Hi!!! I’m a strategist/entrepreneur/software engineer/activist, focusing on the intersection of justice, equity, and software engineering. I’ve been on the fediverse for a long time and am currently checking out /KBin. @jdp23@indieweb.social is my main account on
You’re right … but tech has a lot of lobbying power and they are very very very strongly against a strong privacy bill, or even a bill that would regulate algorithms. So it’s easier for legislators to pass something like KOSA – or pass a weak privacy bill that will actually make the situation worse by getting rid of laws like California’s – and claim they’re doing something.
Yeah really. Think of the children!!!
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.
Not exactly. These bills cut across party lines and there’s a lot of desire to be able to pass something – “think of the children!” So if anything the overall gridlock makes it more likely that these bills will pass. So the dynamics that led to stopping the bills last year was a combination of activists making enough noise, and privacy and digital rights groups pressing the case in meetings with legislators (as well as some grassroots groups with good relationships with their legislators). As a result, that Dem leadership decided not to move the bills to the floor, so the vote never happened.
It turns out that crossposting to Lemmy works better from Lemmy communities. So, a Lemmy community is useful. Since I had already crated the kbin magazine and there’s no way to delete magazines (!), looks like we’ll experiment to see whether or not having two of them makes sense. Here’s the Lemmy community I created, I’m using it for now to cross-post from other communities so that there’s a single place to go for everything. !bad_internet_bills@lemmy.sdf.org
Exactly! Have you considered a career in politics?
Alas, that’s par for the course. But, the email they receive gets counted (and they’ll often run some kind of sentiment analysis software on it) and staffers pay attention to how much mail they’re getting, so it still makes a difference!
I don’t trust them either, and they’re very likely to move ahead with federation anyhow. It still means something that they’re changing the story that they’re telling.
Agreed, other laws are needed as well as this – https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/1197545 goes into more detail.
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!
No, bipartisan legislative support. It’s got bipartisan co-sponsorship both in the House (Warren Davidson is an R, Sara Jacobs is a D) and Senate (Rand Paul is an R, Ron Wyden is a D). And House Judiciary Committee just voted 30-0 to advance it.
Of course as you say we don’t know what’s happening behind closed doors, and there are also legislators in both parties who aren’ supportive, but there really is bipartisan support for this.
It’s a plausible theory but at the House Judiciary Committee everybody in both parties voted “yes”! We’ll see what happens as things move forward. In the Senate, Rand Paul is a co-sponsor and Mike Lee’s a likely yes vote, so it’s not likely to be straight party-line.
Thanks! Those are links to the version of the bill from last session; this year, the bill number in the House is HR 4639 and the text is at https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/hr-4639-bill-text.pdf
That EFF action alert is also from last session, and has the old bill number; they don’t have a new one up yet as far as I know. So I linked to Free Press’ action page, which is more up-to-date.
We’ll see. Cynicism is certainly justified – it’s very hard to pass a good privacy bill, and last year even though everybody supported it, it died in committee. On the other hand, it really does have bipartisan support, and there Congress is deadlocked in so many areas that they have an incentive to pass something.
Also, people I’ve talked to at EFF, ACLU, and Free Press all think that grassroots activism can help make a difference, and that right now is a key time … so it’s worth a try.
Thank you very much, that’s a great point – I’ll update the post to include it!
Nobody’s talking about taking the choice away from others. Some instances are saying they’ll federate with Threads, you’re free to move your account there. Or as you say, people who want to hang out with the bully can download the Threads app right now!
That’s incorrect. Followers-only posts (and local-only posts on instances that have them) aren’t public. Profiles that don’t make public and unlisted posts aren’t discoverable. And, as Threat modeling Meta, the fediverse, and privacy discusses, there are plenty of things that could be done to reduce the amount of data that’s public.
Also, that’s only one of the many reasons people oppose federating with Meta.
That’s right, as the article says
And from the perspective of the “free fediverse” that’s not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is “a long way out” is encouraging. OK, it’s not as good as “when hell freezes over,” but it’s a heckuva lot better than “soon.”
Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ! has plenty of perspectives from both sides.
Great writeup! A couple thoughts:
Very true. There’s a line buried in their white paper that “we expect that most users will sign up for an account on a shared PDS run by a professional hosting provider – either Bluesky Social PBC, or another company” but they very much do tout it as a major benefit. It’s certainly true that the ability to move your data around is a very good thing, and something the fediverse is bad at today, so from a positioning perspective it makes sense to focus on this; their claims that this gives the user power are, um, exaggerated.
Yeah I was in in a discussion where a Bluesky developer suggested that non-profits might run their own Relays … seems unlikely to me, both because of the volume and because of the risk of potentially relaying content that’s legal in whatever jurisdiction the PDS is in but not in the Relay’s jurisdication. Of course Relays don’t have to be for the full network, so we might see more smaller-scoped Relays (although I’m not sure how that differs from a Feed Generator), but if BlueSky and a few others provide the only full-network Relay, that’s a pretty powerful position for them to be in.
Also in that conversation the said that AppViews are likely to be even more resource-intensive than Relays, and so anybody developing an AppView might as well have a Relay as well, so there’s likely to be the same kind of power concentration.
That said I think it’s very good that Relays explicitly appear in their architecture. Relays are also critical for smaller or less-connected instances in today’s fediverse, but don’t get a lot of attention.
Yep. They’ve split the functions of the ActivityPub instance, but it seems to me that they’ve just shifted the power imbalances around, and potentially magnified them.