Open Source

31227 readers

250 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Fediverse as activist tool? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

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.