The Nexus of Privacy

And if you're not sure why so many people on Fosstodon are considering moving, there are some links in the reply.

A deep dive into @FediForum's last-minute cancellation and the opportunities for a collective learning experience, catalyst for change, and perhaps an inflection point -- for FediForum and the broader ecosystem.

Contents:

• A last-minute cancellation has a big impact
• Acknowledgment, apology, amends, action
• "The Fediverse was built by many trans and nonbinary people"
• "Underrepresentation of marginalized communities"
• "Anti-Black incidents and lack of follow-up"
• Now what?
• Appendix: FediForum's response
• Terminology notes
• Notes (with additional references, examples, deeper dives into related points that I don't want to clutter the main post up with, and occasional snark)

This was originally going to be a #FediForum session ... oh well. But why let the FediForum organizers' screwups sabotage a worthwhile conversation? We decided to go ahead with the discussion anyhow. Here's the notes.

Feedback welcome! If you'd prefer to respond anonymously, here's a CryptPad form (it takes a few seconds to load, so don't panic; and it's kind of long, but all the questions are optional).

A summary of what I heard in a bunch of meetings with organizers.

Feedback welcome!

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!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/21234278

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

There's been a lot of discussion about whether or not Bluesky and the ATmosphere (the ecosystem using the AT protocol) are decentralized. Blacksky runs three feed generators, a moderation service, and a work-in-progress personal data store (PDS) as well as providing a starter pack. And the vision for Blacksky "extends beyond any single platform".

That sounds pretty decentralized to me!

But as far as I can tell, nobody else in the discussion is talking about Blacksky as an actually-existing example of decentralization. What's with that?

The official Mastodon web user interface and mobile apps aren't great from an accessibility perspective. Fortunately there are some better alternatives – and many of them also work with Mastodon-compatible software like Glitch, Hometown, GoToSocial, Akkoma, and Friendica.

This is a draft, and I'm sure I missed a lot. Feedback welcome!

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!

The reality is that it always takes time for some states to count all the votes; when these rumors started ramping up, there were over ten million uncounted ballots in California alone. But, many people don't know that this is how things always work. So, with emotions high in the aftermath of the election, disinformation purveyors are taking advantage of the opportunity to get well-intentioned people to help amplify conspiracy theories.

If you see allegations of "millions of missing votes" or voting machine fraud, please don't amplify them! Instead:

• If it's somebody you know, send them a private message letting them know that they're unintentionally amplifying a false rumor.

• If it's not somebody you know, report it to the moderators as disinformation.

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.

The next installment of Mastodon, two years later

Contents:

• It's not "just like email"
• Usability and gatekeeping weren't the only challenges newcomers faced
• The first complicated high-stakes decision is even before you sign up
• Why not help people choose an instance that's a good fit?
• But no

1. THINK before you engage or share
2. SHARE accurate information about the election
3. REPORT disinformation when you see it
4. EDUCATE yourself — and your friends and family
5. GET INVOLVED – and get your friends and family involved

The next installment of Mastodon, two years later

Contents:

• Mastodon 2017 and Glitch 2017
• A BDFL gets to do what he wants
• Flash forward seven years ...
• Seven years later, is Mastodon significantly closer to being a good Twitter alternative?

This is also probably going to be published on the IFTAS blog, most likely tomorrow. But the election's coming up fast, so I wanted to make it available tonight! Once it's published there, I'll repost that here as the canonical version.

A continuation of Mastodon, a partial history

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!