Fediverse as activist tool?
Fediverse as activist tool?
I recently made a post about Shinigami Eyes and BlockParty and started thinking about activist tools.
The ones mentioned are of course merely mitigation tools, but speaking of activist tools more broadly, like some people suggest Signal and Tor Browser for activists, as a fine balance between security and a low technical bar for entrance.
I am not really sure that any of these differ substantially from Matrix and Firefox and why they are so special.
The ActivityPub protocol. the one Lemmy uses, is a mature protocol and people have put thought in various aspects of it.
Apart from Lemmy, there are ActivityPub applications that foster activist and IRL communication, like Framasoft's Mobilizon.
The main issue I would think of about ActivityPub instances for community organizing is the lack of specialized features for this type of work, like polling.
And the major issue of course is the pseudonymity/anonymity and completely open signups renders existing apps like Lemmy untenable for community activism organizing.
In your opinion, what would it take for an Activity Pub application to be a secure, efficient tool for community activism?
Wut? Social media is for public messages. If you want something to be private, don't use Activity Pub
But its a useful tool for blasting public info for organizers, sure
20Exactly, never use social media (Acticity Pup, Insta, Tiktok etc) to organise activism, use it to comminicate with the pubkic, that's what it's made for.
7Um, does community organizing have to be secret to be immune to trolls and bad actors?
4It depends what you're organizing
9Well, if you want publicly available discussions, I think a lemmy community would be well suited, since you can block people from posting or commenting stuff there, but block reading does not work. If you want that it is not public, I would say one of the most convenient and save places would be a matrix space. It is like discord just not a service, but a protocol (well matrix organisation does host an own instance) that allows having private e2e encrypted chat rooms and even video call using jitsi. I just fear, that getting people into the space is a bit more difficult compared to the invitation systems of discord using bots.
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Private messages would need to be end-to-end encrypted. No ActivityPub-based platform does this. I've been mulling over how to do it but haven't landed on anything solid yet.
Signs-ups don't have to be open, they can be closed or vetted - it's just a config option that can be changed with a couple of clicks.
PieFed has polls. But it'd be helpful to take inspiration from Loomio and add much richer functionality here to turn a poll into a proper group decision-making tool.
12add much richer functionality here to turn a poll into a proper group decision-making tool
This wording shapes my thought better than I did in the post.
2E2e private messages are easy, you just have to make them locked to the software you're using. Meaning it they were implemented in Lemmy, you could only use them across Lemmy users.
Otherwise an extension of the ActivityPub protocol would be needed.
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You can run Lemmy or PieFed (which also has build in polls) non federated as a private instance, this way the content will not be sent to other instances and it's basically a forum. You can also disable open signups and only add users manually.
But then you still need to do something about anonymous access, because both just show the content to people who are not signed in, so you would need to put it behind some extra login or so.
5How about Mobilizon? https://joinmobilizon.org/en/
2Repeat after me: ActivityPub
2If you find that the fediverse isnt the right tech for this kind of thing, have a look at NOSTR. I recently learned about it in the context of my hypothetical Lemmy fork. For what I am trying to do with it (decentralized retail inventory), NOSTR was much better suited than Lemmy. My only issue with it is that it ties bitcoin lightning walllets into its authentication mechanism (a dealbreaker for me at least). My future uses for it would be FAR different than yours but it also seems more well-suited to activism as well.
2Sure, the use case is remote to say the least, but the decentralized thing is appealing. I will have to wrap my head around the bitcoin registration thing, since I am not familiar with crypto. But I did imagine something like decentralized exchange or shops as part of community organizing. In that manner you can, for instance, support web creators within a given community etc. So, perhaps the use case not that far as it initially seems.
2If you want to have a go at using that NOSTR tech but stripping the lightning wallet thing out for another (less BTC maximalist but equally or even more secure) form of authentication, I’d be very interested. I’m obviously not going to roll my own auth from scratch….but as I see it, tying BTC to it could prevent MANY people from giving an otherwise very promising tech a chance. Besides, there are already far more secure cryptographic elliptical curves in use by other cryptocurrencies that NOSTR conspicuously passed over in favor of BTC’s.
I probably don’t have the resources nor experience to do it myself but I’d love for this tech to exist.
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