RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117324790823856750

A truly worthwhile thread ... still in progress!

RE: https://mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/117168236715680894

A great thread of ways to get involved with election protection.

It's long enough ago that it's faded from collective memory, but going into the 2008 election there were serious voter suppression shenanigans afoot ... and a groundswell of grassroots activism, along with the usual great work from civil rights and election protection non-profits, helped save the day. We all know how high the stakes are this year, so now's a good time to do it again. There will be ways to help here on fedi as well (stay tuned!) but the impact of on-the-ground volunteering is even greater.

So please, get involved!

@cwebber remember how Bluesky talked so much about their design goal of avoiding the confusing situation in fedi where you see different parts of the conversation and different like and follower accounts depending on what instance you're on?

hahahahaha ...

https://blacksky.community/profile/jdp23.thenexus.today/post/3mtzhlfafec22

RE: https://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/117105821188467747

Please don't do this. Blacksky is up (even though Bluesky is down), so you'll just be embarrassing yourself.

Not only that, if you're ignoring or dismissing the fact that Blacksky is up, you're also reinforcing fedi's reputation for anti-Blackness. If that's not your goal, then give credit where credit is due.

@keith @onepict a question about the latest opt-out scraper. Would you feel differently about it if it honored all the existing opt-in/opt-out flags like "indexable" and "discoverable"?

(My own take, for what it's worth: it seems to me that a separate opt-in is still needed. Mastodon's description of "indexable" and the FEP the specifies it say it governs whether or not the post appears in search rsults, which isn't exactly the same thing as "include in a downloadable dataset." That said I'd be somewhat more sympathetic to the creator if they had been trying to do the right thing but didn't understand the precise meaning of "indexable" didn't include their case.)

EDIT: and also, thanks @keith for getting the word out about this and @onepict for tagging me!

Just in case the parent post gets traction ...

If you haven't already contacted your Senators about the upcoming KOSA and SCREEN Act vote, please do! And if you have, please contact them again before the vote (which is Wednesday morning, 10:00 a.m Eastern, 7:00 a.m. Pacific)

https://www.badinternetbills.com/ from @fight makes it easy. There are other options as well; see Tips for contacting Congress about bad internet bills has a roundup as well as suggestions on what to say.

RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jdp23/116967124444088200

KOSA and bad internet bills are getting voted on by the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday, so I've been thinking more about this ...

If bills like KOSA and the SCREEN Act pass, they're likely to affect every US fedi instance. So how do we mobilize geographically-based instances like pnw.zone, gardenstate.social, sfba.social, jawns.club, hoosier.social, dmv.community, etc to push back?

A couple of ideas I've had so far:

• Influential users can play a big role here, just by posting about it with an action. If there's enough activity on hashtags like #KOSA or #SaveSpeech, they might wind up in trending hashtags to help build awareness.

• Admins could potentially paste an announcement post.

What else?

RE: https://mastodon.social/@bmitra/117003838454044213

An excellent thread!

RE: https://mstdn.social/@mattmay/116988858841146726

Very important! I group of people I know tested out the time for mail to be delivered in Washington state a couple of months ago, and while it's often quite fast there are times where even going between adjacent zip codes can take up to ten days.

With Election Day on August 4, at this point it's better to drop off your ballots at a drop box -- King County Elections has a map of all the dropboxes in Washington state. If you are going to mail your ballot though, please do it ASAP!

How can fedi help fight bad internet bills? (7/6, oops)

And one more -- shame on me for leaving this out of my initial list.

These bad internet bills either require age verification (a surveillance technology) or attack encryption (a critical anti-surveillance technology). Big surveillance-capitalism companies also love them because they put a big burden on small social networks, crininalize anonymity, and require even privacy-friendly networks to share their users' intensely personal data if theydon't want to break the law.

People in fedi generally get that. And a lot of people in fedi here to get away from surveillance capitalism! @cyberlyra and the @TheBulletin crew provide lots of resources for people trying to move away from surveillance capitalism platforms. #FediPact exists! The Free Fediverse defines itself in opposition to surveillance capitalism! Sure, there are also plenty of people here who are just fine with surveillance capitalism, whatever, but there are a lot of us who aren't.

That's a huge strength. How do we leverage it?

And in the process, how can we also get more people involved in projects Tech Reclaimers?

How can fedi help fight bad internet bills? (6/6, for now)

A couple more potential ideas before I wrap this thread up for now ...

• one of fedi's strengths is that many instances are communities. Some are geographically based; others (like infosec.exchange and defcon.social) are communities of practice with some very relevant expertise about some of the reasons these bills are so bad. Are there ways to leverage this?

• fedi platform and app developers are directly affected by these bills. Are there wasy to get them to take a more active role?

And like I say these are just starting points, so other suggestions are very welcome!

How can fedi help fight bad internet bills? (5/N)

The actions in the previous two posts are an example of where it certainly seems like we should be able to make things better. How are people who aren't already following me or Fight supposed to find them? I included hashtags, but I'm not sure they're all that relevant. And stuff like this is often shared in the Bad Internet Bills Lemmy community, but it doesn't have a lot of subscribers -- and it's just US specific.

I'm not particularly sure what the right answer is here, but it really does seem like an opportunity to do better.

And, what about people who want to go beyond just making a call? For example, if there are a bunch of people in an area all on fedi, you could set up a meeting with your legislator (or more likely their staff) to let them know in person why these bills would affect you. (You could even bring people who aren't on fedi!). This can be an intimidating process is you've never done it before, but there's good information out there -- and there are people here who have done that before and can help coach people who are new to the project.

How do point people to how they can get more deeply involved if they the time and interest, give them the information and support they need to be effective?

How can fedi help fight bad internet bills? (4/N)

Narrator's voice: we interrupt this brainstorming thread for a time-sensitive action.

If you're in the US, one very concrete thing you can do is to contact your Senators right now. The Senate Judciary Committee is likely to vote on KOSA next week, and there's also a battle shaping up about the STOP CSAM Act. See the link in the previous post!

If you're in Massachusetts, lawmakers will vote soon on a final version of the social media bill. Grassroots pressure has made it a lot less bad than it was, but it still needs further improvement. So please call your state legislators as well!

https://www.stoponlineidchecks.org/MA

And if you're not in the US, please leave links to actions fighting bad internet bills in your country, state, regiion, etc!

Narrator's voice: we now return you to our regularly-scheduled brainstorming.

#ageVerification #BadInternetBills #mapol

How can fedi help fight bad internet bills? (3/N)

To start with, there are good instructions out there about how to contact legislators -- @fight's Bad Internet Bills in the US, I'm sure there are equivalent sites elsewhere.

Many people here already do that. In a poll I recently did, roughly 50% said they had contacted legislators at least once,, and while it's somethiung of a self-selecting example, I'd be willing to bet the percentage is higher here than on most social networks.

Then again, many don't -- often because they don't realize how critical it is, or know about the bill but aren't sure what to do. So ...

• How can we leverage fedi technologies to make it easier for people here to find out what's going on and why it's so important for them to take action -- especially as these battles strech on over months and multiple actions are needed?

• From a pro-social design perspective, how do we encourage people to take action, repeatedly, and share the information with their networks who aren't on fedi?

#kosa #BadInternetBills

How can fedi help fight bad internet bills? (2/N)

Suppose we decide to make it a collective project and galvanize people around the idea of "Save fedi, fight bad internet bills!" There are enough of us here, many of us with broad networks outside fedi as well, that we could really make a difference.

What kinds of things could we do to make ourselve more effective?

Here's a few ideas to kick things off ...

RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/116841848684568048

How can fedi help fight bad internet bills? (1/N)

If you haven't read Christine's "What happened to the fight for the internet?" (linked in the quoted post), you really should. You can see some of my initial thoughts about Christine's excellent post in the replies, including an observation that people on decentralized social networks can potentially play a big role in pushing back on bad internet bills, but to date haven't had a lot of impact.

So let's make things concrete. What can fedi do to push back on KOSA and age verification bills that the US Senate is just about to vote on, C-34 in Canada, the social media ban in France, upcoming C. hat Control 2.0 in the EU, or whatever bad internet bills are in place wherever you are?

#fediverse @general

Mods and admins: what (if any) policies does your instance have about LLM-driven reply bot accounts?

A few specific questions:

• If the accounts profile gives the impression that it's human, that's arguably impersonation -- although depending on just how the impersonation rule is worded, maybe not. If you have a rule about impersonation, how does it cover this case?

• If it doesn't set the "automated" flag, is it a violation of your rules? If so what's the wording of the rule?

• What about if it replies to somebody who has #nobot in their profile?

• What about if it only replies if it's explicitly tagged (which would ensure it doesn't fall afoul of any rules prohibiting unsolicited communications or spamming)?

• Suppose the account is "well-behaved": the profile discloses that it's not human, it's marked as Automated, only replies if it's specifically tagged, and there aren't any examples of it replying to somebody with #nobot in their profile. Is this something that you view as okay? If not, what's your rule that prohibits it?

@moderation

An unexpected visitor, seen from our kitchen window.

@FediThing @haubles @stefan @tchambers @quillmatiq

do any of you know if there's a list of US Representatives and Senators with active accounts on fedi, either directly on Mastodon etc. or bridged from Bluesky? Sean Casten is the only one I know of ...

More aurora pics, from Snoqualmie Point, Washington, 10:45-11:15 pm July 3.

(Hopefully the color on these is better, the previous ones wound up getting very ashed out somewhere in the conversion process)

#aurora