The House GOP leadership pulled both FISA bills!
Instead, a four-month extension is attached to the NDAA -- unless it gets removed. Dozens of civil rights and racial justice groups oppose extending FISA in the NDAA.
If you agree, call your Senators TODAY and with a simple ask: "DO NOT put 702 in the NDAA.".
(The Congressional switchboard is at (202) 224-3121, or you can use the Senate directory to find their direct number and web contact form.)
Thanks, it's a good point!
It depends if I've turned on "approve followers" -- upvote if you agree!
Totally agree that we need a good privacy bill -- and if the proposed ADPPA consumer privacy moves forward again this year, we'll need to get involved on that to push to strengthen it (because last year's version had huge loopholes, including some that left LGBTQ+ people's personal data at risk).
Not exactly. These bills cut across party lines and there's a lot of desire to be able to pass something -- "think of the children!" So if anything the overall gridlock makes it more likely that these bills will pass. So the dynamics that led to stopping the bills last year was a combination of activists making enough noise, and privacy and digital rights groups pressing the case in meetings with legislators (as well as some grassroots groups with good relationships with their legislators). As a result, that Dem leadership decided not to move the bills to the floor, so the vote never happened.
No, bipartisan legislative support. It's got bipartisan co-sponsorship both in the House (Warren Davidson is an R, Sara Jacobs is a D) and Senate (Rand Paul is an R, Ron Wyden is a D). And House Judiciary Committee just voted 30-0 to advance it.
Of course as you say we don't know what's happening behind closed doors, and there are also legislators in both parties who aren' supportive, but there really is bipartisan support for this.
That's right, as the article says
And from the perspective of the "free fediverse" that's not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is "a long way out" is encouraging. OK, it's not as good as "when hell freezes over," but it's a heckuva lot better than "soon."
Very good point, thanks much!
It used to be a slang term people trying to sound hip would use, but that was many decades ago -- 1930s or 1950s I think.
Yeah, the current thinking is just to have the one magazine for now unless people have good reasons why that won't work. Of course a lot depends on whether there are any active bugs federating between the two systems but I think right now things are copacetic.
Very cool, glad you're back!
Great writeup! A couple thoughts:
Very true. There's a line buried in their white paper that "we expect that most users will sign up for an account on a shared PDS run by a professional hosting provider – either Bluesky Social PBC, or another company" but they very much do tout it as a major benefit. It's certainly true that the ability to move your data around is a very good thing, and something the fediverse is bad at today, so from a positioning perspective it makes sense to focus on this; their claims that this gives the user power are, um, exaggerated.
Yeah I was in in a discussion where a Bluesky developer suggested that non-profits might run their own Relays ... seems unlikely to me, both because of the volume and because of the risk of potentially relaying content that's legal in whatever jurisdiction the PDS is in but not in the Relay's jurisdication. Of course Relays don't have to be for the full network, so we might see more smaller-scoped Relays (although I'm not sure how that differs from a Feed Generator), but if BlueSky and a few others provide the only full-network Relay, that's a pretty powerful position for them to be in.
Also in that conversation the said that AppViews are likely to be even more resource-intensive than Relays, and so anybody developing an AppView might as well have a Relay as well, so there's likely to be the same kind of power concentration.
That said I think it's very good that Relays explicitly appear in their architecture. Relays are also critical for smaller or less-connected instances in today's fediverse, but don't get a lot of attention.
Yep. They've split the functions of the ActivityPub instance, but it seems to me that they've just shifted the power imbalances around, and potentially magnified them.