The Nexus Of Privacy looks at the connections between technology, policy, strategy, and justice. We’re also on the fediverse at @thenexusofprivacy@infosec.pub
Thanks, glad you liked it. Agreed that blocklists (while currently necessary) have big problems, it would really be great if we had other good tools and they were much more of a last resort … I’ll talk more about that in a later installment.
Total bullshit response. Yes, there are a lot of LGBT people on the fediverse. There’s also a lot of homophobia and transphobia on the fediverse. And the instances run by nazis and terfs very much care if you’re trans and will harass you just as much on the fediverse as anywhere else.
It’s tricky … many people do use “queer” as an umbrella term, but a lot of trans people don’t like being lumped under that, and some lesbian, gay, bi, and agender people don’t consider themselves queer. There aren’t great answers.
At some level you’re not missing anything: there are obvious solutions, and they’re largely ignored. Blocking is effective, and it’s a key part of why some instances actually do provide good experiences; and an allow-list approach works well. But, those aren’t the default; so new instances don’t start out blocking anybody. And, most instances only block the worst-of-the-worst; there’s a lot of stuff that comes from large open-registration instances like .social and .world that relatively few instances block or even limit.
If you’re looking for more of a technical deep dive, check out Threat modeling Meta, the fediverse, and privacy
I didn’t say the fediverse has come a long way. I said that many people on well-moderated instances have good experiences – which has been true since 2017. In general though I’d say there was a brief period of rapid progress on this front in the early days of Mastodon in 2016/2017, and since then progress has been minimal. Lemmy for example has much weak moderation functionality than Mastodon. Akkoma, Bonfire, Hubzilla etc are better but have minimal adoption.
And @originallucifer Ipeople have been complaining about this for years – it was an issue in 2011 with Diaspora, 2016 with Gnu social, 2017 with Mastodon, etc etc etc – so it’s not a matter of fediverse software as a whole being in its infancy. Even Lemmy’s been around for almost four years at this point. It’s just that the developers haven’t prioritized this.
If you read the article and follow the links you’ll find plenty of evidence. The Whiteness of Mastodon, A breaking point for the queer community, and Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy are three places to start.
From the article:
I’m using LGBTQIA2S+ as a shorthand for lesbian, gay, gender non-conforming, genderqueer, bi, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, agender, two-sprit, and others (including non-binary people) who are not straight, cis, and heteronormative. Julia Serrano’s trans, gender, sexuality, and activism glossary has definitions for most of terms, and discusses the tensions between ever-growing and always incomplete acronyms and more abstract terms like “gender and sexual minorities”. OACAS Library Guides’ Two-spirit identities page goes into more detail on this often-overlooked intersectional aspect of non-cis identity.
I’ll get to that in a followon post, but one straightforward way to make progress is to change some of the defaults
As I say in the article:
Despite these problems, many people on well-moderated instances have very positive experiences in today’s fediverse. Especially for small-to-medium-size instances, for experienced moderators even Mastodon’s tools can be good enough.
However, many instances aren’t well-moderated. So many people have very negative experiences in today’s fediverse.
This thread is talking about a US-based law, so I shared EFF’s perspectives on national IDs in the US. For a more international view, check out Why ID https://www.accessnow.org/campaign/whyid/ – which they’ve signed along with dozens of other civil society organizations.
It’s true that there are potential upsides of national ID systems as well as downsides. But as that Why ID letter says, “the scalability of digital identity programmes also makes their harms scalable. It is far from being proven that most digital identity programmes have brought additional benefits to users, without placing them at risk.” You’re right that private implementations have similar issues – data brokers and tech companies are as careless with data as government agencies are, and just as eager to abuse people’s privacy. But there are also some big differences: a national ID is mandatory, and the government has much more of an ability to put you in jail or deny you your rights.
Within the privacy community, EFF’s viewed as pragmatists – far from absolutists or extremists. So I agree with @chakan2@chakan2@lemmy.world, it only gets regarded as extreme because big tech and the surveillance-industrial complex have normalized not expecting privacy.
That’s one of the concerns. Here’s more, from https://www.eff.org/issues/national-ids
Mandatory national ID cards violate essential civil liberties. They increase the power of authorities to reduce your freedoms to those granted by the card. If a national ID is required for employment, you could be fired and your employer fined if you fail to present your papers. People without ID cards can be denied the right to purchase property, open a bank account or receive government benefits. National identity systems present difficult choices about who can request to see an ID card and for what purpose. Mandatory IDs significantly expand police powers. Police with the authority to demand ID is invariably granted the power to detain people who cannot produce one. Many countries lack legal safeguards to prevent abuse of this power.
Historically, national ID systems have been used to discriminate against people on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion and political views. The use of national IDs to enforce immigration laws invites discrimination that targets minorities. There is little evidence to support the argument that national IDs reduce crime. Instead, these systems create incentives for identity theft and widespread use of false identities by criminals. National ID cards allow different types of identifying information stored in different databases to be linked and analyzed, creating extreme risks to data security. Administration of ID programs are often outsourced to unaccountable companies. Private sector security threat models assume that at any one time, one per cent of company employees are willing to sell or trade confidential information for personal gain.
President Biden on KOSA: “Pass It, Pass It, Pass It”
Plenty of Democrats support this anti-LGBTQ+ bill – here’s the list of cosponsors. It really does have bipartisan support!
Yeah, I’ve been telling people “good news: 25 comments on the article! bad news: almost all of them were about the acronym”. Oh well, we learn by doing. And as you say, a lot of people saw the acronym for the first time, and at least one person learned that two-spirt doesn’t refer to furries, so there was some useful education … it wasn’t my primary goal here but that’s never a bad thing.
Different terminology makes sense in different contexts – and from different people. For a lot of what I write, I want the resonance of queer’s charged history; other times, it might not make as much sense.
It is very much a fraught topic, so thanks for the very good discussion! Many intersex and asexual people don’t think of themselves as joining the queer community; neither do some trans people, and for that matter some gay, lesbian, and bi people actively dislike the term “queer”. It’s complex! Sometimes it makes sense to highlight specific identities – which is what I did in the post I did on [A (partial) queer, trans, and non-binary history of Mastodon and the fediverse](A (partial) queer, trans, and non-binary history of Mastodon and the fediverse) – but sometimes an umbrella term is more useful, and there really aren’t any great options. It’s a fair point that non-binary, pansexual, and others aren’t included in the acronym … like I said in the post, I with with LGBTQIA2S+ for this one because there’s a Mastodon instance called lgbtqia.space, and Indigenous people are often overlooked in the fediverse so I thought it was important to call out the two-spirit aspect. That said if I had known that 75% of the comments on this post would be about the acronym I might have taken a different path!
It’s tricky. There are asexual, intersex, and two-spirt people who don’t identify as queer so shortening it to LGBTQ can be seen as erasing identities (who are frequently already marginalized in queer communities). I don’t tend to use the full acronym in conversation, and you’re right that it reads like a product ID, but the asexual, intersex, and two-spirt people I know generally appreciate it.
Here’s how the article starts – I’ll put this in the main post here as well, thanks for the suggestion.
“Red alert! For the last six months, EFF, our supporters, and dozens of other groups have been sounding the alarm about several #BadInternetBills that have been put forward in Congress.We’ve made it clear that these bills are terrible ideas, but Congress is now considering packaging them together—possibly into must-pass legislation. I’m asking you to join us, ACLU, Fight for the Future, and other digital rights defenders in a week of action to protect the internet.”
– You Can Help Stop These Bad Internet Bills, Jason Kelley, Electronic Frontier Foundation
That’s great! And a lot of trans people I’ve talked with on Mastodon say similar things, which is also great. But a lot don’t. It depends a lot on the instance you wind up choosing. So the people who stay wind up as a self-selecting sample.