Excellent article by Afsaneh Rigot, author of the Design from the Margins methodology.

Livestreamed as well as in-person, and co-hosted by the Georgetown Center for Privacy and Technology and @DAIR@dair-community.social

"Our theme, “Surveillance / Resistance,” is broader and more ambiguous than the themes for previous years, and this is purposeful. What does resistance mean when surveillance isn’t just something that occurs in the environments where we live and work and play and think and create and struggle, but is actually the material with which so many of those environments are built? In a context of broad institutional corrosion and capture, in the face of proliferating global catastrophe, this is a question that remains open and difficult."

The previous workshops I've been to have been outstanding, and this one looks like it'll be great too!

The reality is that it always takes time for some states to count all the votes; when these rumors started ramping up, there were over ten million uncounted ballots in California alone. But, many people don't know that this is how things always work. So, with emotions high in the aftermath of the election, disinformation purveyors are taking advantage of the opportunity to get well-intentioned people to help amplify conspiracy theories.

If you see allegations of "millions of missing votes" or voting machine fraud, please don't amplify them! Instead:

• If it's somebody you know, send them a private message letting them know that they're unintentionally amplifying a false rumor.

• If it's not somebody you know, report it to the moderators as disinformation.

Well-crafted disinfo takes advantage of our emotions by getting us to amplify false and misleading messages. A specific example of post-election racialized disinfo that I'm seeing a lot of is weaponizing exit poll data to target Latinos, Black men, trans people, and other marginalized demographics.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/17792698. I had posted here last week asking for suggestions, and incorporated some of them -- for example, the last section mentions the proof-of-concept Faircamp integration into Hubzilla.

Including:

• DAIR-tube, the PeerTube page of Dr. Timnit Gebru's Distributed AI ResearchCenter
• The Website League, an island network that's taking a very different approach
• GoToSocial v 0.17, continuing their focus on safety and privacy with interaction controls.
• Piefed and the Threadiverse
• Bonfire's new Mosaic service along with their work on Open Science Network and prosocial design
• Letterbook
• Bluesky and the ATmosphere's continued momentum

The post has more info on all of these and more ... there really is a lot going on.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/17686207

It's a very long post, but a lot of it is a detailed discussion of terminology in the appendix -- no need to read that unless you're into definitional struggles.

I don't like the clickbait title at all -- Mastodon's clearly going to survive, at least for the forseeable future, and it wouldn't surprise me if it outlives Xitter.

Still, Mastodon is struggling; most of the people who checkd it out in the November 2022 surge (or the smaller June 2023 surge) didn't stick around, and numbers have been steadily declining for the last year. The author makes some good points, and some of the comments are excellent.

The Social Web Foundation (SWF) is a new non-profit with a mission of "a growing, healthy, financially viable and multi-polar Fediverse”. In TechCrunch, Sarah Perez reported that SWF has "some backing" from Meta as well as Flipboard, Ghost, Mastodon, and others as well as a "large grant" from the Ford Foundation. "In total, SWF is closing in on $1 million in financial support."

One of the hot buttons in the discussion is SWF's relationship with Meta. So I set up a series of polls on Mastodon. Here are the options for this one -- I'm not sure how to do polls on Lemmy, so please leave your thoughts in the comments

• SWF shouldn't engage with Meta at all
• SWF should work with Meta occasionally, when it's necessary
• SWF should work with Meta together often, but no formal relationship
• SWF should have Meta as a partner, advisor, or some other formal relatoinship, but no funding
• SWF should take funding from Meta, but no formal relationship
• SWF should take funding from Meta and a formal relatiionship

Here's the list:

1. Listen more to more Black people – and amplify their voices
2. Post less – and think before you post
3. Call in, call out, and/or report anti-Blackness when you see it
4. Support Black people and Black-led instances and projects
5. Approach it intersectionally

The full article goes into detail, and also has links to anti-racism resources and appendices with a list of common mistakes to avoid and blocklist resources for moderators.

Thanks to everybody who gave feedback on earlier drafts!