Melmi

I think this is less a problem of “nefarious bad actors” and more a problem of expectations. Honestly, I agree with the quoted comment: I think they should be visible all the time, like they already are on Mbin. I think it would help change the way people think about votes so that they don’t expect Reddit-style anonymous votes and instead it’s a more public Facebook/Twitter-style like system.

If you really want private votes, Piefed has feature that lets you anonymize your votes, but a determined bad actor could still deanonymize you. I think it’s better to change expectations than to try to massage a fundamentally public platform into having private votes, but it’s good there’s an option for people since it’s so highly requested.

This is interesting! I’ve been exploring this and it seems like a neat little license.

I’m not a lawyer, but one funny edge case I noticed is that the Extractive Industries module seems like it makes it a breach of license for crystal shops to use your software since you’re involved in the sale of minerals.

I would tend to agree with FSF that it’s not FOSS, though. There are so many restrictions on this license and who can use it, based on fairly arbitrary things like “if CBP claims you’re doing forced labor” or “you do business in this specific region”. It might be more moral, but it’s a different approach than FOSS, which is less restrictive than more and prioritizes “Freedom” above everything else. Maybe it’s time for a different approach, though?

I think the utility of blocking people on a public platform is kind of fake anyway. If someone is harassing you, and you block them, it’s obvious that you did it so they’ll just log out and suddenly they can see your posts again. Accounts are trivial to make on the fediverse too so they can always just spin up a new one to harass you.

I think silent filtering is better for that reason because they can’t tell that you did it so they won’t just immediately switch to a new account and keep going.

Active blocking like you’re talking about only makes sense if there’s such a thing as “follower-only” posts imo. Otherwise it’s a false sense of security because they can see everything anyway just by logging out or switching to another account.

The cursed LLM thing uses buttplug.io on the backend, I just wanted to share it because the premise is very funny to me.

You’re in luck

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I think your take is reductive. Gender isn’t about stereotypes. I’m sure that for many trans people, part of their trans discovery was not feeling like a stereotypical member of their sex, but there’s more to it than that. You can say that gender relates to a lot of things. Gender is ultimately an internal experience that means different things to different people, and isn’t necessarily related to identifying or not identifying with any given stereotype.

Bioessentialism in turn reduces people to genitals, and sort of refuses to address intersex people because something something “outliers don’t count”. At best it says sure, you can dress up however you want, but it’s super important that everyone know What You Really Are so they can put you in a box and appropriately segregate society.

I don’t think “identifying with social stereotypes” is really an accurate representation of what being trans is.

Sure, there are some people who transition and identify as stereotypical members of their desired gender, but there are also people who transition and are gender nonconforming after their transition, but still identify as binary trans.

Identifying with social stereotypes also doesn’t account for physical dysphoria, which is very real for a lot of trans folks. Some trans folks change little about their presentation when they transition but still want hormones and/or surgery.

I kinda of lean towards the idea of “private accounts” being a bad idea as a result, just because it creates a false sense of security. But I’m not in the target demographic so idk

The issue is that if you don’t default to federation, it becomes essentially impossible for new instances to join the fediverse. A potential new instance would have to go around to every single existing instance and ask to be allowlisted, which is onerous for both the new instances and for the large server admins who would be getting tons of requests. It would also essentially kill small-scale selfhosting as a result.

But how will you get a “universal” view of the fediverse? No single authoritative view exists.

You yourself acknowledge that this is complicated, but I honestly don’t understand what appeal a hacked together fake centralized system would have for people if they don’t care about decentralization in the first place. Any such solution is almost inevitably gonna end up being janky and hacked together just to present a façade of worse Reddit.

Lemmy’s strength is its decentralization and federation. It’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a feature that’s attractive in its own right. It doesn’t need mass appeal, it’s a niche project and probably always will be. I don’t think papering over the fundamental design of the software will make it meaningfully more attractive to the non-technically minded.

That’s I guess why CSEM is used, because if the images are being shared around exploitation has clearly occurred. I can see where you’re coming from though.

What I will say is that there are some weird laws around it, and there have even been cases where kids have been convicted of producing child pornography… of themselves. It’s a bizarre situation. If anything, seems like abuse of the court system at that point.

Luckily a lot of places have been patching the holes in their laws.

CSAM is supposed to be more explicit that the images are essentially crime scene photographs, and to emphasize that it is Abuse first and foremost and not merely pornography.

CP is a morally neutral term, or at least the components words themselves are. CSAM is not, and is explicitly negative.

This is certainly an interesting topic. There are men who are comfortable wearing dresses and wearing makeup and all that, just as there are women who are comfortable with cutting their hair short and wearing baggy clothes and all that. It’s also true that those people are sometimes harassed and called “eggs” by people who are ostensibly trans-friendly (especially fem-presenting guys).

But I don’t think that that is equivalent to the trans experience. I assume you’re not trans, correct me if I’m wrong, but dysphoria is a real thing that for many people is very deeply related to physical body parts, and your theory just doesn’t account for that at all. I don’t think that your average fem-presenting guy wants to take HRT to get breasts, let alone go to the extra length of getting bottom surgery and get vaginoplasty. There’s clearly something more about dysphoria than it just being a matter of what they like differing from what’s socially acceptable, unless you broaden it so wide as “liking having breasts or a vagina” or “liking having a penis”, and even that is a stretch because dysphoria is a very visceral sense of wrongness in one’s body that goes much deeper than just preferring a different body part.

Not all dysphoria is physical, either. It can relate to misgendering, or any number of societal things that aren’t necessarily related to just what we’re “allowed” to do. Frankly, unless gender is outright abolished and there are no longer distinctions between genders or even societal differentiation between sexes, I don’t see it going away. And even in a post-gender world, I imagine there would still be trans people (perhaps by another name) who experienced physical dysphoria.

Your theory also doesn’t account for trans people who present as would be socially acceptable for their assigned gender at birth, and have interests that are similar to their AGAB, but still identify as trans and even may experience dysphoria.

All in all, while I appreciate your conclusion to support trans people, I disagree with your reasoning. I don’t think that being trans is merely a result of one’s likes not being in line with societal norms. I think it goes much deeper than that, and can’t be reduced to such a simple cause.

I feel like this would be spotted and stamped out immediately. Everyone’s eyes are on Threads right now; astroturfed content might sneak in on Mastodon, where regular Threads content will be mixed in with the hypothetical astroturfed content, but here on Lemmy there will be little to no Threads presence due to lack of interoperability, so every single Threads account that shows up will be noticed. It’s already super visible when Mastodon users show up due to the weird formatting issues that happen due to the lack of support.

I just don’t see an astroturf campaign as being viable unless Threads implements community functionality, which seems pretty far out when they’re only now implementing basic federation with Mastodon.

The microblog side of the fediverse is really hostile to scraping or indexing of any kind. On the one hand, I get the idea of safe spaces and not wanting your data to be public, but then why are you on an instance that federates openly?

It seems to me that anything that’s being federated out by ActivityPub is public by nature. If you don’t want it to be public, you should use an allowlist, or just don’t post publicly.

I guess I just assume that everything I’m posting is being scraped and archived forever, because there’s no way to ensure it’s not. It’s ironic that the fediverse is so hostile to this fundamental fact of the internet when ActivityPub is basically designed to just hand out information to whoever asks. It seems like there’s a conflict between the protocol and the culture.

I do agree with Ada in broad strokes. The Fedipact is just a petition. Meta doesn’t care if you sign it. And it’s not binding either—you can sign it and end up changing your mind and federating anyway, or you can defederate without signing it (like Blahaj).

It’s still interesting data though. It may not represent every instance’s stance on Meta, but it does reflect the stances of those that sign, and suggest that they’re more active in the discourse.

You’re right on the money with it being about admins and not users, too. Users aren’t even allowed to sign it, only mods and admins can.

It’s hard to extrapolate too much just from this data, I think.

That said, my read on it: Mastodon is way bigger than any other fedi platform, and with popularity comes outsiders to fedi culture and politics and people who just don’t care. Also, a lot of the big instances want to federate because they have more of a growth mindset, so they when they see Meta they just see more potential users.

It’s interesting though that Mastodon is the platform that would be most affected by federation. We here on Lemmy don’t have great interoperability with the microblog side of the fediverse, so we’re less likely to see Threads activity.

Harry Potter spaces are not unique in creating structure. There are tons of fandoms, with millions of members. It’s not the first modern fandom by any means either. It’s not like if HP suddenly disappeared there wouldn’t be any fandoms of equivalent or larger size to provide “structure” to vulnerable people. Lots of them have more queer people in them too, and less transphobia.

I’m not sure what makes Harry Potter uniquely digital in your mind either. I’m sure you can interpret it as being about that, but I don’t think that’s the interpretation most people walk away with. Even if it really is a lens some people use to understand the Internet or whatnot, I certainly don’t think it’s the first story to be used in that way… There are a lot of stories that can claim that title that far predate Harry Potter, many of which have fandoms of their own.

I just don’t think HP is an essential backbone of culture. It’s important to a lot of people, for sure. And I can’t imagine what it’s like to realize that the creator of a work that’s so important to you is a terrible person. That has got to be a really shitty situation to be in. But there are other fandoms out there. There’s other great fiction, written by authors who won’t weaponize your consumption against minorities. It’s not a dichotomy of either you embrace Harry Potter or you must write your own.

I don’t think it’s particularly hard to find authors who aren’t actively spreading hate, actually. And I don’t think Rowling’s level of transphobia is a particularly specific purity test.

Plus, Rowling takes an active role in promoting hate. She’s loud about it. She has a big platform because HP is so popular, and I think that makes her especially dangerous.

She certainly seems to put her money where her mouth is too.