Those are solid requirements to be listed on joinlemmy.org and I would also add another one about moderation policies prohibiting racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry, Islamophobia, etc. Otherwise, if a user joins an instance that the "official" page recommends and discovers it's racists / sexist / etc, they'll see it as a problem with #lemmy as a whole, as opposed to just one bad instance.

And as we've seen on Mastodon, if a Black user goes to a site where racism is tolerated and quickly encounters racist sh*t, they leave and tell their friends; ditto for trans, queer, Muslim, etc. users having bad initial experiences. Once that happens a bunch of times the reputation becomes hard to shake. Much better to steer people to sites where they're less likely to have a bad experience!

Thanks Kaiity and Ada for all your hard work on this!!!!!

FYI it's not directly related but there was a story in the Washington Post today about Twitter rival Mastodon rife with child-abuse material, study finds ... of course 90% of it came from a large Japanese site (presumably pawoo) but they also mentioned some originating on big mainstream sites; and some sites don't block pawoo, so it's potentially in their federated timelines. Here's the underlying report, Child Safety on Federated Social Media

It's all true. WTF indeed. Here's a letter from over 90 LGBTQ and human rights organizations with more detail. EFF's article from in May, which is the one they linked to in the original article, has good info to.

Exciting times! And get well soon Kaity!

Reparations aren't just a cash payment -- the article lists five different aspects of reparations, and it's very compatible with investing in Black communities. There's debate iover who should be eligible but it's not an unsolvable problem. And sure some people will use it as an excuse to declare racism's over, but the same was true when Obama got elected ... so that's not a reason not to do it!

In terms of support in general, do you support the 1988 decision by the US to pay reparations to Japanese-Americans who had been sent to internment camps?

Yep. This has been an issue for Mastodon.

Yep. Federation could conceivably respond to the EU's requirement for interoperability -- and they could do it in a way that puts a lot of barriers to people actually moving, so works well for them. Of course the EU would say that didn't meet the requirement, which would lead to a multi-year legal battle and eventually Meta would probably pay a billion dollar fine (as they routinely do -- it's just a cost of doing business) and promise to remove the barriers (which they wouldn't, and then there would be another multi-year legal battle).

But none of that works if the EU won't allow Threads for some other reason!

Still, my guess is that they'll figure out a way around the EU's objections to Threads ... we shall see ...

That just shows how little Eugen understands the privacy risks. Why just blocking Meta's Threads won't be enough to protect your privacy once they join the fediverse has an example of how federating with Meta can expose private data. And, data can be public but hard to discover (a profile for somebody who only makes followers-only and local-only posts); federating with Threads adds exposure.

Agreed that figuring out the right action is important! It's clear from the conversation so far that a lot of instances are going to defederate, and a lot of instances are going to federate, so any strategy needs to take that into account.

I talked with a lot of people about this when I wrote Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ! and don't think it's the case that we share the same goals. Some people see increasing the size of the ActivityPub network as a goal in and of itself (and generally support federation); others are in the fediverse because they want nothing to do with Facebook or Meta (so unsurprisingly support defederation). And some people have a goal of communicating with people on Threads -- friends, relatives, celebrities, etc; others don't. So again, these different goals are something to take into account.

Wanting to stay federated DOES NOT mean the user wants to help Meta or thinks that Meta is here for our benefit.

That's correct, but many of the people I've seen arguing in favor of federation do seem to think Meta's looking for a win/win situation where the fediverse benefits as much or more than Meta. And conversely many would argue that wanting to stay federated means the user is helping Meta whether they want to or not.

Did he answer that? 🤣

Yeah as you say it's pretty magical ... although also janky. It really does show the possibilties of federation in a way that mastodon by itself never seemed to. And @[email protected] great analogy to BBSes!

Totally agree. Back in June I wrote about the reasons the FediPact was good strategy and started it with

Most importantly, it counters the gaslighting that resistance is futile. The segment of the fediverse that wants to reject Meta is clearly large enough that it will survive no matter what the big Mastodon instances and pundits do.

Yeah really. Think of the children!!!!

Happy cake day -- congrats, and thanks for all you and Kaity do!

This is functionliaty I'd also find really valuable.

Yes, followers-only posts are public -- upvote if you agree!

Agreed, other laws are needed as well as this. The ADPPA consumer privacy bill is likely to get reintroduced later this session; last year's version had some good features but also a lot of weaknesses, and big tech companies and data brokes are pushing to further weaken it. So it'll be a battle to strengthen and pass it.

But ADPPA doesn't apply to government agencies (and that's not likely to change) so bills like Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale are important complements!

Good perspectives, I totally agree it’ll be a big challenge here as the fediverse gets bigger. Mastodon’s already had a couple of waves of spam - Brian Krebs had a good article a few weeks ago

Yes and no. In the article I say

| Still, despite the quirks, once you figure a few things out, both Kbin and Lemmy can give you a surprisingly good reddit-like experience, and some of the larger communities have over a thousand active users which isn't chopped liver.

That said ....

• on lemmy.ml this post says it has 10 comments but only 8 are visible. Looking at it on blahaj.lemmy.zone it says 15 comments, also only 8 are visible.

• Your comment showed up on Lemmy and (unlike other comments) didn't show up on @[email protected]'s original post.

• Even if you have a Mastodon account, if you click on that link it'll most likely take you to a tab where you're not logged in and can't interact with it unless you know the magic way of cut-and-pasting it to the search window in a tab where you're already logged in -- and your account's not on a site that's defederated from infosec.exchange

Most people (including me!) find stuff like that very confusing!