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.”"

@thenexusofprivacy Maybe it did! I think causation is really difficult to establish, and there's a reading of all the docs that suggests that they essentially did what they'd already planned on doing at some point, and that doing (any) comms was the main thing that changed, there, and possibly the timeline. I was then and am still leery of assuming that user pressure actually changed anyone's minds.@lrhodes @jdp23 @laurenshof @ramsey

Bluesky and the Battle of Wormtonguehttps://privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky-and-the-battle-of-wormtongue/Contents:To suspend or not to suspend?What's past is prologueFrustration continues to mountAppeasement never worksA golden opportunityWormtongue thrives on attention so I'm not using his name in the text. Thanks to @bitterkarella for permission to use their skeet and most excellent nickname. Thanks also to everybody else who gave me permission to quote them!#bluesky

Poll: how would you want your instance to react in this slightly hypothetical situation?A very loud and malicious anti-trans bigot creates an account on another instance, immediately posted an article he's just published in a mainstream publication -- an article that trans people describe as anti-trans but anti-trans bigots and their allies see as useful reporting.Meanwhile on Xitter he announced his intention to "gentrify" fedi and encouraged his anti-trans followers to "colonize" fedi. How should your instance react? You can check more than one. The reply has a bit more detail on the choices (and If you can't see the choices in your mobile app, check the reply)#bluesky #fediverse #trans #lgbtq

@thenexusofprivacy Just to add, this is not a "you do you" situation.The danger from #Meta is they allow hatred to spread, and that puts people in danger who don't even use Meta's networks. The hatred radicalises people who then do nasty stuff in real life against innocent victims. Radicalised people don't block Meta, they keep being fed more hate.This cycle leads to real life violence of the worst kind:https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2022-02-20/facebook-accused-of-letting-activists-incite-ethnic-massacres-with-hate-and-misinformation-by-survivors-in-ethiopiaThis is not an isolated case.Please defederate #Threads

Oh blush. It's a great organization, I'm glad to help! And, great to hear abouttoday's fundraising.@jaz @iftas

It sounds like the only two things that we we agree on in this discussion is that Bluesky's whole-network Relay is currently to the ATmosphere what Google's search engine is to the modern web, and that people can use "proprietary" however they want and some meanings are more effective than others.The actually-existing fediverse is not good at being a large flat network -- missing replies, the challenges of global search (especially on small instances), etc. So if the belief that AT's better for a large flat network seems obviously wrong to you, you're either ignoring these issues, or optimistically assuming there's a solution.Conversely, parts of the actually-existing fediverse are actually quite good at scoped-visibility (as opposed to all-pulblic) networked communities (as opposed to a flat Twitter-like network). Unfortnantely that's not the model Eugen likes, so Mastodon doesn't support it particularly well. So if you think it's obviously wrong that AP is currently better than AT for this, you're probably confusing Mastodon with the broader fediverse. Of course, people are working on scoped-visibility networked communities in the AT ecosystem as well, so AP's lead might be tenuous, but it's still experimental over there. Time will tell!@strypey

@rysiek There is a massive difference but the difference isn’t negligible as you keep trying to insist. 30% of the MAU are on Mastodon nonprofits servers. Probably higher if you discount the servers widely blocked. There’s users whom the vast majority of their followers are on .social

Here's The Website League's Devember update ... lots of progress! It also includes instructions for how to join the Website League. https://buttondown.com/websiteleague/archive/website-league-update-for-december/

Meanwhile, on Bluesky ... "Enhance Your Security Intelligence with DigitalStakeout's New Bluesky Firehose Integration"https://www.digitalstakeout.com/post/enhance-your-security-intelligence-with-digitalstakeout-s-new-bluesky-firehose-integrationIt really is an architecture optimized for surveillance capitalism. Of course, so are other all-public social networks, And they have repeatedly emphasize that everything you do on Bluesky is public, so as long as you approach it as a panoptic environment there can still be a lot of value there.Still, it really highlights how fedi's scoped visibility is an important alternative. And while most Mastodon instances today don't do much to make data harvesting harder, other software like GoToSocial and Bonfire is designed with privacy more in mind.#bluesky #fediverse

Here's a great thread with context on the non-consensual scraping of Bluesky from @cfiesler -- lots of valuable links and instights.https://skywriter.blue/pages/cfiesler.bsky.social/post/3lbwurkbfcs2w is the single-page summary, and https://bsky.app/profile/cfiesler.bsky.social/post/3lbwurkbfcs2w is the Bluesky threadAnd here's a thread from @huggingface's principal ethicist, includngOpen source and open science mean people explore, test, and correct mistakes if there were any, taking responsibility for them in a very transparent way. We don't need the ethicist there to say what's right and what's wrong.Hugging Face is meant to be a platform for people to regain the power they have been losing from big tech companies, and be in control of their data. So we're on your side, and rest assured this won't be happening again in the future.How reassuring! And of course a few hours later it happened again. The second dataset (two million posts this time) wasn't uploaded by a Hugging Face employee,. Instead it was somebody who I've seen described as a "fascist" and is apparently on blocklists for rightwing trolls who uploaded it to Hugging Face. But hey, "open", right?#bluesky

Here;s Digital Defense Fund’s Abortion Privacy Guide, created with the input of abortion workers, legal experts, digisec experts, and patients. DDF's materials are always extremely high quality and this is no exception!There's also a Canva version available with QR codes to download signal and instructions on how to erase your digital history.#abortion #privacy

@thenexusofprivacy @mav I think the onboarding issue here is discoverability of the directories themselves. If you've been here for a while, you know where the directories are, but newcomers will benefit from something that gets presented to them by the software itself and that they won't have to go looking for - especially if they're not tech nerds or academics.

@[email protected] @[email protected] it sounds a lot like the Vouch system I've read about before... which iirc is an indie web thing.