The Nexus of Discussions

@julian this is really neat.

Thanks! fortunately archive.org has it -- https://web.archive.org/web/20241126072739/https://whtwnd.com/alexia.bsky.cyrneko.eu/3l727v7zlis2i@emergencygg @negative12dollarbill

Yeah. People are putting up larger-scale relays as well -- @edavis.dev recently mentioned experimenting with a non-archival relay for < $30/month (not bad at all!). Rudy Fraser has also posted about looking at doing a non-archival Relay for Blacksky. So I agree with your view -- there are llkely to be a few bumps in the road but there don't appear any barriers to solving the technical problem of running an independent whole-network Relay. What's still an open question is the economic motivations for anybody other than Bluesky to running a whole-network Relay. The Free our Feeds approach of trying to get the community to pay for it as a public good is interesting. From Bluesky's perspective, it's great to have them be an independent organization -- and if the reports they're on track to closing another round of funding are accurate, it's very timely.Of course Free our Feeds approach of having most of the "custodians" be AI-focused doesn't encourage confidence. Neither does the heavy involvement of Mozilla. So we'll see how it works out in practice. @moira @mastodonmigration @joeinwynnewood @pluralistic

Mark Zuckerberg Agrees to Turn Meta [Back] into a Pogrom Machine -An excellent post by @emptywheel , including this"Most people — including Elizabeth Warren, in the WSJ story — are focusing on how this is effectively a bribe, a $22 million donation (on top of the earlier $1 million one) trading for regulatory favors. It is. Trump continues to engage in unprecedented corruption in plain sight.But it is more than that. The concession of the settlement implies that Facebook should not have banned Trump for using their platform to incite an insurrection, though it admits no wrong-doing.This is not just about eliciting a bribe for regulatory favors. It is not just about winning an argument about actions taken four years ago to halt an insurrection in process.The entire lawsuit is about an ongoing chilling effect. And Zuck’s capitulation is a capitulation to that chill, a soft commitment that the next time Trump uses social media to launch his mob against vulnerable targets like trans people or legal Haitian immigrants, against co-equal branches of government in Congress or the courts, or against his select targets like Milley, Meta will do nothing to slow the mob."#fedipact #meta #uspol

It's a dilemma -- you're quite right that there's a tradeoff between reach and privacy. Personally, I have multiple accounts; this one for example tries to reach as wide an audience as possible, so it's on an instance that federates with Meta (and most of my posts are public) ... and I've also got a personal account on an instance that doesn't federate which i use for stuff where the goal isn't to get wide visibility (and most of the posts are unlisted, local-only, or followers-only).are you saying that even with authorized fetch and an instance that blocks Threads, we need local- or followers-only to keep Meta's nose out of our businessEven with authorized fetch and an instance that blocks Threads, there are some potential paths of information flowing to Meta indirectly -- for example replies from an account on an instance that doesn't block Meta can reveal your account name (and perhaps some additional information depending on what they say in their reply). Local-only posts can reduce the risk of that, as well as scraping. As to how much it matters relative to other risks ... hard to know.@datum @fembot @Em0nM4stodon

It really is too bad when symbols get soiled because Nazis use them -- and I can certainly believe that @protonprivacy's CEO didn't realize that he had accidentally chosen a Nazi dogwhistle as part of his username. But, it is in fact a Nazi dogwhistle. So while I can certainly see why he doesn't want to change it or feel like he should have to, it makes it a lot harder for Proton to recover trust when their CEO is saying that he doesn't care whether or not people think he's signalling support for Nazis. @olea @Infoseepage @thisismissem

@thenexusofprivacy I wrote https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/how-to-join-mastodon/, which primarily focuses on Mastodon, but has some general information about the fediverse as well.And there's https://jointhefediverse.net, of course.

@Gargron kudos to you for making this decision, I’m sure it wasn’t an easy one but it’s certainly the right path going forward!

And Posty (by @oli) is a useful tool for using those backups to a static site - https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/posty-this-is-how-you-take-your-posts-with-you@ophiocephalic @bastetfurry

People are looking for an Instagram alternative where they don't have to deal with hate, harassment, and illegal content. If you really want to look at the bigger picture, you need to take safety into account.Large instances are much harder to moderate than small instance. Instances with open registration attract harassers, people who want to spew hate speech, scammers, and worse. Until you have a moderation team, and the software to support them, in place, you're living on borrowed time. "If we don't capture the hype, and prepare them for other servers, they will most likely join some VC funded app."Look at what's happened with Mastodon. Instead of prioritizing safety functionality, in early 2023 Eugen changed the default so that people would sign up on .social ... and growth flatlined. When people have a bad experience on the flagship instance, it turns them off the patform as a wholeDo you really want Pixelfed to get a reputation as a place so loosely moderated that people get harassed -- or worse, as a place where you can find content that's so bad (even illegal) that it's blocked on Instagram and Bluesky?BlueSky Flashes are no better, in fact worse.In what way>. It seems to me that Flashes has a big advantage over Pixelfed on the moderation front: they build on Bluesky's AppView and other infrastructure, they leverage Bluesky's omderation -- automated tools, 100+ contract moderators, labeling from composable moderation like Blacksky. Of course, Pixelfed has advantages of its own. And many people don't want to be on a VC-funded, currently-mostly-centralized platform, so even if Flashes is successful your market isn't going away. @dansup

@oli thanks! and yeah it is kind of weird that GtS asks me to approve a self-reply, i'll double-check to see if it's still happening on the latest version and if so file a bug

yeah really. great thread! @grimalkina

@ij I agree, I don’t think you’re being too demanding! And great point about the parallels to Eugen’s making mastodon.social the default.

@shellsharks also I added a link to "Cloudy with a chance of not enshittifying" to the Appendix of "links on Bluesky and decentralization that are worth reading even though they don't mention Blacksky" in https://privacy.thenexus.today/decentralization-and-erasure-blacksky-bluesky-and-the-atmosphere-2/ ... you made some good points in that article!

Right. Or not, it's really up to them!My original post was just saying that since they've repeatedly featured Meta people in the past -- which has led to publicity -- when they use Meta's announcement of anti-LGBTQ+ policies to promote the next FediForum, they're positioning themselves as anti-LGBTQ+ . If that's who they want to be, oh well. But they don't have to be that way!@thisismissem @fediforum @FediThing

@cwebber Indeed. See @jat23's Closing the Door to Remain Open: The Politics of Openness and the Practices of Strategic Closure in the Fediverse and the "Why the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact is good strategy for people who want the fediverse to be an alternative to surveillance capitalism" section of Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ! for more about what's been done so far.

Probably the best way to approximate it is to compare the number of new users with previous days. The two (very imperfect!) sources I use for statistics are https://fediverse.observer/dailystats (which also lets you get daily statistics for each software platform) and https://fedidb.org/ But, the data is messy. @pockets @MichaelimOdenwald @mastodonmigration

Totally agreed that the anti-creator / anti-small business "don't sell stuff here" attitude so many people have here is a problem ... but, be careful about the analogy. "Mastodon HOA" and "fedi HOA" were originally used by @shengokai and @mekkaokereke to refer to the HOA-style structural and casual racism that's so endemic here. When the term gets used in a deracialized way, it's seen as erasing their perspecties - and more generally ignoring the racism of fedi and of HOAs.Of course, others have come up with the analogy independently -- HOAs are annoying in a lot of other ways besides the racism! Still, unless you're specifically talking about the racialized aspects of people trying to police what can and can't be said here, finding another analogy will reduce the chances that your post will get taken in a way that you didn't intend it to be.@Edelruth @hal_pomeranz @mckra1g

@mho interesting rise in Mastodon! How does Flipboard compare?

Pixelfed (the software) does support federation with Threads. I'm not sure which (if any) Pixelfed isntances are curently federating.@mastodonmigration @Jared @wendinoakland