The Nexus of Privacy

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.

Here's the list:

• Commit to spending at least X% on safety
• Support diverse participation on the W3C standards group's Trust and Safety task force
• Focus on consent-based tools and infrastructure
• Work with people who are targets of harassment to develop tools for collaborative defense
• Support threat modeling work
• Develop automated tools to help moderators
• Do any AI-related work in partnership with AI researchers who take an anti-oppressive, ethics-and-safety-first approach
• Partner with IFTAS

An updated version, with a bit more about how Bluesky has addressed some of the problems that the 2022 Twitter influx to Mastodon ran into.

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.

Feedback welcome! There's a list of specific questions at the end of the post, but other topics are welcome as well!

Part 4 of I for one welcome Bluesky, the ATmosphere, BTS Army, and millions of Brazilians to the fediverses!, but like other posts in the series it hopefully stands on its own)

Part 3 of I for one welcome Bluesky, the ATmosphere, BTS Army, and millions of Brazilians to the fediverses!, but like other posts in the series it hopefully stands on its own

Contents:

• Intro
• Let's talk about Meta
• Meanwhile, back in reality ...
• SWF could potentially be a useful counterweight to Meta (although I'm not holding my breath)
• There are many different ways to engage
• SWF and the schism within the fediverses
• To be continued!

The Social Web Foundation 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."

Here's a series of Mastodon polls about SWF. I'm not sure how to do polls on Lemmy, but if you have thoughts, please share in the comments!

• Should SWF be transparent about their funding?
• How should SWF engage with Meta?
• Should SWF take funding from Meta?

Here's the list:

1. Listen more to more Black people – and amplify their voices
2. Think before you post
3. Call in, call out, and/or report anti-Blackness when you see it
4. Support Black people and Black-led instances and projects
5. Approach it intersectionally

The full article goes into detail, and also has links to anti-racism resources and appendices with a list of common mistakes to avoid and blocklist resources for moderators.

Thanks to everybody who gave feedback on earlier drafts!

(Update, 8/19: I changed the wording on #2 to match changes in the underlying article)

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!

Feedback welcome! Here's the TL;DR list

1. Listen more to more Black people
2. Post less – and think before you post
3. Call in, call out, and/or report anti-Blackness when you see it
4. Support Black people and Black-led instances and projects

Other suggestions?

This is a work in progress, so feedback very welcome! And, if please check out the Mastodon poll about interest in a fork

Contents:

• Intro
• There's a lot of low-hanging fruit
• Safety is an especially good area to focus on
• It's not as easy as it sounds ...
• But it's not like it defies the laws of physics!
• What about funding?
• Make sure there are funded leadership and project roles for Black, Indigenous, Muslim, trans, queer, and disabled people as well as others who have been marginalized in Mastodon's development history
• Let a thousand forks bloom!
• Clever conclusion! tbd

As the tbd in that last bullet implies, the conclusion isn't written yet. Like I said it really is a work in progress!

If you're a developer working on a fediverse app or service and want to get it right – or just don't want to be the center of the next firestorm – here are a few suggestions.

Big news in DC: a new bipartisan, bicameral proposal for a "compromise" federal privacy bill, the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA). At this point, take it all with a grain of salt; in 2022, the initial draft of the bill was promising, but it got weakened substantially by the subcommittee and then weakened further by the committee. I haven't read the discussion draft yet so don't have any strong opinions on it.

Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ! If you're one of the fediverse influencers who sees Threads arrival it as "historic" and "a glimpse of the future" ... well, you might want to skip this post.

But if you're one of the many many people on the fediverse who doesn't want to deal with Threads, read on!

The good news is that there are some straightforward opportunities for significant short-term safety improvements. If fediverse funders, developers, businesses, and "influencers" start prioritizing investing in safety, the fediverse can turn what's currently a big weakness into a huge strategic advantage.

Contents:

• It's about people, not just the software and the protocol

• It's also about the software

• And it's about the protocol, too

• Threat modeling and privacy by design can play a big role here

• Design from the margins – and fund it!

If you're in the US, https://stopkosa.com and EFF's page make it easy to contact your Senators and ask them to oppose #KOSA.

There are some straightforward opportunities for short-term safety improvements, but this is only the start of what's needed to change the dynamic more completely.

This is a draft, so feedback welcome!

Transitive defederation -- defederating from instances that federate with Threads as well as defederating from Threads -- isn't likely to be an all-or-nothing thing in the free fediverses. Tradeoffs are different for different people and instances. This is one of the strengths of the fediverse, so however much transitive defederation there winds up being, I see it as overall as a positive thing -- although also messy and complicated.

The recommendation here is for instances to consider #TransitiveDefederation: discuss, and decide what to do. I've also got some thoughts on how to have the discussion -- and the strategic aspects.

(Part 7 of Strategies for the free fediverses )

Many of the Meta advocates I've talked to share the free fediverses' long-term goal of building a sustainable alternative to surveillance capitalism -- and the same is true for people on Bluesky. So there are likely to be situations where some of the people and instances in Meta's fediverses and Bluesky wind up as situational allies to the free fediverses.

A few areas where collaboration could be very useful:

• A key principle of organizing is meeting people where they are.

• Moderation on decentralized networks is a shared challenge.

• Bringing concepts similar to Bluesky's custom feeds to the fediverses, and more generally focusing on human-focused and liberatory (as opposed to oppressive) uses of algorithms in decentralized social networks designed from the margins.

• Meta's fediverses, Bluesky, and the free fediverses are all vulnerable to disinformation.

(Part 6 of Strategies for the free fediverses )

There's likely to be a lot of moving between instances as people and instances sort themselves out into the free fediverses and Meta's fediverses -- and today, moving accounts on the fediverse today. There are lots of straightforward ways to improve it, many of which don't even require improvements to the software. And there are also opportunities to make creating, customizing, and connecting instances easier.

(Part 5 of Strategies for the Free Fediverses )