@Anibyl the worst about it: developed countries take advantage of well-educated specialists in their respective fields from lesser developed countries > it’s lesser developed countries which would pay for the education, not rich countries like germany

#tootsea #germany #exploitation #workforceshortage

from the article:

Suhardi was a fisherman for more than 20 years. He first started fishing working on his parents’ boat, but was then asked to join the crew of a shark boat where he was told he could earn a lot of money. Back on deck, he looks embarrassed to divulge what a meager wage it was, but finally confesses he earned around $50 for up to a month at sea.

Now he and 12 other former shark fishermen are part of The Dorsal Effect, an ecotourism company that helps ex-shark hunters find a new vocation. Each week, the team takes groups of tourists, schoolchildren and university students to off-the-grid locations and guides them around pristine reefs. Each trip is designed to take guests on an exploratory journey of both the shark trade and marine conservation through the eyes of the Sasak people of Lombok.

The Dorsal Effect first launched in 2013, a year after Suhardi met Singaporean ecologist Kathy Xu, who had traveled to Lombok to find out more about the shark trade. The diminutive but quietly determined Xu wanted to protect sharks, but because she knew shark fishing was poorly paid and dangerous, she wanted to hear the fishermen’s stories too. They told her how once they could fish for sharks close to shore, but now with the shark population dropping, the fishermen said they needed to travel farther out to sea, only to come home with a relatively poor catch. The reduced catch also meant reduced pay, so they often couldn’t cover their costs.

“Shark fishing is like gambling,” says snorkeling guide Agus Harianto. “Sometimes big catch, sometimes zero catch. The fishermen are always speculating.”

Shark hunters face other risks as well, he says: Traditional boats without GPS can fall foul of international boundaries. “They use the stars to navigate. The first time they know they have left Indonesia is when they see Jetstar flying overhead,” Agus says, referring to the Australian budget airline. “Then, it’s not long before the Australian marine police take them to shore and jail.”

While they were receiving tourists from across the globe, there was another group that Xu wanted to reach out to. “I think it was the teacher in me who felt impassioned about influencing the young,” she says. She reached out to schools and created a five-day program that would help students understand the shark trade and local conservation efforts. During the program, paid for by the school and students, participants would not only meet the ex-shark fishermen so they could ask them about their lives, but also hear from NGOs such as the Wildlife Conservation Society about their efforts to slow the trade. The Dorsal Effect also hired marine biologists to host nightly lectures and help the students with their field surveys.

While The Dorsal Effect has been successful, it has still faced its challenges. When the volcano Mount Rinjani on Lombok erupted, flights to the island were cancelled and their bookings disappeared. The COVID-19 pandemic also hit hard, but the company still managed to pay the wages of the former shark fishermen. Xu worked hard to keep their profile high by giving talks for WWF and TEDx.

Suhardi says he’s pleased he made the change to a new career. “I prefer to take people snorkeling rather than go fishing because fishing is exhausting, and the income is uncertain. I can earn money much faster offering snorkeling trips.”

His son taught himself to fish after watching his father, but Suhardi says this is just for dinner. Suhardi says his son has other career plans. The former shark fisherman reveals with pride that his son wants to be a policeman.

#tootSEA #indonesia #lombok #ecotourism

@bogdugg

The solution, however, is not to reduce the number of instances, but rather to provide more tools for instances to group communities together.

kbin collections are grouping together communities, but unfortunately, collections themselves do not federate
@gicagaf805

@YugiohMaster88
not at all tbh

when firefish was still calckey, it was a thing > but for a variety of reasons, the project came to a standstill, and two other misskey forks took the lead: iceshrimp and sharkey > as strange as it seems, firefish has already become some kind of legacy ware

moreover, the *keys have federation issues, especially when it comes to lemmy, but kbin is also heavily affected
@hellfire103

@Masimatutu
i agree, and i also recommend friendica!

@YugiohMaster88

@indigojasper
wholeheartedly agree!

@Slow

The instance has clearly communicated that it primarily serves as a test instance, i.e. it does not strive for or want to guarantee stability.

that’s just not true > when c.s switched over to dev branch in april 2023, this was not motivated by wanting to become a “test instance” > rather, this was a desperate move to keep the instance afloat which by then had been become quite wonky > afterwards, things got even worse, so the transpicuous idea to rebrand the whole project

noting, absolutely nothing about f.s is about being a test instance > see also atomicpoet’s post about movin away from f.s - f.s was supposed to be a flagship instance, but only evolved into a shipwreck

the biggest disadvantage of firefish: its community which has become like a sect - but that had been going on for a very long time already …

even weirder if it’s a Mastodon fork such as Glitch-soc, Hometown, Fedibird,… since they use older Mastodon versions as base

i myself have been active on calckey/firefish, hajkey and iceshrimp instances, and never had a problem interacting with people on mastodon forks > there had been some backfilling issues, but they got solved > but federation problems do exist: so far, it is not possible for *key users to interact with lemmy instances; also link posts from kbin do not show up on *key timelines

since you are on a lemmy instance: be aware that people on the *keys cannot interact with lemmy instances

firefish is rebranded calckey, a misskey fork > project has been in trouble since, hmmm, may 2023 > the *keys offer a very different interface, emoji reactions and lots of other features which mastodon does not have > *keys ui is pretty nice compared to mastodon - in the end, this is a matter of taste > but other than that, particularly firefish and its forks do not scale well: there is a reason why former firefish.social admin atomicpoet chose to migrate to another instance, though atomicpoet’s post tries to hide the reasons for moving > note: firefish.social is a special case - this instance is a lost cause with outages beyond comparison > instead of building up a community at firefish.social, the admins effectively destroyed the community by introducing new experimental features instead of focusing on stability