Kevin Talks Tech Episode 6 – Chris Alemany
Kevin Talks Tech is back from a long hiatus! Going forward, new episodes will be released monthly!
In this episode, I talk with Chris Alemany. We "met" on the social media website called Mastodon, an alternative to Twitter. We became fast friends, and I found him and what he spends his time doing instantly fascinating, so I had to talk to him! I think you'll really enjoy our conversation!
Chris is a University Instructor and Computer Technician at Vancouver Island University (VIU) in Nanaimo, a city on Vancouver Island! Lucky him! He was born and raised in the city Port Alberni, about an hour west of Nanaimo. He found work elsewhere to start, but moved back to Nanaimo many years ago and is now raising his family in Port Alberni!
We covered a lot of ground in this conversation, including his time as a City Councilor in Port Alberni, which he did along with his full-time job at VIU! Busy guy!
He has a number of hobbies and loves to tinker with tech! He hosts his own Mastodon instance (server)! In fact, he's spearheading a federal petition to get more Politicians to use decentralized Social Media like Mastodon and not be so beholden to the whims and control of corporate giants!
The Fediverse is a term coined to describe a "federated universe", including Mastodon, and many others, that are built upon an open standard called ActivityPub. Here's how Wikipedia details it.
That petition now sits at over 700 signatures! 500 are needed to be considered in the House of Commons! Please consider signing it here! I talk about that more in this blog post!
"I do hope the petition inspires more Parliamentarians to make the leap, but I also hope it inspires a larger discussion about Parliament as an independent entity creating its own, verified, trusted, social media space that is not controlled by outside forces.
Like email, like the Our Commons website, and all the other services they provide, Canadians should be able to always know that their parliamentarians are using reputable, secure, and law-abiding services under no one's control but Parliament itself."
More than anything, he hopes to inspire conversation and discussion.
Here's a Summary of our chat:
- The Canadian Mastodon Universe is really great. We are huge advocate for Mastodon, actually. We should temper expectations because House of Commons petitions can create conversations, but they don't often create the change that they're hoping for. The greatest potential for this petition is to start conversations.
- The only truly trusted Social Media for Parliamentarians should end with Parl.gc.ca address. We should never have allowed ourselves to become so beholden to commercial platforms for basic communication. Decentralized social media opens up access to all of the people that are on that decentralized network.
- Government agencies should not be beholden to corporate giants like Facebook or Twitter and only accessible to people who are on those platforms. Politicians have a clear mandate to get information out to the Canadian public. If those websites aren't public, then that's not their mandate and they shouldn't be on those services.
- When Chris was a City Councilor in Port Albany, they had a tsunami warning. The best place you could find information from the city was on Facebook, on the Facebook page. Today, things have become so much more restricted, and that includes not having any news articles on Facebook anymore.
- Please check out Chris's federal petition to encourage politicians to use more open platforms like Mastodon for what they share on social media.
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