Has anyone ever considered the potential creation of a Labeler similar to Andrew Lisowski's Bluesky Politician Labeler, but for the Mastodon platform?

This tool, which has been developed for Bluesky, provides valuable transparency by listing top contributors to US politicians.

The Bluesky Politician Labeler

(github.com/hipstersmoothie/us-…)

is an innovative Open-Source feature that enhances political discourse on social media.

It automatically labels posts from US politicians with information about their top financial contributors, offering users immediate context about the potential influences on these public figures.

Key benefits of implementing a similar feature on Mastodon could include:

1. Increased transparency: Users would have easy access to information about political funding sources.
2. Enhanced political discourse: This feature could lead to more informed discussions about politics and campaign finance.
3. User empowerment: Mastodon users would be better equipped to critically evaluate political content.
4. Platform differentiation: This unique feature could set Mastodon apart from other social media platforms.

It could be designed to respect Mastodon's federated nature, possibly allowing instance administrators to opt-in or customize the feature for their communities.

Given Mastodon's focus on user privacy and data control, any implementation would need to be carefully considered to ensure it aligns with these core values.

The feature could potentially be developed as an optional plugin that users or instance administrators could choose to enable.

I personally believe that something like this could SIGNIFICANTLY enhance the political discourse on Mastodon while providing valuable transparency to users.

It would be an innovative addition that aligns with Mastodon's ethos of empowering users and fostering meaningful conversations.

I would consider doing something like this, but, unfortunately, I personally lack the time, energy, and technical knowledge.

bsky.app/profile/hipstersmooth…

bsky.app/profile/us-gov-fundin…

bsky.app/profile/hipstersmooth…

I loved this video that the Daily Show‘s Desi Lydic posted on Instagram, Tiktok, and YouTube. Give it a watch:

youtube.com/watch?v=vv-X1E71RG…

Lydic talks about the dizzying changes that are happening in social media these days. Internet users over the last decade have gotten used to a small number of huge social platforms. But political changes, content policy issues, and legal platform shutdowns have upended that formerly stable structure. People can no longer count on their friends, family, colleagues and neighbours all being on the same social networking system, much less news outlets, politicians, and celebrities. So they’re racing around, trying new applications (including, as Lydic notes, the awesome Pixelfed), and seeking a place to be social again.

Why should anyone have to do this? After all, you and I didn’t change our political outlook or our content policies or our legal ownership structure. We have governments and companies changing all around us that interfere with how we can interact with the people that matter most to us. Regardless of how you feel about these changes, why do everyday users have to be the ones to scramble to adapt?

The Fediverse is based on the simple belief that your social connections and your published content are yours. They belong to you. You should get to decide where to set up your home on the social web, based on your own priorities — technical, political, financial, romantic, whatever. And once you have that place on the social web, you can connect to anybody else, on any Fediverse platform, as easily as if they were on your own.

So when your friends are all trying a new Fediverse-enabled app from the app store, you can follow them from your own Fediverse home, see what they’re posting, like, comment, and share. You don’t have to scramble to install yet another application, go through the complicated signup flow, set up your profile, and alert everyone you know about yet another identity you have. You can stay put, keep all your current connections, but still stay connected to your restless friends and bleeding-edge influencers.

And if you get tired of the place you’ve set up your Fediverse home, you can move completely — taking all your social connections (and, soon, all your content) to the new platform you’ve chosen. You won’t have to make a series of announcements, like Lydic does, about all the different places your Internet presence is scattered. It’s handled automatically by the Fediverse platforms. Your followers, family and friends might not even notice the difference.

Social media is fun; we get it. And there’s nothing wrong with trying new apps. Being a pioneer on the cool new platform is invigorating. But if it’s not fun, and you’re feeling the whiplash of multiple platforms rising and falling weekly, please consider setting up your long-term homebase on a Fediverse-enabled platform. You might be surprised how many platforms are already Fediverse-enabled, and more are coming online every day.

TikTok is done for

+ Drone hysteria, viral prayer apps, QR code undies, a new NYC literary salon, and the manosphere vs Sydney Sweeney

^{Taylor Lorenz (User Mag)}

Evan Prodromou

2025-01-13 00:30:06

Content Policy on the Social Web

On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, announced a new content policy for Meta on Threads. We are disappointed in these changes, which put vulnerable people on and off Meta platforms in harm’s way for harassment. Ideas matter, and history shows that online misinformation and harassment can lead to violence in the real world. There are good analyses of the details of the policy changes at EFF, The Verge, and Platformer.

Meta is one of many ActivityPub implementers and a supporter of the Social Web Foundation. We strongly encourage Meta’s executive and content teams to come back in line with best practices of a zero harm social media ecosystem. Reconsidering this policy change would preserve the crucial distinction between political differences of opinion and dehumanizing harassment. The SWF is available to discuss Meta’s content moderation policies and processes to make them more humane and responsible.

Distributed Moderation

What do these changes mean for the Fediverse? Through ActivityPub, Meta’s Threads network is connected to the social web, also called the Fediverse. This is a diverse network of independent social services using different codebases and different kinds of content. The network of 300M users of Threads can follow and be followed by people in tens of thousands of other communities. These services are operated by a variety of entities: corporations, universities, enterprise IT, cooperatives, non-profit organizations, and self-organized volunteers.

Theoretically, this distributed structure allows people to make choices about which platforms they want to use – based not only on technical features, but also on community composition and moderation policies. Users don’t need to give up on social connections they already have with friends and family; they can stay connected across services using ActivityPub. Different communities and services can have different content policies, but people in different communities can still stay connected.

Ideally, having an account on a Fediverse service gives people the best of both worlds: they can stay connected to users and content they like, and filter out content and users that they don’t. When unwanted content from one community lands in the feeds of people in other communities, the receiving users or their moderators can react under their own local policy: removing individual text or image posts; blocking individual users; or blocking the entire sending community.

Practically, though, there are limitations to this flexibility. Filtering on the receiving side requires orders of magnitude more effort. If a single sending service delivers bad content to users on one hundred or one thousand receiving services, each moderator on the receiving end has to clean up the mess locally. Moderators get understandably frustrated with this kind of displacement of responsibility. A common response is to block servers that send bad content entirely.

In the case of Threads, though, there are complicating factors. Threads is much, much bigger than the typical Fediverse community, and it has many high-profile users in politics, media and technology. It’s also an easy onboarding service to the Fediverse for people who are used to Facebook or Instagram, meaning many of our friends, colleagues and family use it. Blocking the Threads service means blocking access for all users on the receiving service from all these important accounts.

Unfortunately, there’s not an easy answer for Fediverse moderators. We encourage trust and safety teams across the social web to use their best judgement and the tools available to keep users safe, connected, and informed, and also to minimize moderators’ stress and burnout. IFTAS Connect is a great community resource for connecting with other moderators to discuss these tradeoffs.

Improving Social Web Resilience

We see the challenge of a large service that has poor local content policy as a chance to strengthen the social and technical infrastructure of the Fediverse. None of these options will resolve current problems immediately, but we hope starting the research now will make the Fediverse more resilient in the future.

• Finer-grained filtering tools. As mentioned above, moderators on the Fediverse can automatically filter content by author or by originating service. Some platforms also let moderators filter by keywords – for example, blocking out racist or homophobic slurs. More difficult forms of filtering, such as detecting unacceptable images, or the subtle meaning of text, requires more sophisticated algorithmic filtering not supported by many Fediverse platforms. Balancing the ease of use of this kind of filter with the desire from many communities to have final control by human moderators is a good area for future research.
• Collaborative moderation tools. Email filtering systems re-use signals received from other users, so that if a message is marked as spam by one user, or a few users, other users will never see the message. This can balance the desire for human moderation with a significantly lowered total effort for moderators. Shared server blocklists are somewhat common on the Fediverse, but deeper per-user and per-post collaborative filtering is not. Balancing, once again, the specific priorities of a given community with the advantage of collaborative filtering would also require further research.
• Fact-checking and community notes. One major part of the Meta announcement was a cancellation of the fact-checking program for posts on Meta, and its replacement with a community notes feature, which defers fact-checking to volunteers. Neither of these features (professional and volunteer fact-checking) are supported directly in ActivityPub. We think there’s a place for a variety of fact-checking services on the Fediverse, providing annotations on Fediverse content without requiring permissions from the author, the sending service, or even the receiving service. Building the protocol features and reference implementations, as well as encouraging the participation of fact-checking services, is a good next step in this area.
• Jurisdictional boundaries. Zuckerberg mentions in his update that Meta will be collaborating with the US government to resist demands for content policy changes by other governments. Regardless of the valence of these content policy demands, this question highlights an important feature of the Fediverse, namely, that federated services can operate within specific jurisdictions and conform with their regulations. Content that is conveyed across legal boundaries between services can be more clearly filtered or blocked to comply with local rules. We encourage national and regional governments to further investigate this structure for social networking and global connectivity.
• Data portability. Choosing a social media platform to use is an important freedom in the social web. The Fediverse supports limited data portability, such that users can move their followers and followed accounts to a new server almost seamlessly. However, this move leaves all posted content, like text and images, on the old server, as well as metadata such as likes and shares. The new LOLA protocol would allow a full move between servers. We want to see more work on implementing LOLA in Fediverse platforms.

Ultimately, the safety and well-being of people around the world should not be in the hands of any single company. Moderation policies are a competitive advantage in an open social network. We continue to encourage the use of ActivityPub, and the distributed control that it brings.

Meta surrenders to the right on speech

“I really think this a precursor for genocide,” a former employee tells Platformer

^{Casey Newton (Platformer)}

We’ve got an amazing lineup for the Social Web Devroom at FOSDEM 2025. We managed to fit 12 talks into 4 hours, covering a huge range of topics related to Open Source software and the Social Web.

FOSDEM is the premier Free and Open Source software conference in Europe. It’s a grass-roots event, available free of charge, and attracts hackers and advocates from around the world. The event is organized into presentation tracks called “developer rooms” or “devrooms”, which bring afficionados of a particular technology all together for a long block of presentations on related topics.

The main programming in the Social Web dev room on Saturday, Feb 1, will focus primarily on technical topics. A related Social Web Birds of a Feather (BOF) meetup on Sunday, Feb 2 will feature another 5 presentations about social aspects and advocacy for the Fediverse. It’s still in the scheduling phase; BOFs get scheduled late at FOSDEM. But the speakers have confirmed, and it should be a really good track.

Finally, SWF and Hacker Space Brussels are hosting Social Web After Hours on Sunday, Feb 2. It should provide some closing talk. Some of the most interesting speakers in the Social Web will be presenting; this should be a great way to wrap up the FOSDEM weekend.

To stay informed about Social Web activities at FOSDEM, follow the #SocialWebFOSDEM hashtag, or join the Social Web Devroom Matrix channel on the FOSDEM Matrix server.

Matrix - Decentralised and secure communication

You're invited to talk on Matrix. If you don't already have a client this link will help you pick one, and join the conversation. If you already have one, this link will help you join the conversation

^matrix.to

Evan Prodromou

2025-01-04 17:18:28

Social Web After Hours at FOSDEM 2025

The Social Web Foundation and Hackerspace Brussels (HSBXL) are co-hosting an off-site event at FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels, Belgium on Sunday, February 2, 2025 from 19:00 to 21:00 local time. Social Web After Hours will feature four Fediverse-focused presentations from leaders of the ActivityPub community:

• Darius Kazemi will discuss the Fediverse Observatory
• Christine Lemmer-Webber and Jessica Tallon will discuss their work at the Spritely Institute
• Julian Lam will discuss NodeBB and using ActivityPub for threaded discussions
• Matthias Pfefferle will present the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress

The event is open to the public, but space is limited. HSBXL is at Rue Osseghem 53, 1080 Molenbeek, Brussels, Belgium. Light food and drink available for purchase at the event; proceeds benefit HSBXL.

FOSDEM 2025 - Home

^fosdem.org

Tumblr always suited me better than micro-blogging as there is no word count restriction (I can find brevity a problem) and you could have any number of blogs/channels for whatever topic was tickling your fancy at the time.

So I've been keeping an eye out for Fediverse alternatives, jotting down notes and now I'd like throw this open to the Hivemind. And yes, Tumblr is now on ActivityPub, but I am not putting my time into corporate platforms again.

Added bonuses: markdown (or something similar), adding links to posts, quoting other posts and perhaps being able to login from another Fediverse service.

Here's a few I found:

• Goblin - It's a FireFish fork from a former Tumblr employee. Allows multiple accounts but they have to have a different email address, some markdown but not links. I've heard it suggested that most *key forks could be set-up as a Tumblr alternative
• Loforo: "Another surprise is that Loforo is the second most active ActivityPub blog platform in the Fediverse, behind only WordPress." Easy multiple blog creation, formatting in HTML. Unfortunately you can't create your own instance, last time I checked.
• micro.blog - not free, not open source
• Wafrn

Not listed as Tumblr equivalents but some of the general services are flexible enough to do this:

• Hubzilla - has channels but seems more a CMS. Nomadic identities is a great feature.
• Friendica - the BlueSky integration seems increasingly important and, with Meta's enshittification, it feels like a general social media service is a good idea. The way you can have the equivalent of Google+'s circles seems a good feature (while I am no fan of Facebook, Google+ worked well for me while it lasted). The main issue I see is you can only replicate channels with different accounts.

Any suggestions? Have I missed any key features from the above?

I really want a Facebook (the old Facebook timeline) replacement, but end-to-end encrypted, and decentralised so there's longevity.

Edit for clarity:
I'm looking for a way to share things online, end-to-end encrypted to a wide-audience that knows you but doesn't necessarily know each other.

This is why messaging apps don't fulfil this requirement, and chat rooms (like Matrix) also don't fit.

I love Lemmy, I like the idea of Mastodon (twitter-like sites just aren't my thing. ActivityPub rocks. However, none of them are encrypted.

PixelFed is neato, but I don't plan sharing my personal photos with the whole of the internet, which seems to be the only choice with ActivityPub.

Signal and other encrypted messaging apps are great, but are for direct messaging. Where are the encrypted social media apps?

Matrix is cool and all, but it's aimed at groups. Like discord / MS teams replacement.

Someone told me about Futo Circles, which seems to tick all the boxes and built on top of Matrix, but it's currently abandoned.

Are there any other alternatives? My wallet is open, I would very much like to use such an app. I am no programmer, so sadly cannot take on the mantle of continuing the Futo Circles project.