The Nexus of 2024

Can the Fediverse help stop Bad Internet Bills?

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by

jon
in

Also posted

EFF’s action on @technology@lemmy.world, screenshot on July 19

If you look in the comments, there are already a couple people saying that they contacted their legislators (which almost certainly means there are at least a few more who did the same but didn’t bother to leave a comment).  And this link has been cross-posted to several other communities where it’s on-topic, so it’s getting broader visibility.

Another link aggregator tactic that works well on Reddit is to have a subreddit that collects all the links on Bad Internet Bills so that it’s easy to track for people who are really interested in the topic.  It’s worth trying in the fediverse as well, so I set up the bad_internet_bills Lemmy community and the BadInternetBills kbin magazine, so that I (and hopefully others!) can cross-post links there as the week goes on.2

As this example shows, the most effective “take action links” go to pages from organizations like EFF, Fight for the Future, and ACLU – names that many on the fediverse will recognize.  News stories and opinion pieces are also good to share, especially if you include a link to an action as well.  Why yes, that’s a hint!  If you’re on Lemmy or Kbin, please share news stories and action links about these Bad Internet Bills when you see them!

I 💜 #Hashtags

Hashtags are great for activism, and there are some natural ones for this campaign – #BadInternetBills, of course, and hashtags for each bill like #KOSA.  [The links go to accounts on mastodon.social.  If you’ve got an account on a different Mastodon instance, you may need need to copy the link, switch to a window where you’re logged into your instance, paste the link into the search box (which is on the Explore page if you’re using the mobile web interface), and then hit return.  When people say “Mastodon’s not that hard to use”, you have my permission to roll your eyes at them.]

A key aspect of hashtag activism on Twitter is figuring out how to work with Twitter’s algorithms to get it to “trend” and get it exposed to more people.  The fediverse likes to pretend that it doesn’t have algorithms, but Mastodon’s Explore tab (showing the posts with the most activity) and Trending Topics beg to differ. Getting #BadInternetBills to trend, or getting some posts on the Explore page, would be a great way of increasing visibility.  On the other hand, we don’t want to overwhelm people’s feeds – and doing it by having everybody cut-and-paste the same message probably wouldn’t go over well in the fediverse. So if trending happens organically, great, but it’s something to focus on for now.

Discovery

Hashtags are still useful even if they don’t trend, because the give people who want to help the campaign a way to find posts to share.  If you’re on Mastodon, Hometown, GoToSocial, Firefish, Akkoma, Friendica, kbin, or other fediverse software that lets you search by hashtag, check out the #BadInternetBills and #KOSA tags; hopefully you’ll see something that looks interesting enough to boost. And a lot of fediverse software allows you to subscribe to a hashtag, which will mean that new links will show up in your home feed.  

Networking

Once things get going, another good hashtag-related technique is to tag likely supporters (or contact them on other social networks or email), and ask them to help boost posts.  People like George Takei, Molly JongFast, and Popehat have over 100,000 followers; evacide, Cory Doctorow,  and Mike Masnick “only” have 30-60,000 but that’s not chopped liver.  On the other hand, they’re all busy people, and we don’t want to waste their time, so it makes sense to hold off on this until we start to get traction; if things don’t take off this time, we might be better off waiting until the next campaign.

It’s harder than it sounds

Even in the best of circumstances, it’s hit-or-miss whether a social network activism campaign clicks – and the fediverse has a lot of barriers to activism.  For one thing, most people aren’t used to doing activism in the fediverse.  Activists on Twitter will reflexively retweet and quote tweet action links when they see them; that’s not the norm in the fediverse.  And speaking of quote tweets, Mastodon doesn’t have the equivalent – although Firefish does, and we’ll take advantage of that.

Not only that, a lot of fediverse culture and software sees “virality” as a bad thing … so techniques that would be seen as just fine on other platforms might not work here – or might irritate people, making them counter-productive.  Different norms for whether to CW (content warning) political posts add another complication.

And usability issues affect everybody, including activists.  The reason I described the cut-and-paste-into-the-search-box contortions above is because of an experience last November people, a couple of leaders of a well-known progressive organization said they were willing to help with a voting rights activism campaign I was experimenting with.  I sent him them the link to the action, they clicked on it, … and wound up in a non-logged-in tab, and couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Of course seasoned Mastodonians know the trick of cut-and-pasting it into the search box in a logged-in window, but it’s a huge barrier to newcomers – and the harder it is, the less likely people are to take action or even boost links.

Federation Headaches

Also, let’s not forget the complexities of federation.  Over the weekend, I did a short thread with a couple of polls … but if somebody boosted only one of them, there’s no guarantee that their followers would be able to see the whole thread.  And software incompatibilities and bugs make it even more confusing.  When I posted on infosec.exchange I tagged the Lemmy privacy community, but it didn’t show up there – even though a similar approach has worked with other Lemmy communities in the past.  Why?  I have no idea.

But, other platforms have their quirks as well.  At one point polls performed extremely well on Facebook, then a few months later they changed the algorithm and they went nowhere.  Is Twitter’s algorithm favoring posts with links this week, or should I put the link in a reply?  Experimenting is key no matter what platform you’re on.  There are ways to work around these issues, at least to some extent, and over time we’ll figure out what works well in the fediverse.  And hopefully the software will improve as well, because all of these are issues that affect other people besides activists.

Let’s experiment!

One of the big selling points of Mastodon and the broader fediverse is that it’s not owned by a company like Meta, Twitter, or Google whose business models are based on surveillance and exploiting user data. A lot of people are in the fediverse because they care about privacy. Many have knowledge to share, are eager to learn more, and want to have an impact.  

– #Privacy activism on Mastodon and in the fediverse, January 2023

And the fediverse also has some advantages when it comes to activism, starting with the people who are there.  Queer, trans, and non-binary people, who are directly affected by these Bad Internet Bills like KOSA, play a big role in the fediverse – which as I observed in A (partial) queer, trans, and non-binary history of Mastodon and the fediverse is very different from the situation on any of the the big commercial social networks.  And while opinions in the fediverse differ on how to react to Meta potentially joining the fediverse, most people on both sides of that question care about encryption, privacy, and digital rights.  

There are advantages at the software level as well.  For example:

  • The integration between Lemmy, kbin, and Mastodon – while imperfect – is quite powerful when it works, and a lot better than the connection between Twitter and Reddit.  
  • Firefish and Mastodon forks like Glitch-soc and Hometown allow much longer posts – and support formatting as well, which makes a huge difference.  Try doing something like this on Twitter (or vanilla Mastodon for that matter)!
  • Firefish and Glitch-soc also have more flexible polls than Twitter, and there are probably some good ways to leverage that.

So while it’s hard to know how well it work, it’s worth experimenting. If you’d like to help, here’s three easy things you can do no matter where you live.  

And if you’re in the US, please contact your legislators using Fight for the Future’s https://www.badinternetbills.com/ or EFF’s You Can Help Stop These Bad Internet Bills,

Notes

1 I’m using  LGBTQIA2S+ as a shorthand for lesbian, gay, gender non-conforming, genderqueer, bi, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, agender,  two-sprit, and others who are not straight, cis, and heteronormative.  Julia Serrano’s trans, gender, sexuality, and activism glossary has definitions for most of terms, although resources like OACAS Library Guides’ Two-spirit identities page go into a lot more detail. Serrano also discusses the tensions between ever-growing and always incomplete acronyms and more abstract terms like “gender and sexual minorities”.  There’s a Mastodon instance called lgbtqia.space, and Indigenous people are often overlooked in the fediverse, so I decided to go with the acronym despite its problems.

Ontario Human Rights Commission’s page on Gender identity and gender expression is a good short reference on the distinctions between gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, and sex.

2 At first I was only planning to set up a kbin magazine but as I was writing this article I had a hard time figuring out how to use a Lemmy account to crosspost a link to a Lemmy community and so decided to create a community as well.  It’s an experiment, let’s see what works better!  And they’re spelled differently because lemmy doesn’t allow uppercase in names, and I wanted to make it more readable and usable through screenreaders than having badinternetbills all munged together, so decided to use underscores.  Sorry for the confusion.  We learn by doing.