direct replacement of centralized services.

Although it wasn’t really specifically the point of the post, reading it’s made me think that maybe the whole idea of “universally” federated social media (even excluding the spam etc) is fundamentally untenable regardless of the technical protocol, and that treating it as the end-goal might not be the play.