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submitted 8 months ago by Ideology@hexbear.net to c/fediverse@hexbear.net

Organizer for Front End North, @katiefenn@front-end.social:

Last week the LGBTIQA+ Greens, the officially affiliated liberation group for the Green Party of England and Wales, lost its Twitter account for unknown reasons. It was suspended. It was appealed. The appeal went nowhere.

I cannot state enough that trans people need to urgently divest from Twitter. The network is actively hostile to us now.

Maintaining a presence is fine, but we must move the centre of gravity for organising onto other platforms.

I’ve been off Twitter for two weeks now, and I’ve gained a bit of perspective about how much organising still happens on the platform.

The Twitter thread is still our primary source of news and information. All this becomes inaccessible the moment you move off Twitter. And as more and more people quit Twitter, our community is fracturing and becoming less powerful.

I think this really hit us hard when the Cass report was published. Our adversaries are organised, and we are scattered.

Rest of the threadWhen I’ve shared this in some private forums, I’ve been told that those with serious mental health or safety concerns “are better off not on Twitter”.

I argue that this is an argument for excluding some of the most vulnerable in our community, and we should treat Twitter as an inaccessible space for organising.

It’s the people staying on Twitter to the exclusion of other networks that is causing the problem.

We MUST do better than this.


@emilygorcenski


@katiefenn but our enemies don’t organize with Twitter, they just use it as the conduit to project their organization. The conclusions of that study were already determined when it was commissioned. The channel must be severed.



@emilygorcenski That’s true. It shows that they were organised ahead of time when it came out. They’d briefed sympathetic and influential people, and made sure that critics were spending the whole day reading the damn thing while they were giving interviews.

In fact, I think the fact that the earliest criticisms were based off of an easily refuted, leaked press briefing really hurt us.

We should be doing the same - organise off the platform, and channel it through Twitter.

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submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by davel@hexbear.net to c/fediverse@hexbear.net

tl;dr: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is on the Board. Someone please update this meme:

Anyone know anything about “human rights advocate” Esra’a Al Shafei? This is all I found of note so far: S.T.O.P. and the Fight Against Surveillance

The amazing activists sneaking footage out of Uyghur detention facilities in China and those fighting for reproductive justice in the U.S. use the exact same encryption as criminals.

Where’s the footage, Esra'a? We’re still waiting on it…

From JWZ’s hot-take: I see no way this could possibly go wrong

Oh, and apparently one of the other board members, Ghavi, is a lawyer at a firm that is all-in on cryptocurrency and "AI" companies.

Anyway, on to the Board:

Esra’a Al Shafei is a human rights advocate and founder of Majal.org, a network of digital platforms that amplify under-reported and marginalized voices in Southwest Asia and North Africa. She is also the co-founder of the Numun Fund, the first dedicated fund for feminist tech in the Global Majority. Esra’a currently serves on the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit which hosts Wikipedia. She is also on the Board of the Tor Project, developers of one of the world’s strongest tools for privacy and freedom online.

Karien Bezuidenhout is an advocate for openness and supporter of social entrepreneurs. As the former director of the Shuttleworth Foundation, her core interest lies in social and policy innovation through practical interventions and sustainable social enterprises. Through her experience as a board member to social change organisations and social enterprises across the world, she strives to make connections that accelerate learning.

Amir Ghavi leads Fried Frank’s core technology practices as the co-head of the Technology Transactions Practice, where he advises clients on cutting edge technology and intellectual property matters. Amir is also a regular speaker, panelist and commentator to the media on digital assets and quantum computing.

Felix Hlatky has been the Chief Financial Officer of Mastodon since 2020. Felix helped Eugen by incorporating the project in a non-profit LLC in Germany and raising additional funds from Prototype Fund, NLnet and GLS Bank. Felix is the CEO of SOLARYS, a company developing software for volunteer firefighters in the DACH region.

Biz Stone is an entrepreneur best known as a co-founder of Twitter, one of the world’s leading social media platforms. Biz’s career spans various facets of technology and social networking, including contributions to the development of blogging, podcasting, and social media. Beyond Twitter, Biz has engaged in various philanthropic efforts and tech ventures, emphasizing the importance of corporate responsibility and the potential of technology to address societal challenges.

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submitted 9 months ago by hongminhee@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@hexbear.net
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"First post in the fediverse," said the Meta CEO in a Thursday post on Threads. "If you see this and turn it on from your profile, you’ll see likes from federated platforms appear on your posts here."

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13238074

The Fediverse might be getting their own mashups of Tiktok, YouTube, and Vine sooner than anyone thought, thanks to the work of one prolific dev spearheading an effort. The best part? He's helping other projects in the space, too.

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You are the only instance that is this hard to connect to lol!!!

I went to the trouble of swapping my Misskey instance to one on your Allowed list... it still isn't accepting my invite! That's the only way I can get your posts to appear on the instance...

P.S. Re: my username: I forgot which account I was going to give dental advice. Actually, I just remembered. Someone who mentioned braces. I was going to tell them to get Super Floss which is at big box stores and stuff. It's so awesome, obliterates braces gunk (this saved my life in high school, wish my orthodontist told me, screw orthodontists, they are all demons)

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RIP in peace, Firefish/Calckey (git.joinfirefish.org)
submitted 11 months ago by goose@hexbear.net to c/fediverse@hexbear.net

Development activity had slowed to a trickle, and the project owner and lead developer is now stepping away. The flagship instance, firefish.social, doesn't seem to be working anymore. It looks like many Firefish instances are planning on migrating to other Misskey forks like Sharkey.

It's a bummer to see this. Firefish had a decent amount of hype around it for a minute, and the UI and feature set are nice.

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submitted 11 months ago by tree@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@hexbear.net

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11061890

Seems like an interesting effort. A developer is building an alternative Java-based backend to Lemmy's Rust-based one, with the goal of building in a handful of different features. The dev is looking at using this compatibility to migrate their instance over to the new platform, while allowing the community to use their apps of choice.

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by TankieTanuki@hexbear.net to c/fediverse@hexbear.net
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Pros: it will be exciting and engaging to see someone with a federated name and the notice their opinion being dogshit

Cons: mathematically proven to not have cons

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submitted 1 year ago by jack@hexbear.net to c/fediverse@hexbear.net
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We need a pre-emptive strike against zuck

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/9347983

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Major Changes

This release is very large with almost 400 commits since 0.18.5. As such we can only give a general overview of the major changes in this post, and without going into detail. For more information, read the full changelog and linked issues at the bottom of this post.

Improved Post Ranking

There is a new scaled sort which takes into account the number of active users in a community, and boosts posts from less-active communities to the top. Additionally there is a new controversial sort which brings posts and comments to the top that have similar amounts of upvotes and downvotes. Lemmy's sorts are detailed here.

Instance Blocks for Users

Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn't affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.

Two-Factor-Auth Rework

Previously 2FA was enabled in a single step which made it easy to lock yourself out. This is now fixed by using a two-step process, where the secret is generated first, and then 2FA is enabled by entering a valid 2FA token. It also fixes the problem where 2FA can be disabled without passing any 2FA token. As part of this change, 2FA is disabled for all users. This allows users who are locked out to get into their account again.

New Federation Queue

Outgoing federation actions are processed through a new persistent queue. This means that actions don't get lost if Lemmy is restarted. It is also much more performant, with separate senders for each target instance. This avoids problems when instances are unreachable. Additionally it supports horizontal scaling across different servers. The endpoint /api/v3/federated_instances contains details about federation state of each remote instance.

Remote Follow

Another new feature is support for remote follow. When browsing another instance where you don't have an account, you can click the subscribe button and enter the domain of your home instance in the popup dialog. It will automatically redirect you to your home instance where it fetches the community and presents a subscribe button. Here is a video showing how it works.

Authentication via Header or Cookie

Previous Lemmy versions used to send authentication tokens as part of the parameters. This was a leftover from websocket, which doesn't have any separate fields for this purpose. Now that we are using HTTP, authentication can finally be passed via jwt cookie or via header Authorization: Bearer . The old authentication method is not supported anymore to simplify maintenance. A major benefit of this change is that Lemmy can now send cache-control headers depending on authentication state. API responses with login have cache-control: private, those without have cache-control: public, max-age=60. This means that responses can be cached in Nginx which reduces server load.

Moderation

Reports are now resolved automatically when the associated post/comment is marked as deleted. This reduces the amount of work for moderators. There is a new log for image uploads which stores uploader. For now it is used to delete all user uploads when an account is purged. Later the list can be used for other purposes and made available through the API.

Cursor based pagination

0.19 adds support for cursor based pagination on the /api/v3/post/list endpoint. This is more efficient for the database. Instead of a query parameter ?page=3, listing responses now include a field "next_page": "Pa46c" which needs to be passed as ?page_cursor=Pa46c. The existing pagination method is still supported for backwards compatibility, but will be removed in the next version.

User data export/import

Users can now export their data (community follows, blocklists, profile settings), and import it again on another instance. This can be used for account migrations and also as a form of backup. The export format is designed to remain unchanged for a long time. You can make regular exports, and if the instance becomes unavailable, register a new account and import the data. This way you can continue using Lemmy seamlessly.

Time zone handling

Lemmy didn't have any support for timezones, which led to bugs when federating with other platforms. This is now fixed by using UTC timezone for all timestamps.

ARM64 Support

Thanks to help from @raskyld and @kroese, there are now offical Lemmy releases for ARM64 available.

Activity now includes voters

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker. The upgrade should take less than 30 minutes.

If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.

Pict-rs 0.5 is also close to releasing. The upgrade takes a while due to a database migration, so read the migration guide to speed it up. Note that Lemmy 0.19 still works perfectly with pict-rs 0.4.

Thanks to everyone

We'd like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, and helping find and fix bugs. We're glad many people find it useful and enjoyable enough to contribute.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for over three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

This month we are running a funding drive with the goal of increasing recurring donations from currently €4.000 to at least €12.000. With this amount @dessalines and @nutomic can each receive a yearly salary of €50.000 which is in line with median developer salaries. It will also allow one additional developer to work fulltime on Lemmy and speed up development.

Read more details in the funding drive announcement.

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Apologies if this is the wrong comm for the question but I've been wanting to move to RSS more again to help me in avoiding doomscrolling, but I've noticed that the NSFW posts don't show up. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a way to get them included I'm not seeing? like NSFW=true in the get request or something?

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/8543124

In anticipation of Lemmy's upcoming 0.19 release, and to work out any final issues, we're going to deploy a test release on lemmy.ml within the next few days.

We're doing this testing on lemmy.ml only, so that we can encounter any issues before the release, and to make sure the upgrade process is smooth for other production servers.

Some of the following will happen during the process:

  • Apps will likely break (only for lemmy.ml)
  • Lemmy.ml may experience some downtime for the upgrade to complete (ideally no more than an hour).
  • If anything goes wrong, we may have to restore from a database backup, meaning content made in between backups may be lost.

If all goes well, we'll have an official announcement for the release after this testing period.

I apologize for the difficulties this might cause. At most this will be a week of hair-pulling, but its vital that we catch any issues before telling other servers to upgrade.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by diyrebel@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/fediverse@hexbear.net

Most nodes have no constitution

In an effort to find places to create communities, I browse lemmyverse.net. There are hundreds of instances. Unfortunately descriptions of instances are either empty or general purpose.

This is a terrible organization. No constitution. It’s like these neighborhoods where all the shops try to sell a bit of everything. E.g. like when a tiny shop sells spices, phones, cheese, hammers, rugs, and speakers. Nothing goes together. We say shops like that lack a constitution which defines the focus of their business. When there’s a whole street of shops like this, you don’t know which shop to enter for what you need. You have to try many different shops arbitrarily until you find what you need. The #threadiverse is like that. Not many venues focused on a defined purpose.

Have I missed something? Is there a service or document that only lists specific-purpose #Lemmy and #Kbin nodes?

Centralization in wolf’s clothes

The other problem with the Lemmyverse site is there is no “cancel Cloudflare” switch that supports filtering out all instances that are centralized on Cloudflare. I always have to open the filters and manually remove:

  • lemmy·world
  • lemm·ee
  • sh·itjust·works
  • lemmy·ca
  • lemmy·ml (← no longer CF but I still filter it out for other reasons)

The threadiverse exists inherently for the purpose of decentralization. So it’d be sensible for resources for finding nodes to make it trivial to just list decentralized instances.

Centralization - lack of constitution relationship

The lack of constitution effectively exacerbates the centralization problem. That is, when everything is general purpose, this encourages everyone to choose the biggest general purpose venue -- Lemmy·World, the Wal·Mart of the #Lemmyverse.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by PorkrollPosadist@hexbear.net to c/fediverse@hexbear.net

Looks like the ban was reversed, but lol.

Mondoweiss runs their own instance now. Love to see media orgs embracing fediverse tech properly, not just fleeing back to the Silicon Valley monopolies because they got blindsided by some lib fucking mod.

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submitted 1 year ago by jack@hexbear.net to c/fediverse@hexbear.net
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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by kristina@hexbear.net to c/fediverse@hexbear.net

hexbear-specter we also have the most comments. never stop posting

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by kristina@hexbear.net to c/fediverse@hexbear.net

Might be a bad idea for me to go into this while having ptsd issues, especially when I'm probably about to do a long ass sleep, but yolo.


Basic synopsis on my feelings here:

  • tl;dr: I used to believe we should be federated, but after 3ish years of interacting with lemmygrad on various accounts, I have noticed that lemmygrad is not a place that is safe for transgender people at large. The reason for this is principally their debatelord culture and refusing to comprehend that debating a point against a minority's lived experience, then demanding civility when that minority gets angry, is the same shit liberals do.

  • I noticed instances of reactionary content, such as here and/or comments are not removed or users banned. Lemmygrad seems to prefer to debate reactionaries, and obviously subjecting minority groups to reactionary content for personal fun is callous at best, and reactionary at worst. Its important to make it so that there are designated areas for dunking on reactionary content, as well as nsfw and content tags to avoid it. Otherwise, reactionary comments should be removed and visible in a mod log.

  • I discussed in this post why it is important to remove downvotes to protect trans people. After I noticed people were creating evasive comments to debate me, I pretty much told them to fuck off. This resulted in a ban from their admins and they continued to defend their policy. This reminds me a lot of the struggle sessions we used to have about adding pronouns to the site or removing downvotes. People would be evasive in this same way to give the benefit of the doubt then demand civility when people get angry. Those people are not allies and should be purged.

  • The admins seem to have a principle misunderstanding of why minorities don't want to see any form of harassment or discrimination directed at them and how that is perpetuated across social media sites. They seem to legitimately believe that keeping downvotes means that they will be able to stave off reactionary content or is somehow a valuable tool in responding to reactionary content, when in reality they should be removing and banning reactionary content.

  • Certain users were very keen on civility bullshit, particularly @simply_surprise@lemmygrad.ml, @muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml (an admin), @davel@lemmygrad.ml. This is honestly the most disgusting behavior I've seen on lemmygrad, and the fact that the admins doubled down on it is fucked.

I can see staying federated to a bunch of very small instances, especially queer focused and hobby instances, but I'm pretty soured on the fediverse at this point.

I'm extremely disappointed in what I've seen of the lemmygrad mod team. Why are they making me into a splitter over such a basic issue of avoiding the harassment of trans people at a systemic level, bastards stalin-stressed

I am willing to retract this if the admins of lemmygrad self crit and apologize for temp bans or otherwise of my accounts on civility reasons and make it clear that debating the lived experience of anyone of a minority group is unacceptable going forward. There are positive and proactive ways of discussing someone's lived experience without going into debate territory and trying to find a technicality in lived experiences to support an opinion you already hold. I maintain that removing downvotes is a boon to trans users, if you can come up with something better than that and implement it, I am all ears.

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The Atlantic Council is the US’s premier military-industrial complex think tank, and the fediverse is on their radar. PDF

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CNBC: Europe gives Elon Musk 24 hours to respond about Israel-Hamas war misinformation and violence on X, formerly Twitter

Before long the Global North governments are going to realize the fediverse exists, and they’re going to put pressure on it as they’ve done—and continue to do—on corporate social media platforms. They’re the self-appointed deciders of what is mis-, dis-, & malinformation.

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fediverse

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1 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

This is not the place to gossip about other instances.

What is the fediverse?

Guide to the fediverse

Explore the fediverse

founded 2 years ago
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