thenexusofprivacy

joined 1 year ago
 

There's a lot of detail here. If you'd rather not deal with the complexity up front, and just want to get started as quickly as possible, there's a table of contents up front -- feel free to skip ahead!

And as always, feedback is welcome!

[–] thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Great points ... and yes that is a key question!

 

Excellent article by Afsaneh Rigot, author of the Design from the Margins methodology.

 

Livestreamed as well as in-person, and co-hosted by the Georgetown Center for Privacy and Technology and @DAIR@dair-community.social

"Our theme, “Surveillance / Resistance,” is broader and more ambiguous than the themes for previous years, and this is purposeful. What does resistance mean when surveillance isn’t just something that occurs in the environments where we live and work and play and think and create and struggle, but is actually the material with which so many of those environments are built? In a context of broad institutional corrosion and capture, in the face of proliferating global catastrophe, this is a question that remains open and difficult."

The previous workshops I've been to have been outstanding, and this one looks like it'll be great too!

Yes there several english-speaking instances running Misskey or a fork. Here's the list for Sharkey - https://fedidb.org/software/sharkey

Misskey's a vibrant colorful very interactive experience

Bluesky's a very good Twitter alternative, at least for now, although it's owned by a VC-funded startup so we'll see how long that lasts

Mastodon (and even moreso forks like Glitch and Hometown) are good if you want a small-to-medium size community along with the ability to be part of broader conversations. It can be a decent Twitter alternative for some people (especially white techies) but Bluesky's a lot more usable, easy to get started on, and diverse.

 

Well-crafted disinfo takes advantage of our emotions by getting us to amplify false and misleading messages. A specific example of post-election racialized disinfo that I'm seeing a lot of is weaponizing exit poll data to target Latinos, Black men, trans people, and other marginalized demographics.

Thanks for the clarifications!

Yeah, it's somewhat useful but certainly not a great solution. It's great that they went the opt-in route, but there aren't any good existing frameworks for how to do it, so they had to roll their own. There's certainly room for improvement, it would be great if either Bluesky or the Social Web Foundation (or both) or somebody else invested in it, but hard to know if and when thta'll happen.

[–] thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

There isn't direct federation between Mastodon and Bluesky; instead, Bridgy Fed connects them - https://fed.brid.gy/docs#fediverse-get-started

As Strypey acknowledges, there's a lot he didn't know about at the time and left out. Before Mastodon: GNU Social and other early fediverses includes a lot of that.

For what it's worth, the guy who mostly maintains the Wikipedia page agrees with you. And yet even so, at least for now, the Wikipedia page states "The majority of fediverse platforms ... create connections between servers using the ActivityPub protocol" -- which pretty clearly implies that not all fediverse platforms use the ActivityPub protocol.

Anyhow whether or not you agree to disagree ... we disagree. Time will tell how broad usage of the term evolves. In the original article I pointed to examples of TechCrunch and Mike Masnick using the term in the broader sense, but maybe those will turn out to be points off the curve. We shall see!

Yep. And also, like I said in https://privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky-atmosphere-fediverse/

For one thing, most of the people who came to Mastodon in late 2022 didn't have good experiences ... so didn't stay in the Fediverse.6 Flash forward to 2024, and Mastodon still hasn't addressed the reasons why.

Bluesky, by contrast, has put a lot of work into onboarding and usability – as well as giving people better tools protect themselves and others, and find and build communities ... So today, BTS ARMY and millions of Brazilians, and everybody else looking for a Twitter alternative are more likely to have a good experience on Bluesky than Mastodon.

Great point. And Jay won the power struggle with Jack, which almost nobody gives her credit for.

Yeah, it's a great name.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/17792698. I had posted here last week asking for suggestions, and incorporated some of them -- for example, the last section mentions the proof-of-concept Faircamp integration into Hubzilla.

Including:

  • DAIR-tube, the PeerTube page of Dr. Timnit Gebru's Distributed AI ResearchCenter
  • The Website League, an island network that's taking a very different approach
  • GoToSocial v 0.17, continuing their focus on safety and privacy with interaction controls.
  • Piefed and the Threadiverse
  • Bonfire's new Mosaic service along with their work on Open Science Network and prosocial design
  • Letterbook
  • Bluesky and the ATmosphere's continued momentum

The post has more info on all of these and more ... there really is a lot going on.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/17686207

It's a very long post, but a lot of it is a detailed discussion of terminology in the appendix -- no need to read that unless you're into definitional struggles.

 

I don't like the clickbait title at all -- Mastodon's clearly going to survive, at least for the forseeable future, and it wouldn't surprise me if it outlives Xitter.

Still, Mastodon is struggling; most of the people who checkd it out in the November 2022 surge (or the smaller June 2023 surge) didn't stick around, and numbers have been steadily declining for the last year. The author makes some good points, and some of the comments are excellent.

 

The Social Web Foundation (SWF) is a new non-profit with a mission of "a growing, healthy, financially viable and multi-polar Fediverse”. In TechCrunch, Sarah Perez reported that SWF has "some backing" from Meta as well as Flipboard, Ghost, Mastodon, and others as well as a "large grant" from the Ford Foundation. "In total, SWF is closing in on $1 million in financial support."

One of the hot buttons in the discussion is SWF's relationship with Meta. So I set up a series of polls on Mastodon. Here are the options for this one -- I'm not sure how to do polls on Lemmy, so please leave your thoughts in the comments

  • SWF shouldn't engage with Meta at all
  • SWF should work with Meta occasionally, when it's necessary
  • SWF should work with Meta together often, but no formal relationship
  • SWF should have Meta as a partner, advisor, or some other formal relatoinship, but no funding
  • SWF should take funding from Meta, but no formal relationship
  • SWF should take funding from Meta and a formal relatiionship
 

In 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!) and its cross-posts, quite a few people said things like "maybe racism is a problem on Mastodon, but I don't see it on Lemmy." Then again, plenty of comments in the various threads were in fact examples of racism on Lemmy, so one takeaway is that at lot of people don't see racism even when they're looking at it. And helpful commenters pointed out some of the other patterns of racism on Lemmy. ... but that wasn't really the thrust of that discussion.

So I wanted to ask more generally, what are some of the examples you've seen of racism on Lemmy? Quotes and links are great, but also feel free just to describe examples or call out more general patterns!

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