You're right ... but tech has a lot of lobbying power and they are very very very strongly against a strong privacy bill, or even a bill that would regulate algorithms. So it's easier for legislators to pass something like KOSA -- or pass a weak privacy bill that will actually make the situation worse by getting rid of laws like California's -- and claim they're doing something.

Yeah that is really horrible too!

It turns out that crossposting to Lemmy works better from Lemmy communities. So, a Lemmy community is useful. Since I had already crated the kbin magazine and there's no way to delete magazines (!), looks like we'll experiment to see whether or not having two of them makes sense. Here's the Lemmy community I created, I'm using it for now to cross-post from other communities so that there's a single place to go for everything. !bad_internet_bills@lemmy.sdf.org

Alas, that's par for the course. But, the email they receive gets counted (and they'll often run some kind of sentiment analysis software on it) and staffers pay attention to how much mail they're getting, so it still makes a difference!

I don't trust them either, and they're very likely to move ahead with federation anyhow. It still means something that they're changing the story that they're telling.

It's a plausible theory but at the House Judiciary Committee everybody in both parties voted "yes"! We'll see what happens as things move forward. In the Senate, Rand Paul is a co-sponsor and Mike Lee's a likely yes vote, so it's not likely to be straight party-line.

Thanks! Those are links to the version of the bill from last session; this year, the bill number in the House is HR 4639 and the text is at https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/hr-4639-bill-text.pdf

That EFF action alert is also from last session, and has the old bill number; they don't have a new one up yet as far as I know. So I linked to Free Press' action page, which is more up-to-date.

Nobody's talking about taking the choice away from others. Some instances are saying they'll federate with Threads, you're free to move your account there. Or as you say, people who want to hang out with the bully can download the Threads app right now!

That's incorrect. Followers-only posts (and local-only posts on instances that have them) aren't public. Profiles that don't make public and unlisted posts aren't discoverable. And, as Threat modeling Meta, the fediverse, and privacy discusses, there are plenty of things that could be done to reduce the amount of data that's public.

Also, that's only one of the many reasons people oppose federating with Meta.

Yes, I certainly constructed the sentence to highlight the different reactions. Later in the article I say "And by prioritizing their desire to be embraced by Meta over queer and trans people's safety, Meta's cis advocates undercut their claims to be allies in ways that may be hard to recover from" -- which is true no matter what Meta does or doesn't wind up doing with Threads. Of course it's not the only thing going on, but I think it's important enough that it's worth highlighting.

Thanks!

Those are solid requirements to be listed on joinlemmy.org and I would also add another one about moderation policies prohibiting racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry, Islamophobia, etc. Otherwise, if a user joins an instance that the "official" page recommends and discovers it's racists / sexist / etc, they'll see it as a problem with #lemmy as a whole, as opposed to just one bad instance.

And as we've seen on Mastodon, if a Black user goes to a site where racism is tolerated and quickly encounters racist sh*t, they leave and tell their friends; ditto for trans, queer, Muslim, etc. users having bad initial experiences. Once that happens a bunch of times the reputation becomes hard to shake. Much better to steer people to sites where they're less likely to have a bad experience!