Yeah. But he's not going to get what he wants here, so has to decide between burning it down and taking another strategy.

@seindal @javi

@fromjason Well, the First Amendment only applies to government attempts to regulate speech; I think there's general agreement (and not just with techno-libertarians) that corporations can regulate speech on their platforms as long as it doesn't discriminate against a protected class.

Where it gets messy is that some techno-libertarians think that corporations should be free to discriminate; others want to add "conservatives" as protected class (a great example of how it's only nuanced when it's their self interests). And some techno-libertarians think that people shouldn't be able to block them, funny how that works.

In the TikTok case, another complication is that some people genuinely do see it as a national security issue (while others are just using that as an excuse for xenophobiaa and/or trying to get rid of a platform that Black and brown are using effectively for activism and/or creating an opportunity for fascists to control another social network). I haven't been following the stuff in Romania enough to know whether China intentionally tried to manipulate the election or just let the disinfo happen, but either way it's not good. Of course this too is a double standard, Facebook and Xitter manipulate elections just as blatantly, but for people and orgs who see it that way it's harder to mount a full-fledged defense of TikTok.

@javi wow. Really great point about this signalling where Enterprise Wordpress is. Looks like Matt's got a lot to think about on his holiday break.

@fromjason it's complicated. The libertarian wing of free speech supporters is also very pro-market and many of the orgs are funded by big tech. There's also a wing who are opposed to big tech but work together when interests align, which potentially leaves them open to being coopted. There's a similar dynamic on FISA and age verification software. It's tricky!

@bigolifacks thanks for the tag! I certainly agree that people who have the time and energy for multiple social network accounts should diversify their presence ... many don't, and so it depends on (a) what they're looking for and (b) how much time and energy they want to put in to looking. A lot of people are looking for a Twitter alternative; Bluesky's easy to sign up for, and it's also the best Twitter alterantive out there for most people. Fedi by contrast is much better for most people at networked communities (Blacksky's currently the only example I know of in English-language Bluesky) but (a) that's not what most people are looking for and (b) it takes noticeably more work to find a good community that's a match.

.social's just as easy to sign up for as Bluesky, but it's not a good experience for most people as a Twitter alternative -- and it's also not a good experience for most people as a networked community. mastodon.scot and glasgow.social are on joinmastodon.org, so still fairly easy to find (at least when joinmastodon is working, which it isn't today ... but there are less than 50 regional servers there so that's not going to help most people. The lists of Interest-foused instances on joinmastodon are similarly sparse. And what if somebody's concerned about how well-moderated an instance is? A lot of the information people need is out there but it's very hard to find ... here's my work-in-porgress attempt at a reference, but how many people want to read a 4000-word document before signing up?

Resources for choosing the right fediverse instance (REVISED DRAFT)

A daunting choice -- but not irrevocable!

The Nexus Of Privacy (privacy.thenexus.today)

Obviously this are all problems that can be overcome, and I think we're on the verge of making progress with the problem of helping people find the right instances -- @kissane's been doing a lot of thinking about this and has an interesting project in progress. Until that happens though I think it's better to set people's expectations ... right now, if people don't have the time and energy to put into getting started on the fediverse, I'm not sure what's gained by just setting up a Mastodon account.

@gedeonm years ago i prototyped social network software i called TapestryMaker so I keep an eye out for anything social network-related with Tapestry in its name!

@gedeonm i know, i've been following your progress, i was just kidding

@mho you're a trendsetter!

@Sarahp Tapestry, a new app for tracking social media, wishes they had gotten their announcement out earlier this week before Surf did!

@mike intriguing!

@MisuseCase thanks!

@MisuseCase interesting ... are you still seeing them?

also @OutOnTheMoors did you see this by Conspirador Norteño? https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/a-title-similar-to-the-curious-content

And here's @Sarahp's article in TechCrunch on A New Social.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/17/bridgy-fed-a-project-to-connect-the-open-social-web-is-now-becoming-a-nonprofit/

"The nonprofit will also work with existing leaders in the space, like Bluesky, Flipboard, Meta (which is integrating with ActivityPub via its app Threads), and Mastodon to help identify these projects and their developers.

“Before we even started this, we [made] sure that the platforms are on board, because if they’re not on board, then our existence doesn’t even matter,” Ahooja points out. “I think that’s one of the reasons an organization was important, so we’d have a process around all of these different platforms: getting them in the same room and having these conversations.”"

@stefko Sounds like a great project! It's probably too late to add it now, but it would be interesting to know how the results break down in terms of people's gender, race, and tech experience.

I've got some discussion of barriers newcomers in the 2022/2023 wave faced in A faux "Eternal September" turns into flatness, as well as links out to @kissane's outstanding work on this front.

And, for deeper background Mastodon: a partial history has a lot of discussion and links from the early days. So many of the issues that are current barriers were already identified back in 2017!

@quillmatiq I'm looking forward to seeing how things evolve!

It's an interesting question as to how far to take supporting the culture and needs of each instance. Suppose some instance admins have a culture that includes exposing trans people to harassment, and need specific functionality from Bridgy Fed to make it harder for trans people to protect themselves ... how would you react?

Just announced: "A New Social", a new non-profit focused on building cross-protocol services and tools for the open social web, is now leading development of Bridgy Fed.

https://www.anew.social/hello-social-web/

Exciting stuff! Bridging is an important approach that hasn't gotten enough attention, and this work really complements the other multi-polar efforts. Original Bridgy Fed developer @snarfed.org is CTO, and @quillmatiq is the CEO and Executive DIrector.

The press release has supportive comments from @mike, Emily Liu of Bluesky, the Threads team at Meta, @andypiper of Mastodon, Evan Prodromou of @swf, and @jaz of @iftas.

Bridgy Fed has set an important precdent here by prioritizing consent with their opt-in model, and it's really paid off. In fact the threats from Bluesky's current tolerance of anti-trans harassers and the multiple datasets of scraped Bluesky data are exactly the scenarios that advocates of an opt-in approach warned about -- an opt-out approach would have left people on fedi exposed by default. So let's hope that this focus on consent doesn't get lost as things more forward!

@fediversenews

#BridgyFed #bluesky #fediverse

If they are bridged you can block them

Sure I can block them after they've harassed me. Subscribing to a blocklist lets be block them before the harassment.

if they are not bridged, it's like they are reading/subscribing your "public rss feed".
No, unlike an RSS feed they can reply in the app -- so that it's easy for others to see it.

(RSS feeds are a potential harassment vector too, and we should be able to turn them off -- in fact they should be off by default, as they are in Hometown and GoToSocial -- but that's another story)

If they reply, or say bad things about you, this is not gonna reach you.

Whether or not peplies reach me, they reach everybody who's following me on Bluesky and looks at the post. That's still a harassment vector!

@luca @deadsuperhero

I'm disabling Bridgy Fed on this account.(at least for now) -- if you're at risk of harassment, consider doing the same

Harassment has increased significantly on Bluesky over the last week (which tends to be what happens when a site's moderators find an excuse not to take actionn against a coordinated anti-trans harassment campaign, but that's another story). Bluesky blocklists provide some protection, but unfortunately there's no way for fedi accounts to subscribe to Bluesky blocklists or labelers. So there's basially no protection for bridged accounts.

I haven't yet hard any reports of harassment getting directed at bridged accounts ... but then again if somebody on Bluesky who hasn't opted in to Bridgy fed is spewing hate speech in bridged posts replies, we wouldn't necessarily know about it. So, better safe than sorry. If you're currently bridging to Bluesky consider doing the same!

Here's the bug I just filed in the Bridgy Fed Github. https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/1632

Bridgy Fed's development is very resource constrained right now; as far as I know it's still just @snarfed.org working on it part-time, and they've had their hands full just keeping up with the increased load. So, not sure how quickly they''ll be able to respond.

#BridgyFed #bluesky #trans

Time will tell. A pressure campaign on Bluesky did work last year (I talk about it the "What's past is prologue" section of Bluesky and the Battle of Wormtongue but it's a different situation now. At the end of the day they are who they are but they are also looking to build a sustainable business so we shall see.

Also, when I think about whether it's worth putting time into an activism campaign, there's more to it than the chance of whether it accomplishes its immediate top-level goal. Pressuring Bluesky is deepening intersectional aliiances (lots of folks are highlighting the parallels between how Bluesky has treated Black, trans, and Palestinian users), increasing the cost to Bluesky if they wind up not taking action, and highlighting the need for (and hopefully leading to more people working on) alternatives.

@kissane @lrhodes @jdp23 @laurenshof @ramsey

Here's a pretty broad hint that the "LoTT" account Bluesky banned was in fact impersonation -- from their thread about why they haven't taken action on a certain other anti-trans hate account (which is real, not impersonation)

"We recently introduced a new system to detect impersonation. This tool automatically flagged some accounts that were taken down, then reinstated. Other prominent impersonation accounts were quickly removed, contributing to a false perception that we take action based on behavior outside of Bluesky."

https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app/post/3ld7e2hs7622r

@lrhodes @jdp23 @kissane @laurenshof @ramsey