jdp23

@jdp23@blahaj.zone

strategist, software engineer, entrepreneur, activist ... and I run @thenexusofprivacy newsletter My pinned post at https://blahaj.zone/notes/9fe3efzcpx has more about me.

I've been on the fediverse for a long time, so you may know me from accounts like @jdp23, @jdp23, and @jdp23. I've been checking out blahaj.zone for the last few months, and like it a lot, so I'm now making it my primary personal account.

The vast majoirty of what I post is a replies, so if you're looking at this profile and it seems somewhat empty, please check out the "Posts and replies" tab

Pronouns: he/him or they/them

#strategy #equity #justice #technology #policy #disinfo #privacy #algorithmicJustice, #intersectionality #activism #organizing #software #startups ...

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

josh, (edited ) to random
@josh@josh.tel avatar

Hey folks! I'm looking for examples of elected officials and people running for office who have accounts on the fediverse.

Know of one? Please let me know! Boosts appreciated :boost_requested:

jdp23,

@sarahtaber and @tariq are both running and running hard!

@josh

jdp23,

@josh Do you think there would be interest in a panel discussion about leveraging the fediverse as part of a run for office? I've written about the possibilities of privacy activism here, and I've talked with @misc about other kinds of activism, but in general it seems to be a fairly open space.

misc, to random
@misc@mastodon.social avatar

One thing Mastodon (or a fork) could do to win some users over from Bluesky, is support taking your account private. It's wild that X and Threads are the only big post-Twitter microblogging platforms that allow this.

jdp23,

@misc I agree, but my guess is unless it happens in a fork, Bluesky will do implement private profiles before Mastodon.

jdp23,

It's a dilemma.

Historically, there's a parallel with Mastodon adding post visibility back in 2017, which led to a lot of conflicts with other OStatus implementations that didn't support it yet. So one or more platforms could implement the ability to make accounts private, and provide some kind of option that lets people prevent federating their posts to any instance whose software doesn't support it. Threads kind of has that today, but only because almost nobody else implements private profiles so turning off all federation is almost equivalent to turning off federation to instances that don't respect private profiles.

And very much agreed about the use model (I think of going private as an example of "shields up" mode) and the need to bulletproof.

@kissane @misc

jdp23,

Is there such a thing as "standard ActivityPub"? lolsob

The risk of badly-behaving instances (either intentionally malevolent or just buggy) is there in any case -- they can already ignore followers-only visibility on posts. It's similar to @kissane's point about how it's not enough for people who have good reasons to be concerned about the risk from Threads to being on an instance that defederates, you also need either local-only posts or transitive defederation.

@misc

jdp23,

If what we're talking about includes the ability to take a profile private temporarily when somebody's getting hassled (which is the key use case for this), then unless there's something I'm missing, I don't think E2EE works well here: every single public post the person has made would need to be re-encrypted with the followers-only key -- and then every place that the posts have federated would need to get the reencrypted update, so you're back to the problem of trusting other implementations.

(Of course the answer might be different in a system that was built around E2EE to begin with. FUTO Circles is built on Matrix and their concept of Circles (similar to Bonfire's, and others before that of course) might be able to handle something like this. Today's fediverse is built for not-fully-public but non-E2EE scenarios; when I talk about it as a prototype, one potential direction is to take the lessons learn and redo it on top of a next generation foundation that's designed for security and privacy, like Veilid, Spritely Goblins, Cwtch, or maybe Matrix. But how soon will that be realistic? So thinking about how to evolve the current tech base is also interesting.)

For certification systems, agreed that the current approach of "let's just trust everybody by default" isn't likely to be sustainable. It's not exactly a certification system but infrastructure like FIRES can fill a similar role -- and so can instance catalogs like FediSeer and The Bad Space. Also I think this is a place where concentric federations can help with trust decisions. But yeah, this is really an area that needs to be addressed (and not just for private profiles).

@misc @kissane

jdp23,

Deletions work except for rogue or misbehaving instances: when posts or an account get deleted, the original instance notifies other instances (There's a caveat: if the server just disappears before sending out the updates, then the cached posts remain.)

The big difference from DMs is the "make my profile private" operation (and its inverse, "make my profile public again"). Permanently-private profiles aren't a problem; you can approximate them on Mastodon today by making your default post followers-only, not putting any information in your profile itself, and using a pinned post for the info that would usually be in the profile. (There's a PR from 2017 suggesting the ability to have a separate section of your profile which is private that would be useful as well.) But the situation I hear private profiles most frequently discussed in is the "shields up" version, where you're under attack (or just getting a lot of unwanted attention) and don't want to deal; hopefully, once things die down, you can take the shields back down.

[Dropping Erin to save her notifications]
@misc

stefan, to random
@stefan@stefanbohacek.online avatar

Hey everyone! I don't typically ask for donations for my work, but if you do enjoy any of it, I would appreciate you starring this GitHub repo.

https://github.com/stefanbohacek/stefans-open-source-work-fund

Thank you!

jdp23,

@stefan done!

jdp23, to random

Wow! in Woodinville WA

hello, to mastodon
@hello@social.wedistribute.org avatar

A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.

https://wedistribute.org/2024/05/forking-mastodon/

jdp23,

"Committed developers, deep knowledge of the code, community outreach, a coherent product vision, and having a designer all go a long way towards making this successful. Making it easy for communities to switch over is important, too."

@deadsuperhero Those are all good points, can I quote them? I'm updating my article, and will also include a quote from and link to your article in the section on "It's not as easy as it sounds"> "For me, a big concern involves trying to run a fork that actively competes with Mastodon, to the point of trying to replace it. This is what I see when people make calls for a hard fork"

That might say more about what you're seeing than what people are saying. The way I phrased it was

"It's worth highlighting that a new hard fork complements the official Mastodon fork, which is likely to remain a better alternative for large, Threads-friendly instances like mastodon.social."

@soaproot

jdp23, to random

I'm seeing some people express concern that the student protest are counterproductive. We shall see, but here's an important paragraph from a very good article by Brayden King in.Scientific American on "Here's What Universities Always Get Wrong about Student Protests":

"Attention is activist fuel. The more attention that a protest gets, the easier it is to get other people to participate and the greater pressure they can exert on their targets—the very administration that is trying to stop them. As social movement scholars like myself have found in numerous studies, attention is the resource that gives activists their leverage in getting what they want."

And I've been very impressed with what the protestors are trying to do with that attention: steering the attention back to what's happening in Gaza and universities' complicitness in it. Of course, media and politicians do their best to undercut it, so it doesn't come up in the mainstream coverage so much -- they'd much rather spin the false narrative of entitled college kids who don't understand the bigger picture. But if you listen to what they're actually saying, and ignore the spin and lies and focus on what's really happening ... the students know what they're doing.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/repression-draws-attention-to-campus-protests-like-those-over-the-conflict/

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

so who's idea was it exactly to make a US-based mastodon non-profit and bring in a bunch of vulture capitalists and "AI" tech bros to "help" grow the ecosystem

jdp23,

enshittification's not just for profitable multinational's any more!

brb, i'm off to write a think piece on "the democratization of enshittifcation"

@oblomov @eniko

bruces, to random
@bruces@mastodon.social avatar

*If an AI shoggoth was attacking you, which of these stalwart characters would you choose to jump in its way

*The Mayor of Seattle, maybe?

jdp23,

@bruces The Mayor of Seattle's a big fan of ShotSpotter, so his screams as the AI shoggoth mauls him would be triangulated so that they could dispatch all the CEOs as backup to be mauled as well. It's got success written all over it!

blogdiva, to random
@blogdiva@mastodon.social avatar

there are D.C. scum calling "pro-HAMAS protests". the minute anybody in the admin parrots that shit, all bets are off with .

so all liberals on here screaming no matter who, y'all better get your asses in gear and tell every single person in the White House to drop that shit immediately.

am not some magical Cassandra. i have +30 years experience with the treachery of Democrats against antiwar activists.

don't wanna lose in November? PAY ATTENTION.

jdp23,

@blogdiva

Pomona College
Pitzer College

Both are mentioned in https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-12/pomona-college-palestine-gaza-activism

jdp23,

@blogdiva here's a list of encampments from Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ohrobin.bsky.social/post/3kqy6ezq5km2b (only visible to logged-in users)

jdp23, to Instagram

Listening to the Death Guild livestream from @dnalounge ... here's a photo from last month when we were here in person for the DG anniversary.

It'd be even better with hashtags:

Delete
Join

jdp23, to random

Sydette (Blackamazon) is an incredibly important voice in tech justice. If you can, please join me in helping support her.

And please help get the word out!

https://www.gofundme.com/f/tired-and-taxes

jdp23, to random

How Anti-Blackness shapes school discipline—even in school settings composed of students of color

A really interesting article by Tamar Sarai looking at the role of colorism in school punishment -- and Rep. Ayanna Pressley reintroduced for the second time last year the Ending Punitive, Unfair, School-based Harm that is Overt and Unresponsive to Trauma (PUSHOUT) Act, "a bill that seeks to address the school-to-prison pipeline by providing federal grants to schools and states committed to overhauling school disciplinary policies that are often enacted in racially discriminatory ways."

https://prismreports.org/2024/04/16/how-anti-blackness-shapes-school-discipline/

jdp23, to movies

This is pretty cool ... a "lost" Clara Bow film!

The story of the film’s discovery has already caused excitement online. Film-maker Gary Huggins inadvertently snapped up a slice of lost silent film history at an auction in a car park in Omaha, Nebraska, that was selling old stock from a distribution company called Modern Sound Pictures. Hoping to bid on a copy of the 1926 comedy Eve’s Leaves that he had spotted on top of a pile, Huggins was informed that he could only buy the whole pallet of movies, not individual cans. The upside? The lot was his for only $20.

Huggins soon discovered that his new pile of reels included 1923’s The Pill Pounder, a silent comedy that had been thought to be lost for decades. It is a short, two-reel film, shot on Long Island, New York, and directed by Gregory La Cava, best known for later classics such as My Man Godfrey (1936) and Stage Door (1937). The film stars rubber-faced vaudeville veteran Charlie Murray, the so-called “Irish comedian” who was actually from Laurel, Indiana. He plays a hapless pharmacist, the “pill pounder” of the title, who is trying to host a clandestine poker game in the back room of his drugstore. What few realised until Huggins watched the film, was that it also features 17-year-old Bow in a supporting role. She plays the girlfriend of Murray’s son, played by James Turfler, who had already appeared with Bow in her second film Down to the Sea in Ships, directed by Elmer Clifton and screened in 1922....

In this, one of her earliest surviving performances on film, Bow looks even younger than her years. Although she lacks the sleek Hollywood glamour she later acquired, she has the charisma to turn a thankless bit-part into something of a scene-stealer. The critics took note: based on the evidence of this film, the Exhibitors’ Trade Review described her as “perhaps the most promising of the younger actresses”.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/apr/12/after-101-years-and-a-20-find-at-a-car-boot-sale-clara-bows-lost-film-premieres

misc, to random
@misc@mastodon.social avatar

With the @ifnotnowboston account here, I'm thinking I'd like to lean in to what the fedi is good at, and use it more for community and conversation, than breaking news and broadcast. Like, more discussion prompts I guess. Are there some good examples of accounts doing that successfully?

jdp23,

@misc it's certainly worth a try. Two things I've seen work well (not for activism but they could be adapted):

  • polls tend to get traction and often lead to conversations
  • regularly-scheduled viewing and disussing a video, like Monsterdon'
jdp23,

@misc btw have you been following the incident in Berkeley involving a Palestinian law student protesting at a university event hosted at a professor's home? It's a great example of how Xitter still plays such a crucial role.

There was very little discussion of it here, although @AdrianRiskin posted the link to the video and @elsantonegro shared KTVU's article on it.

There's some discussion on Bluesky, almost all of it from white people.

But Xitter's where the action is, with statements from CAIR, NLG, perspectives from multiple lawyer. Muslim women see it differently than tenured white law profs, who could have predicted? Of course there's plenty of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in the replies on Xitter, also very predictable. But since almost none of the press coverage covered the protestors goals and perspectives in any detail, focusing only on the narrow question of whether the First Amendment protects political speech at a semi-official event at a private residence, without looking on Twitter it's a once-sided debate -- and Xitter's still by far the best option of the three for getting Muslim perspectives on this.

jdp23,

Yeah the LA Times article is fairly typical of the news coverage -- you have to go pretty deep into it to get to one or two sentences about the protestors' message and goals and they don't have the statement from CAIR (which is relevant in general and also because Malak Afaneh, the law student who organized the protest, interns there). The KQED link I shared at least had a few paragraphs on it:

"Afaneh’s group, Law Students for Justice in Palestine (LSJP), has long demanded that UC Berkeley divest from manufacturing companies that supply weapons to Israel and accuses the school of being complicit in the widespread destruction of Gaza, where more than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks since October, according to Gaza officials.

The group called on their peers to boycott the dinners at the couple’s house, accusing Chemerinsky of aligning with Zionist causes and repeatedly trying to silence pro-Palestinian student activism.

“He’s provided no support for Palestinian voices, no support for Muslims, but is very staunchly Zionist,” Afaneh said.

Oh hmm, that's useful conext, I wonder why the LA Times and NY Times didn't publish that? (Just kidding, I know why the LA Times and NY Times didn't publish that.)

Zahra Billoo's of CAIR SF had RT'ed some very good commentary. https://twitter.com/ZahraBilloo
@inquiline @AdrianRiskin @elsantonegro @misc

josh, (edited ) to privacy
@josh@josh.tel avatar

Does your public library use Overdrive/Libby for ebooks or audiobooks? ⚠️

In the US and Canada, the answer is probably yes. And you should speak to your library staff and commission about it.

Libby is now owned by a private equity firm & making sketchy changes: https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshittification-of-public-libraries/

The latest development is that their overbroad privacy policy allows them to sell your borrowing history to advertisers: https://infosec.exchange/@longobord/112243098104196246

Thank you @karawynn and @longobord!

jdp23,

My experiene is that librarians really do get the importance of patron privacy -- I know somebody who worked at a library in South Carolina where the (not particularly political) staff was so concerned about NSL's under the Patriot Act back in the day that they independently came up with a warrant canary-like approach to handle it.

Agreed though that without an alternative, it's a tricky situation right now. Enough pressure to try to get them to change their policy is probably the most promising short-term approach, are any of the privacy/civil liberties orgs like EFF, ACLU, Media Justice engaged on this? If so, librarians working with them could be very effective.

@danilo @josh

amy, to random
@amy@spookygirl.boo avatar

I'm gonna make a prediction about Threads: they're going to put pressure on the big servers (that are federating with them) to ban sex work and porn "for community safety." And the people who run them will uncritically just accept that's true.

And they'll do it, ineffectually, but they will.

jdp23,

@amy well, they say they'll block instances that repeatedly fail to adhere to the Instagram community guidelines, which prohibit nudity, sexual intercourse, pictures of female nipples, and "offering sexual services." It's not completely clear whether they'll only block instances where this content federates to Threads, but of course it'd be easy for anybody on Threads who wants to police morality (or just mess with a fediverse) to follow accounts that violates the guidelines and report them.

So yeah, at best, instances that want to keep federation will need to enforce those standards on anybody whose content is federating to Threads -- and if they want to be resilient against morality police, they'll need to enforce those standards on anybody whose content potentially federates to Threads (which is everybody, because even if somebody's currently blocked Threads now they could potentially unblock Threads later). And if Meta decide they want to be more proactive, they require instances that federate to have a public timelines, so they can check to see if this is happening, meaning that it also has to be enforced on all public posts.

When the first detailed disussions of federation came out somebody (I htink the Verge) talked about Meta enforcing their content standards on the fediverse. There hasn't been any discussion of that since, and none of the notes of the meetings between fediverse influencers and Meta have discussed it, but that doesn't mean it's gone away!

EDIT: Adding references! When Threads blocks communication with other servers on the fediverse says "We’ll block a server if it repeatedly or severely fails to meet our Community Guidelines, Instagram Terms of Use, or Threads Terms of Use, including via admins or moderators" and the Community Guidelines has the specifics. My bad for not putting it in originally!

damon, to community

Can someone tell me why and how they view instances as a #community ? What makes them communities? I see people upset at #Bluesky empowering individuals/users why is that problematic? #Askfedi #fediverse

jdp23,

Oh please. There are dozens of instances on fedi that are communities: shared norms, people know each other, there’s a distinction between who’s in the community and who’s not. Sure, the largest instances aren’t generally like that, and of course single-person instances aren’t, but there are plenty of good examples - just because you haven’t experienced it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

@BeAware @damon

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